Principles of Effective Leadership - Lesson 4

Dr. John Johnson
Principles of Effective Leadership
PC506-04
The Need for Leadership
Lesson Transcript

Dr. John Johnson [00:00:01] So now let's talk about the need for leadership. You ever been in a situation where you find you're just self finally saying, just somebody lead? I was thinking about that. I'm trying to think, okay, what comes to mind? And something that came to mind was when I was I went to San Diego State and I majored in political science. I remember one of these poly sci instructors I can't remember was a course on like constitutional theory or something really interesting like that. I'm guessing he'd been teaching for a lot of years and he must have somewhere just got bored with it all. So he came in and he said, he said, You know, I've been teaching this course for X amount of years and I want to teach it differently, but I'm not quite sure how I want to do that. So I'd like to bring you in on this here and see what you think. Well, you know, I'm sitting there going, Well, how would I have anything to contribute? I don't even know what this class is about. This went for like six weeks. I mean, every week we'd come together and just.

Speaker 2 [00:01:17] Yeah, we could go.

Dr. John Johnson [00:01:18] This direction and, you know, we could. Now I look back and I go, I paid for that. Yeah, I paid for that course. That was back in the Vietnam era when I think so many people were going to college as an escape from that class. It I mean, you had to when you registered, you had to run to get in a class to hope there was a space for you. And and back at that time, professors, many of them were rather arrogant, I mean, because they knew that control they had you. They just had you by, you know, I mean, they would do things like this. They'd say, For those of you that weren't able to find a register for my class, there'd be a sheet, a you sign around and I'll take the first five or something. And then sometimes you go into a class and he wasn't there yet and there'd be a sheet going around and you put your name early on it, he'd taken he'd go, I'll take anybody who's not on this sheet. I mean they just yeah, they were it was awful, just awful. And because I knew everybody was desperate, you know, like, if I don't get the right number of units, I lose my two s deferment status. And I mean, Vietnam was a wonderful place. I'm sure that nobody wanted to go to Vietnam in the seventies and the sixties. Yeah. Yeah. You were trying to get out. And believe me, there were a lot of my peers who that was like the last stop. They didn't want to go there. So it maybe it was a little better that he just, you know, he had he will did a lot of control. So it's not like you could say, you know what, I'm not wasting my money. I'm not taking this class. It's like I got to stay with this thing because not only do I need to take it, I got to get a good grade. Here's what I remember. It was just an absolute leaderless time. No leadership at all. It drove me crazy. I felt like just lead. Would you come on, tell us where you're going, what we need to do. We'll follow you. But there was none of that. So we can all pray. Think of a moment. We've been in a situation where everybody just sitting around and come on, lead us. It's kind of like a philosophy professor I had back in that era. Sometimes philosophy professors can be really weird, especially at the community college level. And I remember this guy, he would walk in every time we had class. He'd come in here. He didn't have a chair like this. He had a like a bar stool. He'd get up on the bar stool and we'd all be sitting there, you know, and we'd have her, you know, ready to take notes. And he'd sit there and he'd look up for like, forever. Then he CO.

Speaker 2 [00:04:05] What is life.

Dr. John Johnson [00:04:12] I think back now, you know.

Speaker 2 [00:04:14] I mean.

Dr. John Johnson [00:04:14] And of course back then, you know, we'd go who I, you know, he must be so deep fried and have a clue to anything. But it was sort of like that to just you just kind of want to just tell me, I mean, pick any thing. I'll go with it. Just take me somewhere.

Speaker 2 [00:04:36] So.

Dr. John Johnson [00:04:37] Leaderless. And this is a spike. It creates this huge vacuum. So the question here in this is the need for leadership. Do we need leaders? Well, you know, actually, there are some who would say not not really. I mean, some would question their importance. You know, some management theorists would say, you know, really the. CEO. It's just a symbolic position. He thinks he is leading like the president of United States, some would say. Well, he's got all this power and position, but actually he is more of a figurehead. The Congress is still going to do what they're going to do. So that kind of thinking would say leaders aren't really necessary. Some who are cynical would, just as I put it here. QUESTION Does it really matter? A pastor may think he has lots of leadership. There've been those moments I've as a pastor thought it's anybody really following city but listening. I come out of a sermon. Did that really change anything? I put a lot of work into that. Did that really matter? You can begin to ask that yourself, and certainly some on a more radical side would actually make it their aim to destroy leadership. There are some who just almost seem to make it their mission to hire leaders to kill them. And you might think, well, that sounds kind of rather bizarre. Warren Bennis, I mentioned some time ago he wrote this book, Why Leaders Can't Lead. He wrote this book because it was his observation and looking at leadership from the educational to the corporate to the political sectors. We have this tendency to prop up leaders to kill them. It's true in the pastoral world, when I teach courses here on pastoral leadership, I tell the students, realize that you're going to have a brief honeymoon. Some get three or four weeks, some get three or four days. Some might get three or four months, but it's generally brief. The important thing is don't misunderstand how much you have in the bank. When you're in a honeymoon period, you think you have a lot of money in the bank to make decisions, but actually you just sort of like Monopoly money. You just got that little $500 to start the game and it goes real fast and you really don't have much. If you understand the metaphor I'm using, a leader has to constantly think about the currency. You have leadership decisions, always expend currency. Think of it this way Every time you make a leadership decision, it's a withdrawal from the bank. A lot of leadership I've discovered is I have to constantly be aware of if I make this decision, what will be the cost, how much currency will it require? But I also have to make sure I've looked at the bank statement, so to speak, of my leadership and ask what's in my account right now. Did you make too many leadership decisions? You make too many withdrawals. You might in fact be running in the red. Now, the other mistake is that you've accumulated a lot of capital, but you're not making decisions. Take advantage of it. But we have this tendency to back to the honeymoon, to let a person have a little bit of capital and then just start attacking. We've created a culture today of just killing leaders. I mean, notice that I'm amazed anybody follows any leader the way we talk about leadership, it seems. Anyway, there used to be a certain reverence for leadership, but so much of that is gone today. So the need for leadership, some even on the radical side, would say, No, not really. We really don't. We don't need leaders. But what I would argue for, of course. Well, I have to I'm teaching a course on leadership that leaders are actually not a critical. It's not say we can't be critical of leaders, but if we move to the point we're trying to kill our leaders, we're really in many ways, we're killing ourselves. It may be part of why Paul said to Timothy to pray for those in authority. Remember that. Pray for your leaders. Pray daily. I have an obligation, a responsibility, a civil, but particularly a spiritual responsibility. It's too bad we we don't think that way, but it's true. And that's because my argument here is that leaders are critical. And I point that out from several times in the political realm. David Gergen, who was a press secretary, communications for a number of presidents, makes this point. He says everyone who's worked in government, a corporation or professional group or nonprofit knows that leadership matters. Had it not. For Roosevelt and Churchill to rally Western democracies, Civilization might have perished at a moment of crisis. The quality of nation's leader can be decisive or a mention here and there in the corporate realm. I quote from no tissue. No tissue is a consultant who's consulted with the most important corporations in the world. And he wrote a book entitled Leadership in Chimp. I'll talk more about what that books about later. But he has a chapter in that entitled The Need for Leadership. And he makes the point that that leaders, as he puts it, stage revolutions. I mean, they are critical to the to the direction. And as he puts it, the difference between failure and success. This is what he's observed in all these consulting with all these big corporations. He summarizes it this way. Here's the difference between success and failure in a corporation. It all goes back to the leader in a sense. As the leader goes, so, so goes the corporation. It rests upon the leadership business. Who I mentioned says leadership is the pivotal force behind successful organizations. And I give you a number of others in the religious one. Well, Willimon, one of my favorite writers, says there is no church without leadership behind. Just about every significant mastery is a leader. And Barna again attributes in his research with churches with weak leaders. So what they all conclude is that leadership is necessary. Okay, so let's stop a minute. We test this out and we think about leadership in Scripture, and here's what you discover. I think it's fair to say every time God gets ready to bend history, if you will, to start something, what's the first thing he does? He always raises a leader. So you've got this downward slide in Genesis by Chapter 11 with the Tower of Babel. Things have just gotten so bad, and this is like the epitome of the sinfulness of man building a tower to the skies to kind of shake the fist and say, God, we don't need you at that moment. God does what he raises a leader. He goes after Abraham. And then we read the story of Abraham. At a certain point, there's Moses, there's the burning bush. Why is there the burning bush? Because God is about to shape and bend history. It's going to require Moses, Moses or Nehemiah or Jesus. There's there's Paul. So at every turn, there's a Deborah, there's an Esther. There's a David. So why are leaders critical? I note here several reasons. One reason is they shape the value of an organization in many ways as the values in an organization go that all are determined by the values of a leader. If there is a lack, a failure, I should say, of integrity in a leader, there's almost always going to be a failure of integrity in the organization. Leaders create the culture. Maybe another word. They create the ethos. I mean, leaders, I believe, are that important. They set the tone. They create the atmosphere. When you walk into a whether it's a school or a church or a business or, again, in the political field, it's not to say that followers are just passive. And in fact, followers have this responsibility to choose their leaders. They're all in this together, but the leaders will shape the values. The second reason I give here is that leaders bring together a common vision. I mean, this is, again, what leaders do. If you don't have leadership, you're probably not going to have a vision. What I mean by that is that if you don't have a leader, you may have lots of visions. Everybody has their own dreams and ideas, but you don't have a common vision. It takes a unifier, takes somebody who brings it together. And this is what, again, leaders do. They bring this compelling vision. But here's the third reason leaders are necessary. Leaders are the catalysts. I mean, they're the ones who make things happen. You have to have a catalyst in an organization. You have to have the spark, if you will. You can have all the kindling in the world, but something has to be the catalyst. That's where leadership comes in. Martin Luther King was the catalyst to the civil rights movement. Behind every great band, every great turn is a catalyst. You know, I always go back a lot in Scripture to Nehemiah. Nehemiah was the catalyst. The world would have never been built. He was the catalyst. He's the guy who comes into town and they've been staring at these ruins for all of these years. What was the difference maker? They needed a catalyst. So leaders are the ones who, as Leonard Sweet puts it, close the deals of history. They're the boulders that arrest the drift, as he puts it, the pied pipers behind whom people follow the music. It's just the nature of what leaders do. When you read the story in Leadership Moment of Eugene Krantz, he's one of my favorite stories, probably the best chapter in the book. But he was what, right? He's the catalyst. So here's Apollo 13, potentially spinning out of control. It would have just been a huge disaster for the space program. Somebody has to stand up, be the catalyst to unify, bring things together. If there wasn't a Eugene Kranz, those three astronauts would have never made it back alive. Number four, leaders are critical to keeping things going. That's the other thing. Back to what we talked about here. You say this is a big, huge thing. Why leaders are necessary because not only are they the catalysts, but leaders are the ones who they start through the catalyst to start the new curves. But then they keep things going. Somebody has to end. And that's the real hard work of leadership. I mean, the real hard work is once you've got the great idea and you've got the new direction and the new vision, then there's just the real grunt work of keeping it going. Spin things communicated. And this is what leaders do. Without them, the status quo takes over. So leaders are about movement momentum. Leaders are the ones who get the traction, get traction to the organization, but then keep the thing moving. One of my favorite illustrations, I love football and Bobby Beth, who once was the general manager of a team I really love to follow. But he years and years ago he was the general manager of the Washington Redskins. And the Washington Redskins won a number of Super Bowls, and a lot of it was attributed to the leadership of Bobby Better, the general manager, because he's the guy that went out and found the players. But here's something that gave me an insight to what made Bobby Beth so great as a leader. And it's two stories told that the night that the Washington Redskins won the Super Bowl. Somebody got into the elevator with Bobby Beth or. And he said, Well, Bobby, you must be so excited tonight. Wow, we won the Super Bowl. This is really great. Now, maybe this is a mix of being just so driven crazy, but maybe in his role he had to be. But this person said to Bobby, Better, You don't seem so happy. And he said, Well, tomorrow I've got to start thinking about the people I'm going to have to cut. What was he doing? He understood atrophy. They were at the peak. Atrophy starts where again, at the summit at the top Super Bowl party. But he had enough foresight to see that tomorrow atrophy kicks in if he doesn't create new curves. Why are leaders necessary? Because they're the ones that not only are the catalysts, but they're the ones that keep things going. If they don't keep things going, well, what happens? Things atrophy. They start to die. Okay. So that's kind of an overall summary of the need for leadership. So let's come back and look at our notes a little bit more deeply. Maybe there's a quote. Maybe there's something you want to pick up on and go further with. Yeah.

Speaker 3 [00:19:20] With the issue of leadership and what we were talking about at the beginning, we always have a tendency to want to kill them. Mm hmm. You think that's due to that cultural aspect of power difference? Our distance, the the idea that we don't like that so much in this Western society, where maybe in the east, that might not be. Yeah. It's an issue that plays.

Dr. John Johnson [00:19:47] Is probably what plays into it at the very foundational level is that we are all rebellious at heart. First of all, it's in our nature to rebel, right? So we start with that as a given. What explains our dissonance with leadership? It starts with the fact that we all have this inclination to rebel against authority. Gary Wills, in his book on Leadership, describes leadership as a feud. And we think about that for a moment. Leadership is always a struggle, often a feud. We always fight against leadership, in part because we we rebel against leadership. And maybe part of is because a component of leadership by its very nature is power. That's hard. We don't like to give up power. I think that's a piece of it, a part of it. You have a new political administration will hopefully this party will follow. Well, they won't because it's they've given up a certain amount of power. So they will plot, spend all they can to diminish the leadership here so they can get the power back. And when that happens, back and forth, no wonder there's such little that happens of consequence because that how much of their energy spent just trying to go after the power instead of saying, why don't we just unite and just try to do something productive that would be really helpful for the people? It becomes about power.

Speaker 3 [00:21:25] Do you think it'd be important to and teach people about the importance of submission?

Dr. John Johnson [00:21:32] Absolutely.

Speaker 3 [00:21:33] I mean, how do you approach that in this country in particular where that's not the norm?

Dr. John Johnson [00:21:39] Yeah. First of all, we could start by owning up to a failed tendency at times to mix politics with religion, for one, and say this has been a monumental failure. We should have never been about doing this in the first place. We didn't learn our lesson from Constantine when the church and politics got together. When church and politics gets together, then it becomes about power. And when you have that kind of thing going on, it's hard to teach about submission. That's what I've observed. But when we can distance herself from that and get back to what we should be about and put politics where it should be, I tell our people a lot and feel that, look, the hope of the world isn't what happens in Washington, DC. Hope of the world is a healthy church, and a healthy church is not going to be how we can get to the levers of power. We have our role. Romans 13 Paul says politics. Government has its role. We respect that. We pray for our leaders. So I pray for our leaders. I'm called to them, commanded to. I don't put my hope in them necessarily. Yeah.

Speaker 2 [00:23:06] I was thinking of if you could comment on the political aspect. I know different denominations have different ways of organizing their power structure, and I thought there was a paradigm shift in recent years of going towards an alternative. Mm hmm. You know anything about that? Well.

Dr. John Johnson [00:23:29] Yeah. I mean, sometimes it's that whole pendulum swing again from those who say we don't really need a leader, we can all be together. And sometimes that can be all the way to the congregational rule. Church, which, to its extreme, is a pretty leaderless group of people. And a lot of that is built out of mistrust of leadership. So we're going to make our decisions together. The other extreme would be an elder, let's say, ruled church. So small core people make all the decisions for the church. So in the church world, you see that pendulum swing and it gets back to what we're talking about right here, that the sense of need for leaders, the church has its tensions to swing from one extreme to the other. And the aim is to try to find some healthy way in the middle. That's been my observation anyway.

Speaker 2 [00:24:28] The idea of no longer having a senior pastor but having a teaching pastor rather than.

Dr. John Johnson [00:24:36] Well, that can be part of, let's say, an elder ruled church where you just have a core of elders who rule without a senior pastor, but in that you still have this small core giving the leadership to this broad and some of that begins to become unhealthy, just like I think it becomes unhealthy on the other side. And again, the point I would make is there has to be a healthy understanding of the need for leadership. Leadership has its role, its necessary role. And if we just spend our time trying to kill the leadership or remove ourselves from it, we ultimately are killing ourselves. Yeah.

Speaker 3 [00:25:16] Power struggle like the trend of new men in any community and equal and attuned to it and all when we have it selves done it by itself and when the power struggle will happen. It created the politics.

Dr. John Johnson [00:25:37] Yeah.

Speaker 3 [00:25:38] And that is the thing we worry about how the need for leadership in the church. We ought to be following the direction in the business like of politics, like.

Dr. John Johnson [00:25:54] Yeah, well, again, that's why we have to take our model constantly after Christ. Let's look at how Christ led the disciples. And if we can get that and lead the church like Christ's led the disciples, if we can get to the heart of what Paul was teaching about leadership, this is what makes the trip like. I just recently head to the Middle East so hard because they have gotten so far away from it. But. Yeah.

Speaker 2 [00:26:29] On page seven, there's a quote like kids church in the western world is located at present at the midpoint of that inflection point. Yeah. Have you found that to be true, that most churches have not hit that point in their Western culture?

Dr. John Johnson [00:26:46] And it might be another way of saying that what often is a statistic I read that like 80 85% of churches are plateaued. So they're kind of flatlined. They haven't got.

Speaker 2 [00:27:01] That's beyond the inflection point, though.

Dr. John Johnson [00:27:05] It's located at present in the midpoint of an S-curve. Yeah, I think make it the midpoint of an S-curve. He might look at it as maybe at the midpoint here.

Speaker 2 [00:27:17] Oh yeah.

Dr. John Johnson [00:27:18] He meant the on the ascendancy. No, I think he'd be taking it more here where the where the church has become flat.

Speaker 2 [00:27:27] Part of the notes would be the same.

Dr. John Johnson [00:27:31] Mm hmm. The strategic inflection point, the Kairos moment. Yeah. Again, the strategic inflection is right there at the top where it's going to start to go one way or the other. Okay. So. And cut by Kay Rice. Two words for time in Greek language Chronos from chronological week at our chronological order, Kairos is not so much duration of time, but the optimal moment.

Speaker 2 [00:28:02] In God's kingdom.

Dr. John Johnson [00:28:04] Yeah, when we say we're going to do something at the Kairos moment, we're saying at the most strategic, the optimal moment to do something. If I say it, this is the Kairos moment to go forward with this decision. I'm saying this is the best moment to do it.

Speaker 2 [00:28:23] And would you say that's at the top of the site?

Dr. John Johnson [00:28:27] Well, I think that really, as I understand that whole creating new S curves, the optimal moment to create the S curve is is here, which again, is hard because people think that's where a lot of energy and all of that. Why do we need to be thinking out into the future? Because we're just about to to go here. So maybe what you could say is the obviously the real danger moment is when you're at the top at the point of atrophy. So the optimal moment to begin to spin off and be thinking out into the future and creating new S curves is right here. Obviously, you don't want to be doing it here. You've got to be establishing and gaining momentum. Right. And here it's not only you're establishing momentum, you're establishing credibility and trust. You're establishing at this point, let's say you're starting a church, for example, or you're part of any new movement. You're creating buy in, you're establishing procedures, you're starting to get a sense of structure and all those very necessary things. But now that you've got the momentum, you've got people with you and you're this thing's really starting to move somewhere before and maybe really, maybe it's more about right here. You're starting to see, okay, we've been at this for a while. We're doing really well. But it's kind of something inside. You says, I know what's going to happen. It always happens. There's a new book by a guy named John Carter. Carter has written a lot for organizations. He wrote a really impacting book some years ago on change. And he wrote I think this his newest book is entitled A Sense of Urgency. Basically, what Carter says is that as he's looked at the organizations that have tended to keep at it and keep moving are those who understand urgency. It's kind of like who comes after all of this analysis to say the organizations that are most successful and they keep going, they have a sense of urgency. The others have. What? What would you say? What would be the opposite of that complacency that just become complacent? We're fighting. But to have a sense of urgency is takes a lot of energy, doesn't it? My kids are in their early twenties and I'll say, you know, guys, this is a prime time of your life. This is really key. How you use these years is really important. Sometimes I'll find this apparent that I have a sense of urgency, but they don't. But a little bit. That is a generation of see for me. In my early twenties, we had a deep sense of urgency. We just knew that we had to do it. Now we had to because we didn't know if we, you know, we just had to do it. And again, it's part of what leaders do. Leaders are sort of the ones who kind of keep the clarion call, if you will, and front they keep people aware of the time. You know, every now and then, I just have to stand up in my church and say, look, folks, this isn't it. You know, life is not a dress rehearsal. We only get one shot. You know, we can't squandered the days, Paul said to redeem the time for the days for evil. We're in a war. We're not at a country club. We're in an outpost in the midst of a horrific spiritual conflict. And we don't know when the Lord will return. And we know we have a clear, compelling mission from Act One. So let's be about it. I find that if a leader doesn't do that from time to time, people don't naturally think that way, do they? They just tend to drift. It's our nature. This is why leaders are necessary, why we need them. They are the catalysts, but more than the catalyst, what I keep going back to, they have to sustain the movement. And if you find that you can't sustain the movement, like I said, you have to get out. And that's hard, hard work. Other thoughts about the need for leadership or a focus on this particular theme here, as you've observed, the need for leadership. Do you concur? Would you say our leaders take them or leave them? Or would you say no, actually? I think about leadership there. They're critical.

Speaker 2 [00:33:06] You mentioned that leadership, the values in the organization. Years ago, I noticed when I would go into a Burger King, I always thought the food at Burger King was superior to me. But I always noticed that I got my food a lot sooner at McDonald's. And so I started thinking about that. I thought somewhere in the McDonald's corporation there was a high up leader who had the value of It's really important that our customer gets their food in an efficient, effective manner. And so they set up systems and I started observing the Burger King. It was always like, gosh, like 20 people back there, but they were kind of milling around, standing around. Whereas a Burger King, someone who taught them how you're going to handle this and you're going to get hurt. And so the food came out a lot quicker. And so there was a leader who had the foresight and the vision to make that a value worthy of a system that would.

Dr. John Johnson [00:33:55] Yeah, and most likely that was because that was a value in its own life.

Speaker 2 [00:34:00] Yeah.

Dr. John Johnson [00:34:00] You know that's just maybe how use wired how we thought. I've always preferred Alaska Airlines. There's just something about the culture, the ethos. Of course, there was a day that unfortunately we don't do anymore. But it used to be, especially back when they were serving food, is that you'd get a little psalm or remember that? What was that about? Well, it goes back to its CEO. Really? Yeah, I know. I mean. Right. The point is that didn't just it wasn't like they sat around in corporate headquarters and said, hey, let's come up with some ideas here. This was it came out of his value, his own fundamental value as a committed believer. I think he he died or was killed some years ago. So it's not quite that today. But, you know, it created an ethos. And I'd like to think and not just because I'm a Christian, but it's still to this day nonetheless. There's enough of that ethos that's there that. Makes when I fly Alaska, it's just different than flying United. There's a sense of personal ness, and I think it all goes back to corporate values that go back to a leader. And at times, I've seen this in other organizations. Unfortunately, it's not always true of Christian leaders, but some, I think, like Newport Bay. Newport Bay has been, I think, owned by a man who is a committed follower of Jesus. And when you walk in there, I don't know if they still have it up, but it says, here's our mission. Imagine that's a mission statement in a restaurant and it states it right up there as you walk in. And I love that because when we get to mission, we'll talk about this. When people know the mission, it keeps them focused and on task. But their mission flows out of values and their values come out of a leader.

Speaker 2 [00:36:03] Kobe talks about that, checking into I think it was a courtyard or something about a motel, the service he got that he. Yes. How do you get your all your employees to treat the customers? The Well, as you sit here and you show them the mission statement.

Dr. John Johnson [00:36:16] Probably the mission statement goes back to. Let me show you the leader. Yeah. Leaders do. They really do. Shaped the values of an organization. If you have a leader whose bottom line is the bottom line, it's all about profit. You'll see that you'll feel that it'll be there in the ethos and won't be very pleasant shape. The values bring together the common vision. Catalysts make it happen. Keep it going. Yeah.

Speaker 2 [00:36:53] I skimmed one of the articles. Mm hmm. Talk about different types of leaders. Yeah.

Dr. John Johnson [00:36:59] That Hybels.

Speaker 2 [00:37:00] Yeah. Yeah. The entrepreneur. Mm hmm. Catlin Right. But when you get things started, as you are the catalyst that they are the sustainer.

Dr. John Johnson [00:37:12] One is the sustainer type and one is the catalyst type. I would say that while are gives may predominate over here, Over here a leader has to nonetheless do all of all of these here. There are some that are really good at start ups and then they move on. But I don't think you get a pass from also doing some of that hard work spade work of keeping things going, just like keeping things going. Also need somebody who is is a catalyst too, because again, you just don't want to keep things going. You also got to be thinking out where you're going to be a catalyst for movement into something new or it'll start to atrophy and die. It's too bad it's that way. It's going to be great to get in heaven where things don't atrophy, don't die, that you're not constantly waking up going, okay, what do we have to do? Where's God taken us now? I mean, leaders just have to think like that. It's because the nature is things die.

Speaker 2 [00:38:17] Don't you hear about Beale? Mm hmm. That's fine. The developer, the designer, The designer developer. The number one more managerial. Yeah, more of a planner. Does that fit in this discussion?

Dr. John Johnson [00:38:34] Well, it's just that they're all necessary. And because, I mean, without them, things aren't going to happen. But in a class on pastoral leadership, I use a grid like this. A pasture has to have four pieces to him that when I look back in Scripture by a fundamental identity of a pasture, is he has to be prophetic, he's got to be a prophet, he's got to be a priest, and he's got to be a sage and he's got to be a king. Because I see those as the four predominant leaders in the Old Testament. And Christ brought those four into a perfect blend in his life. So he comes as one wise redeemer Solomon, the high priest, the king of kings. It comes with this great prophetic voice. So what I do is, is I mentioned that a pastor has to be all four, but our giftedness will make one of those maybe stand out more than another. Some pastors are more of a prophetic voice than they are a priest, while others might be more priestly, they're more come alongside, pray for, may not be great preachers. But what I say is that you don't get a pass from nonetheless having to be all four. That's the point. You have to be all. But you also have to respect what your predominant giftedness is. We're all here in this room. We're going to be leaders of a different sort depending on our giftedness. But it's like some of you might be more visionary and some of you might be more inclined to manage the process, but you don't get a pass from either one. You still have to be part of both end.

Speaker 2 [00:40:17] And good leaders can tell you they can be here for roles.

Dr. John Johnson [00:40:23] Right? But you can't say I'm just the idea guy, so I'm the visionary guy. So here, here's a seed. Let's see where it lands in the ground. Hope it lands and somebody takes it from there and then germinates. You know, you got to do the hard spadework to.