What's Coming for the Church: Trends, Readiness, and the Leadership Shifts Nobody Is Talking About

In this episode, Alan Briggs sits down with Holly Tate, founder of The Ready Network and a consultant who has spent 15 years serving churches, ministries, and organizations at the intersection of leadership development and strategic clarity. Holly brings a rare vantage point: nearly a decade at Vanderbloemen doing executive search for churches, four years as Chief Marketing and Services Officer at a leadership software company serving over 600 ministries, and now running her own coaching and consulting practice helping leaders and teams scale.

The conversation covers a lot of ground and moves fast. From the moment organizations outgrow their basketball team culture and have to become a football team, to the trends Holly is watching unfold in real time around shared leadership models, AI adoption, spiritual formation, and what it means to actually be ready for what's coming next.

If you lead a church, serve on an elder board, work as an executive pastor, or simply want to understand the challenges facing ministry leaders right now, this one is for you. And if you lead a business or nonprofit, Holly estimates about 70% of this conversation will translate directly.

What You'll Learn in This Episode:

Holly's 15-year leadership pathway — from cold calling at a radio company to executive search at Vanderbloemen to chief marketing officer at a leadership software company — and what all of it taught her about organizational health

The doer to developer jump — why top performers get promoted into management roles they were never equipped for, and the tension that creates between executives and managers

The basketball team to football team analogy from Larry Osborne's Sticky Teams — what breaks down when organizations cross that threshold and what leaders have to change about themselves to navigate it

The READY framework — Reality check, Evaluation, Action plan, Delegation, Yes barometer — and how Holly uses it as a 90-day strategic planning process for churches and organizations

Why the Yes barometer is the hardest part of the framework to implement — and why psychological safety determines whether it works

The emerging trend of shared and co-leadership models in churches — Holly's two hypotheses for why it's happening and what's making it work

What's really driving fear around AI in church culture — and why Holly believes leaders should be the first to explore it, not the last

The discipleship disruption — why churches are rethinking spiritual formation from the