[piano intro] - Hello, I'm Nido Qubein, welcome to "Side by Side."

My guest today grew up in a small town and struggled with depression and panic attacks until he found meaning in becoming a youth pastor in Louisiana.

Today he's the founder and senior pastor of one of the largest churches in the United States.

He's the author of six bestselling books and founder of Highlands College in Birmingham, Alabama.

Today we'll meet the Reverend Dr. Chris Hodges, the founder and senior pastor of the Church of the Highlands.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Side by Side," with Nido Qubein, is made possible by: - Coca-Cola Consolidated- [upbeat music] Is honored to make and serve 300 brands and flavors, locally, thanks to our teammates.

We are Coca-Cola Consolidated, your local bottler.

- [Announcer 2] The Budd Group has been serving the southeast for over 60 years.

Specializing in janitorial, landscape, and facility solutions, our trusted staff delivers exceptional customer satisfaction.

Comprehensive facility support with the Budd Group.

- [Announcer 3] Truist, we're here to help people, communities, and businesses thrive in North Carolina and beyond.

The commitment of our teammates makes the difference every day.

Truist, Leaders in banking, unwavering in care.

[upbeat music] - Dr. Chris Hodges, welcome to "Side by Side."

I gotta tell you, I have followed you for a long time.

Your leadership has been nothing short of extraordinary.

What you have done in your ministry is amazing, it is big, it has reached millions of people.

And I wanna dig in with you about how you started.

Take me back to your days when you were born in the state of Louisiana, and then you went to LSU and you majored in accounting, not ministry- [Chris laughing] Not divinity, in accounting, and yet you became the founder of Highlands College and the senior minister of the Church of the Highlands, second largest in our country.

- Well, I would not have been the person you woulda picked out if you saw me growing up.

I was raised in a very healthy home, my parents were godly people, faithful to church every week, in fact, my dad played organ in the church, and mom sang in the choir, and I sat with my grandmother about seven rows back on the side that the organ was on so my dad could watch us.

And so grew up, never missed a Sunday at church in my entire life, but just wasn't necessarily brilliant, or having any natural skill, so I was always kinda this middle of the pack kind of a person.

I had a very optimistic personality, I was the life of the party.

I was the middle of three children so when the family wanted to do something fun, they kinda looked to me to kinda provide that entertainment.

I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life when I graduated high school, but my dad was the legislative auditor for the state of Louisiana, and a brilliant financial mind.

And very young he taught me money, and if there's something I'm probably naturally good at, it is numbers and money.

And so I thought I'll just follow dad, you know.

And so I went to LSU and started this accounting major.

It was between my sophomore and junior year, at LSU, that the church that I was attending at the time, my home church, it's still my home church by the way, I call it my home church, but between my sophomore and junior year, they hired me as an intern to help with the high school summer camps and missions trips.

- I see.

- And I got bit.

I knew that's what I was supposed to do with my life.

- It's like a calling to you.

- It really was.

I felt so much wind in my sails, I don't know how else to say it, but I didn't want to disappoint dad so I went back for my junior year.

Well now I'm not, I wasn't even doing well before that, but I'm really not doing well now because I had my eye on something else.

And it was after a time of prayer, actually, that I said to the Lord that if my dad agrees about this change that I had my heart, I'll do it, but if he doesn't, I'm gonna stay faithful.

And so I really prayed hard so dad would see what I was seeing and- - You had a lot of respect for your dad.

- A lot of respect.

He was my hero, best man in my wedding, I love him with all my heart, he's now with the Lord, but.

I prayed and I came to dad, I got him in my bedroom and said, "I feel like I'm called to the ministry."

And I'll never forget tears running down his face, he said, "Chris, it's God, you need to do this."

And so I transitioned to a local Bible university.

- He didn't ask you for a refund on all these years in accounting at LSU?

- Well, actually, I would go back, I actually used more of what I learned- - Sure.

- On the business degree.

- Yes, yes.

- I feel like, and I even went back and finished that degree later on while I was in full-time ministry so I'd like to think that he got that return.

- Yes.

- But I did transition to a local Bible university and studied and the church hired me full-time and now I've been in ministry 41 years.

- And that's Colorado Christian University?

- Right, I actually would go to, with my wife, my brand new wife, to Colorado Springs, Colorado, to be a youth pastor there, and I was in full-time, Bible school, seminary, and finished my business degree, as well, while we were having and starting our family.

- Wow, wow, you were a youth pastor at that time.

- I was.

- What then brought you back to Birmingham and found the Church of the Highlands?

- Well, actually I was, I had had it in my heart that I was gonna be the best number two guy in the world.

I was classically trained in music so I was overseeing a lot of the music programs of the church, I was over students and then when our pastor wasn't speaking, I was kind of the one who would speak if it wasn't him, and was pretty content with that, to be honest with ya, I wasn't dreaming anything big.

But my brother and I was going to Birmingham, Alabama to watch the Southeastern Conference baseball tournament.

And in the '90s LSU had this run of national championships, they won five national championships in a 10-year period in the '90s.

And so we were going there just as a guy vacation, and Dr. Qubein, I can't even describe to you how real this moment was where I went to this, this outdoor mall that overlooks the busiest highway in the state of Alabama and I was getting a cup of coffee at the coffee shop there, headed to the ballpark, and I just had a few extra minutes to look down at that traffic jam in both directions, six lanes, and as loud as I'm speaking to you, I felt like the Lord said to me, you're gonna pastor the people down in that traffic jam.

And it was such a moving experience I really have had maybe three like that in my entire life where I had such a surety of what God was speaking to me, and this calling on my life, that- - And you were still in Colorado at that time?

- I was back in Baton Rouge, we had come back to Baton Rouge for a number of years, again, it was just to serve as an associate pastor.

We wanted to be back around family so after this season in Colorado Springs, we were back in Baton Rouge.

And we decided, my wife and I, just to pick up everything, didn't know a single person in Alabama, and moved there and just organically started meeting with people.

I would spend 10, 12 hours a day at coffee shops sharing this vision I had to start this church.

- You didn't have a church at that moment?

- Didn't have a church, I was gonna plant a church, and really back then, this was in the year 2000, in 2000 church planting wasn't even something that was on the radar of any denomination, it was just, normally you- - And the term, church planting, means?

- You started from scratch yourself.

I mean, you literally create this launch team, normally they're started in some type of portable location.

In our case it was a fine arts theater of a high school, a thousand-seat fine arts theater, and we wanted to start this brand new church.

And I raised up a team of 34 people, and we would never recommend someone to do it this way today, but in three months we decided to pick a launch date.

And 400 people showed up in the very first service- - Wow.

- Of Church of the Highlands.

200 came back [chuckling], so I always say half loved it and half didn't [laughing].

- Yes.

- And- - Well, half was just, observers, so to speak.

- Sure, exactly.

And it just continued to grow.

We were at 600 in the first, after the first year, 1200 in the second year.

- And you were preaching at that time?

- I was preaching and leading the music at that time.

Building this team, starting this brand new church.

- When you say leading the music, you play an instrument or?

- I did, I was classically playing, trained on piano, and played a piano, led the music from a keyboard, and it was more of a contemporary style worship experience.

and there's nobody more amazed than me of what has happened over these now 23 years.

- And today we went from 400 to 600, 1200, and today?

- Today we have 26 campuses that I speak- - 26 different locations.

- Locations.

- Where church is actually held.

- Right, so they have their own campus pastor, own music ministry, children's ministry, but when we get to the sermon portion of the service, I am live broadcast into 26 auditoriums, 26 locations, 24 of them in Alabama, two in Georgia, and we're in 26 of Alabama's Department of Corrections facilities.

So I speak to 52 audiences, or congregations.

- Yeah.

- That we now pastor and.

- How many members would that make altogether?

- So well over 100,000 members of our church, we would have well over 100,000 at Christmas and Easter.

- That's just amazing.

- Nobody more amazed than me.

- Yeah.

[both laughing] - And you know me.

- Yeah.

- God at work.

- God at work.

- God at work.

And you know, I, you know you hear a lot about, what would you call Church of the Highlands, mega church, is that a term that's respectful, or is that a term that's insulting?

- I don't like, that's what people use to describe any church over four or 5,000.

- I see.

- Yeah.

- I see.

Why is it called Church of the Highlands?

- Yeah, I was raised in church, and had gone my entire life, and I always had this sense, on the inside, that there had to be more, not to God, but to more than I was currently experiencing, that God had to offer.

And I always had this nagging sense that, Lord, you must want more for my life than just checking a spiritual box on a Sunday and showing up at church for an hour and going home and then living my life my way.

And so I felt like that was the felt need that we were, that we were going after and so we wanted to paint this metaphor of, there's more- - The Highlands.

- Go to the heights.

- So it's not named after a town in the- - In Scotland?

- Yeah.

- No, no.

[laughing].

- Or in North Carolina.

- No, or in any place in Alabama.

There is actually a district in Birmingham called The Highlands.

- I see.

- And many people think we were gonna actually build our buildings there.

- You were just, sort of an aspirational.

- It was, it was a metaphor of what I call the spiritual journey that most people don't even know exists that God has so much more for you and I think if we do anything well, in the natural, I give God all the glory for everything that's happened.

But if we've done anything well in the natural, we create enormous clarity to what you can experience if you were to step into this faith experience with us.

- So, 26 locations, plus the correctional locations, and each one really is a local church.

- Right.

- And has its own process of worship.

- Exactly.

- Except for the sermon.

- Exactly.

- And the sermon, its... - And then we have one board, you know, one checkbook.

- Yes.

- So what it does it allows us to not have to replicate things.

- Yes.

- That we don't have to have that many times.

- Efficiencies of scale and- - Unbelievable.

- And productivity and all of that.

- And that's allowed us to give over $140 million to charitable causes, we call it missions, locally, nationally, and globally.

- Wow.

- Right.

- Wow.

Where did Highlands College come into all of this?

- Well, back in Colorado Springs, while I was there, the Air Force Academy recruited me, as a volunteer I might add, to come teach, what was then an elective course, on religion.

In fact our house in Colorado Springs was just a mile or so from the gates of the Air Force Academy.

Every day we walked outside and saw these cadets, these university students, jumping out of airplanes, and so we were very close to the leadership there.

I was involved in teaching a course there at Air Force Academy and I got bit by this model of training that is a four-year bachelor's degree university, which our military academies at West Point, Annapolis, and Air Force Academy are, but they're also built on three other pillars of learning in addition to the academics.

There's a character pillar, a military training pillar, and in their case a physical development pillar.

And I've always had this deep passion to train leaders really from one single command, or request from Jesus, that the harvest is plentiful, the workers are few, there's plenty to do, plenty of opportunity, plenty of people to feed, plenty of people to help, that will never be the issue, the opportunity, it'll always be the people to do it, the workers.

And so I wanted to give my life to training up a generation of young leaders who wanted to do ministry and we wanted to use this academy model.

So when we started Highlands College in 2011, we made some modifications to those four pillars, to two of them.

So we have academic instruction, we're a four-year bachelor's degree university, and we have character formation as well, but we have ministry training, instead of military training.

So they're jumping out of airplanes, but our students graduate with 800 hours of ministry experience in their degree field on graduation day and then we actually have a physical development program, but our fourth pillar is spiritual development.

- And I've been to the campus, it's a beautiful campus.

- Thank you.

- It is very innovative, fresh, alive, inviting to young people, it's an amazing place.

- Well, thank you.

- I've also been to your leadership seminars where thousands of people come to learn and where you bring outstanding speakers from around the country as a service- - Right.

- To the community at-large, in Birmingham and beyond.

You know, Dr. Hodges, your life has been amazing, it really has been amazing.

You have built an incredible ministry, both on the college side and on the church side, and I happen to know that you're also invited frequently to be a keynote speaker across America and the world.

And you speak, who knows how many people get to hear you, in-person, and through social media, on video, et cetera, but I do have to ask you this question.

When people talk about the mega church, which now I understand what the definition is, sometimes you hear some lesser than favorable comments about either the pastor- - Right.

- Or the mechanics of the church, and I won't name any names, but I think you know what I'm talking about.

- Right.

- And yet you have not been in any way touched by that.

The people I know who know you well, speak highly of you and speak of your authenticity, your charisma too by the way, but your authenticity, your honesty, your forthrightness, and your capacity to lead a talented group of pastors and administrators in a way that produces excellent results.

Where did you, you spoke of your father, you spoke of going to the university, but somewhere along your life journey, you've picked up some principles, some traits, where did that come from and what are some of those principles of leadership that you so subscribe to?

- I think, in the cases that might be legitimate [chuckling], disparagements on large ministry works, is when everything is centered around the personality of the leader, and really the ministry is more about the leader.

I always wanted to create something where they actually knew more about our ministry, and the church, more than they knew about me.

And for quite a long time, we really, people knew more about the church than they knew about Chris Hodges and that was all by design.

And I call it a systems-dependent model, versus a personality-dependent model.

And I was really impacted by a lot of leadership books, in fact, as I said, I think I've drawn as much in my spiritual leadership to the church from my business experience, my dad's life, the mentors that I have in my life, people like you, Dr. John Maxwell, and others, who have taught me the leadership side that I benefited from.

But one book particularly impacted my life and it was "The E Myth."

- "The E Myth?"

- "E Myth."

- That's a business book.

- It is, by Michael Gerber.

- Yes.

- And the E stands for entrepreneurial, and the entrepreneurial myth is that the product determines its success.

And he made the case in the book that you can have actually have the best product and not have success that it's in how you deliver that product.

Well, faith is not a product, but if you apply that principle to the church world, and know that again, that God has this spiritual journey that he wants for people, I decided that we would focus on the deliverables.

How can we present what God has for people in such a way that they not only understand it, but they can actually do it?

And so we created, we defined the journey very, very clearly.

In fact, I even used people who weren't people of faith to help us come up with the language for this journey, because I didn't want it overly-spiritualized because we didn't necessarily need those who already had taken those steps to understand it, we needed the people who haven't.

- Yes.

- To understand it.

So I put together a focus group- - You wanted to connect with- - Exactly - As many people as possible in a meaningful and spiritual way.

- Because I, to give it to you quickly, I really believe that God wants us to have a personal relationship with him, secondly, to deal with the issues of our life, our hurts, wounds, addictions, to understand what our life is really all about, in Mark Twain's words, the two greatest days of your life, the day you were born, and the day you discovered why you were born.

So let there be some type of discovery process, and of course I believe you have to go to God to find that because he's the one who created you, and then get out there and do something with your life, be mobilized.

Be someone who serves, and gives, and makes the most of your life.

Well, we were describing those in very spiritual terms and few people were actually taking the steps.

I brought in this focus group of people who didn't grow up in church, didn't know the spiritual language, and they came up with four phrases that now more than 18,000 churches use, by the way, of know God, find freedom, discover your purpose, make a difference.

- Know God as in K-N-O-W?

- K-N-O-W. And not know him mentally, but know him personally.

You can actually know God, you can have a relationship with the creator of the universe, he can help you with your personal issues, you can discover the purpose that he created you to do and you can do something with your life, I call it transcendent living.

A life that when you lay your head down at night, you think I made a difference today.

And we created a system around that, that, watch this, that's not dependent upon my personality, it's not dependent upon even my preaching ability, and it resonated and it worked.

And not only so that, for our church, but other churches started coming to us and saying, "Would you please teach us this," and now we influence more than 18,000 churches with this model.

- It all makes sense, makes a lot of sense.

Lemme ask you a couple questions about your writing and your preaching.

How long does it take you to put together a sermon?

- I would probably say 20 hours a week is what I spend- - 20 hours?

- In sermon prep.

- Research, prayerful analytics of what you wanna say.

- I have my own unique style for it.

- Yeah.

- But yeah, it's something like that.

I'm actually working on more than one at a time so every day I study, every day I read, every day I file it.

And I liken it to filling a pantry full of things that you're gonna cook one day.

- Mm.

- So every day I fill my pantry and then on Friday, two days before Sunday, is when I cook the meal, so to speak.

- Really, you wait till Friday?

- Oh, but I already have 90% of ingredients on the counter, it's waiting on me, it's just now I'm putting it together so I can communicate it.

So the ingredients have always been there of what we're gonna teach, or preach, and now I've just gotta put it on the plate so that people want, they wanna eat that meal.

- You've written six books.

I read perhaps your latest book called, "Pray First."

- Right.

- It's an amazing book.

- Thank you.

- I've given it to many friends.

How long does it take to write a book?

- You know, same thing, I've had some that have took me two years.

I wrote a book on depression that took me more than two years to write, and "Pray First" actually took me the least amount of time because it's something that I had been living out for more than 40 years so it was more compiling all of this.

And I do my own writing, but I have an editor who really helps me make it beautiful and readable, but that one only took me about four months.

- Why a book on depression?

- Yeah, twice in my life I went through a depression that I was hiding from people.

- A clinical depression?

- I thought it was clinical depression and so much so that I was ready to check myself into a facility.

And I'm not that type, I'm- - You're alive, positive, outgoing.

- The glass is not even half full, it's all the way full.

- Yes.

- So I wake up every day happy, I'm a very, love humor, you know I'm a Cajun from South Louisiana.

- Yes.

- All right, so we always say if you can't have fun with a Cajun from Louisiana, it's your fault.

- Yes, yes.

- Okay.

But I was going through this and I was hiding, and I was secret about it, and got through it and decided, and I'm embarrassed to say this, Dr. Qubein, that I was in ministry 17 years before I even preached a message one time on the topic.

And I did a message on depression and it became the most rewatched archived message on our website times 100.

- It speaks about the need in our country.

- Exactly.

And that's when, I actually apologized to our church, and I said, "Give me a couple years to know more than I know about it," and I ended up writing this book, patterned it after the life of Elijah- - Yeah.

- Who was one of the great, recognized in both Old and New Testament, as a great man of God who had wonderful miracles happen through his life and in the next chapter is ready to commit suicide.

And in that story, he did five things, that today, secular sociologists, psychologists would say, will create or cause depression, and then he did five things to get out of that cave, I call it the cave of depression.

And so I wrote a book, used that biblical story, but did a lot of secular research talked to a lot- - What is the name of the book?

- It's called, "Out of the Cave."

- "Out of the Cave?"

- "Out of the Cave."

- Still in circulation?

- Absolutely.

It's done extremely well because, again, it speaks to a need that, unfortunately, far too many people have.

- Way too many.

- Right.

- Especially young people and Covid has not helped matters.

- Exactly.

- Universities they have to have more counselors and more therapists to deal with some of those needs that- - Right.

- We feel in society.

Well, Dr. Chris Hodges, Senior Minister of the Church of the Highlands, and Chancellor of Highlands College, you have dedicated your life to be a leader, and a guide, and a mentor, to so many and I honor you for that.

And I count it a blessing to all of us that you have- [upbeat music] Been called to do what you do and that you do it so effectively and I wanna thank you for being with me on "Side by Side."

- Thank you.

[upbeat music continues] - [Announcer] Funding for "Side by Side," with Nido Qubein, is made possible by: - Coca-Cola Consolidated- [upbeat music] Is honored to make and serve 300 brands and flavors, locally, thanks to our teammates.

We are Coca-Cola Consolidated, your local bottler.

- [Announcer 2] The Budd Group has been serving the southeast for over 60 years.

Specializing in janitorial, landscape, and facility solutions, our trusted staff delivers exceptional customer satisfaction.

Comprehensive facility support with the Budd Group.

- [Announcer 3] Truist, we're here to help people, communities, and businesses thrive in North Carolina and beyond.

The commitment of our teammates makes the difference every day.

Truist, Leaders in banking, unwavering in care.