Ryan Burge

And to be honest with you, that has been incredibly successful and really changed the trajectory of American religion, I think in American society in many ways too.

I think many of them are personality driven without a doubt.

And there's this interesting thing that's going to happen in a couple of years, because a lot of these churches started like the 1990s and 2000s.

And those pastors are getting to the age where they don't want to be pastor anymore.

You know, they're 67.

How do you hand a church over to someone else when you're the guy who started that church?

Like literally built it from nothing.

And everyone, not everyone's there because of you, but a lot of people started coming because they want to see you and hear you as the pastor.

How do you hand that off to someone else who is half as charismatic as you or 80% as good a speaker as you are?

And there's actually really sort of famous examples of this going around.

There's a church in Chicago called Willow Creek.

And they were one of the first non-denominational megachurches in America, just outside Chicago.

And they had a pastor named Bill Hybels.

And Bill Hybels had this five-year plan that he's going to retire.

And he was going to hand it off to a new generation of pastors.

And actually, it all went to plan.

He had two elders.

It was a male and a female.

They handed it off.

pastors of the church.