Engaging Followers – Luminex Podcast Episode 7

Show Notes

The relationship of leadership and followership is very closely aligned. In essence, the two are interdependent – the emergence of leaders coming with people first being good followers.

On this week’s podcast, John Messer, the regional executive for Luminex, explains the ins and outs of Robert Kelly’s Follower Matrix (shown in resources) and how that relates to discipleship and leadership development in your churches.

[05:25] The Dichotomy Between Discipleship and Leadership Development

First of all, there is no dichotomy between discipleship and leadership development, rather there is a continuum between the two. Jesus’ disciples are great examples of this. Jesus called them to be his followers and then trained them to become great leaders as well.

[10:31] The Opportunity for Apprenticeship (The Exemplary Leader)

Is there formal training needed to become a leader in the church? Actually, rather than a curriculum based training, apprenticeship speaks of a more relational, organic connection between leader and follower and would be a better approach to training to become a leader in the church. This is also a characteristic of an Exemplary Leader – being relationally involved and taking ownership of mission, vision, and values in order to be able to take a risk in faith.

[15:10] Pros and Cons of a Conformist

Although conformists do bring stability and are needed in the church, their presence could be indicative of a problem in leadership. For example, perhaps they have become conformists due to the inability of a church to answer or invite questions or change. This can be a problem because a lot of learning comes from questioning finding understanding.

[20:20] The Passive Follower

A passive follower is one that lives off of their pastor’s faith. They need to realize that they are just as intelligent, wise, and valuable and that God has a calling for them specifically. Their pastor or leader has to realize that about them as well, and cultivate that passivity into activity.

[25:15] The Servant Leader and the Alienated Follower

Jesus is the perfect example of a servant leader. He did not simply teach his followers, but did life with them and discussed their experiences together.

The alienated follower is often a leader by themselves, and has become alienated because of a relational problem. The key is to re-engage them into the community of the church.

[30:25] Systematic Integration

What are some ways your church can systematically integrate discipleship and leadership development in your church? Some ideas: apprentice programs, seminars, praying together, and doing life together.

Resources:

The Power of Followership by Robert Kelly

Robert Kelly’s Follower Matrix:

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Full Transcription

Intro

Doug: Welcome to the Luminex podcast. Here you will find ideas and conversation to help you and your church leadership. Luminex is focus on developing leaders to start and strengthen the churches. We provide resources and support for you and all the leaders of your church, at Luminexusa.org.

Ep. 7 v. 1

[00:00:25]

Doug: Welcome to this edition of the Luminex podcast, and today we have the regional executive for Luminex, John Messer. John, welcome to the podcast.

John: Thanks Doug.

Doug: John just recently began his role as the leader of Luminex and regional executive for the Reformed Church in America Great Lakes region. A few weeks ago, he did an Emerging Leaders Whiteboard Wednesday. When we talk about emerging leaders, we’re talking about really our core mission which is developing leaders to start instructing churches. John, I wanna talk a little bit about some of your thoughts about how leaders emerge in the Whiteboard Wednesday that you did a few weeks ago. You talked about Robert Kelly’s leader follower matrix. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how it informs how leaders develop, how leaders emerge?

John: Sure. In the field of leadership studies, Robert Kelly is a key person because in the mid-90s, he identified the fact that all leaders need followers, without followers you’re not a leader, but all followers are not the same. So Kelly says that based on two criteria, he was able to statistically categorize followers in four different quadrants. So based on the two ideas that followers are either uncritical thinkers or they are independent critical thinkers. They are either disengaged from the vision mission values and by implication the leaders who are proposing those, or they are engaged with the vision mission and values and the leaders who are proposing those. So Kelly’s quadrant comes up to be four kinds of followers who are distinguished by their either uncritical thinking or independent critical thinking being disengaged or engaged with the vision mission and values.

Doug: So we’re gonna have a picture of this in the show notes on Luminexusa.org so this matrix then creates four quadrants. Can you tell us what those are?

John: If we start with disengaged uncritical thinking followers, Kelly named those passive. They’re not engaged, they’re not thinking critically. So those who are engaged with the vision mission and values and the leaders but are not critical thinkers, in other words they’re uncritical thinkers, those are conformist followers. Then in the upper left quadrant those who are independent critical thinkers but they’re disengaged from the vision mission and values, those alienated followers, and then on the top right quadrant those who are independent critical thinkers and engaged in vision mission and values, those are example followers.

Doug: It’s interesting, you’ve heard the adage, a person who’s trying to be a leader and has no followers is just taking a walk. So the relationship between leadership and followership is really an important concept. Typically people say I’m not a leader I’m a follower, I’m not a follower I’m a leader, but Kelly and you take a different approach to that. Tell us about that follower leader continuum.

John: Yes. That’s been one of the best the big developments in leadership studies in the last decade or two is the recognition, number one, the idea that leaders and followers are two separate categories of people is wrong. Very often, we started to say leaders can’t be leaders without followers that’s true, but also followers can’t be followers without leaders. The two are interdependent. What the studies are finding is that more often than not even people who identify themselves as leaders are followers in certain situations and certain ways. So leadership-followership is really more of a continuum. We wanna recognize that people, any person even a passive follower, alienated follower, can become a leader and probably is, in one way or another, already. A good leader is one who is able to recognize that and to develop those folks whether they’re passive conformist alienated exemplary into the leaders the god wants them to be.

Doug: So really the emergence of the leaders starts with people being good followers.

John: Exactly. And of course that’s very biblical. [00:05:00] We see that that Jesus developed people who first became very good followers and then they became exemplary leaders. So it is the hypothesis that exemplary followers become exemplary leaders. If you’re an exemplary follower, anyone can be an exemplary follower if we recognize what the obstacles, what the issues are that are keeping them in those categories.

Ep. 7 v. 2

[00:05:25]

Doug: That’s really interesting. So often there is a dichotomy that people wanna make a false dichotomy between discipleship and leadership development in our churches, and this kinda helps crack that code, doesn’t it?

John: It does. That was really the breakthrough for me after 25 years of trying to figure out how better to create leaders for the church. The first thing that had a change was my mindset that had bought into that false dichotomy. Because a disciple by definition is becoming a good follower. And part of being a good follower and Christ is also becoming a good leader whatever he calls us. So that dichotomy is false, so break that mindset. And, number 2, recognizing it as a continuum and that we may not all be called to lead in the same way in the same places, but we lead already. For example, I have a number of women that I’ve dealt with over the years, they said, “I’m not a leader.” I said, “Really, you don’t have kids.” “Yeah I have kids.” “You never got your kids ready and after school and prepared and all the things I had to do? Yeah that’s leadership.” I talked to businessmen, say, “I’m just a businessman I’m not a leader.” “Really? You never organized anything for the business community. You never planned and executed something that your employees bought into.” “Yeah I did.” That’s leadership.

Doug: That’s really interesting. It reminds me of that Sunday school song; I will make you fishers of man if you follow me. That we are called to catch people to lead people to Christ, but the prerequisite to getting people to follow Christ and follow us into that relationship with Christ is being a good follower, being a good disciple. That’s amazing. Follow me and I will then make you a leader shows that it’s not that dichotomy it’s really a continuum.

John: Another way of thinking about this, Doug, is when we try to make a dichotomy we have to have discipleship as one flow, as one pathway, that we’re travelling. Then if we say that leadership development is separate, well how does that work? We have to become disciples before we become leaders. I don’t think that’s the way it is. I think if you look at Jesus and his disciples, he was not just developing followers, he was developing followers who were going to become leaders. So the river, think of it as a river of discipleship, includes that stream of leadership development all the way along its path.

Doug: I’m having a kind of eureka moment because being a good follower, being a good disciple, also then includes being a disciple maker which is a form of leadership. Then it also includes leading other disciple makers, and so this pipeline, or this river, from discipleship to leadership is much more natural. It seems like a lot of our churches have multiple strategies. One for discipline, which tends to generate into a sort of Christian education program, and then one for leadership development, which isn’t naturally attached with being what it is, to be a good church member, to be a good follower of Jesus, to be a good family member. How have you observed this in your practice as a Christian minister?

John: It is my opinion at this point, and I think I could prove this (I’d love to study this with some data), but it’s my opinion, that if we are following Christ and our focus is on becoming fully devoted followers, or maturing the followers of Christ, that because moving from follower to leader is part of that process, I would suggest that Christians become better leaders as they grow in their discipleship relationship with Christ. I have seen that actually works itself out in good news church which is where I just came from. In that, there were people who were in leadership positions in various community organizations hospital schools businesses non-profit organizations. When we started intentionally talking about being Christ based leaders wherever he puts us, I found that people had all of these thoughts and desires and wonderings and questions, but they never had a system they never had something that brought those altogether that made sense for them of what it means to be a Christian leader [00:10:00] where God put them in their business in the community school hospitals. So what I’m seeing is that there has been an experiential need for this in the church, and now I’m finding that as we talk about this it’s bringing these things together so that they make sense, so that being a disciple and being a leader are not opposing, they’re not dichotomies, they’re naturally flowing realities for those who follow Christ.

Ep. 7 v. 3

[00:10:31]

Doug: Isn’t it true that sometimes we treat people, who are leaders in all of the other aspects of their life, as though they have to go through some special ritual or some special training in the church to do something that may be a lower level leadership challenge for them? I don’t know that we necessarily serve people that way.

John: Exactly. If we believe what we’re talking about here, that undoes some major misunderstanding that, number 1, formal education precede being a leader; that’s really not true. Leadership is really much more about relational interaction, what we used to call in the armies “on the job training,” it’s learning as you’re doing, I think it also emphasizes the reality that the best relationships that we develop in the church for leaders are those mentoring coaching apprenticing relationships. As a matter of fact, I would be a strong component of apprenticing in churches if we wanna develop leaders. Because that takes people where they are, it recognizes that although they may be following in most realities in most of their experiences now, God is up to something, and he wants to develop the leader in them for something of the future. What we do in that is simply say, “I see this in you, I recognize something maybe you don’t recognize, would you be willing to walk with me and see where God takes us.”

Doug: I love that idea of apprentice. It speaks more of a relationship than a curricula, more of organic connection between a leader and a follower. Let’s go back to Kelly’s matrix for a little while. If it’s true that becoming a better follower is a prerequisite to become a better leader, let’s talk about that exemplary leader who is thinking critically and independently but also relationally engaged with the leader. Where have you seen this come together in a leader follower kind of relationship?

John: The best example that I have of this is an exemplary follower who became an exemplary leader his name was Rick, he was a guy who, not many years maybe 14 years ago, was sitting on a hill side by San Francisco Bridge and was getting ready to jump off. He said I met Jesus and his name was Joe. Joe was a guy who sidled up next to him and said, “Hey brother, you look like you’re in trouble, you wanna talk? Present at the gospel.” Rick became a Christian that day ended up coming to my church. Over the years, Rick wanted to learn, and Rick wanted to learn everything that was about Jesus. He wanted to learn about what it meant to be a Christian. In his discipleship process, he got connected with people who helped him develop as a leader simultaneously recognizing that it was two separate paths, not a dichotomy. Rick become an elder of our church and was the head elder of our church, vice president of our consistory. He was in charge of our recovering ministries celebrate recovery. He was more of an associate pastor than he really was an elder. He just became an exemplary follower of Christ because he wanted to grow. What made him an exemplary follower made him an exemplary leader. The key to that was he was willing to take the risk for the sake of Christ.

Doug: I believe that Kelly talks about this in his book as do others Kellerman talks about this, Irochalef(?) talks about this, there are all followership people that unless we’re willing to take risks, we will never develop into the leader that we’re intended to be. There is something about that trust, there’s something about that maturity, a recognizing that not everything is guaranteed. If I’m willing to take the risk to step out, we would say in faith to do something we believe we’ve been called to do. That really is the defining factor that takes someone who’s willing to think independently and critically to ask questions, to say that doesn’t make sense can you explain to me why are you doing that, John. But is also relationally involved [00:15:00] and takes ownership of vision mission and values that defining step of being able to take the risk is what really has clarified for me one of the exemplary followers.

Ep. 7 v. 4

[00:15:10]

Doug: That’s really interesting. Let’s walk that into this whole idea of being an independent critical thinker. It does seem to me that a person bold faith that takes a peripheral risk is also a person of imagination, of self-differentiation, a person that thinks on their own and is not just complying with the leaders mantra or style or template. Sometimes that can be a challenge for a leader. What are the downsides of having the conformist who’s not critically thinking, they’re engaged with use, they do whatever you want them to do, they’re not dependently thinking, they’re not taking risks. How have you seen that become… we all think people would just do what I say, things would go well, but what happens when that becomes the followership style of the people that are following you?

John: Anyone with teenagers will know what we’re talking about here. Just do what I say and you’ll be fine. Think about it, the unfortunate reality is I love conformists, I really do. They normally love me, they think I’m great. The problem is I don’t need everybody to think I’m great. I need some people to say John, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, what are you thinking? I think the difference is that when I’ve seen conformists in the church, number 1, they’re really honest people. They’re not being conformist to try to manipulate or get something out of it. They’re doing the best they can. I think the issue for them usually is that they have not been given the freedom or the support in being able to question. Because maybe they’ve had a pastor who is insecure and can’t handle questions, maybe the pastor doesn’t know how to create an environment of freedom for people to say what about this or what about that. Maybe they’ve never learned that it’s good to have some who questions because that makes everybody better. But conformists, they bring a lot of stability and we need some conformists in the church. Not everybody is gonna be an exemplary follower leader. We need come conformists, but we want to help as many conformists to grow and that means helping them with the freedom to question, with the trust to be able to say I’m not gonna be rejected by the pastor if I question something that he’s doing, or it’s okay to say what about this, it’s okay to bring up ideas that maybe haven’t been thought before. That’s part of creating a leadership environment in the church which is what I’m suggesting that our leadership culture our leadership environment should encompass everybody.

Doug: So often our faith because of its strength and its certainty tends to give a false signal that what we want is conformity, and then people start growing as disciples and as leaders.

John: Exactly. It is not a service to people to suggest that Christianity is about having all the answers and want you get all the answers that’s maturity; that’s just being not true. Are discipleship and leadership development process is have to help people understand that, number 1, are never gonna know all the answers. Number 2, leadership and good discipleship is really more about asking questions than it is about having the answers.

Doug: Isn’t that interesting maybe discipline is not proving all the answers, but it’s helping people to ask the right questions.

John: I think there’s one of the defining issues of a programmatic based approach vs. a process relational based approach.

Doug: If I just fill in the right answers or the right blanks, then I’m gonna lead in the way that you want me to lead. And then we wonder why we lack innovative and creative spirit.

John: Which one of my little idiosyncrasies is I refuse to do the fill-in the blank Sunday sermon notes for that very reason. I don’t wanna create people who’re just listening for the right answer. I wanna create people who are hearing from the Holy Spirit, so on their note pages I want them to write what they’ve heard from the Holy Spirit not the right word that the pastor says at the right time.

Doug: So some of the work of creating or helping leaders to emerge is to help them to become independent critical thinkers.

John: Exactly. And whether you call that becoming self-differentiated or independent critical thinkers, it’s all the same concept. [00:20:00]  They need to know and be secure enough in who they are that god is doing the work in them and he will complete that in them, and that our job the leader’s job at the fusion four is to help them become all the god wants them to be.

Ep. 7 v. 5

[00:20:20]

Doug: Yeah. It doesn’t instruct the vitals of faith development that when you’re first a Christian or when you’re a young person who is learning Christianity from your family, you’re kind of living on your parent’s faith or the disciples faith. Intellect starts to really become your own and you begin to think this is true not just because someone says it’s true, it’s true because I believe that it’s true.

John: I would suggest that we’re talking about the same process in some cases with passive and conformist followers they’re living off the pastor’s faith in some ways. I believe that part of the issue we have to deal with in some cases is that they have to recognize that God is doing amazing work in them and they don’t have to be passive, they don’t have to be conformist. Maybe God has called them to go above and beyond anything that pastor’s ever gonna be able to do, or maybe something very different from what the pastor is doing. So it’s a leader’s job to help them recognize that and not feel they have to hold back or if they are somehow dependent on someone else’s faith. That’s a basic reformation principle.

Doug: I was think that that the reformation returns thinking about the faith to the person in the rank and file, to the person and the pew, if you will. That one person with the bible and the Holy Spirit living within them can arrive at what the Holy Spirit wants to teach about unchanging truth of the gospel.

John: And the most exciting thing for me is when you’ve got someone who has been passive because they’ve existed in a system where they didn’t feel freedom or they didn’t have that trust, or they weren’t giving an opportunity to state an opinion or to disagree. There’s something really exciting about the fact when someone final gets it that they’re just as valuable, they’re just as intelligent, they’re just as wise, they’re just as serving as the pastor in some cases, and god wants them to speak up, to state their mind to a question because that helps them grow and it helps the entire body of Christ.

Doug: In a sense it’s like flexing the muscle of your faith. If a muscle isn’t worked, it looses its shape atrophies, it becomes weaker. Sometimes, some of our disciple making or catechetical instruction as the pastor preaches on the pulpit, or the teacher teaches in the Sunday school classroom, and you just better write it down and believe without thinking it through. That creates an anemic kind of faith.

John: Leader’s job in the church is not to make disciples of themselves, our job is to make disciples of Christ. That means that we aren’t concerned with how much they reflect what I think and I want them to do. It means taking a different mindset of helping them gain the mind of Christ so that they can fulfill the calling of Christ.

Doug: So highly relational, deeply engaged people, people who are independent critical thinkers don’t just happen. What does the schedule of a pastor look like? How does that change when she or he is trying to develop those kind of exemplary followers?

John: Lots of early breakfast, lots of launches with people from the church. A lot of evenings, very little during a normal work hour. It’s really about being available to people when people are available. Of course, I would love it if people could meet with me from 9 to 11 then have a nice hour lunch and come back and we’ll do our second session from 1 to 3, but it just didn’t work that way. So for example, I usually would have lunch with Rick for example when we’re meeting weed meet for lunch every other week talk about what was going on in spiritual life talk about leadership issues. There are others where I would meet for breakfast, but most often it’s getting together in an evening where we can spend an hour or two together where we’re praying together, we’re going to the scripters, we’re just doing life together really. There’s no program that can account for the unpredicted work of the Holy Spirit. [00:25:00] Sometimes, we would go a directly I really was not anticipating we would go, but we got more out of that and we learned more from that and became closer from that than we ever would’ve done if we’ve gone way I thought we should go study the thing read the thing that I thought we should read.

Ep. 7 v. 6

[00:25:15]

Doug: So it’s a lot more about impartation and instruction.

John: Absolutely.

Doug: So you see pastors that are disciple making and developing leaders and seeing that process we produce, it’s a willingness to open one’s life to other people.

John: If you use the language of servant leadership which is another thing I’m passionate about, the primary principle in servant leadership is that we model leadership for others. It’s the modeling component that really is most important and of course that goes back to Jesus and his disciples again. It wasn’t just Jesus teaching, he wasn’t teaching them didactic lessons along the road, they were talking about life. He was asking questions they were making observations. But what he was doing more often than not was modeling for them what it meant to be a faithful God follower in the midst of world that has the reality of our world. The important aspect of modeling that we have to remember is that we experienced something together, and then we have a very intentional time of stopping and asking some questions about it. What was that we just went through, what did that mean, what was important, what could we have done that we didn’t do?

Doug: That’s really a key to this whole discipline and leadership development enterprise, isn’t it? It seems like then the alienated are the hardest people to help to be good followers of Jesus, followers in the church and of course to be really good leaders. They’re independent thinkers but they’re radically disengaged from the life of the church from the leadership of the church. How do we address that? How do you begin to get alienated people back on the bus, back on the track toward good discipleship and good leadership?

John: Good question. All I have is my experience on this one but I’ll tell you. From my experience, alienated followers are already leaders; they’re leading. Alienated independent critical thinkers are leading somebody, and in a church you tend to know who they are. So I would suggest in my opinion that alienated followers if you can identify what cause them to become alienated are easier to transform into exemplary followers than passive followers.

Doug: So re-engaging these folks relationally is key.

John: Critical. Now the issue is usually an alienated follower is alienated because of a relational problem. There’s something relational that has happened. It can be anything as innocent as the new pastor really like the old pastor he’s different than the old pastor. It can be something as negative as the pastor said something or an elder did something that was truly offensive and hurtful to that person or that group. So really what this is saying if we want to engage alienated followers, we have to be loving enough to take this step of saying hey, you got time for a cup of coffee? I just love to talk and see what’s up.

Doug: It comes back to that L-word to really deeply listening and seeing where they’re coming from.

John: Exactly.

Doug: Now when we’re talking about alienated followers, we’re not necessarily talking about the 5% or 10% of your church that is mentally ill or people who are in need of some sort of discipline because they’re values. These are people who are really thinking well but through some hurt, through some difficulty, through something that may have happened in the system way before pastor’s got there. Things that she can’t do anything about they’re disengaged. So reengaging them is an important strategy for the leader that wants to develop exemplary followers who become exemplary leaders.

John: You mentioned a key word there: “System.” There is a system to this. We have to recognize that we all exist in a system, and sometimes it is simply a matter of that the system has some unhealthy [00:30:00]aspects to it that needs to be corrected. But more often than not in my experience anyway, it is that there has been a hurt and someone needs to ask for forgiveness, someone needs to express love in a way that they can understand very often alienated followers because they don’t feel anybody cares.

Ep. 7 v.7

[00:30:25]

Doug: That’s really an important point that’s showing compassion empathy care is one of the keys to re-engaging people.

John: Right. And they’ve got so many strengths, alienated followers are not negative. It’s simply they’ve been alienated in some way. As a matter of fact, the fact that they’re probably leading a group somewhere tells you that they’re not incapable and they’re not passive. They have lots of capabilities and lots of abilities to be very good leaders in the church, they just have to be reengaged with vision mission values and usually the relationships with the leaders in the church.

Doug: That’s so good. Let’s talk about systems a little bit more kinda following along of that line. We talked about how organic how life on life, how meals and experiences, and evenings together can really help to develop followers and leaders. What about the systemic strategy, the systematic approach to discipleship and leadership development like a mapped out strategic leadership pipeline. How does that fit into the more organic approach?

John: I think it’s kind of both end it’s not neither or. There’s nothing wrong when we talked about the fact that problematic is not really the way to go, that’s not saying there’s no value in programs, there is. It’s just that’s not the big answer. I think that in general terms what we have to recognize is that if it is true that leadership development is a stream within the larger river of discipleship, what we want to do as leaders is to simply recognize that and create some entry points for a leadership development within the discipleship process. In our church in my way of doing that, that means in apprenticing program. So every leader has one to two sometimes three apprentices. What they have done is simply watch people around them who tend to be drawn to them and they recognize something in them and they are loving enough to go to them and say, I have really recognized in you that you have a love for kids, and not only that, but you’re really good at organizing. Shelly, would you mind if we try to develop that in you? I would love to walk with you for the next six months to a year and just see what God wants to do with that. What I see in you is this love for kids and an organizational ability that god really could use.

Doug: So it’s really intentional and systematic, but it comes out and it comes through as organic and as life on life.

John: And along the way then, we would offer some seminars for the training, but again, 70% of what we’re doing is learning on the job it’s relational interactive, and then 20% of that would the modeling coaching sort of feedback thing where we take intentional times whether it’s breakfast whether it’s lunch whether it’s time in the evening to just reflect. So tell me what happened this last week, what were your biggest challenges, what are you celebrating, and then what can we work on together, where can I help here, and then how can I pray for you?

Doug: That’s really important. What would you recommend to a pastor or to a department leader or to a volunteer leader who’s trying to develop disciples to who become leaders? What are some of those first steps toward implementing an emerging leader strategy?

John: Number 1 is pray. Ask God to show you those people that he’s provided to you trusting that he has provided people that he wants you to develop and you gave you eyes to see them. Then pay attention to the people around you. There are people who’re asking your questions. Maybe they’re talking about what are you doing this weekend. Maybe they’re asking more bible questions about have you ever read this, what does god mean when he says this. They’re coming to you for you for a reason. So identify those people, and then watch them so that you can say honestly I see something in you that I think god want me to develop, and the next step is simply asking them whether they’d be interested in doing an apprenticeship with you so you could walk together side by side and just see what God does.

Doug: You said this several time John during our talk together. [00:35:00] I see this in you, I see something in you. That just seems to be basic leadership development competency. Say more about that, how do you hone that skill of seeing things in people?

John: Sure. First of all, I need to say that’s from Ferguson at Christ Community, they have a great resources that they’ve provided to us at the leadership network and is basically ICNU, I see in you. It’s simply emphasizing that we need to pay attention. It’s recognizing that almost all relationships in our lives are based on affinity, baseball fans, find other baseball fans. How do we know? We hear them talking our language. We see them watching the Cubs. We see the hat on head. There are just as many signs in the Christian church of people who have an affinity with us, it’s there in the same bible study. They’re asking us questions. They ask if we wanna go to coffee. That’s affinity, those are people you start with because those are the people god is giving you.

Doug: That’s really great. In a lot of ways, this is not rocket science, it’s becoming a very authentic follower, an exemplary follower of Jesus thinking critically, being engaged with the leadership, and then beginning to reproduce that in other people.

John: I would suggest that it’s really getting back to the way Jesus did it and maybe John Baptist. One of my favorite passages for this is John 140 to 45 in that area where John the Baptist says, “Look, the realm of god takes away the sin of the world.” In the passage says and it was some of his follower some of John’s followers follows Jesus because John pointed them to Jesus, and that’s the same thing we’re doing.

Doug: That requires a great deal of humility and of expensive kingdom thinking.

John: It cannot be about us or we won’t be able to do that.

Doug: John, that’s a bird to end on. Thank you for taking the time for this conversation today here on the Luminex podcast. We appreciate your leadership of our whole organization, and it’s been a delight to talk with you, thank you so much.

John: Thank you Doug, I’m honored. Thank you for doing this, and god bless you.