Flourishing in Ministry: Taking Action & Taking Risks: Andy Crouch

Full-Text Transcript

As pastors and ministry leaders, how can we honestly assess our life and leadership and move toward greater flourishing?

Jason Daye
In this episode, I’m joined by Andy Crouch. Andy is a lifelong minister of the gospel. He currently serves as Partner for Theology and Culture at Praxis. He has served as the InterVarsity Campus Pastor at Harvard University, as well as a number of other ministry roles. His writings have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time, and a number of other publications. He’s written several books, including the award-winning Strong and Weak, Embracing a Life of Love, Risk, and True Flourishing. Together, Andy and I explore the idea of flourishing in both life and leadership. Andy shares how we can take action and take risks that will help lead us from grasping for control or withdrawing, and lead us into greater flourishing and greater impact in our ministry. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, and welcome to yet another insightful episode of Frontstage Backstage. I’m your host, Jason Daye, and each week, I have the privilege and the honor of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader. Together, we dive into a conversation in an effort to help you, pastors, and ministry leaders just like you embrace a healthy rhythm and really flourish in both life and leadership. We are proud to be a part of the Pastor Serve Network, and each week, not only do we provide a conversation for you to enjoy, we also create a downloadable toolkit that compliments these conversations. In this toolkit, you’ll find a lot of different resources, including a Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. In that growth guide, you’ll find insights and questions that you can process through yourself and even take the leadership team at your local church through to dig more deeply into the topic at hand. So, we encourage you to check that out. You can find that PastorServe.org/network. Now, at Pastor Serve, we love walking alongside pastors and ministry leaders, and if you would like a taste of that yourself, we’re offering complimentary coaching sessions with one of our trusted coaches. You can find more information on that at PastorServe.org/freesession. So be sure to check that out. Now if you’re joining us on YouTube, give us a thumbs up, please. That helps the algorithm. It helps other pastors and ministry leaders be exposed to Frontstage Backstage, these topics, and these guests. So we encourage you to and thank you in advance for doing that. Then, if you could take a moment to drop your name and the name of your church in the comments below, we absolutely love getting to know our audience better, and our team will be praying for you and for your ministry. Whether you’re joining us on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform, please take time to subscribe or follow so you do not miss out on any of these great conversations. We have a great one for you today. At this time, I’d like to welcome Andy Crouch to the show. Andy, welcome.

Andy Crouch
Hello, Jason, great to be here.

Jason Daye
So, good to have you on Frontstage Backstage. Thank you for making the time to hang out with us today. We’re going to be talking about something that is really encouraging. We’re talking about flourishing in ministry, and that’s something that all of us in ministry can’t get enough of, right? We all need to flourish.

Andy Crouch
It would be ideal. If we could figure out how to do it, it would be good.

Jason Daye
And that’s why we have you here, Andy. You’re gonna give us all the secrets, right? So you wrote a book, I don’t know, it’s been eight or nine years ago now. It’s been a little bit, back when you were in high school, right? So you wrote a book that is called Strong and Weak, and that book really became, in many ways, kind of an instant classic. In fact, InterVarsity Press has rereleased the book as part of their signature collection, Andy. Well deserved. But really, it is a fantastic book.

Andy Crouch
It’s vintage now. It’s actually vintage.

Jason Daye
Oh, is that what it is? Vintage is cool, vintage is cool. But it really is a fantastic book, and if those of you watching or listening have not had the opportunity to read it, you really need to pick it up. It’s been helpful in my own life. I know it’s been helpful in so many other pastor’s and ministry leader’s lives, and Andy, you dove into this idea of flourishing. It feels like forever ago now, right? Way back when, pre-pandemic, and now since the pandemic, the ideas and the conversations around flourishing just have continued to grow because we kind of felt what it was like not to flourish during those times. It was challenging. But I’d like for us to really dig in a little bit to this idea of flourishing. One of the concepts that you shared, for me, personally I found so helpful was you kind of set up this quadrant of life. What life might look like, and how we are experiencing living out our lives. That quadrant has two axes. It has authority and vulnerability. I’d love, Andy, for you just to begin there. Start with how we get to authority and vulnerability and how those are kind of the crux of those axes in life.

Andy Crouch
Yeah, so I think authority and vulnerability are, in a way, the divinely given drama of being human. The drama of being human is that because of the way God created us, we have authority, which I define most broadly as a capacity for meaningful action, the ability to actually make a difference in the world. That is sort of the birthright, or the created right, of human beings, more than any other creature, in a way. Not that other creatures don’t act, but the capacity for meaningful action is unique. Kind of to a unique extent, we human beings have it. All human beings. But at the same time, and this is kind of the drama, we also have this incredible exposure to meaningful risk, which is my definition of vulnerability. My very broad definition. We human beings, in a way, have more vulnerability than any other creature, even as we have more authority than any other creature. Vulnerability and exposure to risk are things like our awareness of our own mortality, finitude, and limits in a way that we seem more haunted by than any other creature, perhaps. Our dependence on each other and our need for emotional connection with others is more than any other creature. I mean, your dog needs you for sure to pay attention, but your spouse needs you even more, right? And you need your spouse. The amazing seasons of dependence that are built into human life at the beginning and the end of a typical human life. Those are years where we depend completely on our parents or family to care for us as infants, but then also the years at the end of our lives, of a natural, long life, where we depend on other people. All of these are like dimensions of vulnerability. So the sort of fun idea in Strong and Weak is that what we call flourishing actually comes from both, rather than being kind of maximizing authority and minimizing vulnerability. That’s why I set up this two by two, where we actually have two axes. I put authority on the vertical and vulnerability on the horizontal. Up and to the right. That place everybody wants to be is up and to the right, is actually high authority and high vulnerability, by which I mean high risk. Actually, a flourishing life is a life where you’re aware that something’s at stake and you’re not sure how it’s going to go, kind of like this interview, right? What makes this worth doing? What you and I are doing right now. I mean, people could go read the book, right? But there would be very little risk in that. Even for me as the author, I wrote that book a long time ago, and it’s out in the world. I hope it’s helpful. It was a risk at the time. But part of why I think people want to watch, and we want to see an author show up and talk, is that you’re going to ask questions that I don’t know what they are. We haven’t rehearsed this. You haven’t promised me script control or anything, right? Actually, what you’re doing in this interaction, we’re experiencing, and we’re modeling, is a kind of risk that is like part of being human. Yes, I bring some authority, maybe. I’ve thought about these topics. But what makes it a healthy conversation, a flourishing conversation, will be if we both actually find ways to take risks. So up and to the right is the flourishing we’re made for. But then, I don’t know, do you want me to quickly go through the other quadrants?

Jason Daye
Yeah, let’s go ahead. Let’s dive in. Yeah, there’s three others, right?

Andy Crouch
There are three other options, right? We human beings spend a lot of our time, in a way, in some of the other options. So let’s go just down and to the right. So that’s where you have high vulnerability but low authority. So you’re very much at risk. You’re very conscious that something could go really wrong, but you have no capacity to act. I would actually fundamentally call that experience, the experience of suffering. All of us have been in a situation where we were very aware of risk, but we had no capacity to change the situation or affect the situation. These are the most traumatic experiences of our lives and the most difficult experiences. So that corner of suffering is very real. All human beings go there. Then there’s the lower left corner, which is always kind of interesting. It’s like neither one. No, no. It’s no authority and no vulnerability. I would actually call that safety, which is to say, it’s an environment where you’re not being asked to do anything, and you don’t, at least sense, that you’re risking anything. I would actually say this is where every healthy human life is meant to start. That when we ourselves, if we have children, part of what parents do is limit their child’s authority and also protect their child. That’s a healthy thing, but it’s not where we’re meant to stay. The issue with the lower left corner is not that it’s not a good place to begin. It’s that it’s not a good place to end up. But when we end up there, I would call it withdrawal, and that’s where I just back away from the world. I back away from the action that I’m called to in the world and the risk I’m called to. We might want to talk about, why we end up choosing that corner. It’s one thing for a child to naturally, appropriately be in that corner. Why do grown-ups end up back sort of sucking their thumb and wanting to sort of curl up in a ball? Well, there are reasons, and they’re often related to the suffering corner. Then the third one is, in some ways the most interesting, which is authority without vulnerability. That’s up and to the left. High authority, low vulnerability. In the book, I have a name for it, which I’ll mention in a moment. But I’ve realized one of the frustrating things about writing the book. Books are done, or, as they say, books aren’t actually finished, but they are abandoned. So every book, the writer has just abandoned it at some point, like it has to be good enough. I wish I hadn’t abandoned Strong and Weak before I realized the right name for this corner. The proper name for the corner of authority without vulnerability is control. When I can act, but with no risk, I have control. I actually think in many ways, this is kind of the human dream. We wish we could have control. In the book, though, I call it exploiting because what happens when we seek control is we actually use and, at the limit case, abuse other people to gain a sense of control over the world that we’re not meant to have because we’re meant to live with risk. So that’s the basic structure of the book. The book is just a very simple exploration of what each of those corners is like, how we end up there, and how we move back toward the flourishing we’re made for.

Jason Daye
Yeah. Excellent, Andy. Thank you for that overview. It was very helpful. As you’re explaining those, I’m sure everyone watching, or everyone listening, is doing some self-reflection, as we often do. As we read through books, we hear these kinds of conversations and say, Okay, what quadrant do I find myself in today? I mean, because what’s fascinating is we think of pastors and ministry leaders, right? We all want to be in that flourishing space. Obviously, that’s where we really feel like that’s where we’re most effective.

Andy Crouch
In our heart of hearts that’s where we want to be.

Jason Daye
Yet, in seasons, we find ourselves in different quadrants. Now I would say, Andy, and I’m not gonna put words in your mouth, but I believe you’d agree with this, that there are things external that put us sometimes in these different quadrants, right? Then there are things internal, things and decisions that we make, that move us into these quadrants. I’d like to kind of explore both of those. So talk about this a bit. Andy, if you’re talking to a ministry leader who finds themselves in a suffering season right now, from external choices that they did not make. What’s the encouragement there? How do we begin to process through that time in a way that allows us to draw near to God and continue the hope for moving into the flourishing again, right?

Andy Crouch
Wow, yes. I have two thoughts about that. One is something you can do, in a sense, on your own or with God, really, but alone in a way. The other is the role of other people at those moments. So to start with what I can actually choose when I’m in that suffering corner? I mean, one of the amazing things about Scripture is that it gives us models, pictures, and kind of stories of people in all of the corners actually right. The characteristic faithful response to the suffering corner is what we call lament. I’m thinking especially of the Psalms of lament. Though there are other places in the Bible where we read and encounter laments. Jeremiah, Job, and so forth. The key quality, or the key distinctiveness of lament, is that it actually brings into my relationship with God, the pain of where I am. So it’s not just acknowledging and rehearsing to myself the pain I’m in. It’s actually going to God, up to and including confronting God in a kind of adversarial way with the conditions that surround me. About a third of the Psalms are primarily characterized by, hey, you up there, I’m in trouble. You don’t seem to be moving, or you’ve allowed my enemy to triumph, or you allow the wicked to prosper. There are lots of different nuances to this and dimensions of this that get unfolded in the Psalms. But what they all have in common, with an interesting, almost exception in Psalm 88, is that there is also this active rehearsal of but I am still going to trust you. I’m going to tell you exactly what’s going on in my life, but I’m also going to rehearse my trust in you. Psalm 88 is interesting because it ends without a lot of hope in God. It ends dark. My friends you put away from me and darkness is my only friend or my only companion. I actually think it’s very significant that that Psalm is in the Bible. I think it’s tremendously encouraging that we can have, represented in the Bible, someone who, in the end, as they lay out their case, by the time they’re done, they’re like, I got nothing and I don’t see you anywhere. Literally, the only thing that makes it not just a total cry of despair is literally the first word of the Psalm. I don’t have it all memorized, but it’s basically “My God”. The psalmist is still laying this out in relationship with God. As far as he feels from God and he clearly feels extremely far. One other thing about Psalm 88 and I think this is worth dwelling on because this is so much part of our reality. Every human but also in ministry, and very often in ministry, no one is ever given permission to bring your complaint to God, right? Even though that’s a huge part of what is effective. What did Elijah do? What did Jeremiah do? They all brought their complaints to God. Why haven’t we had that modeled for us in ministry? Malcolm Guide is a poet who during Covid, wrote his way through all 150 Psalms and wrote a sonnet for each Psalm. It’s called David’s Crown. It’s an amazing collection of Psalms. In the forward, I don’t remember the name of the author, but the author of the forward observes that if you open the Psalms up to the middle of the book, you would think that would be Psalm 75 because that would be the middle. There are 150 divided by two. But because Psalm 119 is so long, for various reasons, the actual middle of the Psalms is 88. So essentially, where does Psalms start? Blessed is the man who does not walk in the Council of Godly but has this blessed life of God. Psalm 1. Psalm 150, praise the Lord. Everything in creation, praise the Lord. So it starts with a kind of righteousness and uprightness and ends in praise, and it goes all the way down to the valley of Psalm 88 where we also find God acknowledged. So that work of lament is the work of the lower right corner, and when you neglect it, I actually think that’s when you end up in withdrawal. When you don’t bring the very justifiable complaint you have to God about your circumstances, you will end up withdrawing into a kind of detachment, depression, or suppressed anger. So I know that was a very long answer. Let me just say the one other thing I think you need, though, in that corner. The three corners that are not the healthy corner. Actually, I have to put it a slightly different way. There are three things leaders do in ancient Israel. Prophet, Priest, and King. I think they correspond to what brings us out of the three corners. This is also not in the book, by the way, I abandoned it. So the Prophet, we can get back to this. But the prophet confronts people in the upper left corner. People who are exploiting and people who are seeking control. The King, I think is meant to draw people out of the safety corner. The king is meant to live this kind of flourishing life. The king lives the flourishing life, ideally, and takes risks on behalf of the people, too. In the spring of the year, when kings go out to war, they take risks on behalf of the good of their people. The king is meant to pull you out of the withdrawal corner. Then the Priest is the one who meets you when you don’t have authority on your own. Originally, you don’t have the authority to come before God, but the priest gives you a way, in your vulnerability before God, to also have authority with God through the sacrifice that you offer and that the priest ratifies and offers on your behalf. Well, I think we can extend that to say, whenever we are lacking in ourselves the capacity for meaningful action, we should pray for and seek out a priest, in that sense. Someone who will lay their hands on you, who will sacrificially accompany you and say, you do have authority here. It may feel like you have no authority, but you do have authority as a child of God. So lament is kind of a private practice, but seeking out someone who can play that priestly role is a shared practice. Someone pointed out to me, the very worst thing that can happen to you is to need a priest and have a prophet show up.

Jason Daye
Oh, yeah. Right.

Andy Crouch
You need someone who will comfort you and bear the suffering with you. That’s what a good priestly kind of posture is. The worst thing in the world is when the critic arrives and is like, let me tell you about your idolatry and injustice now. But on the other hand, communities that only have priests and never have prophets also have a failure mode, right? So you need both just at the right time, each one.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that. That’s powerful. So, suffering, that quadrant suffering, which we do find ourselves in, in seasons. This idea of lamenting and that idea of reaching out. That communal aspect. That priestly, pastoral-postured person in our life. Important. Now, we kind of moved into this withdrawal, the safety quadrant, which I think is fascinating, the two pieces of this. The safety piece that kind of turns into withdrawal, right? Can turn into withdrawal whenever we are trying to be too safe. The reality is, and I love your thoughts on this, Andy, the idea of security is something that’s become almost an idol in many ways in our current culture, right? We want to be secure financially, right? Individually we want to be secure, financially, or as a nation we want to be secure. So there’s that piece of it, but then there’s the security of the big bads out there. We have defensive postures and those types of things. So security has become such an idol in so many ways. How does that play into this idea of safety and withdrawal? Not to put you on the spot.

Andy Crouch
No, it’s so right. It does feel like the affliction of our time is this withdrawal corner. I don’t know quite how to answer your question, in some ways, but I will give it a little anecdote that I think will just underscore this. When I was really just developing these ideas, I had a chance to present them at a Christian college in a Chapel environment. Very wonderfully, the chapel team prepared for prayer ministry after the presentation of the corners. Basically the invitation was, if you find yourself in any of these kinds of broken corners, you might say, Come and we’ll pray. So it was one of those beautiful times when God moved, and I don’t know, 100 students, maybe, out of the 1000 in the chapel, came for prayer. So we spent all this time in prayer, and we’re debriefing afterward. One of the questions that occurred to me to ask was, well, as you were praying with different students, which corner were they in? Were they in the suffering corner? Were they in the control corner or the withdrawal corner? It was like 90% withdrawal. I had a student that I got to pray with who said, I am realizing I am avoiding friendship, even with my roommates, like I just avoid my roommates. I felt this was a few years ago, and it was before covid. I think part of what was so damaging about covid, for almost everybody, is there was a kind of enforced withdrawal from meaningful action, from authority in the world, and from risk. There was this locking down and masking, and I understand the legitimate reasons, perhaps, but what’s behind this? Let’s get to this corner where we’re not in danger. But I think that almost authorized for so many of us, a retreat from the world and from others. On the one hand, it was very difficult for people, but I think it also kind of accelerated a trend that was already present in our culture, which I witnessed at that chapel service. That already young people, I think the baby boomers, if I can generalize wildly here, were a control-seeking generation. Kind of taught to grab the opportunity, but maybe not as good at vulnerability always, right? But I think this current emerging generation of adults is in a withdrawal culture, and the digital world facilitates that with lots of things. So how do you get out of it? This is where the king model is interesting. The king is meant to live out a kind of full life in a way that draws the whole people into proper worship, the proper care of the land, and all that stuff. I think the only way I know out of this is to immerse myself in the stories of true humanity, I guess. Of course, above all, the story of Jesus. Just go back to the Gospels. Read the Gospels. I’ll tell you a funny thing today. I’m doing a series of interviews today. You’re one of a couple of conversations I’ve had and I’ll tell you, when I finish something like this, I feel a little tired, which is fine and appropriate. But what am I tempted to do? I’m tempted to pull up something on the screen again and just surf, right? So I made a decision today that most days I don’t have the presence of mind to do. I happen to be reading a novel right now. Don’t laugh at me, but it’s Tolstoy’s War and Peace. That terrible, long novel that people don’t want to read. It’s actually amazing, I want to say. It’s the second time I’ve read it. I thought, You know what I’m going to do between my very high-intensity engagements here, where I’m going to be tempted at the end of this to withdraw and say, Oh, I just need some alone time now, or whatever. I’m actually going to open up this novel and read like, three or four pages and you know what Tolstoy is doing is giving you these characters who are kind of forced into these high-stakes situations. War and also peace is really more about family, romance, and love. Who do you marry and what happens when you marry? It’s actually been an amazing experience to choose, rather than choose withdrawal, to choose yeah, I need a little break. I can’t do a whole bunch of work. But instead of just withdrawing, I’m going to actually step into a story of people living at a time of intensity, and it’s been much more refreshing than my normal activities. Twitter or whatever. I mean, it’s just so much better. So I would actually say, now, entertainment isn’t that helpful. Entertainment is one of the primary ways we stay in that lower left corner, just sort of passive entertainment. But choose a good book, choose a good novel, or choose a poem. I think poetry can be great because poets have to take risks to do what they do. Immerse yourself in some stories, literature, or music, that kind of draws you back into, oh yeah, oh yeah. That’s what life looks like. I think that’s how you get out of that safety corner.

Jason Daye
That’s awesome, Andy. As a pastor or ministry leader who finds themselves in that withdrawn corner and feels or senses, there was a time when I was maybe a little more active, a little more bold, a little more out there, and driven by that hope. But now I kind of feel, you know what, I’m kind of on cruise control a bit. I’m withdrawn. I’m isolating myself a bit. What words would you have for a ministry leader who finds himself kind of in that season?

Andy Crouch
I mean, I think that you need to very possibly sit down, take a walk, or whatever, and ask these two questions. What’s my next meaningful action and what’s my next meaningful risk? So I do this many days. I wake up and one of the things I do as I’m starting my day. I sort of think through the day in these terms, what’s the meaningful action I need to take today? I think one of the reasons we end up maybe on cruise control is our lives can end up two ways, routine or reactive. So routine is you sort of know how to do the thing, and so you do it again. Reactive is when other people give you assignments and you just fulfill them. I live with this thing called email. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. But Ben Evans, who’s a technology analyst, says email is a to-do list that anyone in the world can edit. What a great idea. So, I can spend my whole day in routine and reaction, but I need to make room in my day to say, okay, yes, there will be things I need to respond to. Yes, there are probably some routines I need to go through. But what’s the meaningful action that pushes towards something that I know needs to happen, and it can’t happen all at once, but the next step can happen today?Then, very equally important, what’s the meaningful risk? How do I show up today and be willing to take a meaningful risk? In the course of writing the book, one of the things I started thinking about is, Well, I’ll tell you honestly, I thought about a kind of sad thing, which is this amazing sermon that I heard a very prominent preacher preach about listening to the Holy Spirit and responding to the Holy Spirit. Beautiful sermon that I heard him preach three times in three completely different places over about two years, word for word. The irony was this was a sermon about actually responding in real-time to the promptings of God, but somehow God prompted him to share the exact same words, an anecdote, and tear up at the same moment. The first time I was so moved by it, and the second time I was like, this is a little weird. I heard this a few months ago in another city. The third time I was like, this is manipulative, like what this guy’s doing is, maybe, well, it probably is, right? But it’s not just manipulative. He’s not practicing it. He’s just got something he knows works, it’s a new audience, and so he just does it again. So I was like, first of all, I thought, I never want to become that. I never want to be the person who just has the script and the routine and does it, even if I look really good doing it, or I seem really pious doing it. So then I’m like, How do I avoid this? I think it generated a healthy horror in me. Unfortunately, this is a person who went on to have his ministry collapse because underneath that amazingly well-prepared surface, he wasn’t living a life of genuine risk. He was living a life in the upper left corner, 100%. Anyway, one of the things I started thinking about is, who has to say the same words over and over, and yet somehow make them matter over and over? It’s actors. So I actually went to a few friends who act on Broadway. You know, every night they have a script, they don’t get to make it up. It’s not like they’re writing a new sermon, right? So even if you’re a pastor who maybe you have a couple of services at your church you have to preach. You’re not going to write a new sermon for each service, you’re going to do the same material. But how is it fresh? The sixth time in a week because they do six shows a week. I got several interesting responses, but one actor said to me something that really struck me. He said, Yeah, it’s the same text every night. He said, But before every performance, I decide what risk am I going to take tonight? There’s going to be some moment in the show where I’m going to try some new emotion or some new way of interacting with the other actor on stage. He said, I’ve always got, when I go out on stage, there’s something I’m going to try, and I don’t know how it’s going to go, even though the words stay the same. That’s how he keeps it fresh every night. So I’ve adopted that. I do, you know, I have this material. I’ve talked about the quadrants before, right? When I’m preparing to give a talk about it, I literally ask myself, what’s the new thing? What’s the new risk I’m going to try, even with this material that’s familiar, and I know helps? How am I going to take a risk?

Jason Daye
Yeah, absolutely love that. That’s fantastic, Andy. Super helpful because I think that that withdrawn thing, as we say in ministry, I think it’s challenging. That’s a challenging quadrant that I think a lot of people slip into unknowingly, right? You slip into that. Suffering you don’t slip into so much. Suffering hits you. You got it, you know? But I feel like that withdrawn, you know, one day we wake up and realize we’re there. So, I think that’s key, and I think some great insights. Now let’s move to the quadrant that’s probably gotten the most press. It’s like every day there’s another story within the church world of control or exploitation. So how do we end up there in ministry? How do we end up in that quadrant?

Andy Crouch
Well, maybe here’s a moment to mention what I think is the other most important idea in the book, especially for leaders and especially for pastors. There’s a whole chapter on it. It’s called Hidden vulnerability, and it’s about this additional layer, in a way, on this reality, which is, when you’re a leader, there are risks that you bear that other people don’t see. So you can be really living in the upper right of high authority, high vulnerability, but your congregation, or even your staff, if you work with a staff, or the people in the system under your leadership, they don’t see the risks you see, they just see the authority. It’s the same way with children and parents. When you become a parent, you realize this is the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever done. But when you were a child did you ever think your parents were vulnerable? Not as a small child. You never thought that, even though they were and they were feeling it in really new ways as they learned how to be a parent. That dynamic of hidden vulnerability means that the systems around us, not just in ourselves and maybe our own quest for control, but the systems around us want us to minimize vulnerability and maximize authority. It’s often out of that desire for security. This happens at a national political level all the time. Why do nations elect strong male leaders? It’s because we want to be safe, and that means we need somebody in control. Now, that leader, when they get into that position, they will realize there’s all these vulnerabilities that no one told them about before they became president or whatever, and that they can’t talk about. Not fully. Not publicly. But the people want authority without vulnerability. The honest truth about every human system is it wants to be told, we’re going to be safe. We’re gonna be okay. Everything’s fine. They don’t actually want to know. That is like this feedback loop in the life of a leader that then feeds on our own quest, sometimes, for control and it leads to a flight from vulnerability in the leader. A doubling down on public and private expressions of control always ends up exploiting people because you can’t lead people well without risk. If you’re trying to create a risk-free environment, you’re going to do damage. If you’re trying to have control in an environment, you will do damage, and you’ll eventually do violence. I mean, sometimes physical, but sometimes a violation of other people. As a parent, I’ve experienced it. When my need for control was challenged by the behavior of my kids, I would lash out in a way that wasn’t proportionate, wasn’t appropriate, didn’t help them change course, and that wounded them, right? That’s the moment you realize, oh my gosh, I’m not responding this way because it’s the way to health for my kids or me. I’m responding this way because I’m seeking control. So this is the hardest thing because you’ll never be able to fully share all the vulnerabilities with the people in your system, but you have got to find a way to stay on that risk-pursuing journey. God always has another meaningful risk for you to take. Control is not where you want to end up. You need some people in your life who do really understand, if only so you cannot become self-pitying.  When I think about a lot of these failures of exploitation, what I actually think was underneath it was not so much arrogance as self-pity. My job is so hard. People don’t understand. It’s taken so much for me to get here. There’s all these narratives. Therefore, I’m justified in this bit of exploitation, or this additional bit, or this additional bit, and you’ve got to have friends who just short-circuit that process and say, yeah, it is hard, and we’re here for you. You don’t have to pull the rip cord and do stupid things to deal with how hard it is.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s super helpful. Andy, as we kind of survey the church world today, we’ve touched on these different quadrants. What is your hope, Andy, for pastors and ministry leaders, the church, to move ever more effectively into the flourishing quadrant?

Andy Crouch
A couple of things come to mind. The very first thing that comes to mind is actually relationship. Friendship is a better word. Friendship. I don’t call you servants any more. I call you friends. I mean, that’s an amazing thing for Jesus to say to this group of people who really don’t even understand what’s going on at that moment. He said, but still, you’re going to be my friends. I think I see trends, actually, that are healthy toward more collaboration in ministry and towards more shared authority. I don’t see a whole lot of evidence in Scripture for solopreneurs who build a thing all by themselves and somehow sustain it. Of course, they have a bunch of bunch of people reporting to them, but no one they call friends. Instead, I see this amazing interdependence. I see Paul, yearning for his friends to come join him, and grieving when they have to go elsewhere. I think the more we do this as friends, the more risk we can take because you can only take so much risk by yourself. But together, we can take way more meaningful risks than we can alone, and there are people to help us, to be our prophets and our priests in a way. So it should not be the case that being a pastor is the loneliest occupation, and it is often the case. I would say there were seasons in my life when I did kind of feel that. I haven’t been in church pastoral roles, but I have been in ministry my whole life in one way or another, and there were seasons when I felt very alone. I am really grateful that by the grace of God, but also because I kind of tried to pursue this I now feel most days that I really have friends that I’m doing this with, and it changes everything. If we could see that replicated in all the different forms of ministry and church life, that would be good. The other is, I don’t want to put this too harshly, but as a leader, you’ve got to find the people who are willing to take the risk and double down on them. I feel like leaders have spent a lot of time reacting to people who themselves are trying to be either in control or safety. This is very complex in any communal environment. But, I mean, you can only do so much to get people out of that cocoon. You can only do so much to get people off virtual church and back to the real thing. Without dishonoring people, or whatever, you’ve got to invest your energy in the people who are willing to take risks with you, and those will become people you can trust. They won’t all become your friends because sometimes in leadership, the people you lead can’t always be your friends in the same way. Some of them will, though. But what will happen is a kind of life will well up in the organization that does not well up when it’s just reacting to the people who want control and the people want safety. So I think you know, Jesus did this. He sort of identified through his preaching, he identified who’s the good soil, who has the heart that wants the risk, who’s willing to come ask a question. Invest in those people. Double down on those people and you’ll start to find capacity growing in your ministry environment that you don’t have to generate all the energy for. That would be my hope is that we’ll find the people willing to take the risk and not just seek the left side of the graph.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that. It’s a great word, brother. Great word. Man, Andy, this has been absolutely fantastic, brother. Like you, I wasn’t really sure what all would come out of this conversation. I knew it would be good, though, right? This has been a gem of a conversation. Brother, absolutely enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Andy, tell us real quickly if people want to connect with you or connect with your ministry. Tell us a little bit about that. What’s the best way for them to learn more about what you are doing in the kingdom?

Andy Crouch
Yeah, I have a very minimal website, Andy-Crouch.com. But at least you’ll find my books there. In my day job, now I’m with Praxis, and I would love for people to know and visit our site, praxislabs.org. We couldn’t afford praxis.org, so praxislabs.org all one word. Our work at Praxis is with entrepreneurs who are pursuing their business and nonprofit building as people of faith, and we’re creating some really fun stuff that could be really good resources on playbooks, on kind of risk-taking life. We teach the quadrant, by the way, to all of our entrepreneurs, and we’re looking to move up and to the right as Christians build things in the world. You’ll see kind of our redemptive playbooks of how you do that. Might be good. It’s not quite war and peace, but you might read it when you’re looking for encouragement because there’s a lot of encouragement in there.

Jason Daye
I love that, Andy. It’s such a great space in the world that God has you right now, really investing and encouraging those who are seeking to do things that make a difference with the heart of a Christ-follower. Absolutely love the investment and great resources there for pastors and ministry leaders, for people within their own congregations, and those types of things. So love it. Thank you, brother. Just a note to those of you who are watching or listening along, we’ll have links to Andy’s book Strong and Weak and his other books. We’ll have links to Praxis Labs so you can learn more about that all in the toolkit for this episode. You can find that PastorServe.org/network, so be sure to check that out. Brother. It has been a joy. It’s been great. Thank you for hanging out with me. Thank you so much for making the time to be on Frontstage Backstage. God bless you, my friend.

Andy Crouch
Alright. Thanks, Jason.

Jason Daye
Now, before you go, I want to remind you of an incredible free resource that our team puts together every single week to help you and your team dig more deeply and maximize the conversation that we just had. This is the weekly toolkit that we provide. And we understand that it’s one thing to listen or watch an episode, but it’s something entirely different to actually take what you’ve heard, what you’ve watched, what you’ve seen, and apply it to your life and to your ministry. You see, FrontStage BackStage is more than just a podcast or YouTube show about ministry leadership, we are a complete resource to help train you and your entire ministry team as you seek to grow and develop in life in ministry. Every single week, we provide a weekly toolkit which has all types of tools in it to help you do just that. Now you can find this at PastorServe.org/network. That’s PastorServe.org/network. And there you will find all of our shows, all of our episodes and all of our weekly toolkits. Now inside the toolkit are several tools including video links and audio links for you to share with your team. There are resource links to different resources and tools that were mentioned in the conversation, and several other tools, but the greatest thing is the ministry leaders growth guide. Our team pulls key insights and concepts from every conversation with our amazing guests. And then we also create engaging questions for you and your team to consider and process, providing space for you to reflect on how that episode’s topic relates to your unique context, at your local church, in your ministry and in your life. Now you can use these questions in your regular staff meetings to guide your conversation as you invest in the growth of your ministry leaders. You can find the weekly toolkit at PastorServe.org/network We encourage you to check out that free resource. Until next time, I’m Jason Daye encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well. God bless.