Welcome to the Mariners Church Life Group Leader podcast. This weekly conversation is designed to equip and resource youth to build a healthy life group community that studies God's word, practices spiritual rhythms and changes the world together. Hey, life group leaders. This is Sam Smith, the executive director for the Life Groups and Men's Ministry.
And today Scott Kim and I sit down with Justin Herman, the online pastor for Mariners Church. And we talk about how to lead when life is busy, balancing a full life, and also how to lead with joy and adding a little bit of humor into your life groups and into your social time. So let's tune in to today's episode. Back again, online pastor, marathon runner, stand up comedian 2022 Mariners Church man of the year.
We don't actually talk about that much, but that was an internal vote and that did pass. Yeah, so it's a wonderful, beautiful hair. That's just flowing. Yeah.
Is this really how this podcast was going to listen to sing a lot of this? Actually, we have a lot of listeners I'll say. Yeah, first of all, tons. That's good.
And by tons, meaning we have a few wives and moms. Yes. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
We should cut nothing from this. Definitely. Listen, yeah, take a lead. Go ahead.
In our previous episode, we talked about how you have a full life. Yeah. Life for kids. Yeah.
Tell us their age. They are 10, nine, and then two four-year-olds twins. Wow. Yeah.
For I don't know if this is going to air. They turned five the end of November. Wow. We had them during COVID.
We were going for three and then we got three and four, which was the best news ever to me. That's right. So I got some people would freak out. I was like celebrating.
Wow. That was awesome. Well, you also have a full-time job. You're a podcaster.
Yep. Yep. I mean, you just have a lot of hobbies. Yeah, I do.
I do one for kids that I do on the side for fun called carpooling with Jesus, which is great. It's kids podcast. But I have young kids that listen to it. Whole long story behind that, but it's a really fun devotional.
It's got five devotional daily podcast I do for them. And then you know, other people listen to it too. But it's really my kids are a target audience. Just other people tend to listen to it.
And then I do, like, marathons and some trail running stuff and triathlons, which I'm just about to sign up for my next one that's happening in 2026 in Lake Havasu, Arizona, which I'm excited for my first triathlon in probably over a year and so I'm excited for that. Yeah, I have a full life. I take my wife on dates when we can and we have a pool in our backyard. So it's like always like dive competitions like full life.
Yeah, I have a full time job. Marist church is the online pastor, which is great. I get to talk to people from all over the country on any given day, talking with staff here, obviously at our congregations. But I live in Arizona and just like all of our lead pastors, we live in the communities that we serve.
And I get to live in the online community. Physically being away from the church is a benefit in that way. It helps me understand the community, see it from their perspective, you know, deal with conflict differently or deal with the things that pop up, you know, message them, you know, differently and it's a blessing. I love it.
I'm like, you know what, you have a lot going on, which I think a lot of our life group leaders can relate to. So when it comes to family hobbies, ministry work, how do you balance all of that? Today's episode is on balancing a full life emotionally, spiritually, is a great how do you manage that? Gosh, I hope you keep that the title by the way.
I hope you keep it. I hope when someone sees this, they see balancing a full life. They think to themselves, Oh man, this is great. Like I'm going to learn how to balance my life.
Oh, what a blessing. And then they're going to get to this point in the podcast when I tell them that balancing is a lie. Myth, it is not real. There is no such thing as balancing.
If you pursue that, you will be pursuing a fool's errand. And instead, what you should be pursuing is what I pursue. What I think Jesus pursues, by the way, and I think I learned this from him. I can cite examples pursuing health.
I want to be healthy in my relationship. I want to be healthy in my extra, you know, my side hobbies. I want to be healthy in my parenting. I want to be healthy in my, you know, my marital, my relationship with my wife.
I want to be healthy in my relationship with work. I want to be healthy. Now healthy doesn't mean balanced. Okay.
So balance means like, okay, I have everything kind of balancing all these different plates. And if I grab from one, I got to take from another and just going to make sure everything's balancing simultaneously. That's not what it is. There's going to be some seasons where I'm working a little less because my kid has BMX races on weekends.
And so I am not there on the weekends and I'm going to my kids be a match race. That's healthy. There's going to be some weekends or some weeks where I'm all in, rooted's coming up. So I'm just in front of my computer.
I'm crushing stuff and I'm going to miss some things and I'm going to miss, you know, doing the bedtime routine and my wife covers for that. And it's no big deal. There's going to be some weekends. Date night is an elaborate thing down in Scottsdale, Arizona.
We have a restaurant we like called the fat ox, which is wonderful. And sometimes date night is going to be at home with some popcorn. It's not. You know, sometimes it's going to be the seasons of training for a marathon and sometimes it's going to be the season of, you know, I've, you know, kind of been running a couple of miles a day for a while, but like there's nothing coming up.
There last time we talked about a triathlon I've come up is a reason I haven't done a triathlon in over a year is because I haven't had a time for it. It's a full time job. It's a train for some of the big ones. It really is.
And so no one would ever look at me and say, oh, you know, he's really, he's balanced everything out because there's something I do and there's something I don't do and there's seasons where it's different. But I think my wife would look at me and say, well, you know, he's not balanced, but you know, he's healthy. Like he's, he's the, his, his approach to parenting is repar to marriage is a approach to his own spiritual life and his relationship with Jesus. It's healthy.
It's not balanced because there's some seasons where it's a lot more one and a lot less of the other and even weekly there's seasons where kind of abs and flows. But if you, so I think what our problem ends up being is we have such a short view of things. We want to view things week by week or month by month, which is probably the worst way to look at anything. We don't look at, we don't look at anything else that way, but we like to look at a balanced life that way.
We wouldn't look at if we're looking at healthy or get more muscles, like you very much pointing on everyone. No, we didn't somewhere somewhere at home, somewhere home. That was great. But you look at the course the whole year while I was healthy and day and I was with my wife, I was healthy in time with my kids.
I was healthy in, you know, the extracurriculars I did. It didn't overtake so much. Now maybe in a month, you know, you're training more. So like I have a marathon coming up in December.
So like November will be more running like longer distances. And so if you look only at November, you'd say, oh my gosh, this guy just, he's just running all the time. He's running 15 miles a day sometimes like that. It's so unbalanced.
Well, maybe it's unbalanced. If you look only at November, if you take a wide angle view of the entire year, you'd say like, oh, well, there's someone here that he's like running like a mile or two a day or he's just doing some stretching. He's just in the gym doing some weights like so it all balances out because it's a healthy approach, not a well, I want to be balanced all the time. There's going to be seasons where it happens and flows and that's okay.
You mentioned how Jesus modeled this for us to and that you have examples. I would love to hear like, you know, what did Jesus do throughout his life to set boundaries or set aside times for himself? Well, okay. So you guys will imagine Jesus.
So I want to hear one of these three examples that I really like Jesus in the temple turning over the temple. I like that a lot. Okay. Big fan of that.
Um, Jesus healing the woman who touched this thing. Okay. I really like that a lot. And I really liked Jesus in the last summer.
Okay. So these, I'm just using these three. Jesus was around things all the time that probably drove him absolutely bananas. Okay.
Absolutely bananas. The people he's talking to, the Pharisees he's dealing with, like the, so use the women who caught an adultery, who's thrown at him and be like, Hey, Jesus, what should we do with, you know, with this woman? Okay. All of these situations probably drove him bananas, but he didn't go off on every single one.
But there's something unique about the temple where that required a different response. Now that's healthy. They can, he didn't react that way with every single thing that he saw that drove him completely insane, not insane, but drove him nuts. He saw it and he's like, this is not what God would want.
This is not glorifying to him at all. You're just, you're saying his name, but you're not duplicating him in your actions, but he didn't react that way in every single situation. There are seasons for some things and there are seasons for others. And that's a great example of Jesus.
There's a moment for going away, braiding a whip, coming back, turning over tables. That's not the solution for every situation. Okay. So there's season, certain things.
The woman who touched him is another great story. He's going through the crowd. She has been very sick for very long time, won't go into all the details, but it was a mess. And she saw Jesus.
She knew Jesus could do something about it. She reaches out and touch it. They were in a hurry. That's what Jesus was always in a hurry.
And he was reading the book of Mark. It's just like this fast paced. He's always doing something. But in this moment, he stopped and paused.
Now, he didn't always stop and pause. It's, I'm sure he's moving from place to place all the time and he didn't stop and pause every single thing that was happening. I'm sure there's always somebody who wanted to grab a minute with Jesus, but he stopped and paused in this moment. So while there's some moments where it's like, Hey, we got to turn over the temple.
There's some moments that even if you're in a hurry, you stop and pause. And then Jesus, the last supper, he could have confronted Judas at that moment. So like this is the angle that I look at when I read it. Jesus could have confronted Jesus knew what was going down.
Okay. This wasn't a shock to him. Like this wasn't like a, like it was a shock to disciples. Like, you know, they were like, you know, where's Judas?
Like I bet he's feeding the poor or given money to the poor. Like they are completely aloof. Jesus knew exactly what was happening. He could have confronted him.
The other disciples probably would kill him. Like if Jesus was like, Hey guys, just so you know, all the things I've been kind of alluding to, you know, I'm going away. One of us is going to be one of us. It's one of us.
It's one of us. It's that's the guy pointed. It's him and you just would have looked around you just would have been like, Oh, my God, I can't believe you just out of me. And that didn't like it.
It didn't happen. It could have happened. It, but it didn't happen. And so there's there's times where you, you know how things might go.
You have a sense of me, especially as an adult, you have a sense of how things might go in your kid's life or in your own personal relationships and you choose to hold your tongue. You choose to let things play out. You choose to let God kind of do what he's going to do. Let lessons be learned.
Like not everything needs to be called out in every single thing. And so those three like depictions for me speaks like three very different qualities of Jesus that I liked, which Jesus embodied all of the qualities that exist. And he used them in different times in different places. And sometimes when we think balance, we, what we tend to do is lessen the amount of plates as much as we can to create a balance where everything fits.
And so we'll do less in order to have more control and more structure, do more, but know that you're just not going to do 100% at any one given time at any one of those given things. And that's okay. You're creating space for that. So a life group that if you're a life group that that's what we don't have life groups that are built around hobbies, right?
We want to have life groups that are built around like surfing, surfing life groups. Okay, we're going to serve all the time and then talk about the Bible. We have life groups that are healthy because they're made up of, you know, having a serve champion, right? Like they're serving together, even if serving is not everyone's thing.
It's someone's thing and that one person's kind of bringing everybody else along. It doesn't mean they're serving every single week, but it does mean services apart. You know, they're praying together and it's a bit better at praying. Some people are worse.
You know, they're going through scripture together and having discussion and some people are better, you know, conveying ideas or articulating ideas and some people. It's a little bit more of a struggle, but like they're still going through that experience together. You know, a life group isn't just this one thing that is static and unchanging. The joy of a life group is that it is ever-changing with the people that are in it.
It's ever-changing with the experiences you're having in your life group. It's ever-changing with the personalities and as personalities and interests change in that life group. Like the spirit of that life group changes in a way and that's a healthy thing. So it's not about the balance of finding everything that fits.
So it's just so overly structured. It's about having all of the ingredients and knowing that there's me some seasons where you're doing a little less, some seasons you're doing a little more, but as you take a wide-angle view of it, you're able to say, you know what, I've been pretty healthy. This has been healthy. This has been good.
I love that. You know, in our pastors meetings, Eric Geiger has been going through the book in the Amaya. Is Geiger his last name? Yeah.
Because Eric heard too. I was in the past. Just a circle, Bradley. This is so embarrassing.
By the way, I knew it was Eric Geiger. That was a joke. That was a joke, by the way. Not funny, but there are a lot of Eric's on staff.
There are. There's only one Justin and I work with HR to see to that. There will never be another Justin. Yeah.
There was another Justin for a while, but that's when I was off staff. Yeah. Yeah. And they had to fire that guy.
Well, we don't need any of the details of that, but I will say this. I have to say this at the same time. But before I was interrupted by Justin, I was trying to say, Eric had talked about a leader with resolve, has that combination of restlessness and rest. There's that holy sacred restlessness for God's mission and purpose, but also we're resting in Christ and the work that Christ did.
And as you've been kind of sharing about healthy rhythms, I've been thinking about that. Like as group leaders, how do we have that kind of healthy rhythm of working hard for what God has called us to, having that holy restlessness, but ultimately resting in the fact that it's not about us. It's what Christ did and what Christ is doing in our groups. And so I love that.
I love all the stuff that you shared, Justin, about creating healthy rhythms that keep us steady and give us perseverance and resolve. But life's also better when there's laughter and joy. Justin, when I think about you, not only are you a stand of comedian, but you just weigh a lot of joy, laughter in our team. Yeah.
Anytime we get together. This is not a joke. You're one of the funniest people I've probably ever met. I appreciate that.
Yes. That's very kind. I think that's a life group. It is the time for us to study God's word, at the time for us to pray together, to connect with one another.
But I would love for you to kind of speak. How do we create joy, fun, laughter, which is so important in building a healthy group dynamics? Yeah, it is. Well, it starts with not taking yourselves too seriously.
I think there's a lot of serious people out there. I work with serious people. And I'm serious about serious things. But also one of the things I'm serious about is building camaraderie.
And there's two ways to build camaraderie. Maybe there's a couple more, but there's two really important ways. If you can laugh with people around something, camaraderie is being built. If you can laugh with someone, you have a shared experience where laughter is taking place, or you're doing a hard experience where it's in the mud, in the dirt, hard work.
That's why you get people that way to go build a house in Mexico, like the hard work of that. That will bond people together in a unique way. You can get people away and do something like fun where you're laughing together and you're able to have inside jokes together and you create space for goofiness together. It starts to bond you in a unique way.
Here's a really easy one. You know, those little rubber cheeses? They're now all over campus. So here's this is a take from one of our shepherding elders, why?
I'm not going to out who they are, but they're going to know who they are when they listen to this. She has a bowl of them at her house. I stay at their house. I'm really close to this family.
I stay at their house often when I come to town. And she has a bowl of them. And whenever she leaves a house, she'll take one with her and she'll leave it places. And when other people see it, people that are in relationship with her, they'll snap.
Even if it's not one that she left, but they'll just see one. They'll take a photo and they'll send it to her. That's just a fun goofy thing within a community of people that creates a sense of joy and fun. It's unexpected.
It's fun. I see the thing. I love that. I still do that.
When I took my kids to Disneyland, I grabbed a handful and left them around Disneyland, which is awesome, by the way. You look for these little things. Some people would say, oh, that's too goofy or too goofy. That's not my vibe.
Okay. You find the thing that is your thing in your group and have some inside fun, inside jokes, create moments that you're not taking yourselves too seriously. One of the really easy things is groups that can do the whole group together for some kind of summer or winter or in California or summer all the time. It's like some kind of fun at the beach game thing where you're just doing, yeah, social has nothing to do with opening the Bible.
Okay. Has nothing to do, but guess what? You do fun things together. They have nothing to do with opening the Bible.
When you get together to open the Bible, the joy and conversation and examples or it's just a dialogue that takes place will have just a deeper layer of levity around it because you've just embarrassed yourself together and you remember that and you will joke about that and it will come up and it will be effervescent. It will be such a part of the culture of the group, especially when inside joke becomes like a part of that. So you create fun by not taking yourself too seriously, being intentional, creating space for fun to happen, not the, hey, we're going to schedule fun during the first five minutes of life group and then that's not fun. Fun is we're going to start every life group with the highs and lows and happy and crappies of the week and everyone goes around and shares.
That's fun. We're going to start the week by, we're going to start doing phone a friend. If we're stopped by a question, someone can call someone they know and man, if you have a guy who's number, definitely give them a call or steps or someone, they have all the answers. You give them a call and you try and figure out the answer.
Fun little things that's like it's just out of the ordinary, different, but that fun bonds a group. It bonds people together. Laughing together, that shared experience, that does a lot of work. There's great examples of fun in scripture and I challenge anyone to go dig them out.
But there are examples of Jesus having fun with the disciples and I think if we don't have fun with the people we're with, we're not going to want to be with them that long. I love that variation of highs and lows, happy and crappies. I never heard that. You're high ministry coming out.
One thing that comes to mind when we're saying this is my boss, Tim Lucai, another funny dude. Very funny dude. He instilled in me that at our men's breakfast, at our brodios, whatever we do for an event, we got to have an element of humor and we got to have it right at the top. Reason being is that humor breaks down walls in people, especially men when it's so tough for guys to get vulnerable.
Man, having a fun game right at the top or just something to get fellowship going. And you see that in like marriage matters, that couples event that we have and the women's night as well too. There's always something fun right at the beginning and that allows us to fellowship better, just breaks down walls. Yeah, in our group, we actually at the Mirrors bookstore, I found this little tool called conversation starters and we just kind of go around and it's a random question that they get and it's quite funny in the things that people share and that kind of breaks the ice at the start of even our group meetings.
Absolutely. I'm going to infuse this. I'm joined after. And I'm thinking about Scott, our team is reading multipliers.
It's a book right now on leaders that are multipliers or diminishers. And these two guys did a research study on what kind of qualities are characteristic of a multiplying leader. And one of those qualities is people that don't take themselves too seriously, people that have humor, that inspires a team. And I can only imagine that will inspire your life group as well, someone that doesn't take themselves too seriously.
100%. Yeah, 100%. Well, Justin, such great insights today. Thanks for sharing.
Great being here. Life, your leadership, your wisdom and to all of our group leaders. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for listening.
And until next time, keep building relationships that matter, leading with joy and finding rhythms that give life. Hey, Justin. Knock knock. Who's there?
HR. We just hired another Justin. Sorry. I'd resign.