#262 | Revitalizing Leadership: The Impact of Joy and Maturity in Ministry with Marcus Warner, Pt. 2

When you have enough emotional maturity, you are dealing with hard things in a relational manner, whereas immature people who are all about relationships just do the relationships and never deal with the hard stuff.

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?

Have you 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 Apollos 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 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, a podcast for those at the front lines.

Now, being at the front lines, you are a leader of some sort.

You know all too well that we live in a time where leadership is often confused with charisma, performance, or platform power.

But the kind of leadership the world and the church desperately needs right now is much deeper than that.

It's emotionally mature, it's relationally healthy and spiritually resilient.

That's rare leadership.

In the second part of this conversation from the archives, we have Marcus Warner, and together we explore what it means to lead from a place of emotional maturity rather than fear or shame.

We unpack how leaders can build joyful communities, something that's not easy to do.

Stay relational in crisis, which is also not easy to do.

And disciple others through grace rather than guilt.

Something also that is not easy to do.

But you can do it.

That's the beauty of this entire thing.

You can change.

God wants to sharpen you.

God wants to help you be the person and the leader he wants you to be.

This conversation is going to be a guide for you, and we'll walk through key themes from the conversation in the book Rare Leadership.

It'll help you to reflect, discuss, and begin to embody this kind of really rare leadership that is also deeply biblical.

So I want to encourage you to grow in joy, grow in your maturity and relational Wholeness.

And I pray that we might do this together.

You're not by yourself.

For the sake of the church and the watching world.

Happy listening.

You mentioned the fear as a motivator or joy.

And you mentioned some larger churches.

I was interviewed for a very larger, well known church for their senior pastor position.

And I was asked, the first question I was asked was how do you survive in a toxic leadership environment?

And I thought, wow, that's telling.

And my response was, make it not that way because you can't survive in that way.

I mean, not, not long term, but how do you transition something from toxic to a toxic?

And let's define that first.

What is a toxic environment?

And then how do we transition that into a healthy one?

So in simple terms, a toxic environment is one run on fear, right?

And a healthy environment is one that's run on joy.

So it's not that there's never fear.

It's just that you don't camp out there, you come back, you return from the fear to joy.

And so that what you're constantly coming back to that the bigger motivation of why we're doing things.

Fear is often driven by shame.

And so one of the reasons we have so much toxicity in leadership is that there's so much narcissism in leadership.

Because as Dr. Wilder defined it, narcissism is essentially the inability to return to joy from shame.

And so what happens is if I personally as a leader can't handle feeling shame, I don't want to be embarrassed all of a sudden without anybody saying it, that becomes the driving core value of my, of the culture that I'm creating.

Whatever happens, make sure the senior pastor looks good, right?

Don't ever make him have to handle any shame.

Well, if that's the culture I'm creating, I don't have to organize that.

Everybody just kind of picks up on it pretty quickly.

And so what happens now is my fear of feeling shame starts to drive the way that I lead and toxicity quickly follows.

So I would say that in a lot of the toxic cultures you're also going to find some level of narcissism, which is this inability to deal with shame, which leads to people organizing things in a way where, you know, they, they, they look good.

And that's a huge topic in and of itself, obviously.

But one of the, the, in some ways the photo negative of rare leadership is narcissistic leadership.

The, the narcissistic leadership aspect of it.

I mean, I'm still trying to wrap my brain around it.

You have given us so much to really think about.

And I want to stop and rewind and play again to make sure that I get all of the nuances of everything that you're talking about.

When you talk about a leader, a narcissist has the inability to deal with shame.

I want to understand what that means, because there's a lot of talk about shame.

And of course, some people say that there's.

And I spoke with Jim about this.

There's.

There's toxic shame and then there's healthy shame.

And I had Taylee Lau, New Testament scholar from Trinity on, and he wrote a book called Defending Shame, going through Paul's letters because Paul uses shame as an aspect of motivation.

How do we then see this shame?

And how does a narcissistic leader fail to deal with shame?

What kind of shame are we talking about here?

So it can look a lot of different ways.

The.

Jim actually wrote a book on this called the Pandora Problem that Deeper Walk publishes.

So if people want to take a deeper dive into this topic, there's a whole book on it.

The idea here is let's look biblically at.

And Jim does this in Pandora problem is absolute.

Absalom, David and Saul, okay, all three of them had moral failings.

How did they deal with them?

Saul and Absalom dealt with them like narcissists.

And David handled it like a human, shall we say not.

Yeah, it's too harsh.

But you know what I'm saying, He dealt with that with.

Humility is really the word I was going for there came out wrong.

The.

So Saul, when he is told the kingdom's kingship is going to be taken away from him, what's his first reaction?

He's like, Samuel, at least go out with me in front of the elders so I won't look bad to them.

Right.

What's his core concern?

He doesn't want to look bad.

So that's a narcissistic reaction.

It's not.

Okay, I need to own this.

What did David do?

You know, he went into fasting.

He was publicly humbling himself.

He wrote a psalm about his repentance.

Right.

He was a very open about it.

How about Absalom?

Absalom was like, oh, if only I was in charge, everything would be better, you know?

And he.

And so what, what.

What was characteristic of people who can't handle shame is that they become very good at avoiding shame.

And so they do that by deflecting it.

And so the, the first strategy is to deflect the shame onto somebody else.

So it Might be right back at you.

So if you say something about me and I don't, I'm like, well, me.

You're saying that about a me.

Well, what about you?

You know, that that's a classic kind of narcissistic reaction.

Or I tell people, if you're going to interview and you want to try to weed some of this out, a good question to ask is, tell me about a time when you experience shame and how you handled it.

Because a lot of times people will tell you a story of shame, and then the punchline is, but when you really understand what happened, you know, it wasn't my fault.

And I'm like, well, that's a narcissistic answer, right?

It's like, I don't.

If the bottom line of every story is, and it wasn't my fault, right?

Is that's.

That's.

That means I can't handle shame.

I couldn't.

I couldn't deal with that.

And we run into a lot of this, right?

So it affects our marriages, it affects our parenting, it affects our leadership.

And I remember when we were writing Rare Leadership together, Jim told me a story about being at a church where a guy was trying to shame him into taking a leadership role in something that Jim was not going to take.

And after, you know, he's.

And he just, you know, heaped the shame on him, and afterwards, he was like, you just refuse to be shamed, don't you?

And I'm like, he goes, yeah.

And all those things touch base.

They make me feel a little bit of shame, but I'm not going to be controlled by it.

I can't let myself be controlled by the shame.

So that's a mark of maturity, is that people can't control me with shame if I'm really living with maturity.

There's some of us.

If anybody puts any shame on us at all, we immediately capitulate.

Well, they're going to do whatever they want because we can't handle that feeling.

And so there's a lot of.

You know, when you talk about trolls on YouTube and that's sort of thing.

What they're doing, they're dealing in shame, right?

They're trying to heap shame on you to see if they can get you to change who you are, what you do.

Shame is a big issue.

And I think that for a lot of us, we didn't get much modeling on healthy ways of handling shame growing up, but it is at the heart of what we're talking about.

So let me make sure I get this Straight.

When we're talking about shame, it could be toxic shame or, or healthy shame.

It's more of our ability to deal and handle it in a proper way.

That's not quite what I'm saying, but I see what you're, why you say that though.

So what?

I'm.

What I'm.

Okay, correct me.

Okay.

So shame is something that I feel, think about it.

Right hemisphere, left hemisphere of the brain.

Shame is something I feel in the right hemisphere of my brain.

It becomes toxic or healthy, depending on what happens to the left hemisphere.

That is the narrative that goes with it.

And so I can feel shame.

And if the narrative is, therefore you're a terrible, I'm a terrible person, that's toxic shame.

If I feel shame and the narrative is therefore I should probably change what I'm doing, that's healthy shame.

Right.

So it's the narrative that goes with it that makes it toxic or healthy.

So somebody can be heaping toxic shame on me.

Right, because they're giving it a narrative.

Right.

They're telling me why I'm so horrible and why this is all my fault and all this other stuff.

And a mature person can take that.

They're going to feel it, but then they will find a way to get back to joy from there.

So they're not just stuck in shame and they're also not going to do it in a way where they just deflect it immediately to other people because I can't handle it.

How do you deal with people trying to heap toxic shame on you?

Like, I call it the power of definition.

Like if someone tells me, hey, this is terrible what you've done, either I can decide whether or not I like that or not, or I agree with them or not because they're trying to attempt to shame me into doing something that they want me to do.

So how do I, how do I respond there?

Well, you know, I remember reminded me when I was a senior pastor, I got two notes on back to back days and one of them said I was the most conceited pastor they'd ever served under.

The other said I was the most humble pastor they had ever met.

So you, same week, one day apart from each other, and you look at this, you're like, oh, so what do you do with this?

And so what do I do with that?

Note says, you're the most conceited pastor ever.

And I'm like, okay.

So I took this and I showed it to a couple of people I trust and I said, is there anything to this?

You know, there's something I need to own here that I'm not seeing.

And you gotta be careful because sometimes you just surrounded yourself with yes people.

But, but, but you know, what else can you do?

You got to go find out, is there something I'm missing here?

Do I owe this person an explanation?

Because there was no explanation.

There was no this event, this thing, this whatever, right?

And you get a lot of those hit and run shame messages.

And so you got to go say, if that's not the case, then, God, I give this to you and I need to get back to Joy.

Which means, okay, I got to take a deep breath.

I got to get my brain out of just constantly focusing on what could I have done to made him think I was conceited.

So that's all I'm thinking about all the time.

I've got to find a way to distract myself out of that, let go of that and replace those thoughts with some other thoughts that will help me to get back.

And then I want to connect with people that I enjoy being with and get my brain in a relational space where it's easier to hold on to truth.

When we're talking about this issue, this rare leadership, this idea of remaining relational and returning to joy and eye contact and where do you find it working the most?

But you even wrote a book on the workplace about this very thing.

Where do you see it taking place the most in the workplace or is the response that you're getting is that from.

It's from other people.

I mean, in just everyday life.

Yeah.

The number one response I'm getting is marriage people.

Even when I teach leadership and workplaces, people are going like, this has changed my marriage is the number one feedback I get because they're learning how to stay relational with their husband or their wife in situations where they used to stop acting like themselves and become non relational.

The second is in the workplace.

And I've had a few different business leaders now tell me about the transformation that has happened in their company when they began putting these principles into practice.

One of them, a fairly large company, actually gives a rare leadership award every year for the person who most models mature leadership.

They send out a text of the day to all their employees with the rare tip of the day, that sort of thing.

There's a lot of.

And they developed all this themselves just on the basis of running with the concepts that are there.

That's probably where I see it the most, those two places.

And then churches are hard nuts to crack because all of us pastors were trained in seminaries that were basically anchored in that voluntarist approach to life.

And it is not easy to overhaul your approach to living to become more attachment based before you get to all the performance stuff.

As for most of us, our attachments have been based on our performance.

People like us because of our ability to solve problems and our ability to lead and our ability to be funny and our ability to be insightful or whatever it is.

And so we get used to the idea that performance comes first and then come attachments.

And so learning to flip that and is is a big move for a lot of us.

And we're already so busy, it can feel like it's just not worth the effort until we get, you know, to a certain point in our ministry, realize that we've lost everything.

Because I never really mastered the attachment part of all of this.

I think that's the number one thing that kill.

That's killing.

Leadership in all forms of our.

Our culture is people have flipped those things for too long.

One of my favorite stories in like Fair leadership at the workplace comes from Margaret Heffernan, who talks about super chickens.

And the idea here is I'm looking.

It up because I remember writing about it in the book.

I like it.

First of all, just cause super chickens is fun.

There was a study done, I believe it was Purdue University, in which they were trying to breed super chickens who would produce more eggs.

So they're measuring results and all they're doing is measuring results.

And that is.

So every generation of chickens they took out, the top producers, buy most eggs per chicken and put them in a group.

They did this for six generations while they tried to breed super chickens who would be producing more eggs per chicken.

What they found when they got done with six generations of this was that the normal chickens, the average chickens, were actually producing slightly more eggs per chicken at the end than when they started.

They found in the super chicken group, only three of them were still alive.

And what was happening was they were actually predator chickens.

These chickens were.

Their results looked better than their other than the other chickens because they were pecking the other chickens and keeping their production down.

They're bullies.

They were bullies.

They were bully chickens.

And so there's a clear leadership lesson here, right?

And that is if the only thing we measure is results, we are more likely to promote bullies and predators than maturity.

And that's why you have to.

You can't just say, how big did you grow this?

How many sales did you get?

How many, you know, whatever.

Because what Happens is if you only measure results, then you often end up collecting predators at the top of the food chain in whatever it is that you're trying to create and the whole thing becomes toxic.

So I think that's the number one reason why cultures become toxic is that we are promoting these bullies and play and predatory leaders instead of the more mature leaders who keep relationships bigger than problems.

When you can, it takes some discernment to separate those out.

Right.

But if you've been in a setting that's run by mature people, they get results, but it's completely different culture.

And if you're in a place where it's all about results and whatever we got to do with the culture to tinker with to get those results, what we're going to do, that's what creates toxicity.

How do you differentiate between the performance aspect?

Where do you draw the line?

At a team member that's not working?

Because it seems, it sounds like if we do it right, everybody's going to be happy and want to be here.

Because we're keeping remaining relational.

We're going through all these things, yet there are always people that don't fit or there seem to be some issue and they may be they're the toxic one, or maybe they just don't fit and you have to let them know as you remain relational that you're fired.

I mean, how do you do that?

But that's kind of the take.

There's a relational way to fire people and a non relational way to fire people.

One of them is you tell people is like what led up to the firing?

Did you sit down with them and tell them what needed to change?

Were you honest with them about how toxic they were being in the workplace?

Did you give them steps on what needed to happen?

Did you do some confronting up front or did you just blow up one day and fire them?

Right.

There is a relational way to go about this.

You know, a mature boss is going to say, hey, we're not going to tolerate this kind of behavior here.

And so I need to see this change.

I need to see this change.

I need to see this change.

This is what I need from you.

And so a lot of us get ourselves in trouble because we're so afraid of the confrontation that we end up dealing with a much bigger problem later on.

And so again, who does the better job of confronting it tends to be the more mature person can do the confronting in a way that is relational, which is communicating, I care about you, I want to see you succeed.

So here's the things that have to happen.

There's other cases where you go, you say, you know what?

The skill set we thought you were bringing to the table clearly isn't the skill set that you actually possess.

So we're going to make a change and we're going to go in a different direction.

But we wish you well.

Here's your references, here's things you need.

You know, there's relational ways to do these things and then there's non relational ways to do them.

So what we're talking about in a sense is more like firing people with maturity rather than that this keeps you from ever firing anybody.

I always learn in the hardest of times to search for life.

It's easy to turn to the darkness.

In my mind, but I'll be all right.

You were a pastor for how long?

Seven years.

Knowing what you know now, what would you go back and do differently?

I would do more confrontation.

I would.

I was a people pleaser who tried to make everybody happy.

What I would do now is I would be a little more clear on the performance things were that were needed without losing the relational part of it.

In other words, we were really good on the relational thing.

I wasn't good at setting goals and things and getting results.

I probably erred too much on the side of let's all be happy together and not enough on here's our vision.

This is what we need to see happen.

And so what I found from the studies with Dr. Wilder and the rare leadership research and all the things we're doing is that those don't have to be either or when you have enough emotional maturity.

That's part of what characterizes it, is that you are dealing with hard things in a relational manner.

Whereas immature people who are all about relationships, just do the relationships and never deal with the hard stuff.

Right?

So if I can be an immature leader in a couple different directions, one is I can be immature because I avoid all the hard things going on.

I just want everybody to be happy.

That's not what we're talking about.

I can also be an immature leader because I'm only pushing the hard stuff and I never take the time to give anybody a break or to have some joy or to enjoy what we're doing and build relational connection.

And so you can err in both directions.

So we've seen places fold and close for both reasons, right?

One is that somebody was so driven to results they created toxicity.

The other one is they were so afra of toxicity they wouldn't even talk about results.

And you fail both directions because they're both signs of immaturity.

So this is what we're looking at here, is keep relationships bigger than problems, but deal with the problems.

What has been the reception that you've heard with people from this book?

It was kind of funny because I had a guy who was a big wig with a huge company, and he said, firing people are companies.

Like flicking flies off of an airplane.

He says, we've fired thousands of people a year.

And he said, give me the metrics.

What's going on with this?

And he asked me about 26 questions because his first reaction was, I did not like the book because he thought it was, you know, results is the only thing that matters kind of guy.

And I answered his questions, gave the stuff back to him.

He came back, and he is now a volunteer for us, works and is helping us get the message out.

He's become a, like, a true believer on this because he sees now that if you build the culture, the results will come.

Did he get fired from his job for not performing?

No, no.

He retired.

Quite wealthy, actually.

But what he began to notice in all of this was it was helping his marriage, it was helping him with his parenting, it was helping him with these other things.

And he was seeing the connection that this is not either or that you either are nice to people or you get results.

This is talking about, how do I not lose my humanity in all of this?

How do I stay the relational, engaged person that I want to be?

And how do I create a culture of relational, engaged people who are going after a mission.

Right.

Who are going after this thing.

And that's kind of the secret sauce.

Right.

So you look at the best coaches, and there are coaches who win for a couple of years, but then they lose their voice in the locker room.

And then there are people who create dynasties and they create cultures, and those cultures turn out success.

And people love to tell their stories about being part of that culture and what it meant.

So that's what we're talking about with a leader, is that priority one, one of leadership is the culture.

Priority one is creating an identity that is anchored in joy.

Like, it's the difference again.

One of the analogies that Jim used when we were first processing the book was, let's say you start off saying, I want to build a hamburger joint that sells the.

We want to give people the best casual dining experience on the west side of Indianapolis.

Right.

That's going to be our goal.

Well, and then you don't make quite enough money.

The first Month.

So you cut corners and you go from, you know, cloth napkins to paper napkins, then you cut some more corners.

You cut, and before you know it, you're no longer anywhere near this identity of creating the best dining experience on the west side of Indy.

So you've got to find a way, creating an identity that makes you want to go to work every day.

This is who we are.

This is what we do.

This is why we're doing it.

This is us, man.

It's like, I can't wait to go do this.

I love the people I'm doing it with.

I love the people we're going to.

And the more hardships that we face and overcome as a team, the more bonded our team will become.

So we don't bond by avoiding hard things.

We bond by overcoming hard things together.

And so that's really the hallmark of great leaders, right, Is that they are the ones who build teams that get stronger.

Right.

The more battles that they have to face versus immature leadership tends to create teams that fall apart in the face of hardship.

Have you had any other leadership, people that teach leadership come to you after reading the book and say, what are you guys talking about here?

This seems so different than anything that I've ever encountered.

One of my favorite reviews on this was a guy with a PhD in leadership who said, it's practically my job to read books on leadership.

And after a while, they all sound kind of the same.

He says, this is the first one I've read that's truly different.

And he said, in a long, long time.

And he said, there's actually new paradigm, new thinking in this.

And he said, in fact, the people who published the book said, most of our books have one novel idea that drive the book.

You guys have a novel idea per chapter.

I attribute that to the genius of my co author, Jim.

My job is to make it understandable and simple and accessible.

So that's the kind of feedback that we've gotten.

We've gone into both churches and corporate places that have had a tradition of toxicity.

And for a lot of people, they've just never even heard any of these paradigms before.

So what happens is, you may know it's toxic, but the question is, who do you blame for the toxicity and what is to blame for the toxicity?

And what you'll find is that everybody's so busy pointing the finger at other people that no one is actually looking at personal maturity and what the skills of personal maturity are and what the culture should be and how you grow that culture versus the one that we have grown.

And so they aren't all success stories, right?

But most of them have definitely had an aha moment where they.

I may have been thinking about this wrong and that's kind of what, what we're after.

How do you define this maturity?

You've already alluded to it, you've actually stated it, but I want to focus and zoom in on it for a moment so other people know what we're talk, talking about when we talk about maturity.

Maturity is simply, it's simply the ability.

To remain relational and act like myself when I face big emotions.

Right.

So you can define it a bunch of different ways, but one thing that helps me is, is, is the concept of emotional capacity.

And that is how much emotional weight does it take before I lose my ability to be relational?

I stop acting like myself and I can't return to joy.

How much emotional weight does it take that that is how I measure my maturity?

What do you mean then by being yourself, act like yourself in the middle of all this?

So let's just say that I start to feel anxiety and all of a sudden I say we're scrapping all of our plans, we're going to change everything.

We're gonna do this now.

This is what we're all about now.

And then tomorrow I feel anxious about something else and I change the whole thing again tomorrow.

And it's like, and then I get hyper and I get active and I, and I make bad decisions and I just lead in a totally different style when I'm anxious and I'm afraid.

I have turned into a different person because of my fear.

That's what I mean.

I don't act like myself or I get angry and all of a sudden you did something that, that made me mad and I just, and I blow up at you and I went from being a kind, engaged, relational person to being completely non relational, blowing up, acting like a three year old, right?

So when we don't act like ourselves most of the time what we're doing is we're reverting to a younger version of ourselves.

I go, I can go from being a 50 something leader to acting like a 5 year old who didn't make mama happy, right and all.

And I'm having the exact same meltdown and emotional temper tantrum I would have had with my mom as a five year old.

But I'm 50.

So what's happening is something got triggered.

I'm not acting like myself right now.

I'm acting like somebody else.

And that's usually what ends up happening.

So there's some consistency to this and there's also just the developing that.

So one of when I first discovered Jim's life model system, I was a senior pastor and he had charts in there on infant child, adult parent, elder level maturity and some of the care characteristics.

So I simplify it this way.

An infant, an infant can't do anything for themselves.

So if an infant feels an upsetting emotion, you are going to have to soothe them.

You can't look at the baby and say just calm yourself down, you're going to be fine.

In no capacity to do that.

So the mark of their immaturity is zero capacity to handle any emotion without somebody else needing to come in and calm them down.

Child level maturity, I am beginning to learn.

With your help, I can begin calming myself down with some help and guidance.

And then by the time I'm an adult, I'm supposed to know how to feel these emotions and return to joy and handle more weight.

So I expect a 17 year old to be able to handle more than a seven year old to be able to handle more than a seven month old in the same way.

That's because their maturity development is directly related to their ability to handle emotions and still be relational and act like themselves.

That's what this is driving at.

When I first came across this and I looked at this, I'm like, okay, so infants have no capacity.

Children have the ability to take care of one person.

They can take care of themselves or they can take care of you.

But I can't take care of both at the same time.

I can either make sure I'm okay or I can make sure you're okay.

Whereas adults think about the group and that what is best for all of us, how do we create, win, wins, what is best for me and my people to collectively and that is, it's good for me and I have some to share with you.

I can make sure that I'm okay while I'm taking care of you.

So I looked at this and realized that as a senior pastor I was functioning a lot of the time.

I was functioning at child level maturity, trying to be an elder.

And the gap in the emotional weight that an elder carries and the capacity of a child to carry was really big.

And so I remember often wishing there was an older, more experienced veteran pasture I could lean on to help me carry some of the weight of all of the responsibility of this because I realized that the emotional weight of leading a community is not meant to be carried by somebody in their 30s or 40s who are still raising their kids at home.

It's meant to be carried by somebody who's done raising their kids, who's got this stuff.

It doesn't mean that young people can't be pastors, but it means they need to be surrounded by these elders who have this gravitas to them that is not easily overwhelmed by the things going on in the church.

And that's.

That's what we're looking at here.

So I don't.

Like.

I became a senior pastor when I was 35.

I don't think it was wrong for me to be.

I. I had good visionary instincts.

I was a good teacher.

There were.

I understood how to run a church.

But there are all the relational and emotional things that go into leading a church I was not up to.

Right.

And so that's why there could be days when I would appear conceited and there would be days when I would appear humble.

Right.

It's like you can be all over the place with all the various things that you're dealing with at all this.

And I'm thinking what I needed was people to help me carry the weight that is people you can confide in and talk to.

And that's, that's.

I think what's a lot of is missing for our younger pastors.

The rare leadership aspect, that, that maturity to have people alongside them.

Yeah, the maturity that has other people alongside them, that they're not in this alone.

And you think about the isolation that comes with leadership.

It's like if we had a different model of leadership that says as a leader, my, My core job is creating a culture, which means I need to relationship in a cultural relationship.

I can't just be out here telling you how to create your culture.

I have to actually be engaged in that culture and be a part of it.

And that actually solves a lot of problems for me as well, because I'm.

I do have other people handling some of the weight of what's going on.

And it isn't just all on me.

I, we, the churches, we talked about this a little bit.

Churches have been too often too quick to embrace a kingmaker model of leadership.

And that is we hire a king and say, and then we will applaud you and praise you and pay you and.

And give you all kinds of praise as long as you, you know, do this work for us and, you know, make everything okay.

And, and so we look at the pasture, go, well, you're more educated than me.

You're more talented than me.

You're more anointed than me.

You have a, you know, whatever.

And so.

So you just do it right?

And there's a lot of us as pastors who we raise, like, okay, yeah, that's my job.

I'll.

I'll step in.

I'll do that.

They're like, well, essentially we just made it a contract where I'll be your king.

All right?

Your job is you.

You know, as long as I make you happy, you know, there'll be no rebellion and no revolt and I'll stay king.

But.

And it's also why you get a lot of people in this situation where when problems come up, first thing they do is circle the wagons, find out who are their people, who's with me, who's against me, and things begin to split immediately over who's going to win.

And that's a sign of immaturity as well.

There is so much in talking about raider leadership that I think so many leaders need to hear.

It was funny.

I heard the pastor of the church, we've relocated since we've started this ministry and started going to a church.

And the pastor gets up and he starts talking about maturity and he mentions the ability to endure hardship.

Well, and I immediately recognized that.

And I'd heard Jim Wilder say the same thing.

And then he said it was because I had this book given to me and.

And he's a pastor of a larger church and he listens to this show and give a good shout out to him.

But he said because of this, that that's how he was understanding it.

And I think it's changed his.

His understanding of it.

Not only understanding leadership, though.

I want to transition here for a moment and talk a bit about.

FISH is like you call heart focused discipleship.

What is fish?

And you are again the acronym and the acrostic king.

Yeah, well, I have some competition there, but it is my default go to.

I will admit we often joke.

I'm going to have a 365 day devotional calendar with an acrostic a day.

That's good.

I like that.

So fish.

FISH is the.

And I'll be perfectly honest, I'm still not clear on the difference between an acrostic and an acronym.

I've had people try to explain it to me, but I call them across it.

So let's say this.

FISH is stands for freedom, identity, spirit, heart, focus, community.

It is meant to be four elements that come from the gospel and understanding the gospel not just as here's your ticket to heaven, but the gospel is here's the foundation for a whole new life.

So element number one of the gospel is we die with Christ, right?

Why do we die with Christ?

We die to be set free from what enslaves us, right?

We die with Christ to die to the world, to die to the law, to die to sin.

Why do we die to these things?

Because they enslave us.

And so we say freedom is the foundational pillar of the gospel, that we are all slaves of sin, and Christ died to set us free.

Paul even uses this imagery of being locked up in a prison.

And God with one key, you know, the cross, and Christ sit at the cross, sets us all free with this one thing that Christ did.

So now discipleship is all right.

If we have been set free, why we need to learn how to live in freedom.

So heart focus.

Discipleship says discipleship starts with, let us help people break now that they have been set free by the gospel, let's teach them how to live in freedom.

How do I actually experience the freedom that is my birthright in Christ?

And that gets us into spiritual warfare.

It gets us into emotional healing, it gets us into repentance, it gets us into forgiveness, right?

Gets us into lies.

We believe versus truth.

We believe.

So there's a whole journey related to freedom that is fundamental to discipleship, that we've tended to outsource to counseling.

This is crucial, though.

So the I of identity is a second element of the Gospels, that we're raised with Christ.

Well, why are we raised with Christ?

Well, we're raised to be seated with Christ in the heavenly realms.

Well, that puts us in a position of intimacy with God, in a position of authority.

As we interact with the spiritual realm, it changes our identity.

And so this is where we go, that the second element of the gospel is I have a new identity in Christ because I have been raised with him and I am now united with him.

So we'd have to learn what does it look like to live in union with Christ and greater union and greater intimacy with him.

And this also connects to maturity.

Because if maturity is acting like myself, then the more mature I am as a Christian, the more consistently I should live with my identity in Christ.

Right?

The.

The.

It should take more emotional weight to get me to stop acting like a Christian.

And so this is all that's connected.

Then we come to the next one, and that is this idea.

So we die with Christ, we're raised with Christ, and then we're born again.

So what's it mean to be born again?

We're to Be born again is to be born of the Spirit.

So I am born of the Spirit.

Why?

So I can learn to live my life in the Spirit.

Well, to me, that's scripture and that's relationship.

That is Holy Spirit's the author of Scripture.

So I need to have a scriptural worldview.

I need to be anchored in my scriptural understanding of reality.

And I also need to learn how to be relational in my walk with God.

That walking in the Spirit is about a relationship.

Now, that relationship may end in expressions of power, but it's not fundamentally about the power, right?

It's fundamentally about the relationship.

And so walking in the Spirit is the third thing that is cord of discipleship.

And then it's hard focused community, which takes us directly to, again, to that other half of church concept that the soil in our relational soil in which I am making disciples is enormously important to the success ratio.

I'm going to have it doing the first three things.

So if I'm working on my freedom journey, but I'm in isolation, I'm just trying to get it out on my own.

And I'm not in a group that's on a similar journey, that's going to be way harder than if I'm in a group that's on this journey together.

Same thing with identity.

I need to have people around me who remind me who I am and how it's like me to act and to call it out of me.

So I see this in you.

I see this quality in you.

I'm going to call that out, right?

I need people in my life to help me stay who I am and grow, grow my maturity.

Same thing with Walking in the Spirit.

You know, if I just isolate myself in a hole and decide I'm going to teach myself to hear God's voice, I've got no corrections on that, right?

I've got nobody talking into.

They're saying, I don't think that's God's voice, right?

We need community to learn how to walk in the Spirit.

And you look at when Paul wrote, almost everything he wrote is we and us and to you plural.

He's almost never telling an individual, this is what you specifically need to do.

Because he's thinking in terms of group identity and really wanting churches to form the kind of group identity that is routinely producing mature Christians who present people mature before Christ.

So I'm like, how do we do this?

And so the dream is that you can walk into any church in America and get help with all these four things.

Like there's going to be community.

That's a thriving community that you can connect with.

There's going to be freedom ministries taking place and people on freedom journeys.

And when you say, I'm working on my heart issues and I'm working with my addictions and I'm working with my emotional things that I don't handle well, and whatever, they're like, yeah, that's what we're doing too.

Come on, let's.

Let's go.

And that, that you could walk into any, any church and you're going to get all of this.

That's the goal.

And right now, the problem I. I ran into for most of my ministries, people will come to me with problems.

I'd look around through my mind.

I do a checklist.

I couldn't think of a church that did a lot of.

Most of them.

Like, I couldn't say, you know, go to the church.

They'll be able to help you with your freedom problems.

I couldn't, you know, I can't tell you how many times I was sitting here going, yeah, I have no idea where to send you.

I say this because these things are essential to my own growth journey, that when I struggle, when I'm stuck and I'm not going, it's usually because something here is not in place.

I'm missing one of these because as a pastor, when I saw people really transform and really grow, these are the elements that were present.

I asked a group of pastors this question.

If the Apostle Paul was going to say, here are the three keys to a victorious Christian life.

What would they be?

What would the four be?

And we just went through Romans 5, 8 and go.

Doesn't that lead us to dying with Christ, raised with Christ and walking in the spirit and doing it in community?

I mean, is.

Aren't those the four things I said?

So why isn't every seminary in college, Christian college, teaching all of our pastors to be experts in all these four things?

And I'm like, we aren't, you know, we aren't taught that way.

And, you know, you and I both went to seminary.

We know what it's like.

And there's a ton of people who go through seminary.

It's the driest, deadest time of their Christian growth.

Now, there's others.

It's.

It's the opposite.

It's wonderful.

But it's usually because they made a lot of friends there, and there's a lot of joy.

But there's some of us, you know, at a time that you would think would be the Apex of your Christian growth is actually not.

I know, me personally, I went through the most significant depression of my life when I was in seminary.

So we're like, there's something broken.

Here is the idea, there's a, there's a broken discipleship factory that needs to get fixed.

And the, the FISH model is an attempt to lay out, well, here's some essentials that we need to do.

And then it ends with the idea that when we, when we focus on these four things, it will create mission, right?

And it will create healthier mission.

Say my, my father was the director of the School of World Missions and Evangelism at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School back in the 80s.

You know, he dealt a, a lot of counseling with a lot of missionaries who went into mission, but they weren't free, they didn't know their identity, they weren't walking in the spirit and they had no community.

You know, like, well, that's a recipe for failure in mission.

On the other hand, if I am growing in freedom, I'm living out of identity, I'm in community.

I want to invite people into that.

I want to help other people who are struggling with these things find what I have been discovering and get on that same journey.

It's funny though, you mentioned seminary because you don't get that very often.

I mean, I went to Bible college and I went to two seminaries and I got more in Bible college than I did in the seminaries that I was in.

And different circumstances of life, different series of things.

But you're right, it can become pretty depressing in an academic environment like that.

And not that the professors want that to happen.

I mean, any of us would say that they don't.

Many of my good friends are professors and they would say that.

And I know some schools have taken the steps necessary to counteract that, but it made me, while I was there to start looking at seminary.

A bit like chemotherapy.

It kills off a lot of who you are.

You know, hopefully it kills the bad, but it can also kill some of the good.

And the question is, is are you going to survive when you get through there?

Because it should help you in your walk with Jesus and help you find that aspect of it.

Now, I, I am curious about something and, and I'm, I'm curious if you can answer this question or not.

You're talking about heart shaped community or heart focused community.

To me, the culture of belonging in our community right now is very hard.

A variety of reasons.

Some, if they're in a larger church, you have to find Those fears, as you mentioned, getting plugged into those spheres.

Two questions that I have.

Number one, when is it time?

If a church isn't willing to do that or is doing that, they might have everything else orthodox and do you leave if they don't have that heart shaped community you've tried hard, focused, excuse me, heart focused community.

Do you, do you need to go find it someplace else?

Or what if another church has that but they're not walking within your doctrinal comfortability, but they have the community, whereas the other church has the orthodoxy but not the community?

What do you do?

I've experienced both.

I've been in the best community group I was ever in, had the worst theology of any church I had been in.

I did end up leaving, you know, because you just can't stay in that for forever.

I do think that leaving is an option that is on the table in a way that it wasn't when we were all in parish systems.

So what I tell people is you kind of got to build your team and your people partly in your church and partly independently of your church.

The idea here is that I may be called to do ministry in a church and God wants me there, but it isn't necessarily where I get my soul fed.

That can happen, right, where I'm called to be a part of this.

But if that is the case, then I need to have other people in my life that I'm connecting to.

So the nice, nice thing about the zoom culture that we're in, you can kind of collect people that you can talk to, because what we're talking about is level of transparency, right?

How, how transparent can I be and know that I will still be met with empathy and with happy to be with you, right?

If I'm too transparent, will you no longer be happy to see me?

So that's the question.

Now in any church, you don't just lead with that.

You don't get up on stage, pull up the mic and tell everybody your darkest secrets.

Because not everybody has the maturity to handle that.

Within the Christian community, you've got to find the people who've got the emotional maturity to hear your story and still be happy to be with you.

It's actually why boundaries are so important.

One of the ideas behind boundaries in relationship is you need to know that when we're together, I'm going to be happy to see you.

If we've set up time and we're going to have, you know, this kind of time together, then I have devoted that here and I'm Going to be happy to be with you while we're together.

But if I'm going to the bathroom, you show up and you want to talk about your problems, you know, I may not be happy to see you.

You know, there's a.

The, you start with the.

You start with the extreme, right?

There's obvious boundaries here where I don't want you here, right?

I don't, you know, I don't want you in my bedroom at night, I don't want you here at night.

I don't want you there.

And you just start expanding that out and you're like, well, what am I saying here is I want to be.

Make sure that I am happy to be with you when we're together.

And that's why boundaries matter.

So it's actually for both of us, so that you know what you can count on.

And I remember as a young person, I didn't know what to call it, but I remember kind of the mirror neurons in my brain were watching this guy, and he was a good friend of mine.

And I walked into the room and he paid zero attention to me.

And at first I was upset, but then I realized he was completely focused on the person he was with.

They had his undivided attention.

And I then actually respected him because I realized, you know what, When I'm that person, I'm going to get his undivided attention.

And I thought there was something comforting about that.

Now, if he had seen me, he would have waved and come back to it.

But there's, there's a way to, to be there, but that's kind of the idea.

And that's why when we talk about heart focused community, what we're really talking about is a community that is dealing with freedom issues, dealing with identity issues, helping people grow their maturity, helping people walk in the spirit.

It's not all just Bible, right?

So I don't want to minimize Bible, but we have sometimes been minimalistic with it.

And so that's what we're trying to say is heart focused is saying there's more going on at our church than education.

We deal with the issues that are actually going on in your heart.

You mentioned that.

And I've used your ABCs, the academic training, the behavior modification, and church activities as our means of discipleship.

And that leads me actually to a third question, because I'm going to skip over the second one that you've already really alluded to, but I'm going to come back to if a church is all about the Sunday morning experience, what then?

Is the mechanism that you put in place, if there is one, to help create this culture.

And you've again alluded to it from the relational standpoint, starts with the pastors, leads down, kind of the trickle down effect.

But what other things can you put into place in order to bring out this heart shaped community?

So it's not a attractional, we go to class formal instruction so that it's the organic real, I want to be with you joy activity that we want it to be.

Well, it's an excellent question because it is a bit intangible, right?

But if you think of something about it, most of the organic things that develop are building around something programmed.

So when you went to high school, it was a very programmed thing, but you made friends there that you wanted to hang out with afterwards.

So even though you've been with them all day, you still wanted to hang out with them that night.

You know what's going on there.

Well, that's because you have a joy bond with those people.

You have joy when an energy when you're around them.

So churches can't mandate that.

Right?

You can't program that, but you can put programs together that give people the opportunity to connect.

And then you have to begin infusing your cultures with values.

And some of those values you model, some of them you teach.

But you're using teaching and instruction and modeling and practice to start getting certain skills into these places to make it more likely.

So this is why you can have two churches that have exactly the same programming and one will flourish relationally and the other won't.

And it really comes down to the maturity of the people who are, not just the maturity of the person who organized the structure, but the maturity of the people who are actively running it.

So that's why you can go to one small group and it's just blah.

And you go to another small group and it's life changing.

And it usually has to do with, you know, again, that maturity and capacity of those who are leading.

And so that trickles down.

So like in youth groups, it's often the youth themselves and the level of maturity they're bringing to the leadership that they bring into this, that makes a big difference, you know.

And so I often use youth as an example because I've talked to so many pastors like how do we not lose our young people?

And they come up with two, the same two answers.

And that is better apologetics and a more cool experience, right?

And I'm like, well, what if the actual answer there is attachment?

What if the reason we're losing our young people is they feel no attachment to the people in the church, and so the only people they know are the other teenagers, and they don't know anybody else in the church, so why would they come back?

Are you familiar with Christian Smith's work?

No, for not so Christian Smith, the researcher out at Notre Dame, he wrote some books years ago, and it was based on the study of religion in American youth.

And that's not how they.

Souls in Transition was the.

There was a work before that.

The second volume was Souls in Transition.

He wrote another one.

They were doing a study on youth, American youth and religion.

But they didn't let the people in the study know that that was about.

And it was over a period of time.

Basically, it came down to, are there factors that we can isolate for people who grew up in the church and stayed in it?

And he said it came down to three things that they saw.

Number one was that the family did what they practiced or what they.

The parents did what they said and they preached.

Practice what they preached.

Number two, they suffered in some capacity for their faith.

But thirdly, and I thought this was an interesting one, it was another adult outside of the family reiterated what the parents said.

And.

But that's that attachment issue.

There's some type of relationship with another person who's an adult.

This kind of flies in the face of a lot of the modern youth ministry.

And like you, I hear all the time, apologetics, apologetics.

And again, apologetics has its place.

Worldview has its place.

We're not.

We're not saying that those don't have its place.

But like with anything, it's not the solution to everything.

You know, it's a good thing, can become the primary thing, then it becomes a bad thing.

So we're saying, or what I'm hearing you say, and I do agree with you, is that the relational aspect informs a lot of those other pieces that we don't realize.

I mean, we do need to have a reason to get.

To give a reason for the hope that we have in Christ Jesus.

At the same time, it's the relational components that we are losing that the church has not paid very much attention to.

And when people are leaving the church, oftentimes it's not because of apologetics.

They know the answers.

This is why I think people are deconstructing right now, is that they have been.

They have the answers, but they don't have the relational.

They don't have the relational identity and that some of them are rebelling against what they see has been taught to them.

And it wasn't within the context of relationship or it was not helpful.

It was only to keep them in subjection, if you will, and not actually for their benefit or their joy to understand in a greater way who God is.

I mean, what do you think about that?

Am I way off there or am I a genius?

Well, let's.

Wait.

What was that?

Conceited people being the people pleaser that I am.

You're a genius.

Right now my wife's like, oh, you have no idea what you've just done.

That's funny.

There's a.

He's his head has become a float at the Macy's Day parade.

Not a genius.

Not a genius at all.

But anyway, go ahead.

Yeah, but you're.

You're spot on, though, in terms of.

It's like my, my son went to a private Christian school for the last couple of years, is one of the biggest ones in the Midwest.

And he told me that most of his friends are not Christians who attend there.

Right.

And he said that the most of them can't wait to leave home and to never go back to anything Christian.

So why.

Right.

Why is that the case?

Because they're in Bible classes, right?

They're getting theology and they're getting apologetics and they're getting.

They have spiritual emphasis week.

Right.

They've got preachers coming in.

They have mandatory chapel where they got preachers coming in and telling stuff.

So what's going on here?

For the number one answer was family.

There is an inconsistency between what the fan, that the family is trying to get the school to Christianize their kid, but they're not really doing it at home.

You know, secondly, my big thing is at the family level is that, you know, our generation was kind of raised on that.

The goal of parenting was get your kids to perform and succeed.

And so now we're beginning to.

Then the pendulum kind of swung the other way.

And that is just love your kids and don't worry if they, you know, succeed.

And what we're looking at here, what I used to tell my kids is, because I love you, I want you to succeed.

And that's why we're going to have to do, you know, correcting when there's correcting.

But what I found is that there is a joyful foundation between parent and child.

The correction is easier and they are way more open to what you have to offer.

But if I have a fear foundation in my relationship with my kids, right.

Then I'm Trying to.

And then I'm using more fear to try to get them to be Christian.

And there is no joy pull to Christianity.

And it's not just families.

That happens in churches, it happens in the schools.

It happens in all these other places.

So people can be saturated with Christian environments.

But all those Christian environments are kind of anchored into fear of you better.

Instead of actually really developing a joyful.

The kind of joyful attachment makes them want to be a part of this.

What about the people that are not in a leadership position?

I mean, I've been in leadership positions.

It's easier when you're in a leadership position.

Most people, though, don't think about this.

And you and I both know this.

We sometimes it feels like we're trying to put that push, that rock up this hill and helping people to see the power of it.

The reality of this is where actually they live.

Yeah.

And that's why, largely what we're talking about here is that I need to be a personally mature person in whatever I'm dealing with.

If I'm a personally mature person with my family, it's going to help the family.

If I'm personally mature person in the workplace, it's going to help the workplace.

I may have never no ability to influence the structures or the overall culture of the place, but simply by being a joyful, mature person, I have an impact.

So I can control what I can control.

It's not my job to transform a toxic culture.

It's not my job to do that unless that's what I've been called in to do.

And so now as a leader, I'm going, okay, if I am like in charge, then I'm looking at what am I in charge of?

And to what extent can I infuse this kind of relational community into this culture?

So maybe I'm the football coach, but I, you know, I can't run the whole school, but I have some control over this team.

Or maybe I am, you know, I'm a parent.

I got some control of my family, even though I don't have control over the church.

So you're looking at where do I have influence, what can I affect?

And how do I breed a culture of, you know, joy and handling emotions together for them.

So there's a lot people like, well, how do you do this?

How do you do this?

And that's, you know, it's.

There's a lot of training that goes into this because what's supposed to happen is that we're all supposed to naturally develop this.

Just because of all the mature people that were raised by.

Right.

So maturity development is supposed to happen because as an infant I've got my older brothers and sisters or I've got aunts and uncles and I got grandparents and I got my parents and I've got the friends of the family.

And I.

And all of these people can handle emotions and they're all there helping me.

And so what you find is that people who are naturally joyful and naturally resilient often don't know how they got there.

And it's because they just kind of grew up with it with all of these relational connections and all this.

And what happens with those relational connections is this kind of confidence that I'm never going to have to go through anything alone.

My people go through this with me.

So whereas if I'm in a completely broken environment and I have to learn to be self sufficient and self reliant and I never know who's going to be with me when I go through things, it's much harder to have emotional resilience and emotional stability because I didn't grow up with it.

And so now what, what, you know, Dr. Wilder and Chris Corsi and myself and people like that are trying to do is, is break this down.

If I did not grow up with it, I don't have this.

This is foreign.

Where do I start?

How do I begin building this?

So I actually have a book coming out with Chris Corsi next year called the Four Habits of Joy Filled People.

Right.

It's designed to do exactly that.

Where do I start?

But we kind of do that in rare leadership of the workplace too.

There are what we call eight maturity workouts in this book.

So the idea is that if you do these workouts with a small group of people and everybody's doing them and you do this together, it puts you in position to begin growing some of the skills and habits that lead to greater emotional maturity.

And I want to do those.

I mean, if you would have asked me before the show, even before I encountered a lot of what you're doing, you know, are you mature?

And I'd say of course.

And I've been in the faith, I've gone to seminary, I know all the answers to different things, but I would say that there's a piece that's missing.

I remember working with a senior pastor one time and I saw him and he seemed like a really mature person until you got him onto any athletic contest.

And then the reality of who he was really came out.

I mean, he became very Childish.

And it was embarrassing, actually.

It was embarrassing for people of the church.

It was embarrassing for other people.

But there's times where I've had that in my own life and it's made me stop and go, why do I act that way?

Why is it that I remove myself from this situation and I can feel my voice quivering and my pitch rising right now?

What is that?

And how do I help other people see that?

Because that doesn't always fit within the seminary trained.

The answers of the, you know, Paul and where the law fits and all those different things.

It's not what we teach in our discipleship stuff.

We give information, we give more and more information.

We'll talk about what we should do.

But we don't always put the practices in place to help facilitate that.

We think that it's a byproduct.

And we're saying here, no, these are the attentional leadership skills and relational maturity skills is what they really are.

Right.

Would you say that?

Absolutely.

These are relational maturity skills?

These are relational maturity skills.

And today, with the fragmentation of the family, the crush of modernity telling us to perform, and something that's been caught up since the Enlightenment, really, and part and parcel of the Protestant work ethic in which we've been installed with it's go, go, go, do, do, do, produce, produce, reduce, produce.

And if you're not, you just get, you know, you fall to.

You weren't strong enough.

Exactly.

Well, I used to feel like my life was a teeter totter that went between performance and pleasure, right?

And it's like, perform, perform, perform, reload with pleasure.

Okay, go.

Perform, perform, perform, reload with pleasure.

But the whole model was just me, you know, there.

It's, it's, it's what we understand.

I love one of the pictures that Jim point out.

He calls it Joy Mountain and Joy Camp.

And the idea is that if you go camping, you know, first thing you do is you set up your camp, you make sure everybody's going to be okay.

And then you kind of set the guidelines.

Okay, kids, you got to stay with your parents, your older kids, you can go as far as the lake.

But, you know, don't, you know, don't go past that.

You know, then you adults just be back by eight kind of thing, right?

And so what happens then is at the end of the day, whether you have had a good day or a bad day, you know, you're going to be with your people back in Joy Camp sharing the stories of the day, you know, sharing what went wrong, sharing what Went right, Sharing the good things during the bad things.

And you're gonna, you can end that day in joy, even if you had a bad day, because you get to share all of that with your people.

And so now your day ends in quiet.

You know, after the joy, it's now easy to find peace.

You rest, you wake up in the morning, and guess what?

You're with your people.

You connect.

You're you, you start, then you go out and you climb Joy Mountain.

You might have a good day, you might have a bad day, but at the end of the day, you come and there's this rhythm to life.

Life, he says.

So what really messed that up is it gets to be 8:30 and there's somebody not there, right?

You said Everybody back by eight.

Now it's 8:30 and two of the adults aren't there.

Now it's nine and they're not there.

What happens?

You know, joy leaves joy camp.

You go find your people.

You want to make sure everybody is back because there's an attachment.

They are my people.

That's part of our group.

We got to make sure that our people are okay.

So part of the power of, of group joy in the discipleship process is it means that I've got people who notice when I am slipping away.

They notice when I am not at the camp.

They notice when things aren't right and they go get me simply because I'm part of the group.

You know, I'm one of them.

So without the that, without that group identity, without that group culture, without that rhythm, relational rhythm, it's easy to get lost.

And so when we all have weak days, we all have our bad times.

And when we slip into them, if we don't have anybody who notices right, what's going to happen to us?

And so that's part of the power of this and why it is so important.

It cultivates that rhythm that facilitates growth.

That was my conversation with Marcus Warner about rare leadership.

Rare leadership isn't about achieving perfection.

Anyone who tries to do that is.

Just on the fast track for burnout.

It's about practicing presence.

It's about staying relational.

When everything in you wants to react and you have this pressure to feel, to accomplish, it's keeping the relationship above the problem.

Just as Marcus said, it's about returning to joy when shame or fear wants to dominate.

And most of all, it's about reflecting the character of Christ in the everyday spaces where real transformation happens.

At the dinner table, in the office, on the church elder meeting, and even in conflict as you've walked through these conversations and reflections, hopefully you've taken steps toward becoming the kind of person who can lead with love, lead with resilience, and also lead with joy.

It's rare, but it is very powerful.

The church needs emotionally mature leaders right now more than ever before, not just on the platform on a Sunday morning, but in every pew, every home, and every relationship.

This is how the people of God reflect the beauty of God's kingdom in a fractured world by being fully present, deeply grounded, and joyfully connected to Jesus.

So keep practicing, keep returning to joy, and keep leading relationally because the world is watching.

And your transformation just might be the invitation someone else needs to see Jesus more clearly.

Thank you for joining us on today's episode of those who Serve the Lord, a podcast of Apollo's watered the center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics.

We trust that what you've heard has inspired and encouraged you in your walk of faith.

Remember, serving the Lord isn't just about what we do.

It's about who we are becoming in Him.

Whether in the the small moments or the grand gestures, each step of service brings us closer to his heart.

If you found today's discussion meaningful, we invite you to share it with others who might be encouraged.

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It helps spread the message to those who need to hear it most.

Until next time, may you continue to serve the Lord with joy, humility, and a heart full of his love.

God bless you.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off.

Stay watered, everybody.