An Honest Conversation About Failure

This post has been adapted from episode 4 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 and I’m here with Scott Magdalein, we’re your hosts of the Thriving Ministry Teams Podcast, the podcast where we’re talking about all things related to Church leadership, training, and discipleship. And today, we’re gonna be talking about something that’s really fun for Scott and I. We’re gonna be talking about all the times that we failed. So we’re gonna get really transparent, talk about all the frustrations, all the times of failure, maybe leave out a couple things just so you can imagine a few things, but we’re gonna get down and dirty with it, and I’m gonna hand it off to Scott and he’s just gonna start us off here.

Scott Magdalein: I was about to say, all the things of failure, I don’t think that there’s enough time I don’t think, to list all of our failures.

Kevin Fontenot: Five our podcast today.

Scott Magdalein: Certainly not mine. Yeah, so I do believe in transparency, I’m not gonna be that transparent though. So I’ve been very picky about the ones I wanna talk about today, honestly because there’s some higher level trends or lessons I learned beyond just the lesson that I learned. Like, a lot of my failures I learn a really specific lesson on how I handled a situation poorly, or how I could have made a decision differently. But I don’t wanna go there because a lot of those aren’t transcendent themes. I’m gonna talk about two failures that I experienced, that God walked me through or I endured, or however you wanna talk about that, that I learned something that has really helped me in the future as well. So these are high level themes, I guess you could say, from these two failures.

Scott Magdalein: And I’m gonna talk about, my life is sort of split between ministry and business. And so I’ve got a lot of ministry experience, and therefore a lot of ministry failures, and a lot of business experience and business failures. And so, when I say business I mean like running my own business and trying to do something as an entrepreneur. So the first one I’m gonna talk about is a business thing, the second thing I’m gonna talk about is a ministry thing. As always, these failures are in the past for me, far enough in the past where I could feel like I can talk about them. But I promise you, going through the failure, it hurt, and I was not happy about it. And honestly, even at the time I wasn’t like, man I’m learning a great lesson through this. It was much more likely I was cursing under my breath, ticked off about what I was going through or a mistake that I made, or maybe shifting blame at the other time and blaming someone else for what my failure was.

Scott Magdalein: Anyway, so I’m gonna jump in. I’m gonna do one failure, and then I’m gonna pass it off to Kevin, he’s gonna do the next failure, and it’ll give me a little break. Is that cool Kevin?

Kevin Fontenot: That works. I guess we can back and forth so that way we don’t have to harp on you too much. I was just hoping that we were gonna stay on you for a while and then at that point people would stop listening.

Scott Magdalein: No, you’re not that lucky. So my first failure, in 2012 I had been, I had spent probably four years before that as mostly a product manager or project manager kind of person, organizing tech projects, organizing tech developers and designers and team. I had worked on my own products, I had worked as a consultant at a couple of companies. Then I worked at Life Church doing some YouVersion stuff and some Life Church Open and Church Online, that kind of stuff.

Scott Magdalein: So I’d been in the product world, still in the tech business, but in the product world, and I wanted to build my own thing. So that meant I had to learn, I knew some basic front-end web design stuff, but I really needed to go back and learn a programming language so I could build something on my own. And I had this idea for something that I felt like was a good idea.

Scott Magdalein: So I went to Treehouse, teamtreehouse.com if you’re curious, if you wanna know about how to build something or you wanna learn some tech stuff, teamtreehouse.com. I do highly recommend that, that’s not the failure. Went to teamtreehouse.com, learned how to build stuff, learned HTML and CSS. Learned JavaScript better. Learned Ruby on Rails. Picked up a big old Rails for dummies type of book. It wasn’t that exact book but it was a big book that I literally read a book with pages in it learning code and copying code from the book and into my IDE.

Scott Magdalein: And anyway, so I learned Rails and to build this specific thing called PicDigest, and it’s spelled P-I-C Digest.com. So in 2012, things were, the social media world was a little bit different, it was still pretty spread out, but also there was like APIs and you could still kind of work with stuff. Like, Cambridge Analytica hadn’t messed everything up on the Facebook side of things. Facebook I think had just bought, had just purchased Instagram for a billion dollars, and so Instagram was on its trajectory up and it had a bunch of money to grow. And Twitter was still pretty open, and Twitter was still fun at the time. And also Flickr still existed by the way. I mean I guess Flickr maybe still exists now, but who talks about it or uses it? Just photographers maybe, I don’t even know.

Kevin Fontenot: Somebody.

Scott Magdalein: So the idea behind PicDigest was, as a parent I would post a picture of a kid to Instagram and then maybe a picture of a different kid to Facebook. So I had all these photos everywhere.

Kevin Fontenot: Still your kids though, right? Not just random kids?

Scott Magdalein: Yeah. A different kid.

Kevin Fontenot: Yeah.

Scott Magdalein: My children, to these different social media platforms, and content platforms. But my family, and closer friends, would usually only follow me on one area, right? So I had grandparents of course, that were on Facebook and seeing pictures I post to Facebook, but they weren’t on Instagram at the time. But I had friends on Instagram, but they weren’t my friends on Facebook because they weren’t doing Facebook anymore because it wasn’t cool. And of course all my tech friends on Twitter, which didn’t really care about my kids, but they follow me on Twitter and not the other places.

Scott Magdalein: So I had these kind of tribes of followers, and I wanted a place where I could bring all the photos, because we post a lot of photos, bring all the photos in together for the people who wanted to not miss a moment. The idea was, grandparents and friends are missing pieces about me posting photos.

Scott Magdalein: So PicDigest is exactly what it sounds. It takes a digest of all the photos I post each day, to my different profiles, collects them into an email, and sends them out to my family, my friends, as an email. A nice, beautiful, single column email with everything formatted nicely, right in the email. And it was beautiful, it worked well, worked awesome. The first 20 or 30 people that saw it, liked it.

Scott Magdalein: And I’d built it myself, a had a lot of help from a guy named John Macardy, he helped me at the time a bunch. But I built it, for the most part, myself. And I was really proud of it. And then, past the launch phase, the first month probably of launch, and things kind of trickled. And it became honestly, it became work. It went from really fun an idea, and everybody’s on board, to the topic changed or the subject changed, and it was hard to get people’s attention about his new tool. And it became work getting their attention.

Scott Magdalein: And so I just kind of quit it. I just was like, it’s not worth the effort anymore. I’ve got a couple dozen paying customers, but that’s not even close to even covering our sever cost, because the server costs at the time were pretty hefty. And so I just kind of let it go. My failure in that, was leaning too heavily on launch, leaning too heavily on excitement, on my own interest momentum, the momentum of my interest in the thing. And then being tricked, or fooled, or deceived into thinking that because there’s not excitement, that it’s not worth doing anymore.

Scott Magdalein: And for me, that was a big failure because I quit, the main thing here is that I quit too soon. What’s funny is like, four or six months later, something like that, some other tool came out, I forget the name of it, but it got venture funding, like five million dollars right out of the gate and this big … I don’t know where they are, they probably shut down by now. But at the time it was like, oh my gosh, I quit way too soon. And it was the same exact thing, it was essentially PicDigest rebranded.

Scott Magdalein: Anyway, so I learned a huge lesson from that failure, to number one not trust my own motivational curves, which Kevin knows are pretty high and pretty low. But also to not just quit too soon, I guess.

Kevin Fontenot: Yeah, we have a custom emoji in Slack that’s Chicken Little, just so you can click it whenever Scott’s in one of those up and down moments. He’s being dead serious on the up and downs. And, you know you talked about having to read a book on Ruby on Rails, and that kind of ties into the first failure I wanna talk about.

Kevin Fontenot: So I’m a college dropout. That’s something that has bugged me for a while, it’s something I don’t really talk about, it’s something that I always think about quite often, just personally with my wife. And it’s something that I’ve had to reflect on a lot over time and today I’m ready to talk about it. So this should be fun.

Scott Magdalein: This is like counseling, isn’t it?

Kevin Fontenot: Oh, yeah! It’s like counseling. I’m pouring my heart out and I’m gonna have some freedom afterwards, and it’s gonna be great.

Kevin Fontenot: But, in college I switched around majors probably 10 different times. At first I went to a state school where I’m living now in Texas called University of North Texas. Spent a year and a half there and probably switched my major, probably 5 to 10 times during that year and a half. So I had already completed a year of college before going to college while I was in high school, so didn’t have a whole lot of time where I really would have had to complete college.

Kevin Fontenot: But I could decide what I wanted to do, and I knew that I was always wanting to do ministry, I was called to ministry, and so that was what my focus was. But I was in a state school because it was cheaper, and just wanted to get the degree out of the way, but I could never figure out what I wanted to do. So I jumped around from everything from History, to Communications, to Sociology at one point, to Computer Science. And in our Computer Science final, we actually had to write code by hand, like with a pencil and paper to write out code. Which seemed like the most ridiculous thing ever, and probably has a reason that I don’t have a Computer Science degree today, is I had to write out code by hand.

Scott Magdalein: I can’t imagine trying to parse out between a parentheses and a bracket, or like a colon and a semi-colon.

Kevin Fontenot: And it was in C. So it wasn’t like this nice language, we’re talking about C here so I don’t know even know why we had to start with that, but that’s a completely different subject that’s way too nerdy for this podcast to talk about.

Kevin Fontenot: But after a year and a half, I decided that I was gonna go to Bible College. So I switched schools completely, went to Southwestern Assemblies of God University in Waxahachie. I did an online degree so I could stay where I was at because I was really involved in some ministries at that point and didn’t wanna leave the city that I was at because I really felt called there. And probably spent another year trying to catch back up. So I’d spent a year and a half just kind of wasting time at University of North Texas, didn’t really get anywhere because I kept changing degrees, and so I had my basics done but that was it.

Kevin Fontenot: So I went to SAGU and trying to start doing this ministry degree, and it was all stuff I already knew, so it was hard for me to get motivated for it. I’ve always been a reader, I believe that if you wanna lead you need to be reading different things. So I’ve always been a person that really enjoys learning, but like to do it at my own pace and like to figure out things. And so it’s really hard for me to go in and dedicate myself to a particular learning track, and that’s something that I’ve struggled with for a long time. I’ve always been really smart, school’s always been easy for me, it’s just been hard for me to put in the time and effort.

Kevin Fontenot: And so one of my biggest failures is just not being able to commit to anything. And so, I ended up dropping out of SAGU. It’s something that probably still affect me today. It’s something that I have to thing through a lot, quitting, and failure, and giving up on things too early. That’s definitely gotten better with my wife because she’s like, are you sure you really wanna quit that, is now the time? And she’s been a lot more motivational to me than I am to myself and helps me recognize those times where I’m just being irrational with my desire to quit something too soon.

Kevin Fontenot: So it’s kind of similar with what we’re taking about. But mine’s just a lack of commitment to things. I just can’t see the end goal and if I get frustrated with it or can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, I just give up. And that’s really started with college, something that still bugs me today. And that’s failure number one for Kevin, dropping out of college.

Scott Magdalein: Yeah man. Okay, so therapy’s going good today, therapy’s going good. I will say this, Kevin has committed to TrainedUp for a year and a half now or so. He’s been with us for a year and a half, and the amount of growth that I’ve seen just in you Kevin over a year and a half, I do believe that you committing to something will make you exponentially … Oh, yeah I love you too.

Kevin Fontenot: I making heart symbols, for you guys listening to the podcast and not video.

Scott Magdalein: All right, so my next thing, my second thing I’m gonna talk about. This is ministry related. It’s a little bit more recent, it was a few years ago, or maybe a couple years ago.

Scott Magdalein: So here’s what it was. I was a college minister at a church here in Jacksonville. The church was great, staff was great, the pastor was great, great vision. Just one of those really solid regional churches. About 2000, 2500 people that attend there at 3 campuses. Just really solid, good at doing ministry. There’s no superstar at the church, nobody goes for any particular single person or anything like that. These people love to attend the church.

Scott Magdalein: And college ministry was one of the ministries that the church was really trying to do better at to keep students that were in high school at that were going to one of the local schools, we have three really great local schools here for college. And, the church was having a tough time keeping those students engaged in the college ministry so they brought me on to help out with that, and sort of also rehab it after a few different leaders had gone through.

Scott Magdalein: And when I came in, first six months I just kind of held down the, what do you say, toe the line or whatever? Just kind of continued on what was happening and built trust and that sort of thing. And then, it came time to start to lead some change after I’d built some trust.

Scott Magdalein: And so one of the things is, I didn’t lead this change too quickly. It wasn’t drastic change that I led. I did have trust, they did trust me. So it wasn’t like this thing where I came in first week, and was like okay we’re gonna break everything and try to rebuild it. So that wasn’t my failure in this.

Scott Magdalein: So my failure in this college ministry, was that I under communicated what we were changing, why we were changing it, where we were going. And what’s funny is like, all of the changes, everything that we were doing, was totally legit, it was good ideas, it was a move toward Biblical nature of a ministry within a church, it was a move toward bolstering the health and stability of the ministry, it was a move toward equipping leaders to take on more responsibility in the ministry, it was a move toward more Bible study and less events driven type stuff. The church staff, my leadership at the church was behind it and all for it.

Scott Magdalein: And the failure wasn’t in the structure of the change, it wasn’t in did I do it too quickly. It was 100% just that I didn’t communicate it well enough. Which is, for me I guess I can see that kind of trend in other areas, in other projects that I’ve been a part of or other teams I’ve been a part of, where I tend to assume that people know more or understand more or get it or grock it as we say in the programming world. They understand it in the core of who they are, they understand why we’re going the direction we’re going.

Scott Magdalein: I underestimated the level of communication that I would need to lead change in this relatively small ministry with eight volunteer leaders and a few dozen people, college students, in the ministry.

Scott Magdalein: And so the result of that, was a full out rebellion. When we started implementing the changes, it was like a mutiny on the high seas.

Kevin Fontenot: You had like picket lines, and signs being paraded around.

Scott Magdalein: If it would’ve been socially acceptable for them to show up to the church with picket signs, they would have shown up. Pitchforks and torches, maybe.

Scott Magdalein: But, they just, it was like a foreign object trying to be assimilated into a new body, and it just was completely rejected. And over the course of a few months, even with more communication after the fact the changes were made, it was too late.

Scott Magdalein: And so, that was one of the things I regret in ministry, is under communicating before the change all the why’s, and what are we doing, and where are we going, and why are we doing it, what’s the vision behind it and all that kind of stuff. That’s more of a tactical failure, but that led to kind of a ministry failure for me.

Kevin Fontenot: I think that’s one that everyone can relate to. As you were talking, it wasn’t one that I was gonna share but, just thinking through some ways that that’s happened with me as well in ministry. It’s really common, especially in the Church world, where it seems staff turnover’s really high. I think the average time on staff for every staff member is about two years. And so that staff turnover is so difficult to take on for a new leader, for an old leader, where that’s something that everyone struggles with. And I know I have in my ministry when I was a small groups pasture at a church beforehand where it was really difficult because we were completely trying to change things just like you were talking about and it just didn’t end up going well, at all.

Kevin Fontenot: But that’s not the failure I wanna talk about. The second failure I really wanna talk about is one that has a happy ending. So gonna shift gears, leave it a little happy in therapy with that.

Kevin Fontenot: A few years ago, I spent some time doing full-time missionary Evangelism. So I quit my job, was doing IT work at the time. Spent six months, completely self-funded, going out, doing street Evangelism everyday. Don’t worry, I wasn’t yelling at people or holding up signs or anything like that. Just having one-on-one conversations with people on the street, asking them about spiritual things, about their relationship with the Lord, and had a lot of fruit with it.

Kevin Fontenot: So it was something that I really enjoyed at the time and had started it while I was going to a church. So I had a lot of friends that were doing full-time ministry as Evangelists at a different ministry in Kansas City, and had kind of based what I was doing in my city in the Ditton area off what they were doing locally. And so, we had done some conferences together, I had taught with them. And I decided that that’s what I wanted to do, I wanted to create something exactly like they were doing.

Kevin Fontenot: At the time, I was serving just as a small group leader at the church that I was at. And when I was asked to lead that small group, our connections pastor had asked me to lead it a certain way and asked me to do something, I decided to completely ignore that advice and decided to do it my way. Because I was doing my Evangelism thing completely outside of the church, and didn’t have any oversight on it, didn’t have anyone I was submitting to. I just thought of it as my own thing and something I didn’t wanna mix up with our church.

Kevin Fontenot: I have no clue why, looking back, I wanted to do that. I guess it was just more pride or selfishness at that point. I wanted all the glory in my younger days.

Kevin Fontenot: But I ended up, I was trying to raise support for what I was doing. Had quit my job. Had about six months worth of savings that I knew I was gonna be able to support myself at the time. I was unmarried so I was living super cheaply in this old janky apartment, barely eating, all those sorts of things that are fun.

Kevin Fontenot: But, came time where I was like, okay I really gotta get serious about getting supporters. And my wife was one of my first supporters so that, before we got married, which was a nice thing. And she actually accidentally gave to me twice. She tried to support me once and gave to me twice at the same time on accident, and she felt so embarrassed about it that she couldn’t ask about getting her money back even though she didn’t have enough money to give twice. So that was a fun story after the fact.

Kevin Fontenot: But I went up to our pastor at our church and just kind of talked to him. I was like, hey this is what’s going on, I’d really appreciate you guys as a church supporting me as a missionary. Because I knew it was something our church had done. We always talk about supporting other people. So we went and had that conversation, and it definitely did not end the way that I expected it to. So instead of getting supported by our church, I ended up leaving our church, and not on good terms with our pastor.

Kevin Fontenot: I had been stubborn at the time, really selfish, and had kind of said some things in jest to him in some of our meetings before that I didn’t even realize had effected him. Just kind of talking about things about how we were doing things at the church where I thought I was kind of helping us move towards, and giving my opinion, where it really instead felt like an attack. And I definitely recognize some of those things that I had done now to kind of make it that way.

Kevin Fontenot: So I ended up leaving the church completely, went to a different church at that point. And it was something that was really difficult, because it was something that I wasn’t expecting to do. I was expecting to leave that day having a new supporter for my ministry that I was doing, and it ended up turning everything that I was doing kind of upside down. Within a few months after that I was no longer doing full-time ministry, my wife and I had decided to get married at that point and so we were entering into a new season of life. So it was kind of the natural transition for me to shift out of that because I wasn’t able to raise the money that I was going to.

Kevin Fontenot: But I ended up, for the next three years or so, still having that relationship that was broken. And, my wife and I now serve at that church, we have a great relationship with our pastor again. And that took a lot of humbling on myself. So, we had attended a worship service at the church while we were on staff at another church, just to kind of get some refreshing and our friends were the worship pastors at the time at the church. So we had a lot of connections, a lot of friends that were there, and just decided to go and worship.

Kevin Fontenot: And while I was there in worship, I really felt the Lord speak to me and was like, hey you need to go and mend this relationship. It’s not okay for you to just stay where you’re at, to keep being frustrated about it, and to not talk about it and hope it gets better.

Kevin Fontenot: And so my ministry failure before was really about being selfish, about being prideful, trying to do things on my own. And I’ve learned the impact of relationships, and learned the impact of doing things together. So much so, that when it came time to start Disciple Labs, instead of trying to do it myself, I went up to Scott and said, hey Scott here’s the idea that I want to do, do you guys at TrainedUp wanna do this with me? And thankfully, Scott said yes at that point. But that’s been a hard lesson that I’ve had to learn in my life based on failure in relationships, which it’s very difficult to mend and get over.

Scott Magdalein: Man, that’s good. That’s good. I’m glad we decided to talk through some of this stuff, because I mean, especially in ministry we don’t like to talk about failures in ministry because we’re afraid that’s gonna, maybe we’re gonna lose our job or we’re gonna get lumped in with moral failures of whatever.

Scott Magdalein: Now the reason I wanted to talk about this today is I had read a headline in some news article somewhere about some prominent pastor falling from grace. And I was like, you know what, pastors fail. And ministry leaders fail, and sometimes they fail big and they lose their job or they lose their ministry for a season. And sometimes they fail small and it just hurts some relationships or it sets them back in the progress of their ministry.

Scott Magdalein: But if we’re not open, if we can’t talk about those failures, then how are we gonna help each other, how are we gonna learn from one another’s failures? And also how are we gonna help each other grow? How are we gonna help each other find forgiveness for the sins out of our failures? And how are we gonna help each other overcome the shortcomings out of our failures?

Scott Magdalein: And scripturally, it’s completely sound. James 5:16, confess your faults and confess your sins one to another and pray for one another that you may be healed. If pastors aren’t doing that for one another, then how are we going to expect our people to follow that and seek spiritual health through the concept of confession to one another.

Scott Magdalein: So this is wasn’t necessarily, maybe this wasn’t necessarily confession. I mean, we have tens of thousands of listeners that are paying attention to this, so this isn’t us in some private confessional booth. But I do feel like it’s valuable to be transparent with one another as ministry leaders.

Kevin Fontenot: Definitely, that something that, I know the leaders in my life, that I respect the most, are the ones that are the most transparent, that talk about the failures they’ve had, the struggles they’ve gone through, because it allows me to look at them in a light that I wouldn’t necessarily look at them as. It’s a lot harder to look at a leader, to serve the leader, to be committed to a leader, if they’re not open and honest about what’s going on in their life either in the past or in the present.

Kevin Fontenot: And so, as ministry leaders it’s something that we absolutely have to do, not just with each other, but after we’ve come out the other side, we need to talk about those things with the people that we’re leading as well in order to be effective in our ministries.

Scott Magdalein: Yeah. Yeah, man. Okay so this is episode four of the Thriving Ministry Teams Podcast. We are Scott and Kevin from TrainedUp.church. Come chat with us if you want a little chat confession, we love to chat with you. If you need help with training your ministry volunteers, your ministry leaders, come chat with us.

Scott Magdalein: We also run, mostly Kevin runs, Disciple Labs. So if you are concerned, or you’re curious about the spiritual pelt of your people, and you actually want to know from a real data stats perspective how people are doing, check out Disciple Labs, it just launched this week and there’s only two more days left of the launch discount. Which I’m not even gonna give on this podcast because you need go to Disciple Labs, DiscipleLabs.com to check it out to get that discount. You can chat with Kevin their directly on DiscipleLabs.com.

Scott Magdalein: This is the Thriving Ministry Teams Podcast, and we’ll see you next week.