00:05:02.420Rance agreed to help with the book under one condition.
00:05:05.540It could not be about him, but about the boys in the boat.
00:05:08.840When they started to talk about Joe's career with Washington's crew team, Rance's words would become increasingly saturated with deep feeling.
00:05:17.860From time to time, this tough-as-nails man, who'd hewn timber with his own hands, lived in desolate coal-mining towns, and faced life's many obstacles with stoic resolve, would pause to cry.
00:05:29.860As Brown describes the conversation, quote,
00:05:32.380Ranz talked about learning the art of rowing, about shells and oars, about tactics and techniques.
00:05:38.780He reminisced about long cold hours on the water under steel gray skies, about smashing victories
00:05:45.100and defeats narrowly averted, about traveling to Germany and marching under Hitler's eyes
00:05:50.720into the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, and about his crewmates. None of these recollections brought him
00:05:56.780to tears though. It was when he tried to talk about the boat that his words began to falter
00:06:02.320and tears welled up in his bright eyes.
00:06:05.620At first, I thought he meant the husky clipper,
00:06:07.940the racing shell in which he had rowed his way to glory.
00:06:28.300To Joe, it encompassed but transcended both.
00:06:32.320It was something mysterious and almost beyond definition.
00:06:36.180It was a shared experience, a singular thing that had unfolded in a golden sliver of time long gone
00:06:43.080when nine good-hearted young men strove together, pulled together as one,
00:06:48.180gave everything they had for one another, bound together forever by pride and respect and love.
00:06:54.740Joe was crying, at least in part, for the loss of that vanished moment,
00:06:59.460but much more, I think, for the sheer beauty of it.
00:07:02.320end quote. And that was an excerpt from that book, The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown.
00:07:08.000Rance had learned from Pocock and Ulbrichtson about the glorious and near-mystical experience
00:07:13.680of becoming one with his fellow oarsmen in pursuit of a single goal. Even the recollection of that
00:07:19.720moment, a rare moment of perfection on a team of men, had brought tears to Joe so many years later.
00:07:26.600He had learned to live not for himself alone, but for the boys in the boat. Together, they had done
00:07:32.100something remarkable. A group of poor kids from the hard times of the Depression had won gold on
00:07:37.700a world stage. In an age like ours, it's an experience of togetherness that few men ever
00:07:43.880get to experience. Years later, Phil Jackson would say something very similar about his run as coach
00:07:49.420with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. In his book, Eleven Rings, Jackson talks about the kind
00:07:55.640of leadership required to motivate and equip a group of high-achieving men to accomplish
00:08:00.580championship greatness. When he took the job, Jackson said the biggest challenge was convincing
00:08:06.080Jordan that winning scoring titles and MVPs paled in comparison to winning a championship,
00:08:12.360something Jordan had never experienced. When he first started working with Michael, Phil would
00:08:16.780say, Michael, there's no I in the word team, to which Jordan would respond, yes, but there is an
00:08:22.800I in win. Disclosing his source of inspiration, Phil references the book Tribal Leadership.
00:08:28.280In the book, the authors describe five levels of a tribe, ranging from dysfunctional Tribe 1 to highly functional Tribe 5.
00:08:37.100Getting from Tribe 1 to Tribe 5 is largely about replacing the me with a we, and this task requires what the authors of the book call tribal leadership.
00:08:47.580Eventually, Michael would buy into Jackson's triangle offense,
00:08:51.320which distributed the ball and the points to other players
00:08:54.340and in turn made it impossible for teams to simply double or even triple team Jordan himself.
00:09:00.380As a result, the team thrived, winning six championships.
00:09:04.360What the players would later describe was the same thing that stirred Joe Rance to tears.
00:09:09.640They'd come to know the deep power and the bond of the team.
00:09:12.880No longer was it about any individual player saying, I'm great, but about a cohesive whole saying, we're great and we're doing great things.
00:09:22.440The leader's job, as Phil demonstrated, was bringing together talented individuals and getting them to buy into a system that would elevate them to unstoppable greatness.
00:09:33.200More than anything, Phil was able to motivate, inspire, and often diplomatically get players
00:09:38.800like Dennis Rodman, Scottie Pippen, and Michael Jordan to play together as one mystical living
00:09:44.740organism. Jackson would often quote Rudyard Kipling to his men.
00:09:49.220Now this is the law of the jungle, as old and true as the sky. And the wolf that shall keep
00:09:54.920it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk,0.83
00:10:01.360the law runneth forward and back, for the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the
00:10:07.320wolf is the pack. Central for Jackson as a leader was the cultivation of a deep bond of joy that
00:10:14.780can only come from the pursuit of a unified goal. People, he discovered, are bound together by this
00:10:20.580deep sense of connectedness. Kobe Bryant, one of Phil's other pupils, once said,
00:10:26.060we've been through so many battles, the trust naturally grows. The more wars you fight together,
00:10:30.940the more you understand the people you're in battle with.
00:17:36.220Email us at advertising at newchristendompress.com.
00:17:45.160Brian, we're continuing this series on Christian Burroughs.
00:17:49.060And one of the things that we were talking about last time
00:17:51.500that we promised our listeners, dear listeners,
00:17:54.860that we would address as sort of the leadership question.
00:17:59.800One of the things I do think, you spoke about it in the cold open, that is so unique about what we're doing in Ogden, I think is this idea that not only teams and men and tribe, but in particular, you've said something in the past that the closer you get, you want it to look better, not worse.
00:18:18.860Whereas for a lot of groups, it's like it looks really good far away, but you get closer and you see a lot of problems.
00:21:44.040but then you get closer and you find out that there's coldness between the husband and wife
00:21:47.460the church that looks great from a distance and then you find out that it was all sermon editing
00:21:51.740videos and on social media well even though i think we've kind of grown up with this in the
00:21:57.060church um my heroes growing up um a lot of them have kind of fallen into shambles or or disrepute
00:22:06.380think of somebody like steve lawson where um i i remember for years people would say to me
00:22:11.520you know this is the ideal is to be like this guy it all falls apart of course uh within the
00:22:16.880last year but then you start digging and it's like here's a guy who's like the authority on
00:22:22.320the elder board is questionable it doesn't seem like he reports to anyone yeah um it's actually
00:22:27.640not a biblical pattern going on at the roots they weren't obeying that law that god wove into
00:22:34.260creation now part of it is you i think you could get jaded and you can say none of these projects
00:22:39.060will work. Yeah. Anything you try to build is just going to blow up like that. Yeah. We haven't done
00:22:44.160that. We've actually said, actually, we could learn something. Yeah. And though it is common
00:22:48.820in our day to have institutional or movement collapse, for lack of a better term, we could
00:22:56.060actually try to build something differently. Yeah. And I think that is challenging within our day
00:23:01.580as we'll get into. It's very important. Central to any tribe is going to be leadership. Yeah.
00:23:07.940even this concept though of tribe um this is not how a lot of people have thought like if you read
00:23:14.020tim keller for example on the church they're actually anti-tribal yeah it's funny this is
00:23:19.700part of like tribalism and nationalism are seen as bad things yeah that you shouldn't want to pursue
00:23:25.180and here we are saying no tribe is everything tribe is absolutely everything you need a tribe
00:23:31.160you should be building tribes you should notice that god made the world to operate and function
00:23:34.900and tribes and clans and gangs of men and in groups and small communities like people do this
00:23:40.200dumb thing in churches um where any community but it's it's prevalent in churches where they0.77
00:23:46.580they say you know i came to this church but it was just full of cliques0.98
00:23:50.600and and like there is such thing as a a sinful cliquishness where nobody can get in it's
00:23:57.920impermeable no no new people no friends can come in it's inner rings it's lewis there's a lot of
00:24:03.100bad dynamics that really can be described in that language. What I discovered though, as a pastor
00:24:07.880in, you know, the last decade and a half is that often when people say there's cliques,
00:24:15.960what they mean is there are groups of people that genuinely like each other in this group,
00:24:20.440in this church, and they all tend to share some interest or thing that they love.
00:24:25.260And I don't seem to be in that group. I don't fit. And so now I'm kind of bitter about that.
00:24:32.200You know, like all these guys get together and, you know, they love to hang out and, you know, play golf or smoke cigars or talk about, you know, sports or like all this stuff.
00:24:43.880And they're like, no, the church needs to like establish this order where anybody can be in any group of friends and anybody can be in any.
00:24:50.620Well, but no, that's not how God made the world.
00:30:33.400What is interesting, like you said, even take something like DEI, you know, the initiatives that come out of the civil rights era really functionally.
00:30:42.840But you look at how that would even interplay in the church.
00:30:45.860You have Matt Chandler saying, I would actually rather hire the less competent black person than the more competent white person.
00:30:52.360well that's you know jeremy carl's talked about this too uh with the unprotected class you have
00:30:58.640the elevation of people who are less qualified yeah as a systematized process the purpose of
00:31:06.060a system is what it does and so when you look at the purpose of dei is to create incompetence
00:31:12.940to erode trust to deracinate society that's that's the purpose of the system that's what it does
00:31:19.500so competence is a huge part of this but there's there's far more than that competence is one
00:31:23.980piece i think another reason that this that leadership and hierarchy and organization in
00:31:29.960general are so difficult is because it requires two things that seem to tug at tension with one
00:31:35.900another but you need both of them and you you cannot do it without both one of them is um men
00:31:44.480of competence and character who look at a problem or a thing or an office or leadership or a system
00:31:53.120or a people or a nation or city or clan or whatever, and they say, that needs leadership.
00:31:58.280I have been given the gifts to lead it and I should go put my hand to the wheel and lead.
00:32:05.300Absolutely. And I'm the right guy to do this. And I know what needs to be done.
00:32:09.500that kind of courageous conviction, even if 10 people told a guy like that, you know, you're
00:32:16.060wrong. This is wrong. This is how we've always done things. This is how the bureaucracy works.
00:32:20.580You need a guy who's like, I don't care what anybody else thinks. I am 100% certain that I'm
00:32:25.760the guy to do this right now. Yeah. Okay. You need that. And this, this guy that's like, no, no,
00:32:32.260no. Everyone's saying this can't be done. It can be done. There's a certain amount of will that's
00:32:37.780required. Like a will and a conviction and a courage. And at the same time, the other thing
00:32:43.100you need is humility, mutual submission. You need, um, a, a non egotistical execution of a mission
00:32:54.540that God gives that is for the good of the people of people, not just the glory of the guy who has
00:33:01.860that conviction well this was one of the shocking insights i think that we have this stereotype
00:33:08.000from movies about what the good leader say in a business business has been
00:33:12.940you know uniquely in in the 20th century with guys like john d rockefeller
00:33:18.260the focal point became leaders as business guys so in the past that actually wasn't the case
00:33:24.240i think it's just american consumerism that would tend to elevate the business leader
00:33:28.520but it is interesting. You get into like good to great with Jim Collins talking about business
00:33:35.040leaders who are the 10X builders of a generation. And he said the best leaders, this is one of their
00:33:40.900keystone findings. The best leaders were humble and self-effacing yet incredibly strong-willed.
00:33:47.360Absolutely strong-willed. They knew how to do a thing and they would not settle for that thing
00:33:53.840not being done the way that they had the vision to do it and the competence to do it. But at the
00:33:59.300same time, the best leaders, the ones who were loved and remembered and did great, they, you're
00:34:04.740right. They were also, they, I think of Ford, Henry Ford. What were, what were some of his primary
00:34:12.200concerns? It wasn't creating the most value for the shareholders. It wasn't just amassing the
00:34:18.960greatest amount of wealth for himself, though he, though he did produce huge value for himself and
00:34:23.480others um and you know stakeholders in the business he was very concerned with creating
00:34:29.260a uh a kind of culture where everybody who worked for him would be well taken care of
00:34:37.060that they would love their job that they would get paid well to do it that they would work a
00:34:41.180human amount and they would have leisure that um his products would be excellent and serve people
00:34:47.000didn't even get sued for paying his workers so much like the competition was like he's paying
00:34:51.520too much. Yeah. There were multiple vectors of attack in Henry Ford's life against his iron
00:34:58.480will determination to pay his people well and to actually build a culture that was about what I
00:35:05.960would say the moral law of loving your neighbor. Yeah. Truly loving your neighbor and not just
00:35:10.940stripping the most value out of your neighbor and then discarding your neighbor and finding a new
00:35:15.340neighbor that you can strip the most value from at the lowest cost. So you need both those things.
00:35:20.700And another thing that plays into that, because it sounds like I'm just talking about this like really point key leader, you do need really key leaders, you need a king, you need a, you need a point guy, you need like leaders who are in charge genuinely, but you also need within the whole hierarchy of an organization that the awareness that like we said in the cold open, one guy cannot do it.
00:35:40.080And so you have to have a team of leaders that work together. But that team of leaders has to have, again, two things. They have to have total confidence in their area of competence and they have to be really well suited to be like, I am on the right seat in this organization and I am pushing to plow on something deeply meaningful and important and I contribute to in this way.
00:36:02.060But then they also need a humility that says, I'm not always right. I don't know everything. I don't have to be the number one guy. I can take a lower seat. I can, you know, like that, there's this constant tension between that conviction, courage, competence, will, and humility, service of others, self-sacrifice, giving of yourself for others.
00:36:29.340And in the hierarchy, you need a lot of people who also recognize I'm not a number one guy.
00:36:37.080Even where you are a number one guy, a number one guy needs to know I'm not a number one guy in everything.
01:00:19.520The body's many members and that's true of the whole thing, but it's also true of its
01:00:22.960expression and local instantiate, like of local expressions of the body universal.
01:00:28.740You have a mouth and eyes and hands in each congregation over time.
01:00:32.940I think the Lord's faithful to do that.
01:00:34.360And he deploys his troops in that manner.
01:00:37.140But when it comes to specialization amongst the roles, the secret sauce is really in figuring
01:00:44.180out, again, how to keep intention those two things.
01:00:47.720I'm certain about this, and that can even include your own gifting as a leader.
01:00:52.060I'm certain that this is what I'm supposed to do.
01:00:54.040And I'm certain what they're supposed to do.
01:00:56.220And so we can now work together and figure out how to rule and lead in these different
01:01:02.320things so that order and beauty and life comes out of it. And it means figuring out very practical
01:01:08.960things like it's success. If Eric spends a lot more time in meetings than me, because a lot of
01:01:16.080Eric's gifting is in that management, ordering, leading of people in that kind of context,
01:01:24.680particularly on the, on the leadership level of the church, like leading leaders going and
01:01:29.020having a meeting with this leader. And, you know, before we come to any kind of major decision
01:01:33.960as a church or as an elder team or as New Christian Press staff, you will have found
01:01:39.840when it's done well that Eric has spent about 15 times more time than anybody else on it
01:01:45.840because he's been talking to everybody, figuring out what everybody thinks about something,
01:01:51.920building consensus, coming to like, oh, you know, this perspective from this team member
01:01:56.420and this perspective from this team member could really come together and create this vision for
01:02:02.120this change. And so by the time when you come together in a table of like, we need to make a
01:02:06.660call, everybody actually has a pretty deep awareness of what needs to happen, of where
01:02:11.320everybody else is at. And it's because Eric is good at leading in that way. But at the same time,
01:02:18.740if I spent my time like that, it would be a bad, bad, bad thing. I'm not very good at it,
01:02:25.960Number one, I'm, and there, I'm figuring out why, as I work with Eric, why I'm not very good at it, deficiencies in my own gifting, but also because I would then not be doing the thing that I am good at, which is that if I'm, I'm actually really failing the church and the school and New Christian Press, if I am not spending a significant amount of my time with my head down, writing, thinking, producing, preparing.
01:02:53.840Yeah, because the communication is part of leadership too.
01:11:00.460They're in the camp with multiple families.
01:11:03.140And then those people will come to us and say, hey, here's three trends we see.
01:11:06.720And then a lot of what my job is, is interfacing with you and saying like, okay, what are the different levels that we could address that as a body?
01:11:16.520But I can't go and meet with every single family who has an issue and provide weekly counseling for each one of them.
01:11:23.560No, it wouldn't actually be. Even in a church of 150, a pastor by himself would have a very hard time meeting with all 150 people in any kind of consistent basis.
01:11:35.240If you just start looking at the hours in a day.
01:11:37.520Yeah. One of the other things I think with scale, if you look at our eldership team, I'd say we have kind of a radical concentration of competence.
01:11:47.180meaning like if you look at somebody like um for a while you know kevin love was one of the newer
01:11:53.100elders but then i'm like in most small churches in america or many churches like kevin would
01:11:59.800probably be the lead pastor um and then you look at like ben and ethan they're you know much newer
01:12:05.940to the elder team but i look at them and i think they could probably pastor a church um but it's
01:12:12.580unique when you get them all together and then it's kind of a grace too because i think this is
01:12:18.860why a lot of smaller church pastors just feel this pinch because you're basically asked to do
01:12:24.860everything even though it's a smaller group of people you're asked to do everything really well
01:12:29.180yeah and it was kind of drilled in our minds in seminary that like the competent leader can do it
01:12:33.360all um but there was another ditch too i think outside of competence where you would have one
01:12:40.520leader who was like not necessarily competent at everything in leadership but very charismatic
01:12:45.400and what he would do is he would accrue around himself mid to low level manager type yeah guys
01:12:52.480uh rubber stampers guys who you know really towed the company line well yeah wouldn't push back on
01:13:00.560him yeah um and what you ended up with were really mediocre movements institutions and
01:13:05.560organizations and they look like a hyper exaggeration of the strength of that one
01:13:09.860charismatic leader like high loyalty yeah and the hyper exaggeration of his weaknesses yes
01:13:14.540deficiencies so i think i almost want to say that was kind of a feature of boomer style leadership
01:13:21.940yeah it kind of worked maybe in the old world but i think people are starting to drift back to
01:13:28.380things that are actually more like even think about david and his mighty men i think this is
01:13:33.580written in nature david didn't run all the mighty men in exactly the same way that they you know you
01:13:39.500have divisions there's the one there's the three there's yeah different levels of commander and
01:13:45.600there's a reason even modern militaries have copied that tiered structure of hierarchy it's
01:13:50.140very efficient the roman empire did this the lord jesus and yeah it wasn't a new thing he had peter
01:13:55.520he had the three he had the 12 he had the 72 goes out yeah so really helpful uh one of the books
01:14:01.400Brian, that we'll talk about a little bit more is tribal leadership. This concept of learning the
01:14:10.440we over the me has been, I think, a painful process at points. I'll give one example. Just
01:14:19.060when I was in Colorado, I had Hard Men Podcast, started that, had a small following, but there
01:14:25.360were more people who were saying like, yeah, I'm really interested in what you're saying.
01:14:28.100um but i was sort of looking at the culture society and particularly the church and i was
01:14:35.280saying i don't think that me as an individual can change all this um we're talking about tribe but
01:14:42.240i don't have one and we're talking about building a great culture but you know i haven't really
01:14:48.040experienced that myself and just in conversations with you and dan i it was challenging to have to
01:14:55.260say, if I want to do anything great, any lasting legacy changing work, it's going to have to be a
01:15:01.460part of a team. And so look, there are a lot of people who will tell you this, you know, the,
01:15:06.640the only ship that doesn't sail is a partnership, right? There's all these warnings, like just be
01:15:12.540a sole proprietor. It's so much easier. Or just be that individual pastor, build your entire
01:15:18.360organization with mid-level managers who just say yes, and you won't have conflict. Two things are,
01:15:23.880I think problematic with this number one, you can't achieve very much, you know, Dan had this
01:15:30.840saying, you know, it was something like, it's an old slogan, but it's like, if you want to go fast,
01:15:35.020go alone. If, if you want to build long, go together, like you're going to need a team for
01:15:40.980these. So that's kind of one of the problems. But then the other one I would say is a lot of
01:15:45.740these organizations where they built it with one key personality and a bunch of mid-level managers
01:15:50.980around him they still have conflict they still fall apart you don't actually avoid the thing
01:15:57.120that you're claiming that you're going to avoid it's just easier to fire people yeah because you
01:16:00.920can do it alone you can do it with soul discretion correct but a lot of the a lot of the time we we
01:16:06.360can there's the temptation could be to fire away um things that actually would have helped you
01:16:12.280yeah because you don't like them because they're unpleasant pushback yeah so you can fire away
01:16:16.860this is particularly dangerous for pastors because of the a businessman can succeed in business and
01:16:24.480be fairly immoral and and still make a lot of money and so the business succeeded kind of in
01:16:31.160the way in what a business is for well maybe maybe it serves the customers pretty decently
01:16:36.080and whatnot but a pastor who builds an organization such that he's insulated from all criticism or
01:16:43.320help and just immediately shuts down anybody who might threaten his self-conception, he's really
01:16:52.460guaranteeing that he will experience the much greater pain of either the Lord's displeasure
01:16:59.960or total failure. Because it just doesn't work. That's not how God made the church to function.
01:17:05.960He's going to bring shame on the church. He's going to bring shame on himself.
01:17:09.380He's ultimately going to disobey God and put himself in the way of God's displeasure.
01:17:16.180You just, you actually can't, like you cannot do that.
01:17:20.960And so if you're that, no matter where you are in this, like I think a lot of pastors
01:17:25.920listen to this, one place to start if you're like, what do I do?