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When conflict arises in your ministry, how do you respond? Tim Hester, Executive Pastor at Southeast Christian Church, offers a biblical framework for restoration that focuses on healing rather than punishment.

Drawing from decades of experience shepherding both church staff and congregation members, Tim walks us through the delicate process of addressing sin and repairing broken relationships. The conversation provides practical wisdom on preparing your heart before difficult conversations, creating balanced environments where truth can emerge, and recognizing genuine transformation in those seeking restoration.

Tim explains how youth ministers can discern when to handle situations themselves versus when to involve church leadership, always maintaining the goal of bringing people back into right relationship with God and others.

Unlike harsh discipline approaches that often leave people damaged, true restoration recognizes the image of God in each person while still holding appropriate boundaries. Tim shares personal experiences that illustrate both the challenges and beauty of this process, including how one youth pastor's commitment to biblical discipleship transformed all twelve of his children's lives.

For youth ministers navigating the inevitable conflicts that arise in ministry, this conversation offers hope that with prayer, biblical wisdom, and gentle persistence, restoration is possible. What's at stake isn't just resolving immediate problems, but teaching the next generation how to handle conflict in ways that honor God and preserve relationships.

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BTE4.14 Fostering Restoration with Tim Hester

Fostering Restoration with Tim Hester

uh, michael, I have a confession. I lied on the last episode. I was just listening to it and, uh, at the very end of the episode, I said I don't remember exactly what I said, but I was like, yeah, we're definitely 100 sure, gonna do one of these two things next week, and we're not doing one of those two things, so I'm a I don't know what to do.

Own up to it. I typically, I think owning up to it is the best way.

No one listens to outro. No one listens to the outro. We don't need to bring it up. We're not going to bring it up. Okay Onward. Hi, I'm Brad Warren. This is beyond the event, a youth ministry podcast presented by Christ in Youth, where we help you maintain momentum between the mountaintops. Very excited for today.

Today we have a professionally though honestly, tim is not a nepo baby here okay, he is super duper qualified to talk about what we're talking about today. We're going to be talking about restoration and what to do when people that are part of our flock fall into sin or have conflict with one another, and Tim is a really incredible person to engage in this conversation. When he was first married, was a youth pastor, was involved in youth ministry, so he knows what it's like to be in the position that you are currently in. He owned his own business for several years and then he sold his business to become a pastor at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, kentucky, and has been there for over a decade. Now he is an executive pastor. They have several, but he referred to himself as the staff elder, so a lot of what he does is take their elders and their deacons and their staff and shepherd those people really well and in doing that, has gained a lot of really valuable experience in what it looks like to resolve conflict and to restore people in a way that is biblical, in a way that recognizes the image of God in those people and in a way that is gentle, as scripture calls us, to, which you'll hear Tim say here in a little bit. So that's going to be a really fun conversation.

I'm sorry, but I do not have a co-host today, sad. So, michael, you're my co-host.

Well, that's a joke I don't have. But I do have some questions, because I was just like kind of introducing your dad and I don't know. So he owned his own business, yep, was it in a construction of some kind? No, it was a staffing firm. Oh, that's right. Yeah, very Temporary and permanent, temporary and permanent staffing solutions. And he owned that business for how long? I think it was 22 years, 20. So, owned a business for 22 years, sold the business to go work at Southeast, right?

Sort of he. Actually there was an overlap for a few years. Oh okay, so he got hired on and then he was an absentee owner and then at a certain point just realized that he couldn't do both. Yeah, too much, and he needed to be fully committed to one or the other and the obvious choice was the staffing firm, and then that just fell apart completely. That's not true. He committed to being on staff at Southeast.

I thought you were going to say he committed fraud.

No, tim, great dude, really really excited to have him. Michael, I have an update about something. Okay, the past several episodes of this podcast we've talked a bit about Nebraska, uh-huh, and I have some information about nebraska. Oh boy, uh, backstory, I, I, I trashed nebraska, yes, on this podcast. Me and and caitlin, we did that. Um, the the fine people of Nebraska caused an uproar. Frankly, it was a mutiny, saying like oh no, nebraska is a great place to live. I'm sure Nebraska is a great place to live.

Sure, yeah, in the non-island portion of North America, so just Mexico, canada, united states, canada and alaska, okay, in that little section, all right, there are like a whole. I want you to imagine in your mind there are a whole bunch of states that border the ocean, okay, yeah, states and provinces yeah, if you're canadian, uh, there's a bunch of states that border the ocean, right, and then there are like a lot of states that border a state that borders the ocean, okay. And then there's another little layer of states we're getting smaller as we get toward the middle here. There's another layer of states that border a state or province that borders a state or province that borders the ocean. There is one state that does not fall into any of those categories. Can you guess what it is, michael?

the state of isolation the state of isolation. Nebraska oh, you're so far from an ocean so so okay, let me make sure I was tracking correctly. Correctly, nebraska borders a state that borders a state that borders a state connected to the ocean.

Yeah, I think its quickest path is Kansas, oklahoma, texas ocean. That's crazy, looking at a map right now. Yeah, it could also do like Colorado, idaho, oregon Ocean. Uh-huh or no, that's not Colorado, yes, it is. No, it's not.

Wyoming, wyoming, wyoming, idaho, oregon, ocean.

Dang. Are there mountains like in the western part of Nebraska? No, or is it really just like it looks?

like a scene from Dune Part 2. You expect a sandworm to just come cruising along and sweep you away If you're?

listening and you're from Nebraska. I'd love to hear from you Beach or mountains? Neither, Because you don't have either one.

Neither, oh. But you know what they do have Oscars pizza and wings.

Which I like. Yeah, so anyway, they also have Matt Stevens, which I like. They also have Stonebridge Christian Church. Yeah, we were just there Christy.

Babermeyer, which I like Wonderful people. But, boy, the setting is not good. It's tough and that's you know. If you want to respond to that, you can, mhester at cioycom, you can let us know what you think about all of that. But here's what we're going to do right now. We're not going to have a mailbag, because you don't want to hear, believe me, you don't want to know what I have to say about the mailbag, and I don't have a co-host here, and we do have a kind of long and great interview with Tim Hester. So what we're going to do is we're just going to stop right here and we're going to go ahead and jump right over to that. Well, going to stop right here and we're going to go ahead and jump right over to that. Well, tim, I really appreciate you being here as we dive into this conversation.

I was thinking through some of the conversations that you have to have, or get to have, I should say, probably as part of your job, conversations around restoring people who have fallen into sin and reconciling relationships that are broken, and those types of conversations make me, brad Warren, nervous. I don't like them. I don't think that most people enjoy having those conversations, so I am curious why you are passionate about them. How did you get to a place where you became at southeast kind of the guy to have these conversations?

well, I, that's a great question. I mean, first of all, I don't know that anybody's really passionate about these things. They're just a necessary part of you know leading. Uh, no matter what level that you're in and I am one of those guys I do get a lot of the really tough ones when it comes to whether they're congregational issues or they're staff issues or, you know, whatever level we're at, I get a lot of them because I've done a lot of them over the years.

I think that the reason that it's an area that I kind of gravitate toward is because it's going to sound kind of weird, brad, but you know, I love people, I absolutely just love people, and the one thing that I know from even personal experience is that people get in conflict, you know, all the time, and when they do, usually somebody is damaged. When they walk away from a conflict or that's what we fear we think that, oh man, if I don't do this, well, we don't even. Some people don't even think about it. They just enter into these conflict conversations and when they do, somebody's damaged and left on the floor, and that has a tendency to be another one of those stories in someone's life that makes them back away from what God created them to do, so they leave somewhat damaged, and when I see people that are in conflict or when I see people that have been not treated very well or something you know, I immediately start asking myself some questions about.

You know not what happened. That's obvious. There was a conflict, there was something and somebody got damaged. But my question is why? Why did that occur? Why are we even here in the first place? And I think, rather than just getting over the pain of having a difficult situation, I'd rather walk through the pain with somebody and then get on the other side, having understood at least why it occurred, and that can bring long-term, lasting results and reconciliation as opposed, and growth as opposed to we just got over the situation and moved on. So I think that's why, ultimately, I end up getting involved in more of these than I care to, because the truth of the matter is I'm no different than you. These, almost every single time, these things scare me to death. In fact, as we sit here right now at two o'clock today, I've got one of those conversations scheduled, uh, between me and another person here on staff. That's going to be a very, very hard conversation, but it's necessary if we're going to grow.

Yeah, so I think that's why okay, um, I mean, I that that is all really interesting and convicting in a lot of ways. You are. So you were telling me off, mike, of some of the just like demographic information about what your role is at Southeast. I'm going to have you kind of repeat them. You mentioned that you have how many elders and deacons.

Yeah, we have 105 deacons and we have 38 elders currently. And what is your staff? Yeah, we have somewhere around 600 staff members, which is equivalent of about I don't know 450 full-timers, because we have a lot of part-timers.

And we have 14 locations and a Christian camp. By the way, I always hate sharing those statistics depending on who the audience is, because it feels somewhat unrelatable at some point.

Yeah, I know that you would never just like volunteer that information and be like this is my credentials is, but I am um soliciting that information from you because I think that it actually helps people understand just the scope of how often you are involved in this type of thing Because we're ultimately talking about 700 people that are trying to work together to accomplish a mission that God has placed on the hearts of the fine folks at Southeast Christian Church, and every single one of them is a sinner, and people are going to fall along the way and people are going to hurt one another on the way, and so you have kind of a pastoral role in many of these relationships like you're talking about, and I want you to talk from your experience. But also I just want to kind of acknowledge something here too, which is that you are speaking from that perspective. Uh, I am asking the youth pastors who are listening to this to kind of take a mental step, uh, to kind of forward a stream here, um, and apply some of the things that you're going to say to a youth ministry context. So you're saying I have a staff member who we're not going to get into specifics on any of that, but this is how we would address this with our staff, knowing that the listener is going to take that and say, okay, I have students who engage in a similar type of thing and this is a principle that could help me with that. So in that sense, I think it becomes a little bit more relatable, uh, but the there there are two, and all of this another context piece for the listener.

All of this is based on a conversation that I had with you, tim uh, about a year ago in your living room. We just got started talking and I had thought my gosh, more people need to hear this conversation. So if I'm remembering correctly and you can correct me if I'm wrong there were kind of two different things that we talked a little bit about. We talked about about restoration of somebody who's been caught in sin and we talked about reconciliation of relationships that have been broken. So those are the two things that I want to kind of hit on Dealer's choice. What do you want to do first?

Yeah, let's start with that whole concept of restoration.

Oh, okay, great, I love it. Why'd you pick that one first?

Well, because I think that, especially from my role as an elder and to back up, I'm in my 18th year as an elder at Southeast Christian Church and all of our elders at Southeast get involved in what we call restoration cases. A lot of churches call those discipline cases, but we learned a long time ago that when somebody picks up the phone and calls them and says, hey, brad, this is Tim, I'm one of the elders at Southeast, I'm calling you about a discipline case, you know not many people want that phone call or voicemail with that. But when you put yourself in the posture of what is the purpose of biblical discipline, if you will, well, you know it's restoration. Ultimately we pull that out of Galatians 6.1, you know, if there are any fallen among you, let those among you who are spiritual restore them gently and be careful, unless you fall into the same trap. So you know, paul gives us in Galatians this sort of outline that says, hey, you can be a heavy-handed person and bring discipline if you want, or you can restore someone back to a rightful relationship at a variety of levels in a gentle manner but gets them to become a fully functioning member of the body of Christ again. And also. I want to be careful, brad.

There are so many subtleties here, one of which is that if somebody violates something pretty egregiously but they go through a restoration process, they may not be able to be restored back to a position that they left when they were violated, but they can certainly be restored back to a proper relationship with the Lord, obviously, and then, secondly, in a right relationship with people and with the church or whatever. That doesn't necessarily mean that they get to be restored back to a volunteer level position or even a staff level position, that when they violated something that required restoration, they may not get to return back to that position. So there are nuances to this whole thing, but that's why I like to talk about it from a restoration standpoint, because when you stop and think about this, if two people inside of the church organization are in conflict with one another, we've got something that's broken. You know, we were called to live in community with one another, and we were called to live in community from a variety of levels, you know.

I think, first of all, we all know that we were not created to be isolated. It's not good for man to be alone. And God himself there's three of them, you know, and all those types of things. So we know that we're supposed to be living in a community and we know that, inevitably, this whole 1 Corinthians 12 body of Christ thing is is pretty big deal. Um so, uh, everybody has to play their role and everybody, everybody is playing their role without jealousy, envy, strife, all the things that scripture tells us not to have. Then this body works pretty well and when it does, it's a force to be dealt with for the cause of bringing glory to god, which is ultimately what we were all created for. Yeah, so when you talk about doing these restoration issues, man, that's what we're restoring back to. We're trying to restore back to something that God wants to use as a force for his own glory, and he wants to use us as people. So that's why it's an important issue.

Totally, there's a lot of really interesting stuff there, because I feel like a lot of people in the church there are issues that are I think you use the word egregious that it's. It's like hey, listen, you can't work with with students anymore because you've crossed this line and that's just not going to be allowed anymore. And I feel like a lot of people feel like what they would need to do in that situation is just do kind of like a cut and run and you know say, hey, we got to move on, we got to act in the best interest of these students, and you know you can't, you can't be here anymore, kind of thing. And I love that you're saying, yes, we are going to act in the best interest of the students. Of course we're not going to necessarily restore this person to that position, but also we can't just neglect this person and leave them out on the street. That's a person created in the image of God, that's part of our flock and we're going to take the steps needed to kind of restore that person.

So I'm curious just from your and I know that you're you do this a lot, so I'm sure you have kind of a process that I'm interested to know about when a person at Southeast Christian Church maybe they confess something to you, maybe you're made aware of a situation, I'm sure both of those happen with some frequency what does this look like at southeast, what happens? And I'm sure it depends on the nuances of the situation or whatever. But I'm kind of asking 30 000 feet, you know, yeah, what would be the process that they would kind of enter into?

yeah, yeah, great question. And you're right, you know it depends on what the issue is. It depends on you know who the aggrieved are and all those types of things. But let me just answer that in general terms. You know, first of all, you always want to set up the parameters where you can have what you hope is a really honest meeting with someone and really get down to what the root issues are.

And the other thing is, too, is that one of the things we have to recognize is that every single one of us brings in inherent biases to these circumstances, and usually those biases are based on past hurts or how you've overcome your own sin issues and that kind of thing. And I remember one time you know I was taught that oftentimes, if somebody has overcome a certain one time, you know I was taught that oftentimes, if somebody has overcome a certain sin issue, then you're either going to be way too soft on people that have that same issue or way too hard. There's very little middle ground in there, and so you have to be really honest with yourself when you're entering into these situations. Number one am I the right person to really even handle this situation? Is it too close to me where I'm going to lose some level of biblical objectivity. So be honest with yourself and assess okay, am I the right? And I hand off these types of things all the time to other people because of that very situation.

Also, do I have too much relational equity? Because I'm always going to err on the side of people that I just love. I want them to win, I want them to be right, that kind of thing. Personality differences, by the way, also come into play, because I'm a very relational person and what that does oftentimes is that puts me in a position of being even a people pleaser. So you can see, on some cases, somebody like me would might not be the right person to walk into a real tough situation. So I need to make sure that I'm either partnered with someone or handing it off to someone that has a little bit better of a perspective of how to deal with those things. Um, without needing feeling the need to have the feel, the good feels, by the time you're at the end of that meeting.

Which I have two questions about that. I told you I was going to do this, that's totally good. You talked about being partnered up with somebody who might balance you out a little bit in that. Are these the type of things that you wouldn't normally enter into, as like hey, someone has come into this meeting with some leaders at Southeast and it's going to be two or three of us, or are these things that you kind of handle on a case by case basis on your own? That's question one. Okay, go ahead.

Yeah, let me do question one right down. Question two you always want to let them know what they're walking into, because usually when people are having to walk into a circumstance where there has to be a very serious conversation, number one, they're afraid. Number two, they're defensive. You know there are all these emotions that are kind of running through them, and to be able to do this appropriately, you've got to be able to appreciate everybody that's involved and where they're coming from, and so you always want to make sure you're setting the table appropriately when it's, you know, as elders, one of the things that we do. We never do a restoration case alone, we always do in twos. And here's the other piece you know, and some of your youth pastors might have to do this or be involved with it, with some of their volunteers who might be married, as an example, and so you have a married couple that's going through something that might be leading down the divorce pathway, and of course we want to get in the middle of those types of things. And if that's the case, oftentimes you bring in two men as elders into a room and you're doing some fact-finding and you got a wife sitting there and now she's got all these men and she's the only woman sitting in the room. That creates what feels to be like an unfair balance and she doesn't know if she can trust us as men, and so on. And so we always try our very, very best to balance that and actually bring in somebody that can understand who that person is. In this particular example I gave you, it might be another woman. In another case it might be a business dispute or something like that. We might bring in somebody that's got a little bit more acumen in business so that they can understand that business person's perspective. So you always but you always want to let them know, hey, and we always tell them here's what's going to happen.

You know there's, by by the way, brad, usually these things come to us. There's some sort of a of a um, um, an accusation. Somebody's coming saying, hey, I was wronged by someone. Our first question typically is um, you know, first of all you got to empathize right away and and you got to say I am so sorry you were wronged. And you ask to say I am so sorry you were wronged, and you ask them what the situation is. And then the next question is because, remember, these are two members that probably are in the same area of ministry, service in some form or another, at least at the same church, and the first thing we want to ask them is have you gone to them and asked them or appealed to them about what they did wrong to you? Sort of the Matthew 18 outline, right, somebody's sinned against me. I got to go to them and say, hey, you know you violated this. And oftentimes the answer is no.

And then you have to ask some pretty serious questions about that, you know, because they're really uncomfortable I don't want to accuse anybody and then sometimes they want to walk away from that situation as opposed to actually diving into it. But those are important issues because, remember, we're discipling people. You know, it's one thing Jesus told us to do go and teach them everything I've commanded. And so that means that when you get in conflict with somebody, how would Jesus have handled this from a biblical perspective? How are we taught? And so you want to lead them to do as much of the work as they can on their own as believers. And, by the way, that usually uncovers someone's understanding of scriptural principles. You know, I didn't know that was a thing. Or you know, I didn't know that fear was running into this, so, um, but we tell them when they come, we ask those questions and then we'll let them know.

Okay, so we're going to go on some fact finding. So we want you to come into a meeting with us. That meeting will last for about an hour at the most. We don't want to go anything beyond that and we're just going to listen to you. We want to hear your heart, we want to know what happened to you, we want to know all the circumstances. And then we're going to do the same with the person one-on-one that you're talking to. We're going to invite them into a meeting and we're going to do the very same thing with them, and then we're going to compare those stories and then, hopefully, work toward bringing you all into the same room in another context and then begin to work on that together, prayerfully, biblically, and see if we can't bring about some restoration.

So that's kind of a general setup of how we do that and I I really admire the eldership model that southeast kind of has and philosophy that they have. Um, I remember reading a book by bob rus Russell about eldership in college. I was like man, there aren't a lot of books about being an elder and you know, this is really important. So I love how deep rooted that is in your guys' history as well. But I think so for youth pastor listening to this and thinking through like oh, I have a volunteer that you know we need to confront some sin issue in their life. I have a student we need to confront some sin issue in their life. I have a student that we need to confront some sin issue in their life.

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