How Thriving as Leaders Leads Others to Thrive : Justin Irving

Full-Text Transcript

As pastors and ministry leaders, we long to see the people and ministries that God has entrusted to us truly thrive. So, what do we need to pay attention to in ourselves to help those we serve flourish?

Jason Daye
In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Justin Irving. Justin is a Professor of Christian Leadership and the Chair of the Department of Leadership and Discipleship at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. His most recent book is entitled Healthy Leadership for Thriving Organizations. Together, Justin and I look at some of the relationships between healthy leadership and healthy ministry organizations. Justin also pinpoints some of those elements in our lives as ministry leaders where we may actually think we’re doing better than we are and how we can honestly assess those areas so that we can thrive and help those we’re leading flourish as well. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, so good to be with you again this week. Welcome to another episode of Frontstage Backstage. I’m your host, Jason Daye. Each week, I have the privilege of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader, and we dive into a conversation all in an effort to help you and pastors and ministry leaders just like you embrace healthy rhythms and really have the opportunity to flourish and to thrive in both life and leadership. We are proud to be a part of the Pastor Serve Network. Not only do we create and provide an episode with a conversation for you every week, but our team also creates a toolkit that complements the conversation that we’re about to engage in. In that toolkit, you’ll find a number of resources, including a Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. Now this growth guide is designed for you and for you to even take your ministry leaders at your local church through and has insights and questions for deeper conversation around the topic that we discuss. So we encourage you to take advantage of this resource that we provide for you, and you can find that at PastorServe.org/network, so be sure to check that out. Now, at Pastor Serve, we love walking alongside pastors and ministry leaders. If you’d like to learn more about how you can receive a free session with one of our trusted coaches, you can get information at PastorServe.org/freesession and get the details there. So you can check that out. Then, if you’re joining us on YouTube, please give us a thumbs up and take a moment to drop your name and the name of your church in the comments below. We do love getting to know our audience better and our team will be praying for you and for your ministry. So you can drop that in the comments. Then, if you have any questions that pop up during this conversation, be sure to drop those down as well, and we’ll be happy to answer those. Whether you join us on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform, please be sure to subscribe or to follow you. You do not want to miss out on any of these great conversations. Today, I’m excited to welcome Justin Irving to the show. Justin, welcome.

Justin Irving
Well, hi, Jason, thanks so much for having me. Really looking forward to leaning into conversations about sort of being in a healthy place as leaders so we can serve our people well.

Jason Daye
Absolutely. Justin, in the work that you do, you have the opportunity to pour into ministry leaders, and you have done a lot of research, a lot of study, obviously, and even for your own life, your own leadership, self-leadership, as we say. You’ve spent a lot of time really investing in this idea of what it means to be a healthy leader. Because, as we know, healthy leaders that trickles over into the organization, the church, the ministry, whatever it is they’re leading. So healthy leaders help create healthy ministries. One of the things I’d like to start off with, Justin if we could, is you talk in your recent book, Healthy Leadership for Thriving Organizations, which has a lot of good content in there, but you kind of started off by talking about what is the practice of organizational leadership, and you have some key elements in regard to that, and I’d love for you to kind of unpack that a little bit so we can get a sense, Justin, of what you mean when you’re talking about this idea of healthy organizational leadership.

Justin Irving
Yeah, well, of course, we can talk about leadership at any number of levels. I tend to think of leadership studies in general, kind of in a “levels of analysis” approach. You think about self-leadership. We can think about team or group leadership as well as leading others diatically. We can think about organizational-level leadership, and for some, their platform is even beyond that. They’re thinking about various levels of societal leadership. The book is really focused on those who have a stewardship responsibility for a whole church, whole ministry, or whole organization, which just has some unique demands. Leadership can be challenging at any level, but there is something uniquely important and weighty about giving guidance to an organization as a whole. So, I wrote the book for organizational and congregational-level leaders or those that had significant responsibilities over larger teams or divisions of an organization. So I focused a lot on what it means to be a faithful, healthy, and effective organizational steward, and I kind of use that steward language, almost as a synonym for leadership, and really speaking to the function that we are to have as leaders. Ultimately, we are stewarding the things and people that don’t belong to us. From our foundation as Christians, we understand that these are things that we are stewarding that ultimately belong to the Lord, and we are just sort of interim caregivers in the process of stewarding these realities. So what is it that organizational-level leaders do? They are faithful and effective stewards who really are focusing on aligning people and resources around the mission that God has given that community, and that means we need to understand the purpose that motivates us. That means we need to understand the values and beliefs that guide us. But a steward is trying to bring people and resources together to focus on the fulfillment of the mission that the Lord has given us as a community.

Jason Daye
Yeah, absolutely, Justin. I love the steward language that you use in the book. When I was first reading it… and we use that language, sometimes we use that language in talking about leadership. But you just really emphasize the idea that we indeed, are stewarding what God has entrusted to us, right? That’s what leadership is. When we think about the word stewardship or stewarding, Justin, Can you unpack that a little bit and help us understand how that relates to leadership from a biblical perspective?

Justin Irving
Well, I actually was just talking to a class yesterday about some themes related to this. I think, for instance, let’s take the biblical example of Moses, a very strong, prominent leader in the Old Testament. But we were looking at a passage in Deuteronomy 3, where he’s sort of pleading with God one last time at the end of his life to go into the Promised Land. He wanted to be there and God kind of speaks back in that passage to him, saying, don’t speak of this request again. To me, what do I want you to do? I want you to charge Joshua. I want you to strengthen Joshua. I want you to encourage Joshua. I think Moses was just having to learn a lesson in that latter part of his life, once again, that we all need to learn. That is there is an end date to all of our leadership influence in our organizations and churches. We, in a sense, are all interim leaders, and what does it mean if we’re interim leaders? It means we need to be thinking about who are the people coming behind us that we need to invest in and pour into, to develop. Now, that interim role in leadership might be a few months, it might be a few years, or it might be a few decades, but it still is an interim role. When we understand leadership through that lens, I think we’re starting to get what stewardship is about. We’re wanting to set up the people who are going to carry on the mission after us for success because the ultimate mission does not belong to us. It belongs to something bigger than us. It belongs to us as a community. It’s something that has been given to us that we are stewarding for a time and hopefully leaving in a better place to those who come behind us in leadership responsibilities.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that. It’s interesting, over the years, I’ve had conversations with a lot of different colleagues, a lot of different ministry leaders from all different traditions, and all different backgrounds wrestling with their own challenges. It’s been interesting because I’ve had conversations with some who have kind of said a little arrogantly, hey, once I left that church, man, it went down the tubes, and that always saddens me because of just what you’re saying. If we’re stewarding well, then our hope and our prayer is that if our season of ministry is up at a church or ministry organization, and we move on, our hope would be that we’ve left it in a healthier place so that whomever steps in next in the roles of leadership or whatever they might face next, they would face in a way that is healthy for them and helps them continue to be what God’s called that church or organization to be. So it almost breaks my heart whenever a leader is like, Yeah, well, see, I’m gone, and now look at what’s happened to the organization. So I think that’s super important to focus on, and that takes us to this idea of character in leaders of ministries. This idea and this is something that obviously all of us have experienced, seen, and witnessed both really strong, healthy leaders with good character. Then inevitably, we’ve all, unfortunately, experienced leaders that are of not of good character. We see that in the media. We see that in different stories. We’ve seen that just in people we know. So, Justin, I would love for us to spend some time because you really invest some time in your book, Healthy Leadership for Thriving Organizations, talking about the idea of the character of the leader and how vitally important that is in regard to whether or not an organization will be able to thrive, right? That even if an organization looks like it’s thriving for a period, if that leader is not someone of faithful, godly character, then inevitably that organization will suffer at some point, and we’ve seen this. We’ve seen this of high-profile ministry leaders that really seem to have it all together, but on the backstage of their lives, they suffer. So, talk to us a bit about some of the key elements when we’re thinking about healthy leadership. What are some of those key elements that we need to consider in ourselves and in those leaders that we’re raising around us?

Justin Irving
Well, there are certainly different threads we could pick up, and I’ll sort of take cues from you as we go through this focus on character. I think of it as maybe two broad conversations. Why does character matter in the life of leaders? I don’t think everybody is on the same page with that because we see examples of some people who lack character and seem to be leading. We see people with high character that maybe don’t seem to be as effective as we would want them to be. So having good answers to the why does it matter I think is important to people because that’s not always what we see modeled for us in the world at large. So why is character important? Then, if we agree that it’s important, how do we nurture that? What are the commitments in our lives that can help to nurture health, integrity, and character? So when it comes to character, I’ll begin even just with a kind of secular business voice. People probably who follow anything related to the markets know the name, Warren Buffett. He was asked one time how he picks people to work with him at Berkshire Hathaway. I’m just paraphrasing this quote so it’s generally speaking. His response was that he looked for three things. He looks for people with drive and energy, he looks for people who have good intelligence, they’re smart people, and he looks for people with integrity. He sort of jokingly says, if they lack the latter, then he prefers to have them dumb and lazy. Meaning, that if you don’t have people of character, you don’t want them actually to be driven people with high intelligence because they’re probably going to do a lot of damage. I think if that’s true for Berkshire Hathaway, how much more is that true for the Church of Jesus Christ, and for ministries that are seeking to lead faithfully from a kingdom perspective? I don’t want high-profile, charismatic, driven, popular preachers or leaders who are guiding the ship, who lack character. So the why question becomes really important for me. First of all, I think we can make an argument for character from a biblical perspective. That God’s economy is when you have healthy people of character leading things go well for the people. You can kind of walk through all of the kings in Israel and Judah. That’s a common storyline we hear of when people are leaning into faithfulness, or when they’re leaning away from faithfulness, and when things tend to go well, and when things don’t tend to go well. Now we understand that biblical wisdom means that there are normal patterns. So the book of Proverbs, for instance, would be giving us the sense of when things tend to go the way they’re supposed to in God’s economy, here’s how it works. But we also have Ecclesiastes and Job which are also a part of the wisdom literature, right? There are times when good people are suffering, right? Things don’t always make sense, but God is at work. He is still part of the story. So generally speaking, we say character matters because that’s the pattern we see in scripture. But I think there’s also an argument that we could make around the sustainability of leadership, the scope of leadership, and the sequence of these conversations. So let’s just briefly mention those. So in terms of sustainability, my key argument for why character matters is it matters if we want long-term effectiveness, not just short-term effectiveness. Do we want to just have a quick splash that celebrates leaders who look good for a short time? Or do we want to have enduring faithfulness over the decades and over the years? So that’s a real priority from a long-term perspective. I can concede that there are going to be some people who lack character that might have some short-term effectiveness. I think if we see the pattern of long-term effectiveness, the Billy Grahams of the world who led well over the long haul, they’re people of character and integrity. I think the scope matters as well as our platform of leadership in an organization rises and we’re influencing more people. I think the importance of character grows with that. I also think that there is an issue of sequence we can argue. That, yes, character matters for members of our communities and followers in our community, but the biblical instruction is that leaders really need to attend to this even more so sequentially. I think of Paul’s words to Timothy to watch your life and doctrine closely, for if you do, you’ll save both your self and your hearers. Similarly, Paul says to the leaders in Ephesus in Acts 20, pay close attention to yourself and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. So there is a call for us. If we want to be leaders in Kingdom-oriented work, there’s a call for us to prioritize the work of self-leadership, attending to character. I think we all grieve the stories we hear and the stories we see where that has not been the case, and rather than sort of pointing fingers and condemning other people and look how horrible those people are, it should be really pointing us back to the mirror and saying, How do I need to double down on this focus on character nurturing in our lives. So then that leads us to that second part of some of the commitments, which we can lean into if you would like. How we nurture that. But that’s a little bit of an overview about why it’s important from my vantage point.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I like that. Before we jump into the next segment, I’d like to touch on a couple of things because one of the things that we hear sometimes is, Well, God can use anybody, right? It’s almost this, which I agree, I think we would all agree, God can do what God wants to do. But it’s almost this, yeah, nobody’s perfect. It’s okay. If look through scripture, they’re examples of God using bad people for Kingdom things, right? So there’s sometimes this sense of, Well, sure, character might be an issue, but guess what? God’s bigger than all of that. Justin, I’d love to pick your brain a little bit on how do you respond to that type of argument, or whenever someone kind of brings that up, what do you think is a healthy response when we’re thinking of the kingdom of God?

Justin Irving
Well, I think similar to what you said, we can concede the point that God does work that way sometimes. But again, that’s not the normal pattern of how he worked, right? Yes, he can use foreign nations to come in and send his people into exile, right? He can do that. But that’s not really the way it was meant to be, right? It was meant to be a different thing. It was meant to be God’s people faithfully leaning into their covenant commitments to the promise-keeping, covenant-keeping God. So the pattern is that we’re leaning into health. We’re not leaning into sort of the secondary argument, right? That, yes, God has done that in seasons of exile and beyond. So there is a call to say, I think the pattern is we’re looking to the healthy leader in the histories. We’re looking to those Josiah kings, rather than to the other kings that are really going off of the rails. Again, I would say, Sure we can have those kinds of people that might be successful for the short term. From the kingdom perspective, when we see leaders described, we see so much more emphasis on their character when we’re thinking about selection for leadership and sustaining effectiveness in leadership. We run to the pastoral epistles and think about how Timothy spoke to churches and selected and raised up leaders. They were people of character, and so that should be the standard that we’re thinking of in our own expectations of ourselves as Kingdom leaders also.

Jason Daye
Excellent. Thank you for that. Alright, so we’ve got the why dialed in. That’s helpful. So let’s move into more of the what, the how, or the elements that we identify in healthy leaders.

Justin Irving
Well, I’ll name a few categories, and maybe you tee me up for what you’d like to spend some more time on. In the book, I talk about a few different categories. Spiritual commitments to nurture deep and abiding relationship with God to sustain leaders. I talk about the importance of emotional health and emotional maturity. I talk about themes around the relational dimensions of a leader’s life, and not so much that they are able to engage in relationships from a leadership perspective, but that they’re engaged in deep community themselves that sustains them and roots them for their leadership. I talk about the importance of ongoing learning, sort of the intellectual life of the leader. I talk about the importance of attending to ourselves as whole people, which means attending to the physical dimensions of our lives, health, exercise, diet, getting good rest, and sleep. We are whole people and so those dimensions matter in the health of the leader. But also practical dimensions as well. How are we managing our time to care for and nurture the dimensions of healthy leadership in our lives? So I don’t know if there’s one of those you want to start with, but I sure think the spiritual health, the emotional health, and the relational health of the leader are really important starting points in the commitments that sustain people well over time.

Jason Daye
Yeah, definitely. Let’s lean into those.

Justin Irving
Well, from a relational perspective, let’s maybe just kind of back up, start with the third, and move up in that. From a relational perspective, when we consider what has led people to those failures that we grieve, we see things come through our inboxes and our emails. We might get calls from friends. We see stories on social media that grieve us as we hear about moral failures that have taken place, or leadership failures that have taken place. Now I haven’t really studied this completely. This is potentially a future line of research, but my instinct is, in most of those stories, you can probably tie it back to some leader isolation that has taken place over time. I think one of the things that arose as I was hearing from the 216 leaders that were studied for the book Healthy Leadership for Thriving Organizations, was many commented on how leadership can feel isolating over time. That as you move up in sort of organizational tiers of leadership, it feels like a lonely practice. Now, I think that it doesn’t have to be that way. So, leaders who are leading at a high level organizationally or an executive leadership-type functions, I think they need to push against this tendency of isolation and leadership because if we get isolated over time, I think that it leads to a person not having the community that they are made for. We are people who are made in the image of a Trinitarian, relational God. We are made for community. We are made for relationship. When I think about even just the challenges that folks face with their own sinful tendencies in their life. So 1 John 1 would be a passage that talks about that in the language of we need to walk in the light, not walk in the darkest. In that context, John is deeply connecting walking in the light and having relationship with God to walking in community with our brothers and sisters. If there is deep and abiding relationship with our brothers and sisters in Christ, I think that provides a platform for us to be walking in the light and in deep and abiding relationship with God. So I think we can kind of tend to separate, in our minds, relationship with God from relationship with others. I don’t think the Bible does that, right? As we engage with one another, as we are leaning into relationships where people know us and we know them, where there can be honest back and forth, speaking into the deep areas of our lives. I think that kind of pushing against darkness and pushing against isolation is one of the things that sustains us over time in this area of the character of the leader. Relationships really matter. I would just sort of plead with myself, with you, and with our listeners here to resist isolation in leadership. Don’t go it alone. You’re not wired that way. You’re not meant to go alone in the work of leadership.

Jason Daye
Yeah, definitely. Justin, one of the things that you mentioned on that, and I think it’s important because, in the work that we do with pastors and ministry leaders, I agree wholeheartedly that isolation is one of the biggest challenges, and we can sometimes fool ourselves into thinking we’re not isolated because we are maybe in proximity to a lot of people. We’re doing a lot of stuff that feels very relational, and yet we are actually isolating ourselves. So, as you said, we have to be intentional about making sure we have those deeper relationships with others. It’s got to be an intentionality because otherwise you slowly slip into it. It’s like the frog being slowly boiled, right? You don’t know you’re getting into that situation until oftentimes it’s maybe too late or it’s too deep into it. So I love that resisting isolation. It’s great language.

Justin Irving
Maybe I could kind of tie that into some of the spiritual and emotional conversations as well. So as we think about the importance of not just sort of being around people, proximity around people, but actually having deep relationship, I think that also connects to some other areas of life that can be maybe temptations for leaders, right? So one of the temptations, I think, for leaders who are serving in Christian ministry, we might say, is the temptation to start viewing God’s word as more of a tool for our ministry than a treasure for our heart. I think the degree to which we reach that point in our lives where we are kind of viewing our relationship with God and His Word as a utilitarian way to help other people grow in discipleship, but not seeing it as the first love in our lives, the first treasure in our lives. That’s another dimension where we can begin to sort of say, well, we’re around people, but we’re not in deep relationship with people. We’re around God and His Word, but we’re not really in relationship with God through His Word. A passage that I think of on that front is sort of the classic Shema passage in Deuteronomy 6, where we often run to the language of teaching that is emphasized there. We’re passing on the faith to the next generation. That’s important. But in that passage, what precedes teaching? Treasuring precedes teaching, it begins not with Teach. It begins with Love the Lord your God with all of your heart. It begins with these words that I give you today are to be on your heart. If I’m not beginning with love for God and treasuring of God’s word, I really don’t have a platform then to adequately teach others because we are going to replicate what is actually loved in our life, not just what we speak of in intellectual ways. So what are we modeling for people? What do we model as the deepest treasures and loves in our lives? At the end of the day, CS Lewis speaks to these themes, and I talk about this a bit in the book, but he challenges us to say, God will not be used as a means to another end. He is the ultimate treasure and end for us in life and in ministry. If we think about… you speak about loving well, living well, and leading well. If we think about God as just a means to ends to try to do those things, rather than at the heart of what it means to love well, live well, and lead well. He wants to be at the center of our treasures and loves in our lives. So we’ve got to fight for that on a daily basis. To say, people like me, I’m at a seminary, I go into classrooms, and I get to talk to people about God’s word. I get invited to preach or speak to pastors. I get to talk about God a lot. I get to talk about God’s word a lot, but if that ever becomes the primary thing, rather than the secondary thing, meaning I need to first of all be stoking a flame of love for God and a treasuring of my belovedness in Christ before him, that’s gotta be my first love. Out of that then the other aspects of loving, living, and leading well are an overflow out of that first love.

Jason Daye
That’s excellent. Yeah, absolutely. I love how you have kind of walked us through this idea of that proximity piece and fooling ourselves into thinking we’re engaged in some way, when we’re really doing the stuff of God, as opposed to getting deep into God. So I think it’s important in how that relates relationally, how that relates spiritually, obviously, and then we move into the realm of the emotional. So let’s talk through emotional health a little bit.

Justin Irving
Well, I think emotional health and maturity are important for any person and any Christian. I think it becomes essential for those who are given leadership or stewardship responsibility. When I think about the leaders that I really admire, that I have enjoyed working with, or for over the years, they have something there that makes them unique in this category of emotional maturity. Technically, so what I’m going to be describing is something maybe your listeners are familiar with, called differentiation of self, but it’s essentially a person’s capacity to have a calm, non-anxious presence in the face of difference, in the face of conflict, and in the face of working with people who might be difficult to work with at times. There’s a sense of, Am I able to care deeply for the people that I’m leading, but to not care for the shifting praise and criticisms that might come from people? Am I able to have a calm presence when there are very contentious conversations that are taking place around me? Now, I think that’s important for people, and I know people who aren’t Christians are striving to have that kind of calm, non-anxious presence. But I think for Christians, there’s an advantage, really in us having a rootedness in our relationship with God through Jesus Christ that should be able to give us a sense that it is well with our souls, even when it might not be well with our organization, church, or leadership agenda. For the leaders who are able to kind of maintain that calm, non-anxious presence, which is connected to emotional resiliency and emotional maturity. That’s the stuff I think that makes for really effective and healthy leadership practice. I don’t think we do this perfectly all the time. Voices like Steve Cuss has a book on managing leadership anxiety. This isn’t about pretending that leaders never have anxiety, but it’s about understanding it and paying attention to it, and saying that anxiousness doesn’t need to rule my experience of this moment, my experience of this room, or my experience of the relationships that I’m in. There can be a sense of no, it is well with my soul, I can lean in with some comfortability, even paying attention to the anxiety that might be there. But to say that doesn’t have to drive the leadership work that’s in front of it.

Jason Daye
Yeah, absolutely. That’s excellent. Justin, as you are engaged in teaching and training ministry leaders, and as you do your own research and survey the landscape of the church here in North America primarily, what have you picked up on that you feel is maybe the biggest stumbling block to living as a healthy leader? Are there one or two things that you’ve kind of identified and you see cropping up again and again and again that you would say these are a couple of the things, 1, 2, or 3 of the things that we really need to be aware of, think about, and talk about with one another or colleagues? What would those be?

Justin Irving
Well, that’s a big question, and I’ll just kind of join with you conversationally on this. I don’t know if I can plant a flag and say here is the issue. But I think when a leader has not done the work of understanding their own sense of purpose, their own convictions, and their own values that are going to ground them, there can just be a tendency to sort of put their finger to the wind and try to see what the current opinions are around us. Leaders who are giving way to that kind of perspective and that kind of approach to the world around them, I think lead to not only an unhealthy experience on the part of followers, but it leads to a lot of anxiousness in the life of the leader themselves, and that’s not a healthy place to lead from. I don’t think that having a deep sense of one’s purpose, values, and beliefs has to lead someone to be abrasive with people around them. I just think there is a grounding that happens when someone really knows what’s important to them as a leader. Again, I think this is wisdom that’s even out in the secular leadership literature. So there’s a gentleman who led Medtronic, a large medical device company that was based in Minnesota. His name’s Bill George. He wrote a book that focused on authentic leadership and one of his five or six core authentic leadership principles is that a leader needs to understand their purpose. He said the temptation is that a leader might think that he’s saying, You need to know the purpose of the organization and get behind that. He says, Yes, well, that’s assumed that a leader is going to be behind the purpose of the organization. But he says, no, it’s actually more personal than that. What’s your purpose to be there in that organization in this time? What do you feel called to bring to the table? What do you feel called to invest in for that role? You can’t really borrow that from another person. You can’t just borrow it from the organization’s purpose. You need to know what’s driving the passion for you. So I think about you and your role and how you’re seeking to serve pastors. There’s probably something behind that. It’s like you have a passion for helping those in ministry to understand being healthy and to understand what it means to lead well, to live well, and to love well, that there’s something behind that that’s driving you to care for people in ministry. You’d have to articulate that. You probably have articulated it here in some ways on the podcast. But I think, not just you, every leader needs to spend time thinking through what that purpose is that’s grounding you, and it’s probably going to be connected to some deep values and some deep beliefs that help to guide the leadership practice. If we don’t have that, then we’re just going to kind of constantly be trying to tip our ear to who’s around us and try to appease what they want. Yes, we want to listen to people. We want to care for them. We don’t want to have a blind eye or closed ears to what people are saying. But it’s gotta be from a place where we know what’s important to us and what’s grounding us in our leadership.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that language of groundedness. Because some could take a conversation like that, and take it to a very dogmatic, as you said, abrasive leadership. I’m the leader. I know what I know about me. I know what’s best. This is the way. But that’s not how we’re called to lead in the kingdom, right? We’re called to lead with that groundedness that kind of exudes from us. It doesn’t have to be a heavy-handedness, but it should naturally exude from us that we are grounded and we have a deep understanding of who we are in Christ and what God has called us to do, who God has called us to be, and that should flow from us in that way. If we lack that, Justin, I think this is what we’re saying, If you lack taking the time to really know yourself, know your purpose, know your identity in Christ, and what God’s called you to do in this season, then you can just be swayed. It’s hard to lead when you’re just kind of going with the flow, as opposed to really trying to, in that grounded nature, be authentically who God’s called you to be for that season. Because one of the things that you write about in the book, you talk about the idea that leadership isn’t just knowledge, but it is the skill to navigate, right? So it’s not just everything you know as a leader, it’s the idea that you’re looking at what’s going on around you, the changing world we live in, the often chaotic things that are happening, and as a leader, it’s not just about knowing a bunch of stuff. It’s about the wisdom to navigate those things. That’s how we can be a blessing to the communities we serve.

Justin Irving
Yeah, the language I kind of point to similarly on that front is that we want to sometimes think of leadership as a science, but in some ways, it’s more of an art and a practice, right? We need to be able to begin to apply the things we’ve learned and studied. That’s where the main tool that we have for our work of leadership, actually, is the person of the leader, right? So it means we gotta care for that tool. We’ve gotta make sure that that tool has time to be in a healthy place because we’re not like just a mechanic that needs to work with some physical tool. In the work of ministry and in the work of leadership, the main tool is the human tool, and so we’ve gotta take time to care for that tool and make sure it’s in a good place. I’ll point to one more kind of principle. As we think about commitments nurturing health, there’s lots of lots of things we could focus on, but I just want to get one more on the table for sure. That is just the importance of making sure that rest is a part of the rhythm in the life of the leader. I think at times, if we are constantly going about our work thinking like it’s dependent on us, that’s going to lead people to stay up late, get up early, and have a tendency towards workaholism. That approach to leadership, not a rested approach, but a kind of hurried and busy approach, is really a statement of who we think the leadership depends on. We think it depends on us. But as Christians, we know that there is someone else that ultimately is at work. So Psalm 127 is a passage that helps us think about not staying up late and rising up early, eating the bread of anxious toil. Rather, we can actually go to bed and sleep, take naps, and rest, because we know that’s a gift that God is giving us. That passage points us to that, that the Lord gives sleep to His Beloved, but there’s one translation that translates that a little bit differently, not just that the Lord gives sleep to His Beloved, but that the Lord gives to His Beloved in their sleep, right? That there’s a sense that not only is he gifting us as leaders with sleep, but he’s actually at work, even when we’re not. When our head is comatose on a pillow, God is still at work, caring for our people, serving our people, guiding our churches and our organizations, and that gives a rested posture of leadership that I think contributes to a healthy leadership approach as well.

Jason Daye
I love that. Absolutely, Justin. Thank you so much for that. Man, it’s been an absolute pleasure hanging out with you today and hearing from your heart. If people want to connect with you, I know that you lead some some programs there at the seminary. What’s the best way for them to connect with you?

Justin Irving
Well, they can certainly look up some of the leadership programs or discipleship programs we have here at Southern Seminary. We’d love for folks to check that out and you can read a little bit more about me and my bio on the Southern page. I’m also pretty active on LinkedIn or on X if people want to go there. I find these days that I have more sort of meaningful conversations with people on LinkedIn. So if you want to connect with me there, you can look me up on LinkedIn. Yeah, thanks. I really appreciate you taking some time for us to talk a bit about some of the themes related to Healthy Leadership for Thriving Organizations and I really commend you on your focus to work with leaders in ministry attending to these issues of health and wellness, which are so vital in the self-leadership role.

Jason Daye
Thank you, Justin. I appreciate that. For those of you who are listening and watching along, we’ll have links to Justin’s social, LinkedIn, and X. We’ll have links to the book Healthy Leadership for Thriving Organizations and to some of the programs there at Southern for you guys to check out and take a look at. Again, you can find that at PastorServe.org/network in the toolkit for this episode. As we’re winding down, Justin, I would love to give you just an opportunity. You’ve got the ears and eyes of pastors and ministry leaders. What would you like to speak some encouragement to them?

Justin Irving
Well, I think just to summarize some of our thoughts I would want to say that the main argument of the book, the main plea that I have for us here today, is that health begets health, and it really does matter to the life of the people we lead how we’re taking care of ourselves. If we care about the flourishing and thriving of the people and organizations that we’re connected with, we can’t ignore the hard work of self-leadership that we’ve been talking about today. We might want to jump on to just trying to be effective or trying to care for other people, but we actually love people better, we care for the organizations that we’re leading better when we’re in a good place, doing the hard work of self-leadership. So the fact that you all are listening in on these kinds of conversations means you already are committed to growing as a leader, and I just want to cheer you on in that work. Continue to press into that because it matters not just for your life and experience as a leader, but for the life of the people that you are called to serve and lead well to the glory of God.

Jason Daye
Amen. It’s a great word, Justin, again, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to hang out with us here on Frontstage backstage. We certainly appreciate it.

Justin Irving
Yeah. Thanks so much. Jason.

Jason Daye
All right. God bless you.

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.