The central theme of this podcast episode revolves around the invaluable insights shared by Dr. Crosby, the President and CEO of Emerge Ministries, regarding the multifaceted dimensions of mental, spiritual, and emotional health, particularly in the context of supporting pastors and missionaries. Throughout our discourse, we delve into the vital role that Emerge Ministries plays in addressing the unique challenges faced by these individuals, especially in light of the overwhelming demands exacerbated by the recent global pandemic. Dr. Crosby articulates the necessity for a supportive community, emphasizing the importance of mental health resources that are tailored for those who serve in ministry. Our conversation further explores the dynamics of effective leadership within teams, highlighting the significance of fostering an honoring culture that recognizes and affirms the contributions of each member. This episode promises to enrich one’s understanding of the intersection of faith, leadership, and the imperative of holistic care for those who dedicate their lives to uplifting others.

Takeaways:

• The Clarity Podcast provides invaluable insights into leadership and mental health support for pastors and missionaries.
• Dr. Crosby emphasizes the need for mental health care tailored specifically for missionaries in challenging environments.
• A culture of honor within teams is essential for fostering mutual respect and collaboration among members.
• Effective team leadership requires the ability to empower individuals, promoting a shared vision and collective brilliance.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Emerge Ministries
• Southeastern University
• AGWM

Foreign.

Welcome back to the Clarity Podcast.

This podcast is all about providing clarity insight encouragement for life and mission.

My name is Aaron Santemeier and I get to be your host.

Today we have the phenomenal opportunity to have those on the podcast, Dr. Crosby who serves as the President and CEO of Emerge Ministries.

Many of you know Emerge provides a mental health, spiritual health and emotional health support for pastors and missionaries and others and so just was a joy to have him on the podcast today.

I've got to know him a little bit, is now serving on the Emerge board and just really enjoyed getting to learn from him about life and leadership and lessons he's learned in ministry and you won't want to miss it and really enjoyed getting to spend some time with him, an area that he has definitely passionate about and great, great time with Dr. Crosby.

Do want to ask you to continue to subscribe to the podcast.

I know the PODC podcast I subscribe to or the ones I listen to, they show up on my feed and do also continue to send in your questions for Backchannel with Foe and that's the time when we get to sit down with Dick Foth and get to learn from him his wisdom and it's been a fun ride with Dick over these last five to six years and really have enjoyed back channel with Thoth.

Well, there's no time better than now to get started.

So here we go.

Greetings and welcome back to the Clarity Podcast.

So excited to be with a new friend of the podcast.

Dr. Crosby, welcome to the Clarity Podcast.

Really good to be with you, Aaron.

Looking forward to the conversation for sure

and was excited to read your book, the Teaming Church.

But before we jump into that, will you share a little bit about yourself and the role you're currently serving at Emerge and then we'll jump into some of those questions.

Sure.

Well, I'm a husband dad of four kids and now we're up to six grandkids.

I've served in pastoral ministry a number of years in upstate New York and Boston and also served as a vice president, Southeastern University, taught pastoral counseling and leadership and ministry there a number of years.

And then about seven years ago this month we were asked to come to lead Emerge Counseling Ministries the year before COVID So it felt like we came to lead a counseling ministry that had a lot of history, but the next year it felt like everybody on the planet needed counseling during the pandemic.

So we've been here seven years.

Just delighted to be able to serve with a wonderful group of counselors and team leaders Here.

And Emerge has served the church in a number of ways.

We like to simply put it this way, that what we're most known for is Emerge lifts the souls of those who lift the church.

Good word.

Good word.

And, Dr. Crosby, one of the things I've had the honor to get to know you in the last few months is, is your heart for missionaries and for missionaries to be.

To be healthy.

Can you share kind of how Emerge comes alongside missionaries in that specific way?

You know, the whole area of missionaries and the needs of their lives is one that, as you said, Aaron, is very close to our hearts.

One of the concerns is many of them are in parts of the world where they might not always have access to the kind of counseling, support, and help that they need.

And Emerge as a part of a circle of counseling that often will begin in a pastor's office or at an altar, and somebody shares a need.

They go to pastoral counseling.

Often that's what they need, and that's what God uses, and that helps them.

But then many times a pastor or a missionary will feel that they've exhausted their resources, so they come to a ministry like Emerge.

It has clinical licensed therapists who are believers, Christ followers.

They've been trained to help and deal with a number of chronic mental health issues and needs.

And so we've been able to do that over the years.

At Emerge, we have people that will come from all over the world to come, some that just need to be refreshed in their spirit.

Some people are now making an intensive, what we call an intensive Eddie merge, a part of a sabbatical.

But then we'll get calls.

We'll get contacted by missionary groups such as AGWM and others that say, we have a family in need, that they come and could you invest in them?

And that's a privilege.

We always feel like if whatever Emerge can do and our counselors can do to serve those souls, then we.

And we help to help them to be able to get back on the field.

So we feel very strongly about it.

There's so many challenges in life.

Living in a culture you're familiar with that then transporting that to a new culture for families and individuals, it's complex, and so we can't do it all, but we want to do our part to support God's work in the lives of missionaries and their families.

Awesome.

Awesome.

So I want to jump into asking you some questions about team.

Team culture.

And, yeah, really enjoyed spending time with your book and learning from you on this.

So one of the things you shared in the beginning was this idea that prayer renews our passion for God.

But teams put that passion to work.

Can you share more about that?

You know, they really do.

I look at kind of the three legs of the stool of the Christian faith.

One way of looking at it is, of course, we talk a lot about the imago dei.

The image of God at emerge, we believe, is so important to have wholeness in our lives, and none of us are perfectly whole, but we're in this journey of being more perfected, even through weaknesses and challenges and struggles.

So the imago dei, that image of Gaba, then the missio day, which missionaries are very familiar with, the mission of God, you know, that they're on the field representing God's heart for the lost and people in need, people that are broken.

You know, we.

We like to say God wants to save the lost and heal the saved.

And.

But then there's also the passio day, the passion of God.

Our God's a consuming fire.

I minister a fair amount among Hispanic believers, and I. I love the passion so many of them have in life, in family and in ministry, and.

And they.

There' great love there for things that are dynamic and prophetic and all those areas.

But.

But in our prayer closet, our passion is fueled, but it's really through a team that that passion gets to be lived out.

You certainly look at it in the life of Jesus and his disciples, the power of prayer, his rhythm of prayer, but then him living out the mission of God and showing the image of God through the team that he built.

So I think there's a wonderful flow.

And, you know, if you get too caught up in just the team and you're not fueling the passion, you're in trouble.

If you simply fuel the passion and never express it.

That's also a difficult place.

Yeah, I love it, love it, love it.

One of the other concepts you talked about was an idea of an honoring culture in the world we live in today.

What does a healthy honoring culture look like?

So the idea of the honoring culture is one where we respect one another and we develop a comfort or affirming one another.

But then the third level I would add, is affirming one another when it's appropriate in front of other people.

You know, there's something about affirming somebody one on one, that's very powerful, very meaningful.

But when you do it in front of someone else, especially a significant person in their life, it becomes major.

I remember when, you know, I had a group of young people lead me to Christ at Myrtle beach when I was 16.

And about a year or so later, a 60 some year old pastor baptized me as a 17 year old.

And I remember before we went out, there was an evangelist there who was speaking.

I was new to Christianity.

So to me this evangelist was like the Apostle Paul, you know, and he, he said, hey Robert, come over here, I want to introduce you.

And he introduced me and in front of him talked about how encouraged they were by my life and just affirm me in front of him.

And I never forgot that.

Do you know Aaron?

I probably heard him preach a couple hundred sermons.

I can't remember any of them, but I'll never, never forgive that, forget that moment.

Because what he did is what I call a circle of honor.

He drew a circle of honor around me.

He affirmed me.

And it stapled something down in my soul of God's work to have somebody recognize what I felt going on within me and then to affirm me in front of someone else.

It's kind of an honoring moment and we need more of those.

And there, there are a lot of misconceptions about honor today, but I think at the heart of it, you know, in First, Peter says, honor everyone.

You know, there's something that can be found, that can be honorable in just about everyone.

But that honoring culture, I believe is vital in a team.

Not, not, you know, flattery.

Not just a bunch of empty stuff, not just, you know, saying things to make people feel good, but catching people doing things that are godly and affirming it.

Catching people doing things right and affirming it.

It's like we, we nail it down.

We're really good at catching people doing things wrong, you know, but if we can catch them doing things right and affirm them and then even affirm them when appropriate, publicly.

Yeah, that.

That can be very effective.

Yeah, for sure.

For sure.

You mentioned there are some common misconceptions or about honoring.

Are there one or two that you'd share that, that maybe people have misconceptions about what honoring truly is?

You know, we hear more about it today.

I know I spoke to a denominational leader a while back and I said, what are the biggest challenges that people in ministry that they're dealing with that come across your desk and they name things like moral failures and financial mismanagement.

But then they said the new one is power differential.

How we use or misuse the power, our quote, unquote, authority of our role.

And I know, you know, the.

I'm, I'm an ordained assembly of God minister and you know, Pentecostalism, we love the authority of scripture.

We love the, you know, to preach with authority that Jesus led with authority.

We love all those things.

But what we can miss is that he came really maybe before authority to model authority with humility.

And so I think some of the areas where it goes awry at times, Aaron, is control or authority misuse.

Things like expecting unquestioning obedience or equating somebody disagreeing with you with sin, maybe repeatedly invoking God's authority to justify your desires.

God told me, God said, you better really know before you say that.

Because it.

And that because, you know, believers, especially younger, less mature believers, are very impressionable.

And then a setting where leaders absolutely can never be questioned, you know, where we use shame, fear, guilt, you know, maybe exclusivity, elitism, those kinds of things we have to be careful about today.

Millennials and Gen Z are especially sensitive to them.

And with the work we do at Emerge, we're finding that this now is joining the list of other things that are causing real challenges to pastors and churches and unfortunately to boards.

I mean, I, I just saw a story just the other day of a very large church that now has had to totally rethink how they handle people who have a complaint in the church.

And they've literally now listed a page, it's probably wise, on their, on their homepage that conveys how when you have a question or there's some pushback for something, how do you appropriately handle that so that people don't just feel blown off?

Wow.

Wow.

And so you've been in ministry for more than three or four years.

So this power differential conversation, is it something that's.

That you, you said it's more prominent now.

Did it exist in other areas, other seasons of ministry of yours and it just wasn't talked about, or is it something.

What do you think some of the

reasons has become more prominent?

I guess that's the question I'm trying to ask.

Yeah, the.

I think we become more aware as a culture.

You know, used to be authority meant that you had access to certain knowledge that other people didn't have access to.

You know, I've taught at a university, and I remember years ago, you know, you could, you could speak and teach and maybe miss it every now and then on a date or a quote or something.

And now with the Internet, you know, you're there, there, there's such a flat line of information and knowledge available.

You better know your stuff.

But because of it, too, there's a lot more access to, you know, to psychological insight and truth and manipulative trends and stories and, and all those things.

And in some ways, things done in the darkness have now come into the light.

And while I still believe, you know, preaching with authority is important, important, you know, Jesus, Jesus, his capacity was not just his authority, it was also his humility.

And, And I think there's something about that with the leaders being able to live out trusted authority with incredible humility.

Matter of fact, I believe the more authority you have, the more humility you and I need to exhibit.

Wow.

And it goes along with that responsibility of, of the authority that goes with it and that humility to walk in that and super valuable conversation specifically for today.

And it's.

Yeah, appreciate it.

So, team leader, we have team leaders.

They want to show value to team members and those that they're serving.

What is a healthy or practical way that they can do that?

You know, one probably goes back to the one leg of the stool, the imago de respecting this, this individual, this life, kind of the wonder of it.

I mean, we, we now spend so much time with our faces in the face of our smartphones that we're probably not quite as familiar as some of us were 15, 20 years ago with the details of a person's countenance.

And I think this has contributed even to more suicidality in our culture.

You know, my wife and I will, you know, we'll say, when, you know, there are times we'll go to a restaurant.

You'll see an older couple sitting in a restaurant, looking at everyone in the room except one another and not talking.

And we've said for years, we don't want to grow old that way.

Yeah.

But now you'll see a younger couple having a meal, looking at their smartphones and not talking.

And we'll say, wow, that's not good either.

But I'll tell her, maybe he's texting her, you're so beautiful tonight.

But they're not.

They're checking their social media, their email, so.

So I think part of it is realize those people on your team, they're.

They're people, you know, they.

They belong to God.

There's some wonderful things to be able to observe, get to know in their lives.

So the being able to connect on a human personal level, not just a task, duty, job description level.

And that shows up in different ways.

You know, staying aware of needs, you know, it doesn't mean you have to be the best friend to all the people on your team, but.

But being able to help them feel Valued.

And we.

We can kind of tell those moments when we say or do something that makes people feel that way.

Yeah.

How have you learned to navigate it through the seasons of ministry when it comes to those of a different gender than yours, when show value but not going, maybe showing.

Yeah.

Crossing lines.

Does that make sense?

Or there's some kind of.

It makes.

It makes total sense.

Total sense.

Because, you know, I'm.

My mom and dad just had two kids, two boys.

I'm the oldest one four years younger than me, so didn't have any sisters to grow up around, but cousins, other individuals.

And.

And for whatever reason, I have found working with women in leadership to be effective, you know, type of thing.

I mean, I feel like I've worked fairly well with them, but because of a church I was a part of years ago that I served at, I was only there six months, and the senior pastor had an affair with someone.

And I remember when that happened, I was only, like, probably in my early 30s, but it really caused the leadership there for us to really take stock, to kind of say, okay, let's observe what we've just seen happen and what are some why steps and safeguards that we take.

And I'm.

Some.

I might still seem kind of traditional, but, you know, when.

When I'm meeting one on one with a member of the opposite sex, I'll leave the door open and a sound machine on outside or music on in the hallway or something like that.

And that's not everybody's conviction, but that's.

That's mine.

I mean, in the world of professional counseling, just counseling guidelines are different than that.

Yeah, but.

But I think that's important.

I think avoiding anything that can make a member of the opposite sex feel uncomfortable, you know, bringing too much attention to anything physical, suggesting anything sexual, you know, just being appropriate and respecting them, that becomes really key.

And the odd thing is we grew up in family cultures where something that's taboo in one family is not and another so pays to know what the.

The mores are, the social mores in your culture and to.

To stick by them.

I know there's the Modesto manifesto that Billy Graham made years ago, you know, that he followed in a lot of ways.

That is great.

It probably.

It probably needs to be maybe a millennial Modesto manifesto.

Some.

Something like that, you know, might be appropriate.

Yeah.

It's worth looking up just to see, you know, what he did because he was around so many people and amazing.

All the years of ministry and really never in any major way being called into Serious question.

Yeah.

And it is so important.

I won the episodes way back someone mentioned, you know, not to their, their role was not to be engaged in any activity that they wouldn't broadcast in front of a church screen for everybody in the church to watch it.

So.

And they would not, not say anything, you know, that, that they wouldn't say to a sister or if, you know, if they were a female, they wouldn't say to their brother.

And some of those things, it was kind of more of a modern version to that, but at the same time recognizing that.

Yeah, if you're, if you're hiding something, it's probably not, you know, it's probably, it's probably a line you're crossing.

So it's a. Yeah, it is.

You know, Aaron, we've had people ask us because Emerge has spent 51 in our 53rd year now.

I've been here leading Emerge for seven years as I mentioned.

But you know, one of the questions we get asked is with pastors who go through some kind of a crash and burn situation in life or a breakdown of some sorts, you know, or some burnout in their life.

And we have a lot of people that come here for preventative reasons as well.

But when people come for those reasons, are there any common denominators?

And the one that goes way before me back to our founder, that I've heard a number of people say and we've noticed, it's, it's the stewardship of the intimacies of your life.

And what I mean by that is your intimacy with God.

Often that that's lacking in some way living honest to God, but also the intimacies of, of your relationships, your marriage, your friendships, you know, Rod Cooper, Dr. Rod Cooper says intimacy means into me.

See, it's the, the internals of life, this connections of life and stewarding those.

So I think being aware also, you know, we're, you know, we're, we're human.

So we can feel certain magnetisms toward different people, can feel drawn and connected to different people.

So being able to watch the lines between what it means to be friendly and kind and when it crosses a line into something that makes someone, you know, uncomfortable.

Yeah.

Well, thanks for letting me take us doing that little trail, but get back to, get back to the teaming church.

So you, one of the things that I was really challenged by was an under challenged team and you share some of the detriments of that.

So what is an under challenged team and what are some reasons that's detrimental,

you know, when it comes to how we're wired as leaders.

I always think of the, the verse in John 1 that we beheld Jesus, you know, full of grace and truth, and our needle tends to tilt more toward one than the other.

Some of us are more comfortable with truth telling, some with grace giving somewhere, somewhere in the middle.

But when you're very grace oriented, sometimes you can be so grace oriented that you don't, that we don't deal with truth and we don't challenge our team.

We feel like it might be imposing to set goals and deadlines and inspect those goals and all of those things.

So teams, when you don't challenge them enough, they can feel under, under challenged things when things like the goals of the team are not clear, or when the, the leader doesn't really draw on the best that they have to bring, or when you don't measure goals, you don't review goals, or when team meetings just drag on and on and we don't get to these ultimate, well, what's our goal?

What did we do this week to accomplish it?

What needs to change?

Does the goal need to change?

You know, all of those things become very, very critical and that, that whole area of being challenged becomes a vital piece getting the most out of people.

You know, my roots are Methodist.

My mother's maiden name was Wesley.

So, you know, John Wesley, do all the good you can for all the people you can and all the ways you can for as long as you can.

So Methodism was fueled with potential.

You know, you, we all have a God given potential.

So when you have a team under you and you're, you're a leader of that team, you have a stewardship issue to bring the best out of them.

And, and I think sometimes we, we lose great team members because they become under challenged.

One place that I served years ago and I got to know the team that I inherited and one of the guys said to me, okay, here's a little bit about me.

And I want to let you know the last guy that was here used me at about 30% of my capacity.

And I said, well, all right, get ready because you asked for it, you know, but that was great, you know, and he was telling me that he was, you've been under challenged.

Wow.

One of the other things you highlighted was the differences in teams in the church and those in the business world.

And you talked about cohesion, value and significance because we do, I think sometimes we do read business books and we try to maybe apply it to the church, maybe church to the business world.

So more thoughts on that.

You know, I truly believe that any team that you lead, if you're a Christ follower and you want to do it for the glory of God, you know, be it.

Be it a business or a church, you can.

You can lead it in a way that really brings glory to God.

There's so many business leaders that might even be listening out there that, that love God and their work is a ministry.

They're.

They're called and what they're doing, and they're representing Jesus.

Some of them are winning more people to Jesus than pastors and even some missionaries because of where they are and the timing of it all.

But I do believe there's something about a church team, Jesus said, where two or three of you come together in my name.

There am I. I like to say that that verse has kind of been looked at as the consolation prize verse for low attendance on Sunday, you know, but it's not, it's not a consolation prize.

It's revelation.

Jesus said, when two or three of you come together at church, at Starbucks, in the hallway, when you come together in my name, I'm not missing that moment.

I'm there with you.

So there's something about that, the cohesion that can come.

Jesus in joining that team, the value, because the value represents Jesus, something of his glory manifest in a team.

And I believe there is something about it.

Maybe some listening might remember a time where you sat and had a cup of coffee with a couple of friends, or you played golf with a couple of friends, or you, you know, went out with a couple of friends and you began to share about the Lord and you left.

And something within you kind of said that almost felt more like church than last Sunday because there was something purely Christ oriented about it.

So.

And then there's a significance to that.

So I think, you know, pastors and missionaries, we feel like, oh, we need teams and we've got to build teams.

We've got to get the work done.

Yes.

But also let's help our people realize the inherent godly glory of coming together in Jesus name, that there's something powerful about it.

Yeah, yeah, Good word, good word.

I'm gonna go to illnesses you talk about or share, write about three team illnesses and some of, and some ways that we can recognize them.

Um, you mentioned them as rust and luck and freeze.

Will you share about those illnesses?

And then for leaders and people that are on teams, like, how can they begin to recognize them?

So they didn't, they don't.

They don't end up with, with those with Those illnesses themselves.

Sure, sure.

Well, you know, the, the focus on teams really kind of came to be in my life when I was pastoring in New England and when I did a doctorate ministry and we were challenged to do a project based on a real need in the local church.

And I was experiencing some of these team illnesses, and I didn't even know it until I began to study more about teams.

And I read so many.

I read ministry books on teams.

I read business books on teams, sports books on teams.

I was in New England, you know, and military books on teams.

I found out that the most respected school for training people to create teams is West Point, because, you know, life and death is in the balance, turning a group quickly into a team.

So one of them, one of the illnesses of teams is team freeze.

That's when there's a relational distance that develops on the team.

And maybe all of us have at one point, or maybe you're even somewhere now where you can kind of dread the next team meeting because you just don't feel connected.

You're doing work, but you don't really feel like you're doing it together.

And there's a freeze there and there's relational work to be done on a team like that.

Another is what I call team lock.

And team lock is where there's an unresolved issue on that team and you might even get together and the team leaders say, hey, it's great to have the team here together today.

And somebody text to somebody else, oh, my goodness, I can't believe this.

You know, we're trying to do.

There's an issue we're all aware of.

Nobody wants to talk about it.

It's just being left unresolved.

It gets bigger every day.

And so there's a lock on that team.

It's tough for them to get the work done that they need to do.

And, you know, I like to say that we need to be aware of elephants in the room.

When an elephant is born, no joke, they weigh about 150 pounds, and they start walking on all fours in 15 minutes.

So we can't afford to have these elephants in the room in our relationships that are undoubtedly.

I tell my team, I didn't always do this, Aaron, but I tell my lead team members, if there's a little elephant between you and me, if there's some issue, please come and let's talk about it, or let's go out and talk about it, but let's deal with it.

Let's don't give it any time to Grow.

I want everybody in the room to be an elephant hunter.

You know, let's.

Let's snuff them out.

And I think it's true in churches, too.

We let things grow, and they become so big, they become difficult to deal with.

And then team rust.

That's when the goals get old and the mission is the same as it was 10 years ago.

And we just not quite sure where we're going right now.

And if you ask the team, what are we really all trying to work on together right now?

And the team can get rusty.

And I think if you identify with any of those, it's important to stop and to rethink how you're leading the team.

Yeah.

And so those are some of the illnesses.

But then you also mentioned about the role of the leader in bringing out the team's brilliance and the importance of that also.

So we talked about some of the illnesses.

But how does a leader bring out a team's brilliance?

You know, some of it.

I think there are different skills that we can use.

And I do believe if we focus on being not an empowered leader, but an empowering leader, that we will find that we become.

We truly do become more powerful, in a good sense of the term, if we're empowering leaders.

You know, I think it was Jack Hayford that said, God didn't call us to build big churches, but they grow big souls and to.

To grow people that have room for a lot of other people.

Wow.

Are you gonna edit this?

Yeah.

Okay, I gotta switch.

My AirPod just died on me.

I thought it was all right.

Sorry about that.

So should I go back to the beginning of what I said?

If you don't mind that it'll help me.

That'll help the editor, me.

I can do that.

So.

So one.

One aspect is being an empowering leader instead of an empowered leader.

And, you know, when I first became a youth pastor years ago, which is the first role I had in ministry full time, I was kind of excited because I felt like I get to be in authority, you know, over this youth group.

And I thought somehow that was, you know, significant and meaningful.

And in many ways it is.

But after a while, I began to realize, you know, the real challenge of ministry is not being in authority over people.

It's walking with people, is walking with them through the wildernesses of life.

It's kind of the Moses thing, you know, getting them out of some place and leading them towards another.

But I think some of those skills that we need to bring out the brilliance in the team and There is brilliance in the team.

The pastors of the churches there were so frustrated at their lack of growth and they met one day and they said, but we have so many business leaders whose businesses are growing and they're Christians.

Why are our churches not growing?

So they appointed a committee of Christlike business leaders to evaluate them, if you can imagine.

And they created this thing called the Paul Report.

And there was a string of books that were written about it, but one of them, they said, you pastors have vast resources of skills sitting in your churches every week that are under tapped and underutilized because you're unaware of the worlds in which they live and the work they're doing.

So one, one way to bring the brilliance out is to ask questions, to really get to know people.

You know, to visit somebody at work, take them to lunch and find out more about their brilliance.

When you ask questions, you need to get ready to listen, to listen deeply.

It's a lacking skill in our culture today in our eye contact, verbal following.

I love the model that the marriage writer John Gottman talks about of attune.

You know, to attend to the person, the tt is turned towards them, undivided attention, non defensive listening, you know, all those things become a, a vital part.

And then something maybe we don't do enough at times on teams is to reflect.

We get an idea and we're like, boom, let's go with it.

But you know, to reflect on it, we need to take the idea to a point where at least somebody is going to disagree with it a bit.

And you may, you may think, you know, I disagree with some things that my team says or my team leader says or my group leader says.

So how do we deal with that?

Well, here's something I learned years ago.

Somebody taught me come up with some carefully worded ways to disagree.

You know, we can say, oh, I totally disagree with you, and that's going to create a terrible atmosphere.

Sure.

Or you're wrong, dead wrong, you know.

Or how about this, Aaron, what you just said, could I push back on that a little bit?

And then I come with another perspective and, you know, being able to see the other lens and then getting to a place of reflecting and then deciding.

Sometimes teams struggle to make decisions.

And so some questions that are great to have available.

Are we ready to make a decision?

What would it take to turn this into reality?

This idea and who's the best person to lead the charge on this and how soon can we be up and running?

And some of those, the more tenacious people on the team will naturally ask those questions, but, but they're very needed, needed.

And, and of course, vitally, I love the book Lead with Prayer that a lot of people have been reading, but definitely taking time together to seek God, to enjoy the benefit of, of that team and the presence of God and, and to be able to, to get a sense of what he's directing you to do on that team.

Because in essence, as I mentioned earlier, the team can reflect the glory of God.

Wow.

Well, last question I got for you, and then I'm going to ask you to pray for us.

You mentioned the concept of a circling leader.

What do you mean by a circling leader?

And what does that look like in someone's life?

Yeah.

So what I call circle thinking is catching a vision of how teams and communities can reflect the glory of God.

And maybe this is a good place to wrap up because what I love about the Trinity, you know, some people over throughout history, some theologians have said there's no practical application in our lives from the Trinity is too transcendent.

But, you know, Augustine would have disagreed, others would have disagreed, Tertullian would have disagreed.

When you look at the Trinity, when you, when, when I was asked to find the best models that I could for a team, I looked at the disciples, I looked at the threefold cord in the book of Ecclesiastes.

And when the mentor that I work with pushed me further, I thought, wait a minute, it's the Trinity.

The Trinity is the divine team.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

You know, when you see Jesus, you see the members of the Trinity.

You look at the water baptism of Jesus, the Father speaks, the Spirit falls upon Jesus and Jesus is there and there's something powerful.

But what I began to notice, Aaron, is every time the Trinity shows up in Scripture, they're always honoring one another.

When the water baptism of Jesus, the Father said, this is my son, it's like he was holding the spotlight on the Son.

Later when they said to Jesus, the works you're doing, they're amazing, he said, oh, I only do what I see the Father doing.

So the sun's shining a spotlight of honor on the Father later on.

And there are more instances, but the one I'll end with is later on when Jesus was getting ready to leave this earth and to turn things over to his disciples, he said, I'm going to leave you and imagine you know, setting up this incredible thing that he did, the kingdom of God coming into hearts and lives and, and.

And in the midst of it, he said, but don't worry, wait till you see who's coming.

So the sun shining, the spotlight on the spirit, and he gives him the resume.

He'll counsel you, teach you, lead you, guide you, comfort you, lead you into truth, all of that.

And then the ringer, here's how you know it's him.

When he comes, he will not speak of himself, but he's going to remind you of all the things that I've said.

He's going to have a spotlight.

Wow.

And he's going to shine them on the glory of my words.

So that honoring circle when we do, when that pastor said to that evangelist, oh, this is Robert Crosby.

He's a new young man, just gave his heart to the Lord.

He's getting water baptized and he's.

He's starting to get involved in our youth group, and we're really excited about his future.

That did something to me.

So a church team's a team like no other team, whether it's on the mission field or in domestic usa.

Wow.

It's been a joy to spend some time with you, Dr. Crosby.

Will you pray for us?

Sure will.

Lord, I'm grateful for this opportunity to spend with Aaron, for the ways you're using him, continue to bless him, his ministry, and this podcast.

And, Lord, for every missionary listening, every minister listening, every family member listening, every individual listening, we just pray as we look at the model of the team that Jesus you built and the wonderful way you took so much time to build it, to select the right people to pour, pour yourself into that team so your team could pour themselves into a world that needed you.

I pray that grace for each one here and your wisdom as they do that and serve you.

In Jesus name, amen.

Amen.