In this episode we pick up our conversation with Dr. Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer to discuss their book A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing.
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The first thing I would say to young leaders is that every pastor needs to become self-aware through a battery of psychological tests, to try to expose traits of narcissism…
We also need to restore to the pastoral calling the centrality of character… just like culture eats strategy for breakfast, so character eats culture for breakfast… a bad character will form the culture…
We have so valued the platform and performance gifts… pastors on the platform exude a persona… people think that is the real person… they are responding to a persona…
We need to start putting persons of character on the platform more than just persons of gifts…
TOV is the Hebrew word for good… God created everything good… this word is used in the Old Testament hundreds of times… it is master moral category… God is TOV, everything he makes is TOV, and he wants us to be TOV…
We found seven elements of TOV that flipped the script: empathy, grace, putting people first, telling the truth, nurturing justice, nurturing service, and nurturing Christlikeness…
We could do ourselves a world of good by giving our budding pastors a test, for instance, on how empathic they are…
Power physically changes the brain… all of us have power at some level… when we have unbridled and uncensored power, it is damaging to the person who has it along with those who are on the receiving end of it…
The people that have wrecked churches and ministries over the last twenty years had power without boundaries… it never ends well…
Leaders need to learn the habit of being in touch with people in pain, and watching how they are responding to them…
If power is something that changes the brain, we need to practice the habit of losing power and having people over us who have more power than we do…
We also need to learn to invite people to the platform who are better than us… the pain of wondering if people like someone else better than you is a good thing…