Revitalize My Church

About Revitalize My Church

Hosted by Bart Blair and Nathan Bryant, two respected coaches in the field of church renewal, the Revitalize My Church podcast provides real-world advice and encouragement in each episode. In addition to insights provided by Bart and Nathan, you’ll also hear interviews with pastors and church leaders who have personally been involved in a successful church turnaround. They discuss the revitalization journey, keys to renewal, and lessons learned.

Publisher

Assist Church Expansion

Category

education · religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

29 Jun 2024

Latest episode

1 Nov 2026

Latest episodes

55 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   1 Nov 2026

   Ep. 053 | Your Small Church Has What Gen Z is Looking For

   Episode 53: Show Notes Key Takeaways Gen Z, and young men in particular, are showing renewed spiritual interest, and small churches are well positioned to respond. Young adults aren’t looking for a big show. They want to be known, mentored, and given room to ask real questions. A smaller church can win with a Sunday experience that is thoughtful, intentional, and relational. Don’t wait for young adults to walk in. Get outside your walls, start with the grandkids and kids of your own members, and follow through on what you offer. Is Gen Z really coming back to church? The research says yes, though it’s still early. Bart opens the episode with several trends worth paying attention to: Gen Z attending religious services at least monthly rose from 29% in 2022 to 40% in 2024. Becket Fund, via The Blaze Gen Z is still the least religious generation on record: 34% unaffiliated, compared to 29% of Millennials and 25% of Gen X. The Blaze Men are now outpacing women in weekly church attendance, 46% to 40%. StreamingChurch.tv Over 70% of Gen Z check out a church online before ever visiting in person. StreamingChurch.tv Bible sales are up 41.6% since 2022. Carey Nieuwhof Nathan believes the numbers. He sees the Spirit of God drawing young people, especially young men, in a way we haven’t seen in years. The real question is how churches will respond to the opportunity. Why aren’t young adults showing up at my small church? For many revitalization churches, the average age is 55 and up and there isn’t a young adult in the room. Nathan says the issue usually isn’t a lack of interest from young people. It’s that the “road signs” to your church aren’t connecting with them. Those road signs include the sign out front, your website, your Google Business Profile, your social media, and the relationships your people have in the community. Bart adds that churches need to understand how young adults search. Many are skipping Google and going straight to AI tools like ChatGPT. Digital discovery almost always comes before a personal connection. How do you make your church appealing to Gen Z without changing who you are? Bart shares the story of a church that went through a rebrand but filtered every choice through its own tastes rather than the community it was trying to reach. The result still felt too old for a younger audience. The lesson: evaluate your look and messaging through the eyes of the people you want to reach, not the people already there. Nathan is clear that this isn’t about being flashy. Young adults want a church that looks current and competent, but what really draws them is a place where they can get their questions answered, feel safe, and connect with people who will invest in them. What are young men looking for in a church today? Nathan sees a level of intellectual curiosity among young men that he hasn’t seen before. They want to learn, grow, and understand their faith. They also want older, mature believers to invest in them. Many grew up without a dad in the home or spent more time in front of screens than with real people, and they are hungry for something real. Bart’s son had this experience firsthand. He visited a large church and left feeling like no one noticed he was there. A smaller church may not have the band or the crowd, but it can offer the one thing...

2. 

   15 Sept 2026

   Ep. 052 | You Can't Revitalize a Church Running on Empty

   Episode 52: Show Notes TL;DR Dale Sellers returns as the first repeat guest in the show's history to announce that 95 Network is becoming The Renewed Pastor. Most pastors Dale has met across four decades of ministry are discouraged, and seminary training rarely prepares them for the part of the job that actually wears them down: leading people. Fewer than ten percent of pastors in Dale's conference rooms have ever raised a hand to say they take a real day off every week. The two issues surfacing most in pastors right now are the refusal to Sabbath and confusion about identity and calling. When a pastor's gifting does not match what the church needs in its current season, the natural default is to hide the gap, and hiding is exhausting. Many moral failures are less about wanting to blow up a life and more about a leader desperate to get off the merry go round. The Renewed Pastor Pathway is a year long, one on one coaching track built around soul care, identity and context, vision and clarity, and leadership development with a succession plan. The goal is a thousand healthy pastors over the next ten years, with scholarships available for those who cannot cover the cost. Episode Summary If you are leading a church that needs to be revitalized, you have probably built a list of things that need to change. The building. The website. The systems. The volunteer pipeline. Somewhere on that list, usually last, is you. In this episode Bart Blair sits down with Dale Sellers, who has spent his ministry life serving small and midsize churches and who has now decided to spend the next decade of it on one thing: helping pastors get healthy. Dale is the first repeat guest in the history of the Revitalize My Church podcast, and he came back to share both the story behind his own collapse and the reason his ministry is changing its name. You will hear why Dale thinks the training pipeline sets pastors up to be blindsided. You will hear the moment a board member put a hand in his face and told him to stop talking about his struggles. You will hear what he sees when a pastor is not as healthy as they think they are, and what he is building to help. If you have been running on empty and telling yourself the church needs you too much for you to stop, this conversation is for you. Why Do So Many Pastors Feel Discouraged in Ministry? Dale and his wife Regina spent the first decade of their marriage traveling with music groups, playing somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven hundred concerts in churches across more than thirty states. He was in his twenties, full of energy, and could not understand what he kept seeing. Almost every pastor he met was discouraged. Church after church, state after state, the same weariness in the room. He did not understand it until he took a local church role. Within two weeks, he says, he figured it out. The road is not the same as the pew. As he puts it, when you travel you blow in, you blow up, and you blow out. Ministry in one place with the same people week after week is a different job entirely. The training gap is real. Pastors are taught to preach, to handle Greek and Hebrew, to work through hermeneutics. Very few are taught how to lead people. That gap eventually caught up with Dale personally. He pastored a church that went from thirty to three hundred and then back down to one hundred fifty after a split in year eight. The stress of it landed him in quadruple bypass surgery at fifty three, which his surgeon attributed to stress rather than family history. "The church is the only hope for the world. There is no plan B. So we have got to...

3. 

   1 Sept 2026

   Ep. 051 | Evangelism as a Team Effort

   Episode 50: Show Notes TL;DR Five Takeaways From This Episode Evangelism is not either personal or corporate. It is both, and a church that neglects either one will stall out. The Great Commission was given to the disciples collectively, not to individuals in isolation. God's strategy for reaching lost people is his church. When 94% of pastors do not feel effective at sharing the gospel outside the pulpit, a shared church strategy removes pressure rather than adding it. Every believer should be able to articulate their own testimony in two minutes and clearly explain the gospel. Training for that is not optional. Find the person in your church who is evangelistically gifted, empower them, and build your process around the gifts God has already placed in your body. Is Your Church's Evangelism Personal, Corporate, or Both? Bart opens this episode by talking about the weather, on purpose, so he can ask you a better question: have you taken the temperature of your church's evangelism and outreach lately? If you lead a church that is plateaued or declining, this is one of the hardest conversations to have honestly. You know the vast majority of your people are not regularly sharing their faith. You may not be either. And the temptation is to swing hard toward one solution, either a heavy program of outreach events or a push to train every individual member to become a personal evangelist. Nathan Bryant and Bart Blair make the case in this episode that the swing itself is the problem. This is a both/and conversation, and churches that only pick one side of it end up frustrated. "I don't think you can have an effective corporate evangelistic engagement without personal evangelistic engagement happening, because it's actually the combination of the both." Nathan Bryant Why the Great Commission Was Given to the Church, Not Just to Individuals Nathan makes a point in this episode that reframes the whole conversation. When Western Christians hear "go and make disciples," we hear it as a personal command directed at us as individuals. That reading is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Jesus gathered them first. He called his disciples together and commissioned them collectively, to go and make disciples together. No individual has every gift. A single believer was never meant to carry a lost person through the entire journey from first contact to mature discipleship. The church is the strategy. God's plan for reaching the lost is the collection of people and the varied gifts he has distributed among them. Bart reads from 1 Corinthians 3 in the episode, where Paul describes himself as planting and Apollos as watering while God gives the growth. The passage is not just about unity. It is about the division of labor in kingdom work. What Percentage of Christians Actually Share Their Faith? Bart went looking for a clean statistic on how many born-again believers in North America regularly share their faith with someone who is not yet following Jesus. He came back without one. The reports vary too widely to give a clear number. What the reports agree on is the direction: far fewer believers are sharing their faith than are not. And you can verify that in your own congregation, whether you have 20 people or 2,000. One number did stand out. A Barna report referenced in the episode found that only 6% of pastors surveyed felt they themselves were effective at sharing the gospel with non-believers. That means 94% of pastors carry a quiet lack of confidence in their ability to lead someone to Christ outside of a Sunday sermon. That number matters for a specific reason. Most churches do not have enough non-believers in the room on a...

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

44,966

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 64 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

85

Social presence

0

YouTube

76

Engagement

32

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Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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