Simple Faith with Rusty George

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Rusty George
This episode is brought to you by Serv HQ train your ministry, volunteers, leaders and new members online fast and easy with Survey HQ.

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Intro/Outro
Welcome to Leading Simple with Rusty George. Our goal is to make following Jesus and leading others a bit more simple. Here's your host, Rusty George.

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Rusty George
Hey, welcome to Episode 224. Today, our guest is Todd Balsinger. Todd is a seminary professor at Fuller Seminary and he is a very gifted author. Todd has written a couple of great leadership books, one entitled Canoeing the Mountains, Christian Leadership and Uncharted Territory, and his latest book, Tempered Resilience How Leaders are Formed in the Crucible of Change, is so applicable for what leaders have faced over the last couple of years.

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Rusty George
I love my conversation with Todd and I think you will as well. I would encourage you to check out our sponsors website, Serve.

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Tod Bolsinger
HQ Dot.

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Rusty George
Church. They're an incredible organization that really helps you create automated tools to make onboarding new volunteers and church members fast, easy and consistent. So make sure you check out Serve HQ Dot Church. Well, here is my conversation with Todd Balsinger. Well, Todd Balsinger, thank you so much for joining the show. I want to get to your bio here in just a second before we get going.

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Rusty George
I have just kind of a nagging question, and that is for our audience that can't see the copy of the book I have in front of me. You spell the name Todd with only one D. Why is that?

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Tod Bolsinger
I do. I do. That was something my parents. I am Todd with one D. My brother is Scott with one T. I'd like to say that, you know, in a world where not everybody gets D in their name, I shouldn't take two points.

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Rusty George
That's good. That's good. I figured you might have some kind of clever retort because you probably had asked that many times, so. Great. Well, listen, thanks for being on the show. Tell our audience who you are and what it is you do.

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Tod Bolsinger
Yeah. So I am I am a professor of leadership formation of Fuller Theological Seminary. I run a thing called the Church Leadership Institute, and I have my own consulting and speaking company called A.T. Sloan Leadership. Basically, I wake up every day helping faith leaders thrive as change leaders. I work entirely on that problem in a rapidly disrupted, changing world, how can people of faith bring faithful change?

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Tod Bolsinger
That's what I do. Hmm. Yeah.

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Rusty George
Well, that sounds like a fascinating study and also a daunting one as well. So, I mean, I love your story because you're not just a, you know, an academic person that sits around and thinks about it. You've done it and you lead in local ministry for for many, many years. And now you're kind of observing this firsthand through for which I love that idea and I love your latest book.

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Rusty George
But before we get to that, I want to talk about just kind of the headspace behind this. I mean, why why dedicate your life behind working with leaders so much? What was it that intrigued you so much about this?

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Tod Bolsinger
Yeah. So when I was so I was a pastor. So for ten years I was at Hollywood Presbyterian on their staff. They took me on their staff when I was 23 years old. I was the college director. I'd been working for campus life, doing youth evangelism. And they took me on their staff and they said, Hey, we're going to we'd like you to be our college minister.

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Tod Bolsinger
And we'd like you that we're going to send you to seminary and we're going to pay for it because you are going to run out of those little youth talks you do by Christmas. And and you need to learn how to teach the Bible. And so I ran out of them by Thanksgiving. So I was thrilled. And what I realized was they invested in me when I was little more than just enthusiasm and arrogance.

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Tod Bolsinger
And so that sense of investment in me as a leader, they saw something in me that was important and interesting. And what I found is in all my ministries, whatever I was involved in, I was pastoring a church, leading a team. I was always about the same thing, like what had been given to me. I wanted to give to others, which was to invest in leaders.

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Tod Bolsinger
So I went from Hollywood press to San Clemente Presbyterian, where I became the senior pastor at 33. Then I was there for 17 years. They really grew me up as a pastor and I got to help grow their church up and in the middle of that process. I remember a time when we had had a several years of growth.

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Tod Bolsinger
We were going in a really nice trajectory in the ways that you want to have the church go. And my best leaders were starting to drop out of leadership, and I didn't know what to do with that because everything's up into the right the way it's supposed to be. And yet the morale was going down. And I brought in this group to help me understand it because I couldn't figure it out.

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Tod Bolsinger
And what they said to me was, you have unconsciously communicated to everybody here that they're participating in your ministry, and they're going to let you do that because they're so grateful that the church is going well. But this doesn't bode well over time. Really good leaders are committed to wanting to do what God wants them to do with their lives.

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Tod Bolsinger
And unconsciously, I say that I was kind of creating Todd Balsinger Ministries at San Clemente Presbyterian Church. And and what I realized at that time was I needed to rethink the entire notion of leadership. I had to rethink for a rapidly changing world. How do you lead? How do you bring people together for challenges that are beyond your best practices that require you to learn as you go, that are going to be costly and that are going to keep people the best people engaged.

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Tod Bolsinger
And so I not only was committed to leadership formation of others, but I had to keep being committed to my own growth as a leader. And so this really became the center of my sense of calling. And I went back to Fuller because that's what seminaries do. They develop leaders. And I helped. I and then I now I get to basically every day work on helping faith leaders thrive as change leaders.

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Tod Bolsinger
And I love the work. I just absolutely love the work. After 27 years of doing a deep dove into congregations, now I work with church. I work with the body of Christ. As broad it as you can imagine it. Hmm. And it's pretty wonderful, actually.

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Rusty George
I have a feeling you and I are near the same age because I've been in ministry just about as long as you have been. So I'm assuming that you and I are. We're just having that feeling of. I look around and I think our world has changed. BE COVID has fast forwarded everything and see the young generation of leaders as they think about church and life so much differently than I do.

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Rusty George
What are some of the just off the top of your head like, man, this is different now than it was when I was that, you know, back in my day. Yeah. That kind of thing.

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Tod Bolsinger
Yeah. This is the single biggest difference. And it was already beginning. I mean, we're both in California, so in one sense, we've been ahead of the curve of the rest of the culture. But the single biggest difference was up until I would say around and the 1990s, the late 1990s, you could assume that Christianity had a home court advantage where it was.

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Tod Bolsinger
Yeah, you can just go into any culture, right? Even today we're having these kind of conflicts. But up until around the turn of the century, you can assume that like in every town you go to small towns in America, there's like a courthouse and a library. And the first church that got there, first First Baptist was Lutheran, etc. And all the other first churches are all in Second Street because what everybody assumes is the society should be arranged around law, education and religion.

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Tod Bolsinger
And they assume that to be Christian religion, even if they weren't Christians. Yeah. So we learned how to do ministry with a home court advantage. Now we live in a world where there is no advantage. There's no home court, it's all neutral space. And that changes the way in which you think about ministry. And, you know, the mission field is no longer oversee water.

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Tod Bolsinger
It's across the sidewalk and you can't assume that people are going to grow up in the church, rebelled during their twenties and come back when their kids get baptized. Like all the statistics are going the other direction and most of us weren't trained for that world. We just weren't trained for that world. I work at a seminary and people say, say to me, Seminary didn't prepare me for this.

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Tod Bolsinger
And so I began to realize the biggest shift that's happened now is that what I just described, that thing I just described took a generation. In the last 20 years, it has accelerated and in the last two years we've accelerated even further. And now the biggest disruption is the speed of change. So there was one organization that has done a bunch of tracking like like where they expected the church to be at certain years.

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Tod Bolsinger
And I heard a person say every measure that we thought was going to be true about the night, about the United States Church in 2027 is now here in 2022. Wow. So COVID literally cost us five years. I just think about like Blink and five years of strategy, planning and strategic planning, prayer, fasting, preparing, just got lost and now we're having to catch up and that's that change of cultural status and the speed of change are two genuinely huge disruptive things.

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Tod Bolsinger
And I can say I could say more, but now I love that.

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Rusty George
That's so clarifying. Now you got me curious here and I'm way off script, so we're just going to get it's going to riff for a little bit and we'll see what happens. We may cut it out later. Okay. So I remember back when I started in ministry, we were all going through what we called the worship wars. You know, it was all about moving from hymns to choruses and choruses to songs.

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Rusty George
And now there's a band on stage versus a choir and all of that, and people lost their minds over that. Yeah, I long for those days without.

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Tod Bolsinger
That.

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Rusty George
For a good argument about, you know, how many verses are we going to sing. Yeah. What are the major changes? Because you talk about you're trying to help leadership change. What are the major changes that our churches are facing right now? What are what's staring them in the face?

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Tod Bolsinger
Yeah. Well, the single biggest change, this rapid transition, I mean, most of us, if you remember back to the 1990s, like Wayne Gretzky was the greatest hockey player and he came to Los Angeles. Right. And so all of a sudden, L.A. became a hockey town for a few minutes. And people used to always quote Wayne Gretzky, who said the trick to being a great hockey player upgraded anything is skate to where the puck is going.

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Tod Bolsinger
Right. A visionary leader 20 years ago with someone who could glimpse at the world and say, I think this is the trend we need to go that way. And people would resist because they couldn't see it. So the worship service is a good example like today. Can you imagine even today arguing over at all forms of worship? I mean, it barely happens.

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Tod Bolsinger
It happens in some churches, not in the same way. Why? Because basically everybody figured out that whatever is most singable, we're going to do. Yeah. So even contemporary worship leaders figured out that hymns could be really singable, like participation became important. So you could look to the future and you could predict and go there today, skate to where the puck is going.

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Tod Bolsinger
We now live in a world with five pucks going in five different directions. Hmm. You can't possibly get there by predicting, so you need a totally different way of going at it that most of us weren't trained how to do. So I was asked to speak at a conference in Texas with Carey Do Half, and their whole thing was called, you know, they called it the church, the 2030.

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Tod Bolsinger
And they were trying to ask, where's the church? Give me a 2030. And my answer was, That's not what I do. I don't predict. I teach people how to prototype. Mm hmm. Prototyping is where you teach people how to experiment and learn one step at a time. Figure out what the next thing is and do it faithfully. Figure out what you learn and go from there.

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Tod Bolsinger
This notion of having to be a church that is continually learning, which means you have to have leaders who have the humility to stand in front of a group of people and say, I don't have a perfect solution. I don't have a five year plan. Worked out. What we're going to do is we're going to be faithful to our values and we're going to learn to take one step at a time as we go to be faithful to the future.

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Tod Bolsinger
Man That's for some of our older members. This is really hard because they thought the perfect leader is the person with the vision and the plan. Give us the plan. Give us the picture. And today what we're saying is, let's pay attention to the pain and let's do experiments, prototypes, cheap, modest, safe experiments to get ourselves there. Can you share with.

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Rusty George
Us some of those experiments? What should what are you see in some churches? Give a try to.

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Tod Bolsinger
Yeah. So during the pandemic, one of the things that I had so I am on March 13, 2020, like everybody else, I got disrupted like I was I was doing about 100,000 miles a year on planes, traveling to places, speaking. And all of a sudden, in the Denver airport, they gave me a Clorox wipes and told me to wipe down my own seat because I helped keep this plane safe from the Corona virus.

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Tod Bolsinger
And I remember thinking, we're at 30 UCS. Keep people safe at 30,000 feet and you need my help. This is this is real. It's real. Right. What happened? Was it immediately shut down. And every church I knew in that weekend started messing around with what we would have called a television ministry. It was called Facebook Live. Right. And so what you realized is technology.

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Tod Bolsinger
Everybody has to figure out what you do with technology. Everybody's going to have to figure out what are you going to do with discipleship. We now live in a world where an active church member shows up at worship at 1.9 times a month. Mm hmm. So you can't just preach if you preach to them and you preach a 30 minute sermon, you get two times a month, you get an hour a month, you get 12 hours of formative content in somebody's lives.

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Tod Bolsinger
Most people get more than 12 hours of podcasts in a week, or radio shows like People Forming US are totally different. So the experiments are now like, How can you engage people in discipleship? How do we rethink community? What is community when we all can just disconnect into little like minded groups all the time? The the pandemic revealed these pervasive, huge underlying problems that have been there forever, and yet they just became really real.

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Tod Bolsinger
To me, the pandemic was almost like apocalyptic and it was revelatory. It revealed what was there, and it revealed a crisis of discipleship, a crisis of community, a crisis of leadership development. I mean, remember when they used to say, hey, 20% of the people did 80% of the work. Every pastor I know we take that deal. But I take that deal.

00;15;22;09 - 00;15;23;19
Tod Bolsinger
My guest today.

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Rusty George
Is like a good.

00;15;25;07 - 00;15;41;23
Tod Bolsinger
Big number. Right. So you start realizing that experiments are all around those areas. How do we disciple people? How do we develop leaders? How do we build a sense of community in a world that is where almost none of the cultural pieces are helping us, we're going to have to create a different kind of way of doing that.

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Tod Bolsinger
And that's that's what we're beginning to see some of this work being done.

00;15;45;22 - 00;16;14;21
Rusty George
Okay. So we get to your work, two great books, great books, canoeing the mountains and now tempered resilience how leaders are formed in the Crucible of Change. So you're we have leaders out there experimenting. They're trying and and they're just getting their heads handed to them by the people that are trying to bring back the past or get things back to normal, which was postwar, which was pre-COVID.

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Rusty George
Yeah. And it's difficult. And now you throw into that a good heaping helping of of politics and racial divide and now Roe v Wade is out there. So we got all the stuff everybody's incensed about. Yeah. Walk us through tempered resilience, because I can't think of a better book at a better time than this right now.

00;16;33;15 - 00;17;01;03
Tod Bolsinger
Yeah. So. So when I wrote Canoeing the Mountains, it was really a book about how do you lead when you can't rely on the old maps? Basically, that's the whole metaphor. How do you lead when you're in uncharted territory when the old best practices won't work and get to prototype, learn, discover as you go. Right. What I found is five years of traveling in the country speaking about that, everybody wanted to talk about the one chapter in the book that was on sabotage.

00;17;01;18 - 00;17;23;01
Tod Bolsinger
There's this notion that is in the book that it comes out of all the leadership literature and was shared by a guy named Edward Friedman, who was a rabbi who said the most important aspect of leadership is preparing for sabotage. It's your own people who ask you to lead them will turn on you whenever it becomes really costly.

00;17;23;23 - 00;17;38;12
Tod Bolsinger
And he believed it happened 100% of the time, like they can just the normal pattern is you you prepare people for a change. You make a change. They agree to the change. Then they sabotage it.

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Rusty George
Yeah.

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Tod Bolsinger
And so that for leaders was sauce sucking. I mean, when I started talking to leaders around the country, they literally would say, this is the moment. And just think about how many times it's happened in a pandemic. I've got a coaching consulting client. Their church has grown in every measure. They did a $13 million building campaign. They're exploding out of the sanctuary.

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Tod Bolsinger
He turned their church around. They were so excited in wake of George Floyd, their southern church, he said, Don't you believe it's time for us in the name of justice, for us to at least understand that we have a history of racism in our past that probably makes it hard for our neighbors to trust us. Isn't it time that we just acknowledge that started reaching out to our neighbors, try to be part of the healing of this world in the name of the justice that we see in places like the Book of Amos.

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Tod Bolsinger
And he got 20 pages of emails the next day complaining that he was woke and political. He said, Yeah, woke and political. I quoted Amos like and what it was that was soul sucking. Yeah. So. So Temple resilience is really about a way you think about a temple tool, a chisel, not a hammer. A chisel. That, in the words of Dr. King that I quote in the book, can accuse stones of hope out of a mountain of despair.

00;19;01;26 - 00;19;35;17
Tod Bolsinger
Hewing stones of hope. Chiseled temple tools are tools that are strong and flexible. And there's. And what we discovered is by looking at the literature, both leadership literature and formation literature, is that's a process of formation that happens in the life of leaders when they are facing the mountain of despair, like when they're in the crucible of leadership, when it gets hardest is the moment where with the right approach, you can begin to reform, to become somebody who can sit you stones of hope out of a mountain of despair.

00;19;35;18 - 00;19;38;00
Tod Bolsinger
And that that's that that's what Temple Resilience is about.

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Rusty George
Well, it's such a valued word, because our assumption is, a no one else is feeling this like I am.

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Tod Bolsinger
Yeah.

00;19;46;11 - 00;20;06;28
Rusty George
And be it, I just need to leave. I need to get out of ministry or go get ministry a different place. And then I won't have these problems. But you're telling us it's rampant? Hey, let me interrupt this podcast for just a second. Every church leader knows that having trained and engaged volunteers is essential to successfully accomplishing your mission.

00;20;07;10 - 00;20;27;25
Rusty George
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00;20;28;02 - 00;20;45;08
Rusty George
You can even automate next steps to onboard new people. Check it out at Serve HQ Dot Church. Now back to our conversation in and out of ministry or go get ministry a different place and then I won't have these problems. But you're telling us it's rampant?

00;20;45;15 - 00;21;02;06
Tod Bolsinger
Oh, yeah. No, it's. And it's not only rampant, it's biblical, right? So when I when I teach on this, people always say to me, oh, my gosh, what is it about today that we can't trust in the leader? I go, Well, let me take you back to, oh, the greatest miracle in the Bible before the resurrection, the exodus.

00;21;02;26 - 00;21;26;08
Tod Bolsinger
Like right after the cross, the parting of the Red Sea. And the people of God are freed because they go through a dry land and the Egyptian chariots follow them and then are destroyed. So here you are as enslaved people who are now free and the army that is chasing them is destroyed. They are completely free. They praise be to God for Moses.

00;21;26;17 - 00;21;49;13
Tod Bolsinger
And six weeks later to six weeks, it says in Exodus, six weeks later they are saying, you know, Moses, I didn't realize we were going to be camping. I didn't realize we were going to be outside this wilderness thing. You know, slavery. They killed our children, but we did have leeks and onions for lunch. Maybe we should go back.

00;21;50;16 - 00;22;17;19
Tod Bolsinger
And they literally it says Exodus 16 three. The people complain against God and against Moses. Oh, my God. Six weeks, six weeks. They start realizing this is where that freedom was, trying to teach us that sabotage is normal, it's natural, it's to be expected. It's not the bad things that evil people do. It is the huge things that anxious people do.

00;22;19;13 - 00;22;44;19
Tod Bolsinger
And when people get really anxious, they just want to go home to Mama. They want to return back even to slavery. And that's what we're seeing happening at church today. People said, oh, my gosh, we got to get back to the church the way it was. I mean, like when like in 2019, when we've been losing the younger generation for over 20 years, you know, at a rate of a million young people a year.

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Tod Bolsinger
Yeah. You want to go back to that church, right? Like, where do you want to go back to?

00;22;50;11 - 00;23;10;03
Rusty George
Right. I love that line in the book that you just quoted about it. It is it is the normal thing that people do. And you talk in the book about the moment we start feeling resistance. You know, we do want to go back to what is familiar and family. Same root word. Yeah, we get back to kind of what we feel like.

00;23;10;16 - 00;23;14;08
Rusty George
You know, it's bad, but at least I, you know, dance with the devil. You know.

00;23;14;09 - 00;23;43;08
Tod Bolsinger
Right, right, right. Yeah. It's it's really about being we start realizing is is when people feel unfamiliar and a time where they feel, um, family, they feel abandoned. And that's why I think pastors when they, when you, when you challenge them to take on something new, whether it's a praise song instead of a chorus, right. Worship hit, or you invite them to reach their neighbors, or you tell them, hey, the church is really not about you.

00;23;43;26 - 00;24;03;05
Tod Bolsinger
It's about the way we are the body of Christ for our neighbors. And they go, Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. This isn't the church I signed up for. This isn't the church, right? This is unfamiliar. And they get mad because they feel like they're going to lose something familiar, something that feels rooted in home, like their home, their their angry.

00;24;03;05 - 00;24;08;18
Tod Bolsinger
And they get angry at the pastor. Mm hmm. And the leaders have to learn how to lead people through that anger.

00;24;09;04 - 00;24;30;08
Rusty George
And I found myself thinking as I was reading this book, so much of their anger is and at what I'm leading them to do, it's it's something deep within them that is that has to be transformed. For instance, a church that goes through a capital campaign, the pastor always thinks the people are mad about money and they don't want to give them money.

00;24;30;19 - 00;24;49;11
Rusty George
But the problem is, we're all selfish to the core. And this project you want to spend it on doesn't benefit me. Right. You know, a church planning or building an orphanage doesn't help me. So how, as a leader, we got to go back to breaking our people's hearts for the things that break God's heart. What would you say to that?

00;24;49;19 - 00;25;10;22
Tod Bolsinger
Well, and that's so. Think about this. Like how much when you start thinking about this adaptive leadership, this is what we're talking about. We're talking about this leadership where you wear a healthy living organism to be able to go into a new environment has to adapt, doesn't become something it's not, but it has to adapt that adaptations require learning because we don't know what it is.

00;25;10;22 - 00;25;30;28
Tod Bolsinger
It's also don't require loss to let something go in the same way that a caterpillar has to be transformed to a butterfly to let something go in the same way that we have to let something go. That letting go is really painful. And because we don't have any idea what it's going to be like, another side we cling to that past.

00;25;31;12 - 00;25;50;29
Tod Bolsinger
So having to say to people, Hey, God is taking us on a journey that is going to transform us and is going to let us participate in something much bigger than ourselves is so risky. Then you go look at the scriptures and realize This is what Jesus was doing all the time. Drop your nets, pick up your cross.

00;25;50;29 - 00;26;12;07
Tod Bolsinger
Deny yourself. If a seed falls to the earth and dies, it bears much fruit. But if it doesn't, it remains a single grain. Hmm. That imagery in John 12 is so rich to me. Think of a grain that doesn't want to go into the soil. What happens to it? It just shrivels up and dies as a grain. You're going to die either way.

00;26;12;28 - 00;26;30;01
Tod Bolsinger
So the question is, do you want your life to be something that you give over to something bigger than yourself so it can become fruitful or do you want to cling to your little seed mass so that you can then shrivel up and die? Most of us cling to this thing we know rather than the transformation we have to go through.

00;26;30;08 - 00;26;30;20
Tod Bolsinger
Yeah.

00;26;32;18 - 00;26;52;29
Rusty George
You know, I was I heard so much about this obviously over the last two years, but you really could see those of us that were scared of the unknown during COVID. And we were the ones and I mean, this is no disrespect to anybody who did come back right away, but it was the churches that wanted to open as quickly as possible and get back to normality.

00;26;53;21 - 00;26;54;06
Tod Bolsinger
Yes.

00;26;54;13 - 00;27;16;09
Rusty George
And they couched it in, you know, don't forsake the meeting and all the verses we pulled out of context. But it was really that was the only way I knew how to minister. So let's get people back in the room. And I don't know if you've heard this, you probably have because of who you deal with. It breaks my heart to hear the churches right now that are shutting down online ministries to try to get people back in the room.

00;27;16;09 - 00;27;18;06
Rusty George
We're not putting that genie back in the bottle.

00;27;18;07 - 00;27;35;14
Tod Bolsinger
Right. All right. So. So just think about this. We because I mean, look, look, you and I are sitting here having this conversation over Zoom. I wish we were sitting at a coffee table. I wish we were having coffee. We were just chatting about this. Right. There's no doubt. Being face to face is way better than this thing we're doing.

00;27;36;00 - 00;27;56;00
Tod Bolsinger
But if we didn't have this thing we're doing, we wouldn't have coffee today. Right. Like our schedules wouldn't have lined up. We wouldn't have been able to do this. Nobody would have been able to hear this. It would have just been two new friends chatting whenever our schedules allowed us to. Technology, if used well, can can allow things to happen that wouldn't have before.

00;27;56;09 - 00;28;18;03
Tod Bolsinger
The problem is, it feels so unfamiliar to us and we long for this thing we're missing that we will shut down new innovations before we've figured out how to use them wisely. And I'm of the age where I remember when microwave ovens first came out like I was in junior high. Right. Do two. And the promises were. So someday you'll cook your Thanksgiving turkey in your microwave oven.

00;28;18;21 - 00;28;38;14
Tod Bolsinger
Nobody would even think that today. But nobody understood that if someday microwave ovens would be something small and cheap. And in every home, and you'd use it for about five or six things while you also use your regular oven to cook your family meal. We are just so uncomfortable with the new thing that we try to get rid of it.

00;28;39;03 - 00;28;55;14
Tod Bolsinger
And so we find ourselves today really in this place where where the church doesn't even understand how much anxiety it is about the part about going back to what's familiar. Instead of trusting God with the unknown future that God has promised to take us into.

00;28;56;09 - 00;29;19;16
Rusty George
The longer I lead, the more I find what you just said to be the most difficult thing to do. Because it's not. It's not a science. It's an art. Yeah. And I love this quote that you pulled out in the book that says Leadership is disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb because this is constant of pushing and pulling back.

00;29;19;16 - 00;29;39;25
Rusty George
Pushing and pulling back. And I see people go to, you know, obviously different extreme. So I want to talk about leaders for just a second. Yeah, I was just thinking about I mean, Jesus, obviously, you know, he's he's he's perfection. But you have a guy like John the Baptist who just is out there. Yeah. Okay. And loses his head, obviously.

00;29;40;04 - 00;30;00;21
Rusty George
And then you get a guy like Judas who's really just trying to get Jesus to do what he wanted him to do. Let's start this revolution. Let's get back to what we really wanted. So you have these two different extremes. How does a leader live more in the center of going back and forth slowly without just turning in the John the Baptist or Judas, but sticks with Jesus?

00;30;00;21 - 00;30;03;27
Rusty George
And that's three J. So I get bonus points for that as a pastor.

00;30;03;28 - 00;30;14;10
Tod Bolsinger
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one of the ways to think about this is my favorite scene about John the Baptist is when he sends his people to Jesus because he's disappointed in Jesus.

00;30;14;22 - 00;30;15;00
Rusty George
Yeah.

00;30;15;11 - 00;30;34;22
Tod Bolsinger
Are you the one to come or do we look for someone else? Why? Everybody was looking for a messiah. The Messiah is the one who is going to make the world right for John the Baptist. That Messiah meant you're going to come and you're going to call Israel to repentance. Jesus, I'm expecting you to be a little bit more hellfire and damnation.

00;30;34;22 - 00;30;53;17
Tod Bolsinger
Yeah, like. And like. Is this really what the kingdom looks like? I'm not sure if I got a picture of it. He is so faithful all the way through that he does lose his head over being faithful to his call. Right? That's martyrdom. It's faithfulness. But even he grappled with the fact that he couldn't understand what his cousin was doing right.

00;30;53;17 - 00;31;16;11
Tod Bolsinger
Like Jesus affirms John, he says, Look, John's being faithful. He doesn't quite see it. Sometimes I think we need more John the Baptist not being a wild, but being trusting Judas is basically the person who says, Well, I know how to make this happen, happen. This happens with power. You start a revolution will fall for Jesus hand. What?

00;31;16;12 - 00;31;38;10
Tod Bolsinger
I put him in a corner. He'll have to do it. We'll start a revolution. He wants to use worldly power. And that's the one that comes to the worst outcome. I mean, he not only betrays himself, he ends up committing suicide because he realizes it's just completely wrongheaded. It's horrible. Right. We, I think, are much more tempted than we want to admit to be Judas.

00;31;38;11 - 00;31;54;13
Tod Bolsinger
We want to use worldly power to force God's hand to get us the vision of the kingdom that we've always expected, rather than having to go through, like John the Baptist question and wondering, worrying and being faithful every step of the way, even if it call costs us.

00;31;55;16 - 00;32;07;21
Rusty George
I don't know how much of a of a fortuneteller you are, but look into the future a little bit. What do you think? Where do you think we are in ten years from now?

00;32;09;04 - 00;32;35;04
Tod Bolsinger
Well, this voice I don't I'm not good I'm not good at predicting what I what the closest thing I can say today is I really believe that there is going to be a growing hunger for leaders who will give us false certainty. We're going to the more anxious we get, the more we want people to give us certainty.

00;32;35;19 - 00;32;55;03
Tod Bolsinger
And when we want certainty, we end up blaming. So we're going to end up we're going to have a growing number of folks who are going to become addicted to the leader who says, I can solve it. I will give you the here's the plan. I got it clear. And it's that's going to stunt the growth of people are going to have to learn how to walk by faith and not by sight.

00;32;56;01 - 00;33;16;14
Tod Bolsinger
We're going to have to learn to trust the Lord to the darkness and take faithful steps. The key I think the future is going to be built on the depths of our discipleship. Will we learn to be people who trust in the Lord and His Word and the Spirit into the place where we follow without knowing where it will go?

00;33;17;23 - 00;33;37;11
Tod Bolsinger
I think that's the thing we're going to be called to over and over and over again. And I don't know at this moment what that's going to look like. When I'm asked by younger leaders, they'll say, you know, Todd, you talk all about this adaptive change. You know how long the church will be in this. And my answer is always, well, it's like we're in the wilderness and we're trying to get to the Promised Land.

00;33;37;11 - 00;33;58;13
Tod Bolsinger
And I'm pretty sure I'm dying in the wilderness, and I'm pretty sure you are too. So the question that is, how can we be faithful that there will be a remnant who will carry on? Mm hmm. You know that. You know that. Great passage in Jeremiah four. I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. You know that's the plan.

00;33;58;13 - 00;34;20;20
Tod Bolsinger
That's the. That's the verse. Everybody wants you to speak on it. A Christian college commencement or baccalaureate or like it's such a powerful passage, you know? I know the plans I have for you. Since the Lord's Lord plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plan to give you hope and a future. And then it says, So I will come back in 70 years.

00;34;20;20 - 00;34;24;09
Tod Bolsinger
I You read the passage. It's I will be back in 70 years.

00;34;24;12 - 00;34;26;11
Rusty George
That doesn't make the magnet does it.

00;34;26;11 - 00;34;44;25
Tod Bolsinger
Yeah. That, that doesn't. Right. So what do you do in the meantime? You plant gardens, you bless the city, you're put in you, you, you work for the shalom of the place. You are you are faithful. 70 years from now, when your grandchildren are here, I'll come back to you and I will bring you out of this exile.

00;34;45;00 - 00;35;08;02
Tod Bolsinger
I believe that's the generation we're in. It's. It's the most depressing thing I say, but it's the most hopeful, because I believe that my life and our work is built in something that is built on generations and that we need to think long term in our churches I mean, every single time you dedicate a baby or baptize a baby or you welcome a young family, don't think, oh, we just added a new family to our member.

00;35;08;02 - 00;35;20;16
Tod Bolsinger
Think this is our hope. How do we how do we pass the faith until this one will pass the faith onto their children so that there will be a faith and a mission going forward? Mm hmm.

00;35;20;27 - 00;35;41;15
Rusty George
That's so good. Okay. I want you to speak to two groups of people here. Group one, church leaders. Encourage them, tell them what to do next. You've you've tipped off a little bit to what you just said about it's the long game. And if if the Bible tells us anything, it's that Jesus has a long game. He's playing here.

00;35;41;15 - 00;35;59;13
Rusty George
And thankfully for us, you know, but I mean, nothing happens quickly. We got 40 years here, 400 years there, 70 years there, and we want it in 10 minutes. So what would you say to leaders and then what would you say to just people that are in the church? But they're easily frustrated right now.

00;36;00;03 - 00;36;27;22
Tod Bolsinger
Yeah. Yeah. So the main thing I'd say to leaders is throughout the scriptures, the most cherished leaders are the most humble. Mm hmm. And humility is really teach ability. So leaders are learners. My my encouragement to leaders are lead the learning. It's a you know, I work at a seminary. Everybody comes to the seminary. Somebody said to them, you're the best Christian I know.

00;36;27;22 - 00;36;50;18
Tod Bolsinger
You should go pro. Usually go out the professional Christian school and we give them a master of divinity and they sound like a superhero. And your job actually is to not be a master. It's to be the master learner, or it's to say, look, let's lead the learning. Remember that disciple means learner. Let's work on developing humility and let's learn together as we go.

00;36;51;01 - 00;37;11;26
Tod Bolsinger
That if you create a culture of discipleship, a culture of humility, we will fit. God will meet us there. God gives grace to the grace, to the humble right poses. The problem gives grace to the humble. And when I would say to those who have the rest of us are in the middle of these churches, is to actually recognize this is your ministry too.

00;37;12;19 - 00;37;33;07
Tod Bolsinger
Like, I really do believe in the priesthood of all believers. I believe people like you and I, our job is to equip the saints for the work of ministry. It's it's to actually be the coaches more than the star players. It's to be the ones who really believe that God's spirit is going to work through our people and to literally invite them into this exact same ministry with us.

00;37;33;07 - 00;37;49;00
Tod Bolsinger
Come, come, be partners. Let's, let's do this together. Let's build communities that witness to the hope of Christ in the world and not trying to recruit, recover some glory days, some power, some influence and prestige. It's it's wrong.

00;37;49;06 - 00;37;55;25
Rusty George
It's so well said. The book is Fantastic, Brother. I really loved it.

00;37;56;00 - 00;37;56;16
Tod Bolsinger
Thank you.

00;37;56;25 - 00;38;17;18
Rusty George
I was encouraged. I learned a lot and I've been telling everybody I know about it. Tempered Resilience How Leaders Are Formed in the crucible of change. I know you're busy. I know you've got a lot going on, but keep writing because you're right. Well, thanks. And it's it's really, really helpful. So thank you for being on the show.

00;38;17;18 - 00;38;25;01
Rusty George
And I can't believe you're just down the road and we've never met. So we're going to get that cup of coffee face to face and we got to do it.

00;38;25;15 - 00;38;25;20
Tod Bolsinger
Yeah.

00;38;25;23 - 00;38;27;01
Rusty George
Thank you, brother. I appreciate it.

00;38;27;10 - 00;38;27;22
Tod Bolsinger
Take care.

00;38;28;22 - 00;38;51;26
Rusty George
Well, Tom, thanks so much for being on the podcast. So grateful for his input into our listeners lives and into mine. And if you enjoy that, make sure that you pick up a copy of his book and even share this episode. Okay. Next week, we're going to go a little controversial. I'm bringing in a woman to help make sense of has happened as a result of the overturning of Roe v Wade.

00;38;52;07 - 00;39;16;00
Rusty George
We don't often talk politics on this conversation, but I know many of our leaders who are leading churches found themselves surprised to see so many differing and adamant positions on this event that took place our country a few months ago. And she's going to give us some insight. Her name is Teresa Brennan, and she's the president of the Right for Life Group here in California.

00;39;16;00 - 00;39;33;15
Rusty George
And I think that you're going to learn a lot about different sides of this issue, and particularly what we could do as leaders to help our people. So make sure you check out next as we walk through this pretty interesting topic. So thank you so much for listening. And as always, keep it simple.

00;39;34;00 - 00;39;57;22
Intro/Outro
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