Creating An Exceptional Training Program At Your Church

This post has been adapted from episode 5 of our podcast. You can listen to the full podcast here, watch the video below, or keep reading.

Kevin Fontenot: Hey there, I’m Kevin Fontenot, I’m here with Scott Magdalein, we’re your hosts of the Thriving Ministry Team Podcast, where we’re talking about all things related to Church leadership, development, discipleship, and training. And we’re really excited today, because we’re gonna be talking about a subject that’s near and dear to our hearts. We run a company called TrainedUp where we help Church leaders really go through the process of training their people. And so, we’re gonna dive into that topic today. But before we really dive in deep, Scott how are you doing today?

Scott Magdalein: I’m doing good. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, personally. I don’t know if, I know you know, but I don’t know if everybody else knows that we wave a brand new baby. And most of the time she sleeps really well, but lately the last few nights she’s been not sleeping great. And at the same time, I had to catch up on some work, so going on fewer hours of sleep than normal. But generally, I’m okay, I’m in a happy mood. How are you?

Kevin Fontenot: I’m okay, I’m doing good. I’ve had half my Redbull this morning, so I’ve got a little bit of caffeine in me. Other than that, it’s going good. Don’t have any babies kicking me or screaming at me in the middle of the night, so I got a little bit more sleep than you did probably.

Scott Magdalein: Probably so, probably so. So today’s topic, you we’re talking about is gonna be something near and dear to our heart, so I’m kind of curious about that. So can you help me, what’s near and dear to my heart?

Kevin Fontenot: Yeah, well I hope it’s near and dear to your heart, otherwise we’re gonna have a short episode today. But we’re gonna be talking about training people inside a church. And that’s something that we talk about a lot, I know you do a lot of coaching calls with some of the coaches that use TrainedUp, kind of around this topic of how to create an exceptional training program in the Church. And I know that’s something that’s really difficult to grasp, it’s easier for us to say that we need training, but it’s harder to actually come up with that plan and that system of really creating it.

Kevin Fontenot: And I think before we dive into the practical side of what that looks like, I’d really like to spend some time on the topic of why is this so difficult for churches and pastors? Why is that training aspect so difficult?

Scott Magdalein: Yeah, you’re right, this is near and dear to my heart, honestly. I mean, when I started TrainedUp a couple of years ago, it was just a problem to be solved in my own ministry. And then, I found out that it was a challenge for other ministry leaders as well, more than just a passing nuisance, it was a core challenge for their ministry. And so, over the course of a couple of years, I’ve always said this, that the things that God gives you to work on, that’s how God builds passions for you. And so for me, volunteer training, developing leaders, equipping people to do the work of ministry, Ephesians 4:12 says, has become a deep passion of mine. So you’re absolutely right, that is near and dear to my heart.

Scott Magdalein: The question that you asked, to get to it, I think was something like, why is ministry training so difficult? And the reason is, because people don’t like to come to meetings, training meetings. And there’s a couple of reasons for that. I don’t think that people don’t like training, in fact I think people actually love training, and people like reading books that improve themselves, people like going to online courses to learn new skills, people like watching “How To” videos on YouTube. People actually love training, in fact training is a multi-billion dollar industry. People like it so much, that they pay for it. The problem with Church training is that it’s usually super boring, and also it feels really irrelevant. So there’s a lot of training that is like, I don’t think I’m ever gonna need this.

Scott Magdalein: And also, it’s boring because it’s always just kind of like this, come to a meeting and we’re gonna talk through your handbook. Okay open your handbook to page three and we’re gonna start talking through your handbook. And so, people don’t like that kind of training because they generally don’t like things that are boring. In the same way that you could say, people don’t like watching boring movies, that doesn’t mean that people don’t like movies, it’s just people don’t like boring movies.

Kevin Fontenot: Unless we’re talking about like Mystery Science Theater 3000, right? Because then I really like boring movies.

Scott Magdalein: That is such a perfect retro reference. I was a kid when I first started watching that, and man, I didn’t get half the jokes. But now as an adult I’m like, I watch it again, and I’m like, oh I totally get that now.

Scott Magdalein: Anyway, so people don’t like boring things generally, and training in churches tends to be boring. And I know that Church ministry leaders, they try to spice it up, and they try to maybe add a lunch to it, or the maybe add an appreciation piece to it, or an awards ceremony to it sometimes, or maybe they’ll try and keep as minimal as possible, so they’ll only do one training a year, and make it a big event so they can get as many people there as possible, and then they go through the handbook, they walk through some best practices for how to do some things. And again, it’s not that people don’t like coming to the meetings, but it’s boring.

Scott Magdalein: And so, we’ve done surveys, and the average best, the high-end average of attendance at those meetings is generally 60%. In fact, that’s amazing to me, because I never actually got 60%. If I got to half, I would be like, alright it was at least worth having the training meeting because we got to half. Of course, I don’t do training meetings anymore, because I do TrainedUp, but if I got to 50% attendance at a training meeting, I felt like it was a win.

Scott Magdalein: So to me, that’s why training is so difficult, because we assume, as ministry leaders, that people don’t like training. When in fact, people just don’t like boring training. The thing is that there’s another way, there are other ways to do training that makes it palatable, accessible, and still accountable for ministry leaders to be able to provide training to their people, and they’ll still engage with it. You can get up toward that 100% training coverage mark, I guarantee you.

Kevin Fontenot: No, that’s really good. And I like that you alluded to that survey that we did. So just a little background, I ran a survey last year with a bunch of small groups pastors, and there are the people that we really want to be training their people well. They’re the leaders of our discipleship ministry, they’re the ones that are walking right beside people every day and trying to help them with their walks with the Lord. And I just kind of surveyed these discipleship pastors, these small group pastors, and just asked them, hey what percentage of people are actually showing up to the meetings that you guys are doing when it comes to training? The number one and number two responses were 40 and 60 percent, and that was well over half the results. More than half the people that were taking the survey said 40 to 60 percent, and those were the top two answers.

Kevin Fontenot: And so, it’s really difficult. We think that we can just throw a pizza party, and maybe do some tacos if we’re really feeling it, that’s gonna get me to the meeting.

Scott Magdalein: I was gonna say, tacos would get me to a meeting.

Kevin Fontenot: As long as you’ve got some good chips and salsa, and it’s tacos, I’ll be there.

Scott Magdalein: If I got to eat some chips and salsa or tacos while the training is happening, that would be all right.

Kevin Fontenot: Yeah, see but if I do it online, I can pick my own chips and salsa and then I’m all set, so that’s my preferred method of doing things.

Scott Magdalein: Well it’s funny, so you mentioned that this is a survey specifically for small group leaders, which is crazy, those are high profile, high responsibility, high skill people, and these are people that are generally super bought in. These aren’t greener volunteers that just joined last week, these aren’t people that have been visiting the church for six months and decided to start volunteering. These are long time, committed people, that have a lot of responsibility on their shoulders to be a part of the spiritual growth of a small group of people in your church, and it’s still hard to get those people to come to a training meeting.

Kevin Fontenot: Definitely, it’s so difficult. I mean, I help lead small groups, I’ve been a small groups pastor in the past, and it’s really difficult to get people to show up to any sort of meeting. And it’s not necessarily part of them not being bought in, or a question of that. People are busy, there’s a ton on their plates. They have baseball practice, ballet recitals, piano, underwater basket weaving for their kid. There’s so many things that are going on in our people’s lives, and it’s just difficult to do any sort of training with them.

Kevin Fontenot: It’s not necessarily a matter of them wanting to do it or not wanting to do it, it’s just a matter of time and taking that time off to be at a training meeting, thinking through getting a babysitter, having someone to watch their kids, making sure that someone is there to pick up everything that needs to be picked up, all of the household chores that they’ve gotta go through. It’s really difficult to get people to just drop everything and come to a training meeting, even if they have enough time, they have enough notification to actually come and put it on their calendar, something is always coming up.

Kevin Fontenot: And so, in today’s world, it becomes increasingly difficult to get people to come to a one time static event, no matter what it is. That’s why, even church attendance has dropped, even among the faithful, the committed core that call our church home, that are giving, that are tithing. The average church attendance even among those people has dropped over the last decade because there’s so much going on now.

Kevin Fontenot: I know when I was growing up, I played baseball, that was my favorite sport, and Sunday was a day that we never had games or anything like that. Today if you play little league or any sports, Sunday’s a day that’s wide open for those activities now, and it’s just a lot of change inside of our culture has happened.

Scott Magdalein: Absolutely. And so, what happens is when a ministry leader over time gets diminishing returns on training meetings, and even though the same amount of work needs to go into a training meeting whether you have 10 people or 50 people, because of the diminishing returns, they end up starting to bail and not have training meetings. And so they replace that not having training meetings with a Sunday morning briefing kind of thing. And so they say, show up early on Sunday morning, we’re gonna have a pow-wow. And of course even with that, you have a lot of people that are late.

Scott Magdalein: Some of the good churches that make that pow-wow really valuable, there’s a lot of celebration and prayer, those kind of churches, and let’s say they do a great job with training, the problem is then you have people on a rotation. So the people who were here last week are not gonna hear the content, or the training pieces, or the training best practices that you mentioned last week. And the people that are here this week, aren’t gonna hear that next week. So the idea of being able to do proper, good, high accountable training, on a Sunday morning before or after a service, also doesn’t work. And you find about the same amount of people are either late, or the missed a Sunday because they were out of town for a Sunday, or they are on the off-rotation where they didn’t get that training. And so still you end up with incomplete or not full coverage of your training for all your volunteers.

Kevin Fontenot: Definitely. So-

Scott Magdalein: So, go ahead man.

Kevin Fontenot: You alluded to a little bit of the reason, the problem you were trying to solve TrainedUp when you first created it when you were in ministry. Talk a little bit more about what that problem was, the solution you envisioned, and why TrainedUp even exists today because of that.

Scott Magdalein: Yeah, so I was trying to train my volunteers. I had, honestly it wasn’t even a huge church, so what’s crazy is that even small churches have this problem, it’s not a problem that’s just a big scaling problem. It’s a problem if you have 10 volunteers or 100 volunteers or 1000 volunteers. It’s just a matter of how big is the problem.

Scott Magdalein: So for me, I had a couple of dozen volunteers and a couple of different ministry areas. We had a small staff of three, and I had to train people that wouldn’t come to training meetings. And at the time, I was also kind of new. I had been there less than a year, so I didn’t have the leadership equity to really lean on people to come. I would say, hey there’s a training meeting, and people would just be like, alright nice to know about it, but we’re probably not gonna be there.

Kevin Fontenot: Underwater basket weaving was taking precedence that week.

Scott Magdalein: For real man. So what I did, is I built the first version just to solve my own problem. I was like, okay if you’re not gonna come to a training meeting, then I’ll bring the training to you. So I have a web development background, I built a really rough first version of TrainedUp just for myself, and it allowed me to be able to put videos in front of people. I’d record them with my webcam, upload them to, at the time I think I was uploading them to YouTube or maybe Vimeo or something like that, and then I added some follow-up questions on a webpage.

Scott Magdalein: And it worked, kind of. It helped them to watch the videos and go through them. I didn’t have any system for being able to keep track of everybody going through the courses or through the videos, but at least I was able to get them videos and roughly see who watched those first few videos. Of course, I realized pretty quickly that just having some videos on a webpage with a form is not gonna work for the next course. And so then it’s difficult to track who’s in the first course and who’s in the second course. And then there’s a new volunteer and they need to go through all of it. And so it was kind of like, it got out of hand really quickly, that’s kind of what came up with the actual version, first version of TrainedUp instead of just solving my own problem.

Scott Magdalein: But again, my problem was, people don’t come to volunteer training meetings, people show up late on Sunday mornings, or they’re showing up just in time to volunteer, and I needed a way t get training in front of my people and make it accessible to them, and still for me to be able to know who watched it and who didn’t watch it.

Kevin Fontenot:  Yeah, that’s such a key thing that we’ve been trying to do with TrainedUp. And I think we’ve really been able to dive in and solve it with the latest version that we pushed out, especially with our redesign that we did back in September of 2017 to really make that process really simple and easy. But tell me a little bit more about the content that you were producing. So the tool may have not been ready at that point, as far as the results that you were hoping for in that first version that you created years ago. Talk a little bit about that content you were creating and what it looked like.

Scott Magdalein: All right so, the content was actually really simple, honestly. It didn’t look much different than this. I didn’t have a fancy background like I do now. If you’re watching on YouTube, you see my background. Podcast listeners, it’s like a muslin sheet that all TrainedUp branded. It hides what’s on the other side, which is just a work shed, my office is also a work shed.

Kevin Fontenot: And I definitely designed that one right the first time.

Scott Magdalein: Yes. This one was designed by Kevin and he sent it to me, and the first one was a little bit out of proportion. Anyway, so I didn’t have this fancy background, I didn’t even have a nice microphone like this. I just had my computer and my earbuds, and I would just talk into my webcam and upload it to YouTube. And all I would do is just, I mean at the very beginning I was just doing best practices stuff, like just remember to, things like don’t spank other people’s kids, and make sure that every kid who leaves the children’s ministry, if they have a diaper that that diaper’s fresh, when you greet a parent have a smile on your face, don’t be looking like you’re stressed out already when you’re receiving kids. When you’re handing the kid off, if you need to splash some water on your face before the parents start coming and refresh your look before they show up to the door to get the kid, do that because handing them over and you looking stressed makes them feel uneasy as well.

Scott Magdalein: So little things like that, just to remind my volunteer leaders of their role, the implications of their role, and some good reminders to do that role really well. Honestly, none of it was really groundbreaking stuff, honestly none of it was the first time it had ever been taught. And that’s kind of the idea, is that once I recorded the videos once, it’s done, I’ve done the training, and all I have to do is just share the link with somebody. So if a new volunteer comes on board I can say, all right we already have that training, before we get started I’d really like you to watch these three videos that cover some of our best practices and our policies for our ministry.

Scott Magdalein: It makes it easy for them to, before their first serve Sunday, it makes it easy for them to be up to speed, it makes them feel confident about showing up and them knowing what to do instead of being the only guy in the ministry who’s lost and always having to ask questions. So it helps me know that my people, when they show up they’re ready to go. And it helps also the volunteer have confidence when they show up and not feel like they’re the odd one that doesn’t know what’s going on.

Kevin Fontenot: That’s really good. I think a lot of people have this idea about training and online training that there has to be this hour long course, because that’s typically what we do in in-person training, we have this hour of time where we’re trying to get everything talked about in that time. We have distractions, disruptions, people ask silly questions inside of that that make you go down some sort of rabbit trail that you don’t wanna be on. And it takes a really long time in those in-person meetings with kind of diminishing return, that we’ve already discussed.

Kevin Fontenot: And people seem to have that same idea when it comes to online training that they have to put out this really well-produced video on what this looks like, with really practical examples and nice video work, and they need to be a professional cinematographer with drones and pyrotechnics and all that sort of thing. But you’re saying that we could just do this, kind of like what we’re doing right now, with the webcam in front of our computer, just talking about the practical aspects of training, is that right?

Scott Magdalein: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, talking about length, that’s actually a good point to talk about. Before I started TrainedUp, I spent a few years at a company called Treehouse, which is based in Portland, Oregon. Treehouse is an online training company, and they built this entire training concept around short videos with short follow-up quizzes, if you will. And it’s a great way to train online, it’s incredibly effective. They have 80-something thousand students at any given time that are active and learning in their system. And it’s all based on short five minute videos, maybe seven minute videos that teach one thing, so the video covers one topic, it doesn’t try to cover a lot of stuff in a short period of time. It’s just one idea with follow-up questions about that specific idea, and then at the end they ask a bunch of questions, kind of review everything.

Scott Magdalein: And so, a lot of people get entire careers from the training that they get from Treehouse. So that format of learning is really effective. Not only is it engaging, but also it engages the memory muscles to help keep new learning in your head longer, so that when you get to, if you’re a cognitive learning person, when the person gets to that night when they’re able to sleep and that memory can move from short term memory to long term memory while they’re dreaming, it helps them to keep more of that information in short term memory so that more of it moves into long term memory.

Scott Magdalein: So that short format is something I learned at Treehouse, and I brought that over into my ministry volunteer training, because it’s really effective. So all my videos, all of the videos in the TrainedUp library, 600-something videos, are all under seven minutes. We don’t have anything that’s over seven minutes in our entire library, because short training is what sticks in people’s heads.

Kevin Fontenot: That’s really awesome, I think it’s difficult to see the practical aspects of what a training program looks like, especially when you’ve been seeing and doing these things for decades. A lot of us, as ministry leaders, we went through these training classes decades ago, and they haven’t really changed a lot when they’re in-person. So being able to focus in on those practical aspects in a really short video format where it’s informal, it’s just me and my webcam or me and my phone recording something, and it doesn’t have to be super polished, that is really inspiring and feels great for me, because I know I don’t have to put a lot of work into it. So I really like that, and I think it’s gonna be really helpful to a lot of people.

Kevin Fontenot: So let’s talk and kind of go hypothetical here for a second. I’m gonna give you a scenario, and we’re just gonna get really practical, and I’d like to hear what advice you would give to this person on the other end that was looking to try and implement training inside their church. So they’ve been a pastor of a couple years at this church, they’ve been trying to do training meetings, no one’s really interested, no one’s showing up. They have people that love serving, that are excited about what they do, they just don’t seem to want to do the ministry itself. So they’re a kids pastor, they’re looking to implement this training, haven’t really seen it done well, have kind of been doing the same thing for a long time, what advice would you give them? What steps would you take in their ministry to rollout a training program?

Scott Magdalein: This is great. So I do coaching on a weekly basis, I do coach with lots of different ministry leaders every week, and it’s almost always around the topic of, how do I get momentum rolling with, a lot of our training is specifically with TrainedUp, but the concepts transfer to any online training, and really any new training program. So let’s even broaden that to any new training program, where can I start to start building training momentum?

Scott Magdalein: And a lot of the time, our ministry leaders assume that when they start, they need to start training everybody in their ministry. And so what I say is, don’t do that. You’ve got a lot of inertia built up where people are used to not coming to training meetings, which also means they’re used to the training being boring. And you just saying, hey new we have training videos instead of training meetings, they’re still gonna assume that the training’s boring because they’ve always been trained to think that the training is boring.

Scott Magdalein: So, what I say do, is don’t start with your existing members. In fact, just kind of set them aside for training for right now, you’ve probably not been doing a lot of training with them already, so another couple of months of them sitting without training is not going to be a big deal. What I say is, shift focuses to your new volunteers. You probably have new volunteers joining every once and while, and depending on the size of the church, either every week or every month.

Scott Magdalein: And for those people, they have no context for assuming that the training is going to be boring. In fact, they probably assume that the training is not just not boring, but vital, valuable, and gonna be interesting and at least help them to know what to do. So those new volunteers are gonna have positive assumptions about the training, usually, and they’re also going to have the motivation to go complete the training, whether it’s a meeting or online training, because they wanna make a good first impression. As a new volunteer, I want them to think that I’m gonna be a good volunteer, like I’m gonna show up, when you schedule me I’m gonna show up, when you give me a task to do I’m gonna do it, I’m all in.

Scott Magdalein: And this also is kind of the highest point of motivation, because they feel a calling to step into ministry. Most people who volunteer to volunteer, aren’t doing it out of an obligation or a grudge, that’s just not what motivates people. And so when they’re motivated to step into a new volunteer role, they’re motivated out of wanting to contribute and be a helpful part of something.

Scott Magdalein: And so, you gotta leverage all of that opportunity to get them trained right from the very get-go. Because if you get them really well-trained from the get-go, ongoing training’s a cinch, ongoing training is not a problem because they have come in and they got a majority of the information they need to do a good job right in the very beginning. And if you’re using really good training techniques, that training that they’re gonna get in the beginning is gonna stick in their long term memory, so you won’t have to retrain them over and over again because they’re actually paying attention to it and they’re keeping it in their head.

Scott Magdalein: So, all that is a build up to say, a good way to get started with building momentum, is to start with onboarding training for your new volunteers. Now onboarding training for new volunteers is usually really difficult for churches because it’s hard to do onboarding training without an online tool. Doing onboarding training for new volunteers without that means either an every Sunday morning training meeting for new volunteers, which is usually difficult because you only have a few new volunteers every Sunday. A lot of churches will say, okay we’re gonna do new volunteer training once a month, but then you kind of miss out on that hotspot if somebody volunteers and they’re ready to go that very next Sunday, they have to wait three or four weeks to get the training before they can start serving. So the hotness of their interest starts to cool off. And even still, you still have people who will, I can’t make it to that meeting because I’m gonna be out of town that week, and I’d love to serve but I’m gonna be out of town that weekend.

Scott Magdalein: And so, the best way to implement an onboarding training for new volunteers is to do it online. And of course, you have a few options when it comes to online training, you can do YouTube videos that are private or unlisted, or you can put them on a webpage or something like that. Again, I tried that, I did it for a little while, but it just did not work for more than a handful of volunteers, it became really difficult to keep track of them. Which is why I built TrainedUp, and why TrainedUp is the best, absolutely best tool, to do onboarding training for new volunteers.

Scott Magdalein: Once you’ve created your course, you’ve recorded your videos, and added the follow-up questions to each video, if you wanna do that kind of thing, all you have to do is once somebody joins your team, include it in the initial communication with them before they get started, things like you need to run a background check if you’re gonna be working with kids, or make sure you pick up your t-shirt on Sunday morning, or what Sunday can be your first Sunday, that kind of initial communication. Include in that communication a link to the training, and iterate why it’s really important to complete that before they get started. And I guarantee, you’ll have 80, 90, 95 percent of the people who complete the entire training before their first serve Sunday, because their assumption is it a requirement, that it’s something that’s really important for them to get started. And also, they’re gonna wanna know everything they need to know so they don’t show up and be the one that doesn’t know what’s going on.

Scott Magdalein: So, if you wanna build momentum, build a training program, I would start with the new folks. They’re the freshest, they have the least amount of negative preconceived notions about training, they’re the highest motivation, and it’s also really easy to train them really well in a way that prevents further retraining down the road.

Kevin Fontenot: That’s good. It takes a while to change the course of direction of any sort of program, whether that training in your church, whether that’s the overall mission and vision of what you’re trying to do. It takes a while to be able to implement those things. And so, starting from the new volunteers, the people that are just starting out, that’s a really low hanging fruit when it comes to being able to implement something as serious as training, because people don’t have that preconceived notion, it’s really easy for them to figure out exactly what you’re asking them to do and to do those things.

Kevin Fontenot: And one thing that I know happens in a lot of ministries, once you start training the new volunteers, the new volunteers start doing all the things exactly like you’ve asked them to do, it makes your existing volunteers want to do exactly what the other volunteers are doing. Because they don’t wanna look like the guy who doesn’t know what’s going on, or doesn’t know how to do these things, or that he’s being shown up by some new guy that just got there a couple weeks ago. And so, you can use that to your advantage as well.

Scott Magdalein: That’s a great point. Honestly, that is a peer pressure of, okay all new guys seem better trained and like they know what they’re doing, and I’m kind of winging it every Sunday because I’ve been around for a couple years. That’s a great point, that training readiness and training completion starts to trickle into the rest of the team.

Kevin Fontenot: Yeah, trickle down training is what we’ll call it.

Scott Magdalein: Trickle down training.

Kevin Fontenot:  TrainedUp-nomics. Awesome Scott, do you have any final thoughts you wanna leave us with related to creating a training program in your church?

Scott Magdalein: Yeah. So if you’re moving to online training, you might be intimidated by the whole talking to a camera alone in a room kind of thing, I get that. I honestly am sometimes still intimidated by it. But here’s my quick advice, give it a try, it might take five, six, ten takes for you to say, okay I’m comfortable doing it and I got through without stumbling over my words or whatever. But give it a try, you don’t have to actually share it with people until you’re happy with it. So it’s not just one take and then it immediately goes out to your whole team and you’re like, whoops I said the wrong word there or I stumbled over something and now the whole team has it.

Scott Magdalein: I was coaching with a female ministry leader, an executive pastor yesterday, I’m trying to say. And she was saying that she was wanting to implement a training program in her church, and we were talking about how to move from trying to train everybody at the same stage at the same time throughout her whole church, to a more stage-based training using TrainedUp. And her concern was, when we shoot the videos, do I have the ability to retry it if it didn’t work. And I was like yeah, of course, we wouldn’t build a tool that you only get one chance and then it immediately goes out to your team. So I was like, yeah you just, you record, and you get to review it afterward, and then if you don’t like it there’s a big button that says retry. And so I said, you can click that button as many times as you want. And I told her it’s really not a big deal for you to go through several takes before you get the one that you like. In fact, that’s what pros do. Actors and actresses, they take takes, that’s what a take is, it takes multiple times to get it right.

Kevin Fontenot: Yeah, one of my favorite things watching is bloopers of any sort of show. I’ve been watching a lot of Office bloopers lately. And even as serious as The Office can be with some of the funny moments and professional comedians trying to make the jokes, they still mess it up over and over again. And it’s great when it happens with the same line and they have to do 12 different takes and they keep messing up in the exact same spot. So if professional actors have to take the takes and they can’t go without bloopers, you can too.

Kevin Fontenot: And don’t worry, we never see any of the bloopers or anything like that. It gets deleted, we’re not gonna have a blooper reel of anything like that. Although that would probably be really great, it would be some good marketing material. We definitely don’t have it though.

Scott Magdalein: Maybe we should start saving those for marketing.

Kevin Fontenot: Maybe we’ll just leave it as it is, but.

Scott Magdalein: My favorite bloopers, talking about blooper reels, I like Chris Pratt’s blooper reels from Parks and Rec days, those are some of my favorite. My wife and I’ll sit and watch those on YouTube and just cry-laugh while we’re watching those videos.

Kevin Fontenot: Yeah, one of my favorite ones of his, he threw a briefcase and actually dismantled a whole light switch and he just broke it for a Parks and Rec scene.

Scott Magdalein: And I remember that one, and all the actors froze, like what do we do?

Kevin Fontenot: Awesome. Well this has been Episode Five of the Thriving Ministry Teams Podcast. If you wanna give this online training thing a shot, we definitely encourage that with TrainedUp. We have a 30 day happiness guarantee. And even better than that, if you use my coupon code RED BEARD, I’ve got a big red beard, so just use the code RED BEARD, I’ll give you 50% off your first month. You can try it out, see if it works for you. If it doesn’t work, just let us know, we’ll issue a refund, no questions asked. Get started with TrainedUp at TrainedUp.church.

Kevin Fontenot: If you have any questions, we have live chat available directly on our website. If you wanna talk about a podcast episode, you want advice on how to do training in your church, let us know. We love having these conversations, we’re not just people behind the brand that are trying to put content and don’t wanna connect with people. We genuinely wanna have conversations with you. So head over to TrainedUp.church, use the code RED BEARD to get 50% off your first month, and we’ll see you guys next week.