Our Mission: To cultivate the life of Christ in heart, mind and culture.
Redbird is a non-profit ministry that offers pastoral care to individuals, organizations and groups.
What is pastoral care? A pastor wears a lot of hats, but our primary calling is to lead God’s people and His church through the study and preaching of His Word. That can sound stale to some, but studying and preaching God’s Word isn’t just about offering spiritual insights and answers to the converted.
Pastors study God’s Word so we can know who this God that created us is, what Jesus has actually done (and is doing) and how that matters in our real, boots-on-the-ground daily lives. We study scripture so words like grace, forgiveness, sin, mercy and calling don’t become one-dimensional words that blend into the religious white noise of the day. In short, pastors study God’s Word so we can stand in the grace-filled, glory packed realities of life. But it doesn’t stop there.
We lean into God’s Word so we can bring it and apply it to people’s lives like medicine to a wound. But in order to apply any medicine effectively, we need to know where to apply it and how to apply it. So, we listen, we watch and then we move.
We listen to the hearts of our people to discover where they are hurting, in need, frustrated or confused. We watch for where they are weak and need to grow. More importantly, we watch for where the Holy Spirit is already moving in their lives and do our best to move with it. We do this by sensitively (that doesn’t mean without boldness) reaching into the broken, weak and frustrated places to tell people about the heart of God for them, the truth about themselves, the truth about others and the truth about this world.
Good pastoral care requires Spirit-led discernment and wisdom. It requires an understanding and skill navigating the God-breathed emotional realities of the human heart. It requires training and the study of common-grace truth so we can not just understand how God made us, but how He heals us. More importantly, it requires a pastor to have a willingness to go on that journey themself. But most importantly, it requires the humility to see that no level of discernment, wisdom, understanding, skill or experience can restore a human heart. That is the work of God; a work that God does in Christ, by His Spirit through His Word in the context of our relationships, stories and lives.
So, we study…we preach…we listen…we watch…we move. Rinse and repeat.
This is the call of the pastor and the church. Redbird affirms and supports this call whole-heartedly. Sadly, the needs of this world are bigger than any single church or group of churches can meet. This is not a deficiency of a model, leader, denomination, theology or philosophy of ministry. It is the reality of a fractured world this side of heaven. That’s why Jesus said in Luke 10:12, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
Redbird is a pastoral care ministry that exists to step into the field and stand as the church, alongside the church, for the church and God’s people. To that end, Redbird offers pastoral care in three ways:

- Guidance and Counsel
- Strategic Partnerships and Chaplaincy
- Teaching and Training.

Francis Schaeffer once wrote that we are “glorious ruins.” We are glorious because we were all created in God’s image and display His fingerprints as creatures of hope, love, longing, and relationship. We are ruins because we live in a broken world that has distorted that image and misdirected our hope, love, longing and relationships.
There are times when we can see God’s glory all around us and in ourselves. But, there are also times when our ruin seems to win the day. We experience pain over joy, chaos over order and loneliness over love. Redbird exists to step into the ruin and guide people to the glory; and we step into the glorious to point to the One whose glory it reflects. We do this by offering guidance and counsel to individuals, couples and groups.
Redbird walks with people trying to make sense of their stories, married couples who want more from their relationship, people contending with sexual brokenness and everything in between. We also work alongside organizations (churches and non-churches) that do not have the capability, capacity or resources to offer this sort of care to their people.

God is the creator God and we are made us in His image. That means He created us to create; to partner with Him as He redeems this fallen world. As lofty as this sounds, it simply means that we are to move in the contexts in which He has placed us to bring life where there is death, hope where there is despair and love where there is indifference. There are few places where we have an opportunity live out this call more fully than where we work.
This is why Redbird offers Strategic Partnerships and Chaplaincy to culturally impactful organizations. By “culturally impactful” we mean entities and individuals to whom God has given a platform to speak and move into the larger world around them. Redbird walks with professional sports teams, counseling centers, and businesses with an outward focus (or those that desire to have an outward focus) to be a spiritual voice, presence and guide. We partner with organizations and minister to them by building relationships, offering counsel, prayer and studying God’s Word. Redbird has seen that ministering to individuals within these contexts not only impacts their specific culture, it impacts the lives and cultures into which they move.

We all have questions…Who is God? What is the Bible? How do I live out my calling in this world? Questions matter because the questions we ask tell us a lot about our hearts and what we long for. But in a world where every bookshelf, social media account and television show offers a different answer, it’s easy to get confused. Who do you listen to? Who do you let guide you?
Redbird guides people by helping them honor their questions. We lead them forward by showing them the deeper, God-given need driving their questions. And we help people wrestle with the thing that all our needs and longings are pointing us toward: Jesus. We do this through classes, teaching times and gatherings.
Redbird also trains people, pastors, counselors and other soul care providers who want to learn how to better to care for the people. We help them understand their own questions, longing and story so they can do the same for others.

The Rev. Billy Cerveny is the founder and Executive Director of Redbird and a long-time Nashville resident. Billy offers pastoral care to individuals, couples, organizations and groups. He also preaches, teaches and guides people into a deeper understanding of God’s word, themselves and others.
Billy grew up in Jacksonville, Florida before attending Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and Covenant Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. He is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church (PCA) and prior to launching Redbird he was a pastor at Midtown Fellowship’s downtown campus in Nashville.
Billy is currently partnering with Soccer Chaplains United and is the chaplain for Nashville SC, Nashville’s professional soccer team.
Before becoming a pastor, Billy worked as a singer-songwriter, television producer and writer. He is married to Charla and they have three beautiful children (Emmy, Wiley and Scout) and a faithful hound named Lolly.

A Path Home.
We believe that there is only one God who is three persons: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19). We believe God is perfect (Matt. 5:48); perfectly good (Luke 18:19), compassionate, gracious, loving, just and complete in and of Himself (Ex. 34:5-7, Col. 2:9-10). We believe he created this world as an expression of His goodness, life, love and glory (Gen 1:31, Ps. 19:1-6). As part of that, He made man (that means men and women) in His image (Gen 1:16). That means a few things:
First, it means He made man different than anything else in creation (Gen 1:26). We were made spiritual beings that have the capacity to understand, hope and long for things greater than ourselves (John 4:24, Ps. 119:20, Job 32:8). However, what we understand and long for can only be answered and satisfied by God (Ps. 107:9, Col 1:15-18).
Because we were created with a spiritual reality, being made in His image also means that we were created to live in relationship and connection with Him (Ex. 20:1-11). It is there that we find our meaning, sense of purpose, and are loved and made alive (Col. 1:16, Gen 1:16-17).
Being made in God’s image also means that we were created to live in relationship with others. We see this modeled in God Himself and the relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Relationships were created to be a good thing and were meant to be a blessing that to one another and the world around us (Gen. 2:18, John 17:21-23, Gen 12:2-3).
Finally, being made in God’s image means that just as God is a creator, we were created to create (Gen. 1:28-30). He made us to use our gifts and resources to partner with Him to build a world that reflects who He is and what He values (Ex. 20:1-17). This isn’t a call to be something we are not. It is a call to be human; to create culture, cuisine, businesses, art, music, families and everything else. We are to do it in such a way that it testifies to the God of goodness, life, love and glory (Col 3:17, Rev. 21:24-26).
As beautiful as this is, we also believe that long ago man (again, that means men and women) rejected God’s design for them. They turned to their own knowledge of good and evil to create their own sense of purpose, life and meaning. They asked created things to be for them and do for them what only God could be and do. This was the birth of sin and the result was tragic. It not only severed man’s connection with God, it brought spiritual death, isolation and twisted man’s sense of purpose in the world. It also infected the way men and women related to one another (Gen. 3:1-24, Rom. 1:25).
Sadly, this is the spiritual DNA that was passed down to all of us (1 Cor. 15:21-22). As a result, we are all left with incomplete hearts that cry out for something…anything…to lead us back home (Ps. 84:2).
But, God loves us and He was not and is not content to leave us. So, he made a path home to Him in Jesus (John 3:16).
We believe that this is a path we cannot, nor were we meant to walk in our own strength, goodness or ability (Rom. 7:14-25). In His love for us, Jesus came to walk this path perfectly and die on the cross for our sins so He could raise us to new life through His resurrection and Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 5:21, Rom 4:25, Rom. 6:8-11).
We believe this is a path we cannot walk alone (Prov. 3:5-6). For this reason, Jesus gave us His Spirit (Acts 2:1-4, John 14:26). It is by that Spirit that we are made new creations; holy and blameless, once and for all (Eph. 1:7, 2 Cor. 5:17, 1 Cor. 1:30, Heb. 10:8-10). It is this same Holy Spirit that moves with, in and through us on this path home to give us life, understanding, hope, healing and change (Gal. 2:20, Phil. 2:13).
We believe that this is not a path where we pursue God or where He pursues us. It is where we are caught by Him and He never lets us go (John 10:28-30). This is a path where the needy, broken, shame-filled and rejected are called precious sons and daughters (Rom. 8:16, Gal 4:6). It is where the truth and grace of the living God come together to wind through our darkest nights and brightest mornings (John 1:17, Phil. 4:11-13). This path simultaneously offers us a journey we must go on and rest from the journey on which we have been (Ps. 119:105, Mat. 11:28).
We believe this path home was perfectly written about in the scriptures and it is through them alone that we know the truth, grace, love and call of Christ (1 Tim. 3:16, Matthew 4:4, John 16:13-16). This is a path that no eye has seen except by the light of the Holy Spirit and no foot has touched except by the gift of faith (John 14:17, 2 Cor. 5:7, Eph. 2:8). It is the path of God’s glory and it leads us home because we were all made to for His glory (Is. 43:7).
We believe that one day Christ will return and the tear wiping hand of God will descend to make all things new (Rev. 21:1-4). Until then we walk this path together. Because of Grace. With Christ. By His Spirit. Through faith. Alongside one another. Amen.