In this episode of Backstage Pastors™️ Phil and Tyler sit down with David Fletcher, founder of XPastor.org, one of the most comprehensive resource hubs for executive pastors. David shares the origin story of his work, which began out of a lack of available research and has grown into a platform with thousands of resources and hundreds of thousands of annual users.
The conversation explores practical tools available to executive pastors, including free courses, weekly webinars, and a robust salary database built from billions of dollars of church compensation data. David explains how churches can leverage this data for better, more objective compensation decisions and discusses the value of independent compensation studies.
David is a wealth of knowledge gleaned from years of serving executive pastors — and from being one.
CHAPTERS
01:34 Introducing David Fletcher & XPastor.org
07:29 The Origin Story of XPastor
10:00 Free Resources for Executive Pastors
12:00 Courses, Webinars & Getting Started
14:11 Compensation Data & Salary Forecaster17:00 Why Churches Need Compensation Studies
23:41 Benefits, Trends & Staffing Insights
27:39 The Retirement Crisis for Pastors
29:13 Innovation, AI & Leadership Mindset
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Editing and Support by The Good Podcast Co.
Ep 05_David Fletcher
[00:00:00] Phil: Hello and welcome to the Backstage Pastors podcast, conversations and content, specifically designed for executive pastors and second chair leaders in the church and nonprofit world. We are brought to you by the Church Hub, gratefully, and I am your host, Phil Taylor. My co-host is Tyler Drewitz.
[00:00:28] Tyler: Hey everyone.
So Phil, just a random question to get us started, but if you could instantly automate one task in church leadership forever, what would it be?
[00:00:38] Phil: You know, I, I’m gonna go with the assimilation process. I think that it, it’s one of those things that can so easily get missed Yeah. In in the world of just sort of growing your church.
Mm-hmm. And we know that guests are gonna show up. On a weekly basis sometimes a lot depending on if you’re living in an area that’s got a lot of new people moving into the area [00:01:00] and, you know, Monday comes quick and you’re busy, you’ve got a lot going on. You’ve got staff meetings, you’ve got one-on-one meetings with your team, and I think assimilation can easily get missed.
And so. Automating that, making sure that you’ve got people who, that is their number one job when they wake up on Monday morning. But even if you don’t have the kind of staff or you’ve got somebody who’s leading it, so much of it can be automated with technology nowadays. So I think that’s probably the number one thing.
That’s what I would want to automate
[00:01:28] Tyler: for sure. And we didn’t compare notes and I am right there with you. So that just shows you.
[00:01:34] Phil: Well, Tyler, we’ve got David Fletcher on the show today. David has been serving executive pastors for like 2025, I don’t know, maybe 30 years. He runs ex pastor.org, which it, it’s, I would assume it’s the number one site out there for executive pastors.
[00:01:51] Tyler: I couldn’t tell you the name of number two.
[00:01:54] Phil: I, I wouldn’t even know where to send you. Sure. But, it’s certainly the most comprehensively resourced [00:02:00] website. There are like literally thousands and thousands of articles on there and resources. And really our goal for this first season of the Backstage Pastors Podcast is to get you acquainted with introduced to all the key voices in the XP world and you know, books that are out there, resources that are out there that we would say.
This is a key resource for specifically the executive pastor role. And so Fletch’s website, a lot of times goes by Fletch fletch’s website and all that he does is without a doubt one of the key resources for the xp, the second chair leader. And it, you should have it bookmarked on your computer.
Because when you email Tyler and I with questions about half of our answers are gonna be, have you checked Fletcher’s website? Mm-hmm. Have you checked xpa.org? So
[00:02:49] Tyler: yeah. Most, and most XPS should have that one. And then irs.gov just based on frequency of visit. Absolutely. Well, before we get to that interview, we want to take just a minute to share [00:03:00] how Phil and I serve churches around the country.
So, I personally serve as the executive pastor in a lay position and one of the original planters of Formation Church in Salt Lake City. I also re lead my XP church, where we come alongside churches around the country providing bookkeeping, remote executive pastor support, and really helping pastors navigate the operational and financial side of ministry with clarity and confidence.
And then about a year ago, I co-founded Ridgeline Printing with a long time friend and lead pastor of Formation Church because we were just so tired of seeing churches overpay for custom apparel, signage, printing projects, basically anything you wanna put your logo on in it. We just end up too expensive and poor quality.
And so we really focus on fair pricing, strong quality, and understand church needs. And just based on our own experience deeply the realities of mobile church needs for that kind of thing. So most of my time is spent solving real problems for pastors, financially, operationally, practically so that they can focus on leading well.
How about you, Phil? [00:04:00]
[00:04:00] Phil: Yeah, I, you know, I do a lot of things, but it all relates to the idea of serving pastors and churches. I spent 20 years in pastoral ministry in a number of executive pastor roles, and now I get to just work with pastors and churches all over the country, primarily with Plain Joe Studios.
Uh mm-hmm. We work on building projects master planning. Branding, we call it spatial storytelling. And we love coming alongside of churches at those critical times. When you need to expand your building, you need to add a building. You need to just fix a building that is stuck in the nineties or 2005 or whatever it might be, and you need to give that building a, a new lease on life.
Plain Joe will come alongside of you. And really helped that happen. Well, I also do a lot of coaching through backstage pastors. I coach a lot of executive pastors and you, you know, if you found the podcast, you probably have already found my books, but my books are defining the executive pastor role.
And then the second one is eldership [00:05:00] development. From application to affirmation. It’s really meant to be a, sort of a, a case study or an annotated look at a two year elder development process for your church. Gives you a, a, a headstart on, on how to build something like that for your own church.
[00:05:18] Tyler: Absolutely. Well, and I mean, I’ve been able to benefit from all of the different way, ways that you serve, but just to throw out there for plain Joe, our church and our new building we were talking about is was blessed enough to have you guys and your team come out and it was just so, I mean, literally and figuratively transformative for our team.
So I cannot say enough great things about playing Joe Studios, but this, this podcast and interview is with David Fletcher. So let’s get to that.
[00:05:47] Phil: David Fletcher, it’s good to see you. Thanks for taking time outta your busy schedule to be on the Backstage Pastors Podcast. Appreciate it so much.
[00:05:56] David: Hey, I’m happy to be here. It’s early in the morning. Look at us. We’re all bundled [00:06:00] up.
[00:06:00] Phil: That’s right.
[00:06:01] David: Everybody has a coat on.
[00:06:04] Phil: Well, I think the last time we talked was when I was on your weekly live webinar talking about the updated version of my book.
And that was nice of you to welcome you on there. But, you know, over the years we’ve done a lot of things together. I’ve been at your annual conference multiple times. Tyler, I don’t know if you’ve ever gone to the XP seminar there in Dallas. I haven’t, but it’s,
[00:06:28] Tyler: I haven’t had a chance yet.
[00:06:29] David: Oh,
[00:06:29] Phil: Tyler, you’re a heretic.
[00:06:31] Tyler: I know you gotta go. I know. I gotta make it. I gotta make it.
[00:06:35] Phil: I tell all the executive pastors that I coach, that you’ve, you’ve gotta go at some point to the seminar and I love what you do there. With that, sometimes I’ve done breakout sessions. I think I did a main stage session once, one year with you there.
But really, you know, you have been one of those guys that has been an influence in my life for, gosh, close to 20 years, [00:07:00] and and I appreciate it.
[00:07:02] David: My pleasure. It’s been a, a wonderful journey to be on.
[00:07:06] Tyler: David, you’ve also been speaking into the world of XPS for such a long time, so could you just kind of, walk us through, I know sometimes people are a little shy or reluctant to sort of walk through their resume, but I think it’s really helpful for our listeners and just everyone, like walk us through your journey of working with churches and pastors and this call to help provide resourcing to the XP world.
[00:07:29] David: Well, way back when there were dinosaurs still roaming around. I walked into the library at Dallas Seminary doing some research for my dissertation, and I thought I’d lost the golden touch of being a good researcher. There was nothing in the library. So I walked downstairs and I saw the head research librarian now, Phil Tyler, how would you like that title?
Head research library? And he knew me and he said, Hey, David, are, are you the executive pastor at this church? And I said, yeah. [00:08:00] And he said, what is an executive pastor? And that told me everything I needed to know. Yeah. There was no research on xps. That was 23, 24 years ago. Wow. So I started Xpa at the time and Google Analytics was in like a beta still.
And I began seeing these hits from all over the us.
[00:08:20] Phil: So you started Ex Pastor as a research project Initially.
[00:08:24] David: Well, more of I was one and there was nothing out there,
[00:08:28] Phil: right?
[00:08:28] David: So I thought, well, let’s just pull together whatever scan data there is. And that was the origin of the site. And it now gets like a half million visits a year.
[00:08:38] Phil: Crazy,
crazy,
[00:08:40] David: crazy.
[00:08:40] Phil: Wow.
[00:08:40] David: And I try and give away as much as I can for free. I’m 66 now. Started it when I was 43, and I’m not taking anything with me last time I checked. So I give away as much as possible.
[00:08:53] Phil: Love that. What about like your, your journey through like different church worlds? Like I know you’ve been at a few different churches.
Talk [00:09:00] about that.
[00:09:01] David: Yeah, so I’ve been in churches of, as an XP from like 1200 to 7,000 or something like that. Wow. A lot of different sizes. Had everything from apartments to cell phone towers to all sorts schools with it. And it’s been a, a really delightful journey. I stepped outta being an XP about seven years ago and devoted myself to XPS around the nation through Xpa.
So lots of experiences, smaller staffs from like. 20 all the way up to 350. Just bizarre in size.
[00:09:39] Phil: Yeah.
[00:09:40] Tyler: Crazy, crazy. Well, you know, the focus of our first season here on the podcast is all about. Key voices and resources specifically for xp. And of course your site is without a doubt, one of the best, if not the most complete website out there.
As a matter of fact, I’m a part of a bunch of different kind of Facebook groups for XPS and different [00:10:00] resources for xps, and inevitably what will happen. Almost every single day is someone logs on, they’ve, they’re newly in the XP role, and they ask the infamous question, what resources exist? And it’s, it’s like a game for me to see how long before someone says your website.
Oh. And it’s typically within seconds. Yeah, usually the same minute as the poster, and so for sure, just a, a wide variety of things. And yet we’re always amazed when we talk to XPS and, and just how many of them have, have found your site. And so could you talk about, I know you’ve mentioned giving away things for free, so if you’re an XP of a small church, you’ve been told you have $20 for your development budget, what, what are some things that people could utilize your re website for?
[00:10:45] David: Well, we have 1400 articles on the site.
[00:10:48] Phil: Wow. Wow.
[00:10:48] David: So you name it in over 23 years. I mean, it’s like what the French say. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Really, the church world has changed remarkably, [00:11:00] but the core of what you do is also remarkably the same. The tax laws haven’t changed much.
The thing we’ve seen the most is smaller churches, churches of 500 who now have xps because in all, there’s hundreds of articles on insurance, on health issues, on legal issues, there’s active shooters and churches of 80, so in the old days, in the dinosaur days, it used to just be big churches. And now it’s churches of all sizes.
I also made, we used to have paid courses and now we made ’em all for free. Oh wow. If you wanna just walk through all these various courses, 10 courses we have, they’re all free. The salary forecasters free, so it’s really just the workshops and the seminar and the comp studies that pay the freight, which after we cover that, everything’s free.
It’s great. I
[00:11:56] Tyler: love
[00:11:56] Phil: it. You mentioned those courses, David, so like if, if I’m a [00:12:00] new executive pastor, is there a specific place that you say, Hey, do this course first on the website?
[00:12:07] David: I would say go to the courses. Finances is pretty basic because every board, every finance team wants you regardless of your financial background to know about ministerial housing allowance in depth.
Mm-hmm. And a lot of CPAs aren’t that hip on that ’cause it’s pretty arcane. You gotta know the difference between FICA and cica. Once you’ve been doing it, it’s like, oh, I get it. But, and who’s a minister who can qualify to be paid Zika, which has changed remarkably in the last four years too, due to some federal court rulings.
Not law, but rulings. So I would get started there and it’s a great place. Then we have it on generosity, and I would also look at the, gear Up. We do a Gear up workshop every year in October, and that’s kind of the new [00:13:00] things that are coming around. That way you can see, well, what’s on the horizon, what’s happened?
I would just tune into, you know, see if, if the particular I think we have like 300 videos for free. The other thing to go would be to go to the weekly webinars, right? And they’re all recorded. They’re on the site. You can tune in live or you can look at the recordings. I post ’em the same day.
[00:13:24] Phil: Yeah, I would strongly recommend that anybody watching or listening this podcast that you, you know, immediately go to xpa.org and sign up for your emails.
You don’t, you don’t overload people with emails. You. But to be able to see what that weekly webinar is gonna be on is really, really helpful. And, you know, if you have time to join it, great. Watch it later. That’s great.
[00:13:50] David: And there’s no ads on the site or in the emails,
[00:13:52] Phil: right?
[00:13:53] David: It’s all ads. I just get tired of going to sites.
Even my favorite, the Wall Street Journal. You’re reading an article and then [00:14:00] it’s like popups. Some girl in the bikini pops up, it’s like, nah, I’m not interested in that. And then, oh, weight loss drugs and, you know, you just. Get used to not seeing those things. So we have never done ads on the site.
[00:14:11] Phil: That’s great.
Awesome. You mentioned briefly there as you were kinda listing off some of the things that, that sort of pay the bills, so to speak is the compensation study. Talk a little bit about that. ’cause that’s, I think is a really helpful tool.
[00:14:26] David: Well, for those who are watching the video, let me share a screen and it for those just doing audio, I’ll talk about it.
So the salary forecaster, you can send me your salary and it’s all we use these security things. You send me everybody in your church, and then you get what you see on the screen back. And what it says is like, how many of worship. Where it is, Midwest annual budget, payroll benefits, and then you get specific salaries to compare.[00:15:00]
And this is all set in forecaster format for 2027. So you can all be comparing things in constant dollars.
[00:15:08] Phil: Hmm.
[00:15:09] David: And this allows you to sift and sort your salary data. We also have pivot tables. You can look at like here, just administrative assistance in the Midwest. When you download this data, which you can, I can’t activate the pivot tables on the screen.
You can close the Midwest and you get the south and the Northeast and the west. And this is for all of our positions. And you can see there is just so much data out there. And I do this so that, i, I’m really concerned that we have good salary data to compare, and if you don’t have the money for a salary survey, they’re like 2,500 bucks and up.
You can begin to do it on your own.
[00:15:52] Phil: So let me get this straight then. So there’s an aspect of the salary data that you make available. Is it for free or for [00:16:00] cheap? Explain that.
[00:16:01] David: It’s for free. Okay. If you send in your data to me and I get a billion dollars of data a year. It’s a huge trust factor
[00:16:08] Phil: for churches.
You receive, receive a billion dollars in data from churches every
[00:16:11] David: year. Every
[00:16:11] Phil: year. Wow.
[00:16:12] David: Every year. And then I make that available. And the forecaster now, because it’s been growing so much post COVID, has $3.7 billion in, in data. Okay. That you
[00:16:24] Phil: download. So if I contribute to the data, I get the data. Great.
[00:16:27] David: Yeah. You can’t buy the data, which is great. Right. You have to be a church that submits your data.
[00:16:31] Phil: Mm.
[00:16:32] David: Okay. So as a church, you submit your data. And it has to be all the data or most of it, like 90%, I’m fine, right. Some big churches can, you know, get things a little smaller ’cause we die with 300 employees and then you get $3.7 billion of sortable, SSTable, filterable data back and you can download all of that data.
Wow.
[00:16:55] Phil: So, okay, so, so you’ve got the free data. But then let’s say I wanna like [00:17:00] go ahead and do the full compensation study. Why would I, why would I want to go beyond the free data to actually have you guys do an actual compensation study?
[00:17:13] David: Well, the problem Phil is if you’re an xp, you have a dog in your own hunt, right?
Mm-hmm. And so a lot of boards are saying, ah, Phil, we love you, we trust you, but we want someone independent. And someone who’s done a lot of these. Now from your side, Tyler might say, man, I could do it, but wait, I begin to get into the sifting and sorting the data and it’s taking me 30, 40, 50 hours,
[00:17:41] Phil: right,
[00:17:42] David: to do that.
So what I provide, I’ll show you what I provide, and here’s my methodology. Again, I’m just. Give it away for free because I wanna increase where churches are is a good salary study. We’ll look at local teachers ’cause they’re locally negotiated. Most of your [00:18:00] pastors are gonna be paid like a teacher. The senior staff, senior pastor, xb.
Some others will be paid like a principal or higher district officials. You look at local cost of living. You look at the national database, that’s the salary forecaster. I always include 50 to a hundred salaries. You wanna do bell charts, I’ll show you that in a minute. And then you do a salary grid.
So you know, you look at teacher salaries and look at this. This school district district is paying beginning at 51,000 and up to 123,000 bucks a year
[00:18:35] Phil: based on experience and education and all of that.
[00:18:38] David: That’s right. And then the principals are gonna be 1 53 and goes up to a superintendent of 3 24.
[00:18:46] Phil: When you do a compensation study, like let’s say I bring you into our church to do a compensation study, and, and let’s just pick a scenario here.
Let’s say we’ve got two campus pastors. Yeah. And you know, one campus pastor, you know, has [00:19:00] 15 years of experience and his master’s degree and has worked for us for five years. Other, you know, campus pastor B has, you know, three years of experience doesn’t have a master’s degree, and we just hired him.
Like, are you, are you giving us advice on, hey, here’s how these two people’s pay should differ actually.
[00:19:23] David: Well, so what I do is I, I find 50 to a hundred comparable salaries, and here in, when I do a report, this is what I give people, and it makes compensation team meetings really short because it’s very hard data, it’s very easy to sift and sort, and then you do an analytics table.
So the 10th percentile for that, let’s just do a senior pastor for a minute, is that 1 0 7 goes up to 1 67. If I had two senior pastors or two campus pastors, I would do two lines in this chart and your other person is probably gonna be here, [00:20:00] and you also get in a comp study. Quads. So this is the 10th percentile.
This is the 90 percentile, and you’re probably gonna pay the one guy. Let’s say he had two xps. One guy might earn around 1 0 9 and the other guy might earn around one 20. So I wanna give you the data so you can sift and sort and figure out, well, he doesn’t have as much education, but he has a ton more of experience.
Okay? So we’re gonna place him on the, these quad charts.
[00:20:32] Phil: And then I’m guessing you or somebody else from your, your team, there’s some sort of a consultation that we’re doing over the over zoom or whatever.
[00:20:40] David: I’m always happy to do that. Jesse’s done that. He just did one. He’s Jesse Spradley helps me. He just did one with a wonderfully smaller church.
I’m happy to do it, but frankly, Phil, the 35 to 50 page report is generally so complete that people don’t come back with a lot of questions.
[00:20:58] Phil: Right?
[00:20:59] David: This is like, boom. [00:21:00] Well, this is what our teachers make. This is what the MIT database says. We need the average cost of living. It costs 85,000 bucks to live in our town.
Here’s what you know, they figure out they can pay. Here’s what flood suggests is the range. I get very few questions back. It’s actually kind of unnerving. Will somebody please ask a question?
[00:21:21] Phil: Wow.
[00:21:22] David: Fair. Either they think it’s all hogwash, which I know it’s not because I get so many compliments back on the reports like, wow, you, you gave us the data we needed.
This is terrific.
[00:21:34] Phil: So when you’re, you’ve obviously done a lot of these, you and Jesse have when you’re working with a church what are you finding is like the. The kind of standard on who your contact is, like is it one of the pastors or staff members? Is it a lay leader? What do you recommend on that?
[00:21:52] David: I’ve had it all over the mat. I’ve had an elder, so I had an elder at a very large Presbyterian church and he said, I can’t give you the name of the [00:22:00] church ’cause it’s of a bit of a diss on the old comp team. He said, our meetings used to be long. Drawn out, no consensus with a lot of, well, I don’t know if Phil should earn, and I don’t know Tyler, and he said we had the shortest.
Data driven meeting ever, and we had unanim unanimous consensus on our decisions. Wow. ’cause the data was all in front of us. Generally, for small and medium sized churches, I’ll have either a comp team person or the XP for really large churches. We begin to get the HR director send us info, but that’s in consultation with their xp.
It doesn’t matter who sends it to me, the data’s the data.
[00:22:42] Tyler: So you had mentioned having someone do like a full compensation study, something like that, runs about 2,500 and most churches can’t do that.
[00:22:49] David: It starts at 2,500 with five bell charts, extra bell charts are 1 75. Okay. You a bigger church. And the price, I mean, it’s more complex.
I’ve done churches [00:23:00] of, I can’t give you the actual size. Let’s just say above 10,000. Sure. Hundreds of employees and what you do is you get a fairly simplified compensation grid that the employees fit into.
[00:23:13] Tyler: Okay.
[00:23:14] David: I’ve, I’ve had churches that have done 28 bell charts absolutely killed me, but man, they got a ream of data.
I just finished one for a church and they had 98 pages of data. Wow. ’cause they wanted to know a lot of detailed info, big church. Big budget paid their people really well and they wanted to see us. Are we paying people fairly? And yes, they were, they were high, higher than some, but very fairly. Hmm.
[00:23:41] Tyler: That’s great. That’s awesome. So, so what about benefits? Like how do you handle that in the compensation study? I know through my company we support churches around, and I would say there is not one commonality between two churches we support and the benefits they offer. So walk me through what you’re seeing out there just in Pastor Land in terms of benefits, what people are [00:24:00] offering, and then how you’re weighing those things.
[00:24:02] David: Well, Tyler, to get at that, I’m actually launching a beta. Okay. It’s, anyone can send me an email and participate in the beta, but I’m not making it generally available, and it looks like this. Because benefits are really hard to track, and very few churches are gonna publish their benefits. So this looks very similar to the salary forecaster.
On the one side you have the private data data. I never release. Nobody gets that, not even Jesse, because that’s just the way it is and everybody knows that. And then here’s the public data. And we, we wanna begin to assemble, well, what are churches paying for 4 0 3 B plans? What’s the percent of that people are contributing?
What are the other IRA contributions, et cetera. But the another way to think about that is I have a bell chart. I’m happy to send it to anybody. And it shows that. 50% of churches [00:25:00] pay from like 48 to 63% of their general fund go to salaries and benefits.
[00:25:06] Phil: Mm-hmm. Okay.
[00:25:07] David: So the bottom line is actually your best way to look at your overall benefits, and then we’re trying to be more granular and we’ll see the whole thing may fall apart.
That’s why it’s a beta test, you know, of looking at benefits.
[00:25:20] Phil: What are you seeing in terms of percentages for like matching at churches like. I’m sure it’s all over the board, but like, what, you know, what do you find yourself re maybe a better way to say it is, what do you find yourself recommending?
[00:25:34] David: I don’t have enough data to tell you what’s out there yet. I, I have $75 million in church data so far. I won’t be comfortable making any recommendations till we get to the 200 or $500 million mark. It’s, it’s all highly specific. That’s the hard about benefits. Often a 4 0 3 B will be at about 5% to [00:26:00] 7% of salary.
I prefer to see a matching fund if the church will do it. Yeah. So we’re gonna give you Phil, 5%. Now, Ty Tyler, because he may have a spouse that works, we, he may put in another 5% and we’ll match that. So now he’s getting 15% of his salary in retirement.
[00:26:20] Phil: Hmm.
[00:26:21] David: I can say this. Americans are terrible at saving.
Are you ready for the, well, here, let me, I, you know, I have this, let me just share this for the people who can see it, because it’s a wonder when you get a chart, it, it just, it, it helps see the whole story. So benefits over the last 20 years have been remarkably. Constant at about 54% of general fund salaries and benefits.
In the last couple of years, two years, we’ve seen payroll, that’s the green bars here decline by about [00:27:00] 2%, and benefits have gone up in the last two years, about three quarters.
[00:27:07] Phil: Hmm.
[00:27:07] David: And then here’s that chart I was telling you about that. Of all the churches we surveyed. About half are in this range here, where they’re spending 48 to 61% on benefits.
[00:27:19] Phil: Mm-hmm. That’s a lot.
[00:27:24] David: Well, it is. And it, it means you don’t have a lot of money at the end of
[00:27:29] Phil: the day. Do you see any other trends that you’re noticing in, you know, compensation or data or benefits that you’d, you know, want to talk about here on the show? David?
[00:27:39] David: Retirement. Retirement is absolutely terrible.
So the average two thirds of pastors when they reached age 67, whether they’re working or not, had less than a hundred thousand bucks in retirement savings,
[00:27:52] Phil: two thirds had less than a hundred K saved for retirement.
[00:27:58] David: And in the median for the US [00:28:00] the average worker is 200,000 bucks.
[00:28:04] Phil: So we’re half of the average.
[00:28:06] David: Half of the average. Absolutely terrible. I don’t know about you, but a hundred thousand bucks doesn’t go very far. When the new car is now averaging about 50,000 bucks, that’s the average new car.
[00:28:17] Phil: Sure.
[00:28:18] David: So churches and pastors, unless they wanna work at Walmart and no, no complaints on that, but you’re qualified to be a greeter at the door and not much more as a pastor.
You’re gonna be working somewhere else after you retire.
[00:28:33] Phil: I am curious to know you know, some pastors will opt out of Social Security. Do you see that they have saved more? You know, are you seeing much of that or?
[00:28:43] David: I don’t have data on how much they’ve saved. I don’t, I would not recommend opting out of Social Security.
You can buy your own Medicare insurance, but it’s a lot more expensive than if you’re in the program. And so I, I don’t have data on that, Phil, and it would be an [00:29:00] interesting one to collect somehow if people would wanna share it.
[00:29:04] Phil: Well, this has been great to hear a little bit about this. Is there anything else you’re working on there at Xpa that you wanna share before we finish up today?
[00:29:13] David: I’m always working on new stuff. It is so much fun just to mess around and help. The benefit study is really the latest thing. The beta. Yeah. And you know, it’s kind of scary and you should always do things that are kind of scary because we may get all this data and it’s like it’s totally unusable. It’s just like,
[00:29:33] Phil: right,
[00:29:33] David: you learn stuff and it’s like, yeah, whatever.
Or it could be the best thing since sliced bread. I don’t know.
[00:29:42] Phil: We’re, we’re grateful for the ways that you invest in executive pastors through ex pastor.org. Again, as Tyler said, we’re constantly recommending thank you people to go there. You know, I’ll get the emails saying, Hey, do you have a policy on this or that?
And I’m like, you know what? Just go to ex pastor.org. [00:30:00]
[00:30:00] David: Hey, another great place for policy is I use perplexity and. I, I always like to look at an actual policy, but perplexity AI will create, when you type in Evangelical Church of 500, I need a security policy. They will give you things you may not think about.
You don’t want to cut and paste from ai, but in terms of seeing like, oh, I, I wouldn’t have thought about this other category. This is really good. I would always do an AI search. Yeah. And at some point that’s gonna take over some of the ex pastor articles, like on policies, right?
[00:30:36] Phil: Yep, sure. That’s right.
Yeah.
[00:30:37] David: But we gotta remember, garbage in is garbage out and you have Absolutely to check their references.
[00:30:43] Phil: Mm-hmm.
[00:30:44] David: So like in perplexity, I did a search yesterday and they had like 10 points. Five of them were from the same article that didn’t really list what they were talking about. AI was kind of inflating something.
Like it said, a Tesla battery should be at [00:31:00] 90%, and I go to that website in Tesla and there’s no 90% listed. I have no clue where AI got it from. Hmm. Garbage. It’s mixed garbage out. It’s mixed bag
[00:31:11] Phil: for sure. Right. Yeah. AI is,
[00:31:14] David: but for giving you the range of ideas, it can be really helpful.
[00:31:19] Phil: Yeah.
[00:31:20] Tyler: True. Absolutely.
Hmm.
[00:31:22] Phil: Well, Tyler, any other further questions on your side?
[00:31:25] Tyler: No, I think just I know Phil mentioned it earlier, but why don’t you, David, just, if somebody wants to stay connected to what you’re doing, keep up to date on all of it. How can they best go about that?
[00:31:37] David: Free newsletter. Sign up for that.
That’ll get you twice a week at most. Kind of the latest webinars, articles. I have an article coming out on observing a VW bug. So there was an article in the Wall Street Journal. Wow. And they had this photo of the bug and there was a pressure bottle attached to the tire. Anyone know why either of [00:32:00] you?
[00:32:00] Tyler: Pressure man.
[00:32:02] David: So this, this actually applies to the church world in terms of being alert and doing novel things. They to keep the cost of the bug down. Back in the sixties, they didn’t wanna run a wiring harness to the front of the car to power the windshield wiper. And they said, well, how are we gonna power water?
To the, the windshield wiper, right? The little pump. So what they did was they connected and they used it for like 10 years in several different cars. They connected a pressure bottle to the spare tire that pressured the, the water. That would go to the windshield wipers. Huh? Now it was genius. It saved them probably like 10 bucks per car.
But that shows the relentless drive to keep things cheap. But what it was was it was a very novel way to do business and it worked. And that’s where I think we need to be in the church. Like [00:33:00] so you find a new health insurance company, is it really gonna work? You know, like we had a conversation last week, someone wanted to look at church health the one that’s not the insurance company CHS, and maybe it’ll work for you.
Check it out. Gotta think of that VW bug. Like how do we do things cheaper and better without sacrificing quality?
[00:33:24] Phil: Right?
[00:33:24] David: So you try it for an experiment for a year on a low scale. Might be a different HVAC system or HVAC monitoring system or a way of measuring staff and you say, Hey Tyler, we’re gonna do this staff report.
It’s just a beta, so don’t worry if you don’t like it, we can change it. We may scrap it, but this is what we’re gonna do for our annual reviews this year.
[00:33:47] Tyler: Hmm.
[00:33:48] David: You try it. Yeah. And then you find out the staff loves it. Like, oh, we hated that old system. It was terrible. Didn’t tell us anything. If we change this new system just like 5%, we’d have a workable deal for our [00:34:00] church.
[00:34:00] Tyler: Sure.
[00:34:01] David: That’s where we need to be as xps. The military on a aircraft carrier, you call it your head on swivel, you’re always looking around. Because you don’t wanna be on the flight deck and have one of those big steel cables snag your foot right when a jet comes in because you’re gonna be carrying a hundred feet down and you’re dead.
And that’s where we as church leaders need to be is heads on swivel.
[00:34:25] Tyler: Love that.
[00:34:27] Phil: It’s great. Well, David, as always, it’s great to catch up with you. We just missed the xpa seminar for 2026, but I highly suggest that people would put the dates on their calendar for 2027 and try to be there. If you’ve never been definitely sign up for the weekly email on xpa.org and we just appreciate you being on the show and I’m great to be with you.
Hundred percent. Certain that you’ll be back on again. I’m sure you’ll be a frequent guest here with Tyler.
[00:34:55] David: Thank you. Awesome.
[00:34:57] Tyler: Thank you. It was great meeting you, David. Bye guys.[00:35:00]
Wow, that was such a helpful conversation. It’s just so rare to hear from someone who’s been serving executive pastors this consistently and this thoughtfully for so long. I mean, David is really one of the pioneers in this space. So much of what we now consider normal. In the XP world Resources research connection, he’s been building for decades.
[00:35:25] Phil: Yeah. Well, you can follow up with us in a few different ways. Tyler, how do we follow up with you?
[00:35:30] Tyler: Yep. You can follow up with me at, at Tyler ditz on Facebook or Instagram. That’s D-R-E-W-I-T-Z.
[00:35:38] Phil: And you can follow up with me at Phil Taylor XP on all the usual social places. You can follow the show at Backstage Pastors in Instagram and Facebook.
The Backstage Pastors Podcast is brought to you by the Church Hub. The church hub serves pastors, ministry leaders and their spouses through equipping and training resources. The [00:36:00] church hub.org is the place you want to go to find out what’s going on there. Check, taking a look at it. Just recently, there’s some great cohorts that are being offered there.
You might wanna check it out. LPs, XBS ministry Spouses, all of it. Lots of good opportunities there. And our podcast is produced by our friends at the Good Podcast Company. They’ve been awesome to work with. Our theme music was written by my good friend, Seth K. And we’ll see you on the next show.
