Next Sunday is more than just a podcast — this is your community of forward-thinking church leaders looking to make a meaningful impact not only today but for years to come. Our conversations create every church leader’s field guide for bridging generations, cultivating generosity, and inspiring change in the church. Every other week, you can expect candid discussions, insightful interviews with special guests and practical tips you can apply to your congregation to start shaping your church of tomorrow, today . We embrace challenges, celebrate victories, and aren’t afraid to ruffle a few feathers along the way, because what happens next Sunday could change everything.
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August 25, 202623 min
Why Staff Giving is NOT Optional
Churches often focus their generosity efforts on the congregation. But what happens when the staff members responsible for leading those efforts are not personally participating? In this episode of the Next Sunday Podcast, Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer explore why staff giving is more than an internal policy or financial matter. It affects leadership credibility, staff advocacy, and the broader culture surrounding generosity. The conversation also moves beyond expectations to pastoral care. Jim and Frank discuss reluctance, marital concerns, financial pressure, compensation, onboarding, and why staff giving should never be reduced to forced compliance. Listen for a candid and constructive conversation about helping the people closest to the mission understand, practice, and lead generosity with integrity.
June 27, 202612 min
[Summer Session Ep.5] What "Ready" Actually Means
This is episode 5 of 5 of the Next Sunday Podcast Summer Session: five focused conversations to help pastors and church leaders arrive at fall with a congregation of ready hearts. Download Beyond The Generosity Gap Workbook , a free guide designed to help you put these conversations into action before the season arrives. For God loves a cheerful giver. It is one of the most quoted lines in conversations about generosity, and one of the most misunderstood. In this final episode of the Next Sunday Summer Session, Jim Sheppard unpacks the Greek word behind "cheerful", hilaros, and reveals that it carries two co-equal meanings: joyful and ready. Paul uses the word ready five or six times in the verses immediately before that famous line. The point was never just happiness. It was preparation. Jim and Frank close the series with a direct challenge to pastors: stop apologizing for the offering moment. Stop managing reluctance. The goal is not to protect people from their wallets; they know how to do that better than you do. The goal is to form people into ready, eager, willing givers. And that formation work does not happen in September. It happens now.
June 27, 202612 min
[Summer Session Ep.4] The Generation Nobody's Discipling Into Generosity
This is episode 4 of 5 of the Next Sunday Podcast Summer Session: five focused conversations to help pastors and church leaders arrive at fall with a congregation of ready hearts. Download Beyond The Generosity Gap Workbook , a free guide designed to help you put these conversations into action before the season arrives. The data is encouraging. Gen Z's propensity to give is at or above that of Boomers. Their faith is growing. So why isn't their generosity keeping pace in most churches? In this episode, Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer name the gap honestly and place the responsibility squarely where it belongs. Frank introduces the idea of "checkmatic giving," the way automated digital giving, while convenient, has quietly removed generosity from everyday family life and eliminated the natural discipleship moments that used to happen around the kitchen table. Jim traces the larger pattern: Boomers didn't disciple Gen X well in this area. Gen X didn't disciple Millennials. And now the gap has compounded into Gen Z. The good news is that their willingness is there. The question is whether the church will disciple that willingness before the window closes, and whether it will start building the formation pipeline for Gen Alpha before it is too late.
June 27, 202616 min
[Summer Session Ep.3] Starting Strong
This is episode 3 of 5 of the Next Sunday Podcast Summer Session: five focused conversations to help pastors and church leaders arrive at fall with a congregation of ready hearts. Download Beyond The Generosity Gap Workbook , a free guide designed to help you put these conversations into action before the season arrives. Most churches treat their fall giving campaign, year-end giving, and new year launch as three separate events. In doing so, they exhaust their congregation, miss their best opportunities, and arrive at January wondering what happened. In this episode, Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer make the case that September through February is one continuous discipleship rhythm, not three disconnected seasons. They unpack the theological difference between Cain's question and Abel's question as the frame for what truly transformational giving looks like, and show what it means to build a second-half narrative that carries people through each moment rather than resetting with every new push. They also land on what may be the most overlooked communication opportunity of the entire church year, the annual giving statement. Everybody opens it. Almost nobody uses it well. This episode shows what it looks like when you do.
June 27, 202614 min
[Summer Session Ep.2] Why It Feels Harder Than It Used To
This is episode 2 of 5 of the Next Sunday Podcast Summer Session: five focused conversations to help pastors and church leaders arrive at fall with a congregation of ready hearts. Download Beyond The Generosity Gap Workbook , a free guide designed to help you put these conversations into action before the season arrives. Most pastors sense it. Generosity feels harder to cultivate than it once did. But few can name exactly why. In this episode, Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer bring the explanation to the surface. The environment that quietly reinforced giving for decades has shifted, and the formation gaps it was masking are now fully visible. Jim introduces the idea of false signals, the metrics that make a church look healthier than it actually is. Hitting the annual budget. A faithful older generation quietly carrying a disproportionate share of the weight. Attendance growing while generosity participation stays flat. Frank adds a challenge that cuts to the heart of it: getting really good at budgeting and forecasting is not the same as making disciples. The status quo is not working. And the summer is the right time to figure out the difference, before fall demands results you haven't prepared for.
June 27, 202615 min
[Summer Session Ep.1] The Mirror Nobody Wants To Look In
This is episode 1 of 5 of the Next Sunday Podcast Summer Session: five focused conversations to help pastors and church leaders arrive at fall with a congregation of ready hearts. Download Beyond The Generosity Gap Workbook , a free guide designed to help you put these conversations into action before the season arrives. Before you diagnose your congregation's giving culture, there's a harder question to sit with first. In this opening episode of the Next Sunday Summer Session, Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer make the case that the giving temperature of a congregation almost always reflects the spiritual and emotional temperature of its leader. A great strategy launched into unprepared hearts will run off like rain on hard ground. The real preparation begins with the pastor. Jim and Frank walk through what an unresolved relationship with money actually looks like in practice, the apologetic tone before a giving message, the constant rationalizing, the tendency to reach for a new strategy rather than do the harder interior work. They challenge pastors to identify where money still creates tension in their own lives, and why that unresolved tension will quietly limit everything they try to lead this fall. This episode is not a diagnosis of your congregation. It is an invitation to look in the mirror first.
June 2, 202626 min
What Your Biggest Givers Wish You Knew
High-capacity givers and major donors are often approached transactionally—by schools, charities, alma maters, museums, and causes that lead with one question: “How much can you give?” This episode explains why pastors must lead differently, and what your biggest givers wish you knew about shepherding them well. In this episode of The Next Sunday Podcast, hosts Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer continue the conversation on segmentation and generosity by asking a practical question: once a church knows who its high-capacity givers are, what should pastors do—and how should they relate to these givers with integrity? Jim makes a clear point: don’t start with the money conversation. If a pastor leads with giving, it immediately signals a transactional posture—treating a person like a resource instead of someone to shepherd. Instead, Jim reframes high-capacity giving as a stewardship assignment—one many people are unprepared to carry, especially first-generation wealthy families or newer believers who suddenly find themselves with significant resources and little discipleship framework for what to do next. The episode also challenges assumptions about financial ease. Frank references a recent study noting that even households earning around $500,000 report feeling “paycheck to paycheck,” which exposes how common lifestyle pressure and financial tension can be, even at higher income levels. The takeaway: pastors shouldn’t assume complexity disappears with wealth. A key leadership moment comes when pastors fear reaching out to a major giver who is pulling back, because they worry it will be perceived as “I’m only here for your money.” Jim pushes deeper: that fear often reveals the pastor’s own transactional mindset. Until that posture is corrected, the conversation will stay awkward, because the awkwardness is coming from the leader, not the giver. Finally, Jim and Frank emphasize that generosity is discipleship—progressive sanctification—and churches can hit a campaign goal while still failing their people spiritually. The call is to help people grow over time, strengthen the “muscle” of generosity, and steward the pastoral opportunity with clarity and courage.
May 20, 202629 min
Lessons From Leadership Transition
Leadership transition and executive succession are hard, especially in the faith-based sector, where healthy succession stories can feel way too rare. This episode revisits a real transition one year later to unpack what actually makes succession work when the predecessor is still around and the organization keeps moving forward with trust and momentum. In this episode of The Next Sunday Podcast, hosts Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer reflect on Generis’ CEO transition—15 months in—to share the behind-the-scenes realities that made it sustainable. They aren’t telling the story to brag. They’re telling it to prove it can go well, and to offer practical “nuggets” that might help leaders facing their own handoff. A key framework Jim shares is the relay race analogy: Succession requires baton release and baton embrace. The outgoing leader has to let go fully. The incoming leader has to take it and run. But the hidden work is what determines whether either side can do that well. Jim explains that before handing off leadership, he had to confront two internal deal-breakers that could have wrecked everything: identity and control. Frank highlights what many teams miss: the hard work is heart work. It’s the internal readiness, the posture, the humility, and the willingness to do deep work before the public announcement ever happens. They also get practical about what protects the new leader: building relational capital and trust long before the transition leaders backing words with actions (not operating with “shadow leadership”) letting the successor lead meetings and make decisions without constant oversight giving context without controlling outcomes—so the new leader can lead with freedom A standout line from Jim reframes why he stepped out of the CEO role: “I’m not doing this so I can leave quicker. I’m doing it so I can stay longer.” The episode closes with a challenge for leaders navigating succession: talk to trusted people, do the identity work, do the control work, and make sure you’re truly ready to release the baton—because the greatest gift you can give your successor is a clean handoff they can fully embrace.
April 28, 202627 min
Misdiagnosed: Stop Managing What You Need to Solve
Leadership problems don’t disappear when you rename them. But many leaders do exactly that—calling a problem a “tension” so they don’t have to deal with it. This episode exposes that pattern and offers a better path: accuracy, courage, and the willingness to turn the light on. In this episode of The Next Sunday Podcast, hosts Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer unpack Frank’s Substack post Misdiagnosed and the leadership drift it names: misdiagnosis becomes a sanctuary for the tired leader, the insecure leader, and the leader running low on emotional margin. The conversation starts with a well-known leadership idea: some things are a problem to solve, and some things are a tension to manage. Frank explains how that true principle often gets misused. When a leader is conflict-avoidant, exhausted, or protecting themselves emotionally, they may start declaring problems to be “tensions,” because tensions feel safer. They can be tolerated. They don’t require action. Jim and Frank explore what fuels that pattern: Fatigue and relentless pace Conflict avoidance that intensifies when leaders are tired “Avoidance in wisdom’s clothing” Growth as a mask that makes misdiagnosis easier to ignore Frank argues that a healthy leadership habit is learning to keep “new eyes” even when you are no longer new, and to ask, “If someone took my job tomorrow, where would they look that I should have been looking?” They also get practical around one of the most common places misdiagnosis shows up: team dysfunction and staff issues. Jim makes the case that keeping the wrong fit around is not kindness. It is costly to the whole team and ultimately costly to the person who isn’t thriving. He even recommends generous severance, because the delay almost always costs more than the decision. This episode is a must-listen for pastors, nonprofit leaders, executive teams, and church boards who want to lead with clarity instead of convenience.
April 14, 202624 min
Stop Apologizing! You're not "Spending Money On Yourself"
Church building campaigns and facility projects often get framed with one phrase that creates confusion fast: “We’re spending money on ourselves.” This episode explains why that language is theologically inaccurate, practically unhelpful, and unnecessarily apologetic—especially when the goal of church infrastructure is mission, not self-indulgence. In this episode of The Next Sunday Podcast, hosts Jim Sheppard and Frank Bealer unpack why pastors and leaders say this so often, even when their vision is clear and their motives are good. Jim argues the phrase usually comes from anxiety about money, inherited church tradition, and a leftover transactional mindset that makes leaders feel like they have to justify internal investment by attaching an external “offset.” Jim offers a cleaner, more faithful framework that brings everything into focus: We invest inside the walls so we can be more effective outside the walls. That shift changes the entire conversation. It clarifies that facilities are not inherently selfish. It reminds people that ministry happens both inside and outside the church walls. And it removes the subtle message that internal investment is spiritually suspect. They also talk about how “percentage give-back” language can unintentionally reinforce guilt: “We’re keeping most of this for ourselves, so we should give some away.” Jim argues it’s not wrong to have multiple goals in a generosity initiative. It’s the framing that gets sideways when it sounds like a penalty for building capacity. A key biblical anchor comes from Nehemiah: the burden “out there” drove the project “in here.” That’s how church infrastructure should work. Leaders build and strengthen the base so the mission can expand. And when those projects are aligned to mission, clearly articulated, and rooted in real capacity needs, churches often respond with clarity and faith. Finally, Jim gives practical counsel for changing the culture: the senior pastor has to lead, staff need retraining, and it will take time. But the result is worth it, because when everyone understands “inside the walls, outside the walls,” the whole church can move forward with confidence.
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