131: Encouragement From A Small Church Pastor’s Wife | with Joni Topper

Laurie Graham 0:01
Hey, this is Laurie Graham. Welcome to the Small Church Ministry podcast.

Laurie Graham 0:15
Hey, welcome back to the Small Church Ministry podcast. If you are brand new to the show, we are just all about small churches and loving the impact that we are having all over the world. We have a special guest with us today, Joni Topper, who has a heart for encouraging people, especially in small churches. So I’m really excited. Joanie, do you want to introduce yourself just a little bit and share your experience in small churches and what you love and even how you find yourself where you are right now?

Joni Topper 0:46
I sure will. Well, I’m what they call a cradle roll baby. I’ve been in church since since I was since the church nursery. And so it’s a very natural place for me to be. I’ve married a man 42 years ago, who 28 years ago became a pastor. I didn’t marry him knowing I was going to be a pastor’s wife. I’ve been playing piano in my Sunday school class since I was 10 years old. I can remember being frustrated because my 10-year-old teacher didn’t realize I could play more than three hymns. So we sang the same three hymns.

When I was 16, I got a chance to play the organ in a church that ran 2000 on Sunday mornings. It never occurred to me at the time how unusual it was for a 16-year-old to get that opportunity. It was just a natural thing for me. I do women’s ministry. I still teach teenagers. I’m 66 years old. And I keep thinking, well, God keeps leaving that door open and the teenagers keep showing up. And it’s like, I get to teach them about Jesus. How cool is that? So if it’s in a small church, my hands are probably in it. And I love it. And I think the most favorite description I’ve ever heard anyone say is, “Joanie is somebody who wants to look like Jesus.” And that’s exactly my heart. I want to look like Jesus, and I want to help people understand. They can see God’s glory in their own story, no matter how small or insignificant it seems to them at the time.

Laurie Graham 2:27
So true. So Joanie, you recently wrote a book called, “The Power of a Well-Placed Yes.” So I love that you called your book, “The Power of a Well-Placed Yes,” not just “your best yes,” and “like we’re all living our best lives,” right? So can you talk about this title, and just what this book is about, and who it’s for, and then we’ll get into some, hey, let’s help everybody now right now on the podcast.

Joni Topper 2:49
Okay, sounds good. When I worked for the post office for 30 years, I had all these plans when I retired to spend time with my mom, who had lived 300 miles from me for many, many, many years, and to get in the recording studio because I write music also. And I’ve been doing music with a gentleman for 20 years. So we had all this music we needed to record. And five months before I retired, my mother died unexpectedly. She got sick and died in 12 days. And my music partner vanished and started doing the country music scene.

So all of my all my plans went out the window. And I had been writing stories down for years of things I watched God do in our small church. And one of my friends who had spoken for a women’s event in our church called and she said, “Joanie, I’m doing a women’s speakers and writers event near you. You need to come.” And I said, “Well, I’m not a writer.” She said, “Joanie, you write music, you’re a storyteller, as well.” I said, “Yeah, that’s true.” She’s and I decided, “Well, how can you go wrong spending a weekend with some Christian women?” Well, she made us come up with a topic for that event. And my topic I chose to write about was from two twins who started a movement called “do hard things.”

And it was about launching from teenagerdom into adulthood. Well, I took that concept and applied it to my own life. Okay, I’m heading into a new chapter. I’m getting older. I’m going to apply the “do hard things” to my life because everything it seemed like that was coming into my life was something I didn’t know because of tech or because now jumping in the writing world. And I started to compile all those stories. So I started realizing how important our small church was. And I also started thinking about the fact that during COVID, so many small churches, not only small churches, all churches, struggled.

They didn’t look the same when we kind of got back to normal life. And I kept hearing people say they were frustrated, and they felt unimportant. And they were afraid if they closed the doors, no one would notice. And because of those stories I’d written for so many years, I realized, “You need to put these together and tell people, remind them how important they are in God’s kingdom.” And that has little to nothing to do with us. It has to do with how great our God is and how big he is, and how purposeful he makes our lives when we’re obedient to him.

Joni Topper 5:48
I ran across an article that talked about being in the Bible Belt. And even in the Bible Belt, this is a survey that was done this year, in February and March by Household Pulse Survey. It says that in Texas, where I live, over 40%, or like 9 million people, say they never, ever attend a church or religious service. And I thought that means even in the Bible Belt, we’re living in a ripe field for people to know about Jesus. They need to be, they need to be told. We don’t need to close our eyes and pretend that this giant is too big for us. We need to obey God and trust him to do something powerful with our obedience, which is exactly what he promises to do.

Laurie Graham 6:45
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So with the concept of the “well-placed yes,” I want to ask you about this. Do you think most people in small churches aren’t making “well-placed yeses?” Or do you think we’re not recognizing them? Or is there an intentionality? Like, tell me about that concept and what that means to you?

Joni Topper 7:03
I think small churches have an opportunity because they are small. For instance, someone new just came to our church. In a conversation when we had them to our house for dinner, I discovered that the husband is a fourth-generation beekeeper. There’s another church member in our church who is trying to learn how to be a beekeeper and she’s been struggling with it for a year.

Laurie Graham 7:32
That’s amazing, what a great connection.

Joni Topper 7:35
Yes, so I was able to connect them to collaborate about beekeeping. The beekeeping is not the point; that connection. Once we move beyond sitting on a pew together, and saying “how are you,” and giving the superficial, “I’m fine,” to having a personal relationship with someone, suddenly, they’re my family. I care about them. I know each other.

We went to someone’s home one time, who showed us all through his woodworking shop. Well, in the process of us learning about his love for working with wood, we had all kinds of things around the church that he decided to do. He built trim around our gorgeous stained-glass window. He made custom things all over the church out of wood. Well, about a year later, his shop burns down, and we grieved with him because we understood, because we knew him.

Joni Topper 7:35
If we’re going to minister to people, we have to get to know them. If I know that your son is trying to earn extra money, and that he excels in math, and I have a struggling math student, I know we can help each other. We have to spend some time together in order to get to know each other. And that’s what I think ministry is about.

People don’t talk to you about the deep needs of their life, or their spiritual questions, if they don’t know you care about them. Yeah, those conversations and those relationships come out of our saying, “Yes, I see you. I know your child is struggling, and I care and I can help because I know this person whose child can tutor your child,” or whatever. But those things all come out of our taking the opportunity to say, “Yes, Lord, you’ve put me with these people and I’m going to love them. You told me not to just be around them. You asked me to love them. And I can’t do that if I don’t get to know them.”

So I think those yeses are tied to our willingness to love someone, which is a risk. It’s I can’t tell you how many times my heart has been broken because I invested myself in someone, I thought they were good here to stay, and they were gone. They were gone for a reason sometimes. Many times, I don’t even know what the reason is. I just know they were part of our congregation, and now they’re gone. And I grieve over that. And yet, sometimes I get to know what happened in their life later, and God was healing them, and then sending them out to their own ministry, or preparing them for something he wanted them to do in a different community. There’s just, there’s all kinds of things God’s doing. We think we know the picture and we don’t know the picture. We know a tiny little snippet of it.

Joni Topper 7:35
Someone called me about one of the stories in my book this afternoon. And she said, “Joni, I need to tell you something.” I said, “What do you need to tell me?” She said, “You tell this story about when Lady Bird Johnson died, and her funeral procession came through town, your Sunday school class walked to the end of the block and watched that funeral procession.

And you were surprised that there weren’t many people there.” She said, “What you don’t know is the main procession was on the other main street of town. You only saw the tail end of it.” And I thought that is such a great story. I’m so glad you called and told me that. Because it reminds me that ministry is the same way. We only saw from the corner we’re standing on, we don’t see the whole picture.

Joni Topper 8:34
Yeah, so true. I love that your yeses are so much about relationships, and I see it in your heart and in your face. And it’s so Jesus-like to me, because I think sometimes when we think about our best yeses, or our well-placed yeses, it’s about, “I feel like I need to start this ministry or do this there,” or it’s very task and action-oriented. And how different it would be if our yes, if our best yes, if our well-placed yes, was, “Hey, there’s a person in front of me at the grocery store. And I need to say yes to that,” or “there’s a person in my church that I’d rather avoid.” Right, we all have people like that sometimes. That maybe that’s where my yes is. So I love that. I love your focus on relationships.

Laurie Graham 12:16
So I just got to ask you, because you, you said you’re married to a pastor, and you’ve been pastoring a long time. Have you ever been in situations where your church was very small? Or have you ever struggled with numbers? And I’m just bringing this up, because so many people who find us just really feel like if we were doing what God wanted us to do, we’d be growing. And we’d have 200 people and there’s like a 200 barrier or something. So how have you dealt with that? Or have you faced that at all?

Joni Topper 12:49
Oh, absolutely. Right now, our church is happy if we have 35 people on Sunday morning, hallelujah. And yet, I’m remembering the day that my husband stood up when there were like, 35 people there and said, “We’re going to start a choir.” And in a way, I wanted to laugh and say, “Are you kidding me? Who are we going to sing to? Ourselves?” Well, God started bringing people to us. And we, we formed a choir. The choir wound up having 30 people in it. And there were another 60 people to listen to us. We’ve never been better.

Joni Topper 13:27
But here’s what I know. So there’s, here’s an example. There’s some men in our church who went and served in a Kairos prison ministry. When they would come back and talk about their Kairos weekend, those stories coming out of their mouth about the goodness of God in that ministry made other people in our tiny congregation want to serve in that ministry. It made other people in our tiny congregation say, “You know what, those guys have to take 100 dozen cookies every time they go. We’re gonna bake the cookies for them.” So suddenly, it’s not two guys involved in the Kairos ministry. It’s a whole bunch of us. Yes, we’re tiny, it doesn’t matter. Jesus set the world on fire with a handful of disciples who said, “Yes, we’re going to do what this man we’ve been following told us to do.” And that was what I call impactful.

Joni Topper 14:31
When the story comes out of my mouth about what happened to me, it means much more to you than if it comes from someone else’s mouth. I mean, yes, I tell other people’s stories, but my stories are the best ones because I lived them. And I think generational learning has a huge impact. Whether you’re, whether you’re learning from your grandparents or from being around people from an older generation, watching someone else face challenges and move forward is a great teaching method. It sets an unforgettable example to watch someone else persevere through their trials, and trust God to help them and remind you that God is going to help you too.

Laurie Graham 15:20
Yeah, yeah. And that’s one of the things that small churches, like, it’s, it, that organically happens in small churches, because we are small enough that we really are family. And we do see each other’s griefs and sorrows and joys and celebrations. And it’s like when something happens to one person in the small church, it happens to all of us. And I believe God works in big churches, medium-sized churches and small churches. But in churches, it’s very different. It’s very, very different. Because that many things are missed in larger settings that for us, we hear the stories, and we’re kind of living them together. So I love that you brought that up, another, another, you know, plus, encouragement for small churches.

Joni Topper 16:05
One of the things that, that I see about spending time with people with someone that has a strong faith, and it kind of humanizes our faith when we, when we take it off the page of the Bible and put skin on it. It somehow or another impacts us in a different way. The stories in the Bible are so down to earth. But it’s powerful. And once again, it requires spending time with a person of faith and recognizing that you can be that person in someone else’s life. Someone is looking at you saying, “How do you deal with discouragement?” Yeah, it’s not that you don’t acknowledge you’re discouraged, it’s that it doesn’t, it doesn’t stick to you, it rolls off.

Laurie Graham 17:00
Yeah, even if even if we journey through it, you know, there’s a, there’s a different ending to the story.

Joni Topper 17:11
I think the most powerful thing is to realize that our job is to trust and leave the results to God. So the pressure is all off of me. God is capable, he created the universe, he has the resources that I do not have. He knows the whole picture, and I don’t know the whole picture. He does the real work in people’s hearts, the hearts of our students.

And so once we get out of panic mode and move into just being obedient, God starts showing us his glory. And we begin to recognize the huge privilege that it is to serve him. The concept that the creator of the universe would, would use me to do anything is just almost laughable. It is totally laughable. But we can stop viewing the situation from what we see and start viewing it from a standpoint of faith, and it changes everything.

Laurie Graham 18:09
Yeah, you know, when you said the outcomes are up to God, like the outcomes aren’t, aren’t our responsibility, like we’re obedient, the outcome is up to God. How has that helped you like in small church ministry, in the different positions you’ve been in? Whether it’s, you know, teaching the kids or leading worship or being married to the pastor and hearing his struggles? How has that helped you to kind of, I guess, own that, that you’re not responsible for the outcome? You know, God is?

Joni Topper 18:36
It takes me from being doing something out of duty to doing something out of joy. It completely changes the landscape for me, because I’m just like everybody else. If you tell me I have to do something, I’m probably going to kick and scream. But if you tell me I get to do something, man, I’m figuring out what I want to wear, and what I need to take with me.

Laurie Graham 19:03
Yeah. It changes the pressure of it. You know, when we think all we need to do is this step. And whatever happens happens. And I think for me, it takes that pressure off. And I see a lot of people in small churches serving with a lot of pressure, a lot of discouragement, a lot of hanging their heads, wondering what they’re doing wrong. Do you ever run into people like that in small churches?

Joni Topper 19:29
I am one of those people sometimes. On Sunday morning, when I’ve worked, you know, for three weeks with someone to do a trio and Sunday morning on my way to church, I get a phone call from one of the people in the trio and they’re not coming and they got cold feet and they’re not going to do it at all. And I’m going, “Really? So what am I supposed to do this morning about that slot?” Or you are you’re on the way to church and someone calls in, they automatically call you because you’re the preacher’s wife, right? And, “I won’t be there to teach my Sunday school lesson today.” And I’m going, “Okay, can I shift my thinking? Okay, that’s fourth graders.

What do I need to teach them?” If I, if I look at it from a standpoint of total frustration, or if I get angry at those people, then I can’t serve well. But if I look at it from, “I don’t know what that lady that backed out on the trio is going through at home, I don’t know if her husband is having a crisis, if her child is having a crisis, if her mother kept her up all night long crying on her shoulder.” I don’t know what happened to her. I cannot assume that she’s somehow doing something evil to me. It is not about me. And if my job is truly to lead people into a place of worship, because I’m the worship leader, then I can’t stand up to lead with that mindset.

I have to stand up to lead knowing God is way bigger than me. And that these people gave their time to come and focus their attention on a holy God who deserves to be praised. And I can lead them there, or I can lead them away from there. And it’s a huge privilege to get to do it. I’m, I’m sitting at that keyboard, getting to see everyone’s faces toward me, lifting their voice in praise, and it is a huge privilege. And you know, I’ve, I think about this scripture right here. This is Isaiah 55:8-11. It says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “For as high as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

As the rain and the snow come down from the heavens and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish. So that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater. So as my word that goes out from my mouth, it will not return to me empty. It will accomplish what I desire, and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” I don’t understand how the rain makes the flowers bud and flourish. And I don’t understand how it makes the seeds grow. But I know it does.

And the Word of God is like that in me if I will let it live in me. And if I let myself get irritated with people, the very people that he asked me to love, then I can’t do anything. So it’s all tied to my attitude and my willingness to be a servant to say, “Yes, Lord, you put me here, you gave me this opportunity. I get to teach those fourth graders today. I never get to see those kids today. I get to see them.” And that takes responsibility and turns it into purpose. People need purpose. And God lays it on our lap if we will take it.

Laurie Graham 23:37
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that you shared that you have your discouraging moments in small churches, too. And I love that your church is 35 on a Sunday right now. We had somebody just today in the Facebook community post. We have a Facebook community, like 10,000 people plus, like, it’s crazy. Yes. She posted, “We’re just about as opposite of megachurches as you can be. We’ve got 35 on a Sunday.” And she was asking for intergenerational ideas, you know, what could they do? Within an hour, there were like 63 comments of people saying, “Oh, that’s my church, too. This is what we do.”

And they’re sharing all these beautiful ways that God is moving in their churches, things they’ve done to connect the generations. As you said, just building relationships. And nobody can tell me that if a church doesn’t reach a certain size, it’s not successful or not doing good ministry. Like, I know people who are amazing in ministry, and they are servants of the Most High, and they are in small churches, and God is using them powerfully in small places.

So I appreciate your example and your stories. And Joanie, I love how you even talked about the stories of people in the Old Testament, how ordinary they were. And how funny to think, you know, if they only knew the generations later, people were going to hear about me, me lying that that was not my wife, that my wife was my sister, that somebody, I was going to be reading about me, letting somebody down in a basket, that somebody was going to be reading about me, you know, just being deceitful or making this terrible mistake or doing ordinary things. And for you to write your book and take your stories, your ordinary stories, and put them in print. What was that process like for you?

Joni Topper 25:20
That, it was grueling. I didn’t know anything about it. The lady that first invited me to the speakers and writers conference here is actually from Chicago. And I had joined a writers’ group, and it wasn’t a good fit. And I called her, I said, “What should I do?” She said, “Gracefully back out of it. Let me think about it and pray with you about it for a while.” Well, about three months later, she called me and she said, “I’m putting together a writer’s group, I will coach, there’s only four of us.

Some of them are in Chicago, some of them are in Seattle, and then you’re in Texas.” And so we were all we all had writing projects. And the rule was, you had to come every two weeks with something prepared for all of us to critique. So I listened to a lot of critique, I learned a lot of techy things I never wanted to learn. But I keep going back to that “do hard things” and going, “Oh yeah, that was for me, too.” But what I have determined is we do not age out of God’s call on our life. It provides purpose for all of our life.

And I want to go to church every week and say, “I can’t wait to get there. I can’t wait to see you walk in the door.” And when I leave there, I’m going to be changed every single time. I don’t think that church is something to check off the list. I go there to be changed. And I think the people around me do the same. They go there because they need to know more about this mighty God that we serve. And I don’t care how long you’ve been studying and learning. He’s going to show you something new all the time. And it’s not just for me, it’s for me to take and share with someone else. Wow.

Laurie Graham 27:18
Wow. Well, Joni, your joy and your desire to learn is amazing and contagious. And I just want to thank you for taking time to be with me on this podcast, share a little bit more about your story with people who have never met you, like just experiencing you for the first time. It’s, it, to me, it’s just so beautiful. And so life-changing when our lives like bob and other lives. But before we end, is there anything else that you’re like, “Oh, I wish she had asked me this,” or, “I want to make sure to say this before I go?”

Joni Topper 27:50
I will tell you this, you just asked about what writing was like. About three months before I launched my book, my Facebook page got hacked and disabled. So I lost all my contacts. Wow. And I’ll be real honest with you, I was crying about that. “Nobody knows who I am. I do not have a name in the author world.” And I thought, “Okay, Lord, I’ve spent a couple of years putting this together, learning how to do something I do not know how to do.”

And I was driving into town one afternoon, and we’ve, we had been on the, we were on the tail end of a horrible drought in Texas. But we had finally had a rain, and you know how it is when you finally see some rain clouds. And they’re so gorgeous in the sky and the clouds parted, and the sun came through them. I just started laughing. And I said, “Okay, Lord, you can bring the rain. You bring the harvest. You will tell me how to market this book, because these stories are not for me. They’re for your people, and you love your people.” And the fact that my only thing I’m only what I had knew to market it, vanished a couple of months before, before it was time to launch my book, just once again, takes it out of my hands.

And let me say, “Lord, whoever is blessed by this, it will not be because I did anything, it’s going to be because you are almighty God, and you can orchestrate anything.” And I was, I was almost glad after I thought about it like that. Because I realized, it’s not for me, it’s for him. It’s for his people. And he will do exactly with it what he wants to do, and that’s what I wanted in the first place. But you know, we can get caught up in ourselves. Yeah, yeah.

Laurie Graham 29:53
And you know, I don’t even think I mentioned, Joanie, that the tagline or the subtitle of your book, because your book is called, “The Power of a Well-Placed Yes.” But after the colon, it says, “God’s abundant faithfulness in a small church.” And so you’re literally speaking from the vantage point of a small church. And everything that God, God does is abundance. So I just love it. Joanie, if people want to connect with you or find your book, what’s the best place to find you?

Joni Topper 30:22
My website is Morning Glory Ministry. The “morning” and the “glory” share a G, so there’s only one G.

Laurie Graham 30:31
That’s good to know. Drop the link in the show notes. It’s much easier to click than type, I know.

Joni Topper 30:38
Absolutely. I’m on Facebook as Joni Topper. And I have an Instagram account called Morning Glory Ministry. I lost access to a number of my social media accounts that were linked to the one that got stuck.

Laurie Graham 30:56
Hey, a lot of us have been there. So you’re not alone in that. And maybe, just maybe we’ll get you back to speak at one of our conferences.

Joni Topper 31:05
I would love to do that. Right. So you, you’re listening.

Laurie Graham 31:09
You, this is not the last you’ll hear from Joni. She is a just an amazing, I’m going to call you a saint, a saint in a small church, because saints are God’s people, you know. And it’s, it’s beautiful to meet you and connect in this way and really, just begin sharing your story across the world, really. So thank you for being with us.

Joni Topper 31:32
Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure. I love your small church Facebook group.

Laurie Graham 31:37
Yes. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Like people don’t, make sure to drop the notes, the that link in the show notes too. It’s a community that is powerful, positively powerful online. Like when does that happen, right?

Joni Topper 31:51
Absolutely. It’s really beautiful. And some friends to that Facebook group, who have come back to me and said, “Oh, thank you. Thank you for introducing me to that.” Yeah.

Laurie Graham 32:02
So yeah. Our Facebook community is called “Creative Solutions for Small Churches.” So come find us there too. You and Joanie will be in there, too. So we will see you all around. So that’s all we have for today. So until next week.