#261 | Revitalizing Leadership: The Impact of Joy and Maturity in Ministry with Marcus Warner, Pt. 1

I'll be honest.

You know, there's some big churches that are notorious chewing up and spitting out staff, right?

So why are they.

Why are they doing this?

Why are they chewing up, spitting out staff?

It's because they've lost the joy component to the leadership, and they're not leading with maturity.

And so in the absence of joy and maturity, the only thing left to you is fear.

Welcome to those who Serve the Lord, a podcast for those at the front lines of ministry.

You've given your life to serve.

But what happens when the well runs dry?

If you've felt the weight of leadership, the tension between tradition and change, or the challenge of staying faithful while engaging culture, you're not alone.

I'm Travis Michael Fleming, founder and executive director of Apollo's Watered, the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics.

I've been at the front lines for over 25 years, leading churches to become thriving testimonies of God's grace.

I've wrestled with the same questions you're facing, and I've seen how God brings renewal even in the hardest seasons.

Each week we have conversations with pastors, theologians, and cultural thinkers as we seek to equip you to lead well and stay rooted in Christ amid shifting cultural tides.

So grab your coffee and listen in, because your faith matters, your work is not in vain, and the Lord is still with you every step of the way.

Welcome back to those who Serve the Lord.

Leadership is a hot topic.

It always has been.

Walk into any bookstore or browse online, and you'll be inundated with thousands of titles offering their own spin on what it means to lead well.

But very few get beneath the surface.

I mean, really into the emotional, relational, and even neurological foundations of leadership.

Why do people follow?

Why do they trust?

Why do they thrive?

The answer isn't fear, pressure, or charisma.

At its heart, leadership is about relationships.

It's about building joy, earning trust, and loving people well.

That's why today's conversation matters.

We're going into the archives to revisit a powerful conversation with Dr. Marcus Warner, co author of Rare Leadership, alongside Last week's guest, Dr. Jim Wilder.

This book has been quietly transforming how leaders lead, not just in businesses or churches, but in homes, schools, and anywhere else.

People are called to serve others.

And for those who take discipleship seriously, who believe Jesus is Lord over every square inch of our lives, leadership isn't just a skill set.

It's a discipleship issue.

In the world of missioholism and cultural apologetics, we talk a lot about how the gospel speaks to every aspect of life.

Rare leadership gives us practical tools to live that out, to lead in a way that reflects the character of Christ and builds communities marked by joy, resilience, and grace.

It's also part of the bigger picture.

I explore in Blueprint how we recover a vision for formation that goes deeper than performance and gets to the heart of who we're becoming.

So let's jump into this conversation that I had with Dr. Marcus Warner and discover how leadership rooted in joy and maturity can be part of God's transforming work in the world.

Happy listening, Marcus Warner.

Welcome back to Apollo's Water.

Hey, it's good to be here, Travis.

I had a good time last time.

I think I shared way too much personal stuff.

But you do that to people.

I think so.

I don't know if that's a gift or a curse or what.

I do find that maybe we should start calling it, I don't know, podcast Confessions, something like that, where people start just admitting different things in their life.

I know my son was proud of me for admitting that I watched anime, so we did that.

It was a bonding moment for the two of you.

It was a bonding moment.

It was good, you know, when I.

Went back to edit that show and I started to laugh again that you admitted it.

Yeah.

You've done this before, but we're gonna do it again.

Are you ready for the fast five?

Let's do it.

Here we go.

Number one.

What was your favorite toy when you were a kid?

It was my stingray bike.

I rode it everywhere, went to the park with it, rode in trails, pretended I was Daniel Boone.

I mean, it was, you know, Daniel.

Boone on a dirt bike.

I'm just saying it was my horse, you know?

So I was like, okay, I could always pretend I was anything I was.

I'm old, so that was that long before.

I miss those days, though.

And everybody just rode their bike.

And your mom would say, you know, be back before sundown.

Exactly.

That was.

That was my childhood.

Yep.

Oh, good times.

Good times.

All right, second question.

What is the household chore that you enjoy the least?

Oh, my.

Well, household chore I enjoy the least, honestly, is just figuring out how to organize everything.

It's like I get, oh, so overwhelmed just by the sheer volume of what needs to find a place that I give up and punt too often.

But, yeah, that's the one I hate the least, is just trying to figure out how to organize all the clutter.

So much clutter.

First world problems that we'll take.

It's a first world problem for sure.

It is a first world problem for sure.

I mean, there is something strange in our culture when we have people making money because they have storage facilities because we have too much stuff to put in our house.

Exactly.

A little simplicity, I think.

A little simplicity.

But I said that to my wife, and then she says, no.

I mean, she's like, yes, I agree with you.

Simplicity.

And then I try to throw away her cassette tapes that were remixed that we don't even have a cassette player for.

Right, right.

And she's like, no, you can't throw those out.

What are you talking about?

We don't.

Or even VHS stuff.

We don't even have this anymore.

But it is what it is.

Yeah, I know.

We're.

We always have plans for it.

Yeah, we're gonna.

We're gonna do it, but it never happens.

All right, number three.

How about this one?

How about.

What's the household tour you enjoy the most?

The most is probably.

This is gonna be weird, but just doing the dishes, I think.

Cause I grew up doing it as a kid, and so there's something kind of relaxing about that.

Second would be just mowing the lawn.

I have a friend of mine who owns a bunch of McDonald's.

This was from years ago when we were in Chicago together.

And he had a different place, like a different home out and kind of out in the country.

And I learned this, and being in the city, you don't have any grass really, anywhere.

I mean, just to get a little patch of y.

And I grew up as a farm kid.

We had to mow all the time.

And I remember asking him, I was like, can I go out to your house and just mow your yard?

And he's like, no.

And I was surprised because I thought, oh, what a great thing would be this thing for me to volunteer to do.

Because who likes to mow their yard if you have to mow it all the time?

And he goes, no, that's the only time where no one bugs me.

That's my time.

But I'm with you on that.

I like doing the dishes because no one talks to me.

I like it because it's short.

I get it done, and I feel like I've accomplished something.

Oh, that's a good feeling.

Okay, number four.

If you were an app, okay, a phone app, what app would you be and why?

This is really boring.

But my first thought was notability.

I use notability all of the time.

As I keep all of my meeting notes there.

It's like, but you can also do art and you can draw and you can create and you can import and you can create all kinds of things.

So it's functional.

It gets a lot of stuff done, but it's also creative.

I didn't even know that app existed.

I'm just saying is the first one popped in my head.

My son again.

That's when my son said, hey dad, you got to get this.

And I now use it for all of my meetings.

So now I'm going to check that out after we're done.

Yeah.

All right, here we go.

Number five.

If you were a car, what kind of car would you be and why?

If I was a car, I would.

Yeah.

That's an impossible question.

Well, I would be, I would probably be a Jeep.

Yeah.

Because, well, where I live, I live in suburbia and jeeps are a status symbol here.

They're not used for offers.

If you're a rich high school kid, you've got a Jeep.

Right.

That's kind of how that works around here.

So I'm not sure what that says about me, but that's where I connect.

Okay, you don't want to.

I mean you've got some photographs behind you.

Colorado Yellowstone.

Yeah, yeah, I, I, I have a desire to be that sort of thing.

But my Colorado experience is more like hiking and Garden of the Gods.

You know, where they've got bathrooms every 200ft.

You know, that's.

That'S the most thing that makes me stressful.

My, when I'm driving someplace and I don't know where I'm going to park and I don't know where the bathroom is.

That's just betrays my age.

All right, well let's, let's jump in.

Actually we got a few things we're going to talk about today.

We've got, I mean I've got two books here.

I've got Rare Leadership in the Workplace and Rare Leadership.

And we also got a little bit of Deeper Walk which we've talked about in the past.

But today we're going to focus a little bit on Rare leadership.

Now, what is Rare Leadership?

And you co authored this with Jim Wilder, so you have to forgive me if I say that you wrote this and it was Jim.

I don't know who wrote what.

But what is Rare Leadership and why is it important?

Rare leadership is really about maturity.

It asks the question what separates the leaders we love to follow from the leaders we have to follow.

It's a one word answer and that is are they mature?

Dr. Wilder, who co wrote it with me is a neuroscience attachment theory expert.

He developed a system called the Life Model that is a maturity development system.

What we did is we took his approach and we oriented it towards leadership and said, what have we learned from neuroscience and attachment theory about maturity development and how does that impact the way people lead?

Because if you go through the church, you go through nonprofits, you go into government, you go into hospitals, doesn't matter where you go, Things are blowing up because of a lack of maturity in our leaders.

Jim is.

He thinks in terms of brain.

What's happening in the brain, what synapses are firing, what's happening here?

I think in terms of acronyms and acrostics.

So I took his ideas and put them into to the acrostic rare, which stands for.

These are the four characteristics of mature leadership.

And the first one is they remain relational.

And because if I don't remain relational, I am shutting down, I'm blowing up, I'm melting down.

But whatever happens, you lose me.

My relational self doesn't show up.

So the second characteristic is the A is act like yourself.

And again, the idea here is some of us change our personality with every emotion that we feel.

And so I am a totally different person when I'm angry, or I'm a totally different person when I'm sad, or I'm a totally different person when I'm afraid.

And so what happens is, if I'm the leader and my whole Persona changes with every emotion that I feel, then people walk on eggshells around me because they never know which leader they're going to get.

So there has to be some.

It's not that I'm not affected by emotions, but they don't turn me into a different person.

And so what you find with a lot of people who lack that level of maturity, there'll often be somebody in the office who functions almost like a surrogate mom.

And they warn everybody what mood the boss is in today.

Kind of, yeah, watch where you step today, because you're not going to, like, he's not in a good mood.

And we've learned to kind of justify these things, excuse these things.

But the idea is that these are really what make or break the culture that we're trying to build.

Build is the personal maturity.

So then the third one is return to joy.

And that's the idea that joy is actually the fuel your brain wants to run on.

It will run on fear when it has to, but it wants to run on joy.

And so as a leader, I'm either going to motivate people with joy or with fear.

And I'm either going to motivate myself with joy or with fear.

Now, we all do a little bit of both.

But if I am routinely motivating myself with fear, I'm going to burn myself out.

And if I'm routinely motivating my people with fear, I'm going to burn them out.

I need to, as a leader, be able to return to joy myself.

And I need to be able to help my team recognize where they're at with their emotions, help them return to joy, and help all of us do what we're doing because we love what we're doing and not because of the bad stuff that's going to happen.

If we don't, that leads to the E. And that is that we endure hardship well.

And that is immature people try to avoid hardship at all costs.

Mature people endure hardship well.

And the well is basically defined by the first three characteristics.

And that is when things get tough, I still remain relational.

I still act like myself, and I return to joy, and I help people around me return to joy so that the best version of ourself is showing up.

That's rare leadership in a nutshell.

You talk about this aspect.

You said R. Sorry, I'm opening it up.

It's been a little bit since I've read this because I read this and then I read your other book.

I read this one before that, but you're talking about rare leadership.

So R is it what again?

Remain relational.

Remain relational.

So these are talking about our.

I know Jim refers to our relational circuits, right?

Our RCs are on or off.

The one thing and I kind of talked to Jim and Michael Hendricks about this is that the one thing I struggle with is talking about brain science.

I mean, it's brain science.

And there's a whole nother language that's needed to get this.

Describe what these relational circuits are.

Or maybe this is a question for Jim, but what are these relational circuits?

Like?

How do we remain relational?

What's the other alternative if we don't?

So the way I describe it is there's basically an on off switch on the right side of your brain.

And when that switch is on, my relational self is present.

When I am relational, I use the acrostic cake to evaluate this.

So there's really clear.

And that is when I.

When I'm relational, I'm curious.

I'm curious how you feel.

I'm curious what you think.

Right.

When I'm not relational, I'm not curious.

I think I have you all figured out, I don't want to hear what you have to say.

I lose all curiosity about you.

So that's an on off switch.

So when my relational circuits are basically when this whole side of my brain is functioning properly and has it shut down.

So you think about this on off switch, it's a little bit like when it goes off, it's like my brain is going into a cramp.

And when my brain goes into a cramp and things start shutting down on this side and the switch goes off, I lose access to the higher level brain functions.

And it's at the higher level brain functions that I remain relational and act like myself and live with joy.

So as this cramps up and I lose access to those higher level functions, I become less relational, I stop acting like myself and I lose my joy.

And some of us just live there and some of us get stuck there for long periods of time.

And that's why we go to counseling.

Like I, we don't go to counseling because we have too much joy, right?

We go to counseling because we can't find our joy.

You know, the, the technical term that most people know is amygdala, right?

The amygdala is like the fight or flight part.

So what happens with the amygdala is really what is causing this thing to, you know, cramp up and shut down or stay on.

And so the amygdala is assessing every attachment that I form.

And that assessment was one of three things.

It's either good, it's bad, or it's scary.

So if it's good, that's easy for me to stay relational, act like myself.

This is all fun, this is all good.

That's no problem.

If it's bad, it tends to trigger what we call low energy emotions.

Which low energy emotions would be like shame or this is bad, I'm bad.

This, you know, I'm doing bad things.

Or disgust.

Like I'm disgusted with myself.

I'm disgusted with you.

That's a low energy emotion.

Sadness and despair, those are like the four classic low energy emotions.

If the amygdala says this is scary, then that's when I get fight or flight.

And I will become angry.

I want this to stop or I become scared.

I just got to get out of here.

And so when I'm running on a lot of fear, then I have high energy going on in my body.

So where this gets really complicated, if it's not already where this starts to get, is that you can have high energy and low energy emotions at the Same time.

So to your body, it's a little bit like somebody stepping on the gas and stepping on the brakes at the same time.

It's like I've got fear and anger that are stepping on the gas and I've also got shame and despair that are stepping on the brakes.

And so my body can literally shake, right?

Because I've got so much stress and so much pressure under here.

And so the way this affects every relationship we have, it affects all of life.

And so maturity is maturity.

We're just going to take maturity and apply it to leadership.

But so you got to understand maturity first so that you can understand how this directly impacts leadership and how to apply.

So I said cake.

I just gave you the One is curiosity, it's appreciation, it's kindness, and it's eye contact.

So basically the idea here is that when my switch is on, my relational circuits are running.

It's easy for me to do those four things.

I can be curious about you, I can appreciate what you bring to the table, appreciate what you do.

I can be kind much more easily.

And it's easy to make eye contact.

When my switch goes off.

One of the first things I often lose is eye contact.

I just find myself looking at anybody but you.

So you probably heard your wife say, would you please look at me?

Right?

It's that eye contact thing has been lost.

And when my.

When that gets triggered and that switch goes down, I normally kind persons can't think of a way to be kind right now.

I can't even think of what it looks like to be kind to you right now.

I just am so upset with you or whatever it is.

So I've lost that ability to.

So what we tell people then is that you get these circuits back on by first of all recognizing that they've gone off.

Break eye contact with the person.

And now you're in problem solving mode in your brain and the problem you're trying to solve is how do I find some curiosity, appreciation and kindness.

And then once I can find those and my relational circuits start flowing again and that switch pops back on.

Now I can make eye contact again, re engage.

And sometimes that takes seconds and sometimes it takes minutes and sometimes it takes days.

Now and then it depends on how developed your capacity to do it is.

And that's really one of the hallmarks of maturity is that mature people do this quickly and immature people often get stuck here and it changes everything.

I just want to fight for cause if I get to know my purpose, I don't know if I Like it or not gotta know that you're the answer When I'm searching my mind I forgot When I'm walking through the fire.

I just look toward the light when it's hot.

There'S so much that you've already said that made me stop and go, oh, no, am I not the mature person?

Like, even you mentioned the cake.

I'm like, there are times where I'm like, I'm not curious about right now.

What you have to say, I don't want to know.

But I mean, how do we remain relational in that way?

I know you alluded to it already, but when we go into that, and I think Jim calls it enemy mode, when the relationship circuits shut off, how do we then remain relational with people and stay curious?

So if you have lost it, then by definition you've lost it, right?

You're not there.

So the question is, how do you get it back?

So that's what we mean by this second R, the return to joy.

How do I get back from here?

And so sometimes I just need a break, right?

I need to.

Sometimes it's like, I'll find my curiosity in five minutes.

I just need a break.

Sometimes that break is I avoid eye contact.

Like Jim has described doing this in counseling sessions, right?

He's like, you hear somebody describing a problem that you've heard a thousand other people describe, you kind of know where this is going and you can lose your curiosity.

So when that would happen, he'd look away.

He said, you know, he would think to himself, what can I be curious about?

And then when he'd find something, he'd remake eye contact and they and his relational self would be present again.

So the goal here is not to not feel things, but to remain relational even when I do feel things.

And that's the goal.

So we, we put it this way.

Let's keep relationships bigger than problems.

Because when, when my.

The other thing that happens when my relational circuits go off is that I and I get into enemy mode and I'm doing things without my relational self present, I'm much more likely to care only about winning and to be more interested just in what is best for me, and I stop caring about what is best for you.

And so that's what defines enemy mode.

Enemy mode is where I only care about my own victory here and what's going to be best for me, and I no longer care about you.

So now then, we need a break.

All right?

So a pause.

And that could be, like I said, just a 30 second pause while I Kind of find it in this conversation.

Or it could be, you know what?

I really need a timeout.

Can we come back to this conversation tomorrow?

So there have been times, for instance, in marriage where my wife and I, it's getting toward the end of the day.

We're like, we're either going to stay up all night arguing about this, or we just need to agree to keep the relationship bigger than the problem, put this thing on hold, take a break, do something that will be happy together, that'll help us be happy together, and then let's bring this up tomorrow and deal with it another time.

So that's like, we call that let's just keep the relationship bigger than the problem.

So you got to recognize when you have lost it and you are not doing those things.

So we do use cake as the evaluation tool.

Am I curious?

Am I appreciative?

Am I kind?

Can I make eye contact?

And if I've lost those things, that means I'm offline.

I get them back online by taking a break and finding them.

And if I can do it in one conversation, great.

If I can't, then I may need to excuse myself, take it, you know, and go find.

You're mentioning that the relationship is bigger than the problem.

I like that description we've always had in our marriage where we would say that we don't go to bed angry, and no matter what, we wouldn't go to bed angry.

And I remember sharing that in a sermon.

And this older man walks up to me, saunters up to me afterwards, and he just looks at me and he goes, three days.

And I was looking at him quizzically.

I didn't understand what he was talking about.

And he turned to walk away, and I said, three days.

Three days.

What?

He goes, that's how long we've been awake.

Meaning that.

Meaning that we haven't gone to bed yet because we're still fighting.

I mean, he was a jokester.

But go back for a moment.

Some people still have a very.

They don't have a clear definition of joy.

And you, you mentioned the difference between the brain operating on joy or fear.

Let's define joy.

How do you define joy?

So from a brain perspective, joy is based on attachment.

It is a happy to see you attachment.

And so it's the feeling that we get, right?

And so it's not a choice.

The way that we tend to be taught other choices we can make that make it more likely.

But it's, you know, if you're a grandparent and your grandkids walk in the room.

You don't go, oh, they're here.

I better choose to be happy.

Right.

It's this reaction that you have.

Oh, it's you, and I'm genuinely happy to see you.

Sometimes we can have that with somebody we just met.

Oh, it's like, oh, I remember you.

Yeah, we had a good positive encounter, and I'm feeling a little bit of joy right now.

So that's.

Joy is that feeling that comes in my brain when I'm happy to be with somebody.

This is why I can even be grieving a loss of something, but be happy to be with my wife.

When she sits down next to me and we're there together, there can still be some joy, even in the grief.

And it's actually that joy that gives me the strength to deal with the hardships of life.

So we would say that the key to enduring hardship, well, is really cultivating the ability to have joyful relationships in our lives and.

And maximize the joy potential in our relationships.

So in another.

Yeah, in another book I wrote, I called it the joy Gap.

That is, there's this gap between moments of shared joy.

And the bigger that gap gets, the easier it is for negative emotions to take over.

Have you seen the Home of the Sun?

Summer is no comparison.

Breathing deeply.

What is the difference between how brain science defines joy and we would biblically define joy?

That's a good question, because what happens when we go to defining terms?

We tend to read our own definitions into them, of course.

Yeah.

And so what happens is, if I have come to believe that joy is a choice, then when I see the biblical word joy, I go, oh, well, see, there it is.

And then it's the same thing with love.

Is love a choice or is love attachment?

Both.

Right.

It's like there's times when I choose to do the loving thing, but I can't just choose an attachment.

So an attachment has to be developed, it has to be grown, it has to be discovered, it has to be nurtured.

So at the heart of who God is, this word chesed, is an attachment word.

It's the idea that God is so bonded to us that he wants to what is good for us.

Right.

And so I do what's good for some people simply because of the attachment I have with them.

There's some people because of, you know, our bond, I'll do things for them I wouldn't do for other people.

Right.

That's kind of what chesed is.

It's like because of our attachment, I'm going To do something for you I wouldn't, you know, just necessarily do for anybody.

But I'm doing it because I love you.

So that's a little bit different than I'm going to choose to love you right now.

Right.

Notice I already love you, but I'm going to now make some choices because I love you.

So joy is an attachment word.

And I would say biblically speaking, it's also an attachment word.

So what's really fascinating is how connected it is to grace.

Because, you know, grace and forgive me, it's been one minute since I looked at it.

But I. Karas, Karin.

Right.

So in Karus and Karen are related words, one's joy, one's grace.

And the idea is that grace is an attachment word.

And it's the idea that God freely attaches to us because of what Jesus did.

And because of that, there can be joy in my walk with God because I know that God is happy to see me.

And I say this is crucial because I think that one of the biggest barriers in our walk with God is that we're fear bonded to God instead of joy bonded to him.

We don't see God as being happy to be with us until we perform or we look at God as he's got to choose to love me.

Today, he doesn't really love me.

Right.

And so we read a lot of our own stuff into that.

So that's a long answer.

But joy from a biblical perspective, I would say is actually the same.

It's still an attachment based word that is related to relational happiness.

So where do you find joy most often in the Bible, it's in the face of God.

Right.

So it tends to get translated in English as the presence of God.

But the Hebrew word there is base.

And I don't think that's an accident.

Say, make the face of God shine upon you.

Well, I don't think it's the Moses shining face that we're talking about there.

I think it's a joyful face.

Like I'm, you know, like your face lights up when you're with somebody you're happy to see.

And I think this is God's, you know, God's face light up with joy when he sees you.

Right.

That's a great blessing.

And I think that's what that's talking about in Psalm 16, you know, David says, I find joy in your face.

Right.

Eternal pleasures in your right hand.

And so I think that that's part of it too.

Why do I find joy in God's face?

You know, it's because humanly speaking, I get it from people's eyes.

You know, their eyes light up, and it's the first place that babies look.

You know, when they see you, they're looking at your eyes.

And what they're looking for is, are you happy to see me?

And if you're happy to see me, then bonding is really easy.

All of that is so incredible to think about how we are wired for joy and for the belonging aspect.

And you talk about this in the book.

I mean, belonging is really one of our core needs.

God's made us to want to belong and have that desire.

Why have we missed this so much, though, this idea of belonging in the church and in leadership?

Well, I think the main reason that we've missed it is that there was an Enlightenment influence that came into us.

Like, we fought against the Enlightenment, but it influenced us in subtle ways we didn't recognize.

And one of them was that out of the Enlightenment came the idea that reason is the core thing about being human.

But the second generation of the Enlightenment moved past reason and said, it's actually the will is the most fundamental thing about being human.

And so that philosophical movement is called voluntarism.

And what volunteerism taught us was that everything boils down to choice.

And so we sort of read that back into the Bible and we turned everything into a choice, right?

We turned salvation into a choice, make a decision for Christ, right?

We, you know, as it chose to attach to Christ, be grafted into the vine, let that attachment grow.

It became transactional.

So choices turn everything transactional.

It's very difficult to have a lot of joyful bonding attached, you know, relationship.

When my whole relationship is just, I'll do this for you if you do that for me.

And, you know, you give me money, I'll do that, or whatever it is, it's all tit for tat.

That's.

That's transactional.

What we're talking about here is bigger than that.

So, anyway, back to volunteerism, though.

It's this idea of the will.

And so what is out of voluntarism that we can begin saying, love is a choice, joy is a choice, salvation, everything became a choice.

And so now we read the Bible and we just see choice in it.

When we actually read closely, there's nothing about choice in that text.

We've just sort of read it into there.

And it's not that choices aren't important.

Don't get me wrong.

It's not like it's attachment or choice, but the brain, I think, helps Us understand this and that attachment comes first in the brain and then choices.

And I think that's the way God designed it, and that is that he wants us, because of our attachments, to make loving choices.

But we don't have to just choose to create a loving attachment to my wife every day I have that.

When I wake up, I have to sometimes remind myself that it exists and make choices consistent with it.

But I'm not just choosing to start loving her.

When you talk about the believing in the attachment aspect of things and that influences our choices, do you think that that's one of the things that's been missing a lot in the church because we focus so much on the choice aspect as an individual and not as belonging and attaching to a group of people?

Yeah, no question.

The emphasis on choice slides very naturally into performance.

That is, making the right choices.

Is performing the right way what I love.

You mentioned Michael Hendricks and Jim Wilder, their book the Other Half of Church.

What Michael did such a genius job in his imagery there of the soil, the idea of the soil.

And you look back on your life, you go, when did I grow the most as a Christian?

When did I find it the easiest to grow?

And it was almost always when I was in a group that was happy to be together.

And like, you know, I was.

Me and my people, we were doing this together, right?

That's when I flourish.

And it's because all the nutrients of that relational joy fuel growth.

Well, what happens is if you say, well, that's a nice icing on the cake if you can get there.

But what we really need is a disciplined, quiet time and practicing these spiritual disciplines, making sure that you're making all the right choices and doing all these other things.

What we've essentially done is if you remove joy and relational joy out of the discipleship process, it becomes draining.

It becomes a lot of hard work, and it's all on you.

So it's not that those things aren't important, but if I'm doing them out of.

It's like the difference.

Is the joy the foundation, or is the joy the icing on the cake?

And I was like, if joy is actually at the foundation of what's going on, all those other things just become much easier without them.

I need a ton of accountability.

And accountability is basically fear.

It's like, if you don't do this, I will do that.

So what we're trying to do here is say, well, it's not that accountability is always bad, but there's something better.

And that Is that if I as a leader, if I can create a culture where people are bonded together in joy, then they don't need nearly as much accountability.

Because in fact, I've got to tell them to go home.

Okay, that's enough.

We've been doing this long enough.

Everybody, you know, take a break.

Because I'm doing what I love with people that I love and we're in this together.

And there's an energy that is created.

It's when you're lacking joy and when you're lacking that energy that you have to build everything on accountability.

Is that possible in a church that's larger?

Yes, because it happens in spheres.

So senior pastor and exec team build joy with each other.

That has to be a joy based culture.

That passes then.

So then when the other execs are meeting with their team, that joy gets passed on.

And when others get, then that joy gets passed on.

In other words, every leader is responsible for creating a joy based culture in the teams that they lead now in that joy based culture.

I'm just saying that's first it's the priority.

Then comes, okay, here's, and here's what we need to accomplish and this is why we need to get there.

But if you flip those and what happens is everybody's doing everything out of fear of what will happen if I don't.

And I'll be honest, you know, there's some big churches that are, are notorious for being chewing up and spitting out staff, right?

So why are they, why are they doing this?

Why are they chewing up, spitting out staff?

It's because they've lost the joy component to the leadership and they're not leading with maturity.

And so in the absence of joy and maturity, the only thing left to you is fear.

And it's like, get this done or else.

And so there are, you know, don't get me wrong, you know, we got, you know, sales people got to bring in money, coaches got to win.

You know, people gotta, people gotta eat right.

You gotta get this stuff out there.

So there are things that have to happen.

But even there, if you lose sight of why you're doing it in the first place and you're only doing it to hit the numbers and you're only doing it to get there.

The joy gets sucked out of it and pretty soon you don't want to do that anyway, you're just going to go do something else.

So the idea here is we got to find a way to keep joy at the core of what's going on.

Even as we're pursuing excellence and pursuing the numbers.

That was the end of the first part of my conversation with Dr. Marcus Warner.

And I want to thank you for joining us today on those who Serve the Lord.

I hope this conversation with Dr. Warner encouraged you and gave you a fresh vision for what leadership rooted in joy and spiritual maturity can look like wherever God has placed you.

That's the beauty of it.

And this was just part one.

Remember that.

Be sure to come back next time as we continue the conversation and go even deeper into the kind of leadership that reflects the heart of Christ.

And we have some, some brand new conversations coming down the pike.

I am so excited for you to to hear them.

I mean, we have such guests as Mark Sayers, Christian Smith, Paul Miller, Lyle Strobel, Brian Miller.

All of these different people are going to be coming on the show sharing their insights that are going to help equip you to minister in this moment.

Even better, and if this episode has resonated with you, would you please take a moment to rate and review the podcast?

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To remember that you're not alone, that we're doing this together.

Whether it's through this podcast, my book blueprint, or the work we're doing with Cultural Apologetics and Missio Holism, we want to help you follow Jesus in every area of your life and help the church that you're part of flourish in today's world.

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Until next time, keep serving the Lord with joy.

Thank you for joining us on today's episode of those who Serve the Lord.

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God bless you.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off.

Stay watered, everybody.