“Healthy Team Culture” with Chris & Eddie
Show Notes:
“Everybody in the system affects everybody else in the system.” Chris McAlilly and Eddie Rester dive into a thoughtful discussion about what it means to have a healthy church culture and leadership. They discuss everything from trust to gratitude to humor, while discussing their own personal experiences and with growing a strong team dynamic.
Resources:
Learn more at the Weight’s website
Read about Chris McAlilly on OU’s official website
Learn more about Eddie Rester at Lovers Lane official website
Transcript:
Chris McAlilly 00:00
[INTRO] Leadership today demands more than technical expertise. It requires deep wisdom to
navigate the complexity of a turbulent world, courage to reimagine broken systems, and
unwarranted hope to inspire durable change.
Eddie Rester 00:22
As Christ-centered leaders in churches, nonprofits, the Academy, and the marketplace, we all
carry the weight of cultivating communities that reflect God's kingdom in a fragmented world.
Chris McAlilly 00:33
But this weight wasn't meant to be carried alone. The Christian tradition offers us centuries of
wisdom, if we have the humility to listen and learn from diverse voices.
Eddie Rester 00:43
That's why The Weight exists: to create space for the conversations that challenge our
assumptions, deepen our thinking, and renew our spiritual imagination.
Chris McAlilly 00:52
Faithful leadership in our time requires both conviction and curiosity, rootedness and tradition,
and responsiveness to a changing world.
Eddie Rester 01:01
So whether you're leading a congregation, raising a family, teaching students, running a
nonprofit, or bringing faith into your business, join us as we explore the depth and richness of
Christ-centered leadership today. Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Eddie Rester 01:17
I'm Eddie Rester.
Chris McAlilly 01:17
I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to the Weight.
Eddie Rester 01:19
Today our guest is...
Chris McAlilly 01:22
We have no guest today.
Eddie Rester 01:23
Today, we're the guests.
Chris McAlilly 01:24
Yeah, that's right. We're going to have a conversation on church leadership. Eddie and I have a
combined many, many years of church ministry. I've been in ministry for, I think, seventeen
years. It's 2008, if the math is right there, how long have you been in ministry?
Eddie Rester 01:41
I'm just doing the math. So I came out of seminary in 1997, this is 2025, so twenty eight years.
Chris McAlilly 01:48
Twenty eight years, that's more than me.
Eddie Rester 01:50
That's more than you. It's not as much as your dad.
Chris McAlilly 01:52
No, that's right, thirty - what's that? So that's forty five years of combined ministry experience
in this conversation. So we don't need a guest.
Eddie Rester 02:00
We don't need a guest for this, yeah.
Chris McAlilly 02:02
Yeah.
Eddie Rester 02:02
We may need a guest to correct the things that we're about to say. You know, one of the things
that as I think about churches and churches that grow and churches that don't grow, because
this got asked to me in a lunch meeting I had, was "Eddie, sometimes on the same street, you
have one church that's growing and thriving, and another church is it's dying and struggling,
and what's the difference?"
Eddie Rester 02:28
And I think there are a lot of things that can be the difference in those situations. And we could
probably list five or six things, and you may want to list five or six things, but I think one of the
things that makes a difference in churches that are growing or not growing, is a healthy
congregational culture. But in my world, healthy congregational culture only comes from
healthy staff culture.
Chris McAlilly 02:51
That was something that you preached over and over and over again when we started working
together. So we came on the staff at Oxford University, United Methodist Church in 2014 and
by that point, you had been a senior pastor in another context for many years. And one of the
things that you said to our staff over and over was, healthy staff makes a healthy church.
Where did you learn that?
Eddie Rester 03:24
I think I learned that from my experience working with a guy named Willis Britt, who is the
senior pastor of the church when I came out of seminary. He was a senior pastor, just watching
how he intuitively worked with the staff, but then also going to events at North Point and
Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church and other churches, and really learning and absorbing
from sometimes what the senior pastor said, sometimes what it was staff people, what staff
people said.
Eddie Rester 03:54
Sometimes it's just watching them in motion. And what I noticed was there was an
effortlessness and a joy that existed in the staffs of churches that were thriving and growing.
And when, when I peeled those layers back, I would find that there was a lot of work
underneath that, that allowed them to do what looked effortlessly, effortless and joyful. Coming
in as I preached that, what was your I'd love to know your response to that. Did you think, what
was your thought when you heard that the first time, or your experience of that since then?
Chris McAlilly 04:29
So I was hearing it, having come out of a context where I was the only person working, so just
working on a team versus working solo was something that was really exciting to me. I will say
just, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind, if you're listening to this, and you're a pastor of
a church and you don't have a big team, your staff, your - is really, you know, it's, it's a lay
leadership context where you're building your health, the health of your congregation, the
health of your team, is the same thing. I think as you grow, and you move from a church that's,
you know, fifty people to one hundred and fifty people to probably the threshold would be
around three hundred you know, where you move into kind of a medium size, to a, you know,
kind of a larger church, I think at the time we started working together, you know, somewhere
between four hundred or four hundred and fifty and five hundred and fifty people were showing
up on a Sunday.
Chris McAlilly 05:27
So we were kind of a medium to large size church in our context, in Mississippi. And in that
context, our staff was probably, you know, fifteen or so, is what we were working with. And I
think what I realized is those relationships, we weren't doing ministry for other people first. First
we were really, you know, doing ministry with and for one another. So, yeah, there's a person
on our team who prays for each individual and each individual member of the family, of each
individual person's family, first. That's a really powerful - was a really powerful thing that I
learned. I don't know. I think that the relationships you realize, I think, over the course of time,
that the relationships you have with the people you work with, and this isn't just in a church
context, those are the people that you're spending the majority of your time with, and those
relationships will either be more or less, you know, healthy.
Chris McAlilly 06:28
So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know that I had, I just kind of watched consistency, I think is one
of the ways in which you sought to create it and more efficient and impactful meetings, rather
than just kind of drawing on and on and on. Those are two things that I saw you do really early
on.
Eddie Rester 06:50
I remember some of our early meetings, and I think healthy teams have effective meetings. I
just this flash to my brain. Emilie, who works with the podcast, is on staff there at Oxford
University United Methodist Church. We would in those early meetings because we took on the
legacy agenda of those meetings. Do you remember this, Chris? We would sit there for twenty,
twenty-five minutes going over the calendar. Every single week.
Chris McAlilly 07:19
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think it's important to note that we came into a fairly healthy lay
leadership culture, very healthy church, and the staff culture was very healthy. I think the
meeting, you know, the meeting structure, things are, things happen differently in different
generations. And so, you know, the way meetings were run in the 1970s and 80s is different
than the way meetings get run in the 90s and the 2000s and there's, you know, part of it is just
personality and part of its part of its kind of generational style.
Chris McAlilly 07:42
But, I think one of the things I appreciated about your your way of running meetings is that we
didn't have a ton of meetings, and the ones that we did have, we tried to get some something
done, something accomplished. And so I think one of the things I saw early on is you were
looking for ways to stack wins and build momentum as a team. And you know, I think that's
really important for the team, to experience a team, a win as a team, and then to recognize it
as a team win.
Eddie Rester 08:30
Yeah, I think that a lot of things are flashing through my brain right now. I want to try to
systematize some of them, but a team win and they're two. I want to make sure we think about
both of those words, because sometimes when you think team wins, you think, well, this person
over here had a great event, and they had a win. But a team win means that everybody on the
team realizes that that win, in whatever area it was in the life of the church, was our win. And
the flip side of that, if there's a, I hate to call it a loss, but if there was a slip up, a trip up, or
whatever, it's not just on that singular person or that subset of the team. It was our slip up. It
was our trip up.
Eddie Rester 09:14
And so maintaining that sense of results, focus, or direction for the entire team. I think it's
something people forget. It's very easy to fall out into silos for every ministry. And that was a
model of ministry in the 80s and 90s, is that you had your youth ministry silo, your
administrative silo, children's ministry silo, worship silo, and there was no connection. And so
what would happen was churches would have blowing and going youth ministries that had
nothing to do with the rest of the church, or you'd have incredible worship, but then really
anemic children's ministry.
Chris McAlilly 09:56
Yeah, so one of the things that we did early on, so we were looking for ways to build team,
team wins and shared culture. So one of the one of the early decisions that we made, the
church that we were serving together, and the church that continue to serve has two traditional
services and one more contemporary, or modern expression of worship. And they were doing
different sermon series. They were, they were focusing on different scripture and what we
wanted to do is try to make a large church feel, where people were feeling disconnected from
one another in the different services, feel like they were part of one thing.
Chris McAlilly 10:39
And so we decided to do, I think that this is one of the early decisions that we made that was a
shift, was to do one scripture, one sermon series, one conversation across the entire life of the
church as a way to kind of build shared culture, and that has continued to be really beneficial. I
think they created alignment, you know, between the difference, yeah, so moving away from
fighting against the tendency to silo and towards a shared effort, I think is one of the things
that, yeah, I think it really helped a lot in terms of building kind of a team culture.
Eddie Rester 11:11
To lean into the silo mentality, what happens often is you get folks who are very good at what
they do. You know, when I look to fill positions in churches or, you know, hire folks, I want to
hire people smarter than me, sharper than me.
Chris McAlilly 11:29
Yeah, you do. That's right.
Eddie Rester 11:31
I mean, I'm the kid from Akron, they're gonna be a lot of people smarter than me. And so, so I
want to make sure that we're doing that. But what often happens is that people who are sharp
and brilliant and great at what they do, what happens is they begin to build their own, I hate to
say kingdom, but because they're very good. And they lose sight of, and sometimes, as leaders
in the church, we allow people to lose sight of the whole.
Eddie Rester 12:03
I think I realized early on in my time in Hattiesburg, again, I mentioned Willis Britt earlier, that if
we weren't doing worship well, I came in to do youth ministry, and I realized it didn't matter
how much energy I poured into youth ministry, if we weren't doing worship well, then those
families who were sending their kids to the youth ministry weren't going to connect to the
larger church. And all we were doing was going to create this thing off to the side that people
could celebrate in the church, but it wasn't building the body of Christ. It wasn't building the
fullness of the church. And so beginning to figure out, okay, how do we make sure worship
connects with young families, families who have kids, that we're creating structures where it's
easy for families with kids to connect as well. It became part of the larger conversation.
Chris McAlilly 12:54
Yeah, I think that that's exactly right. So it's the problem that can arise if you have excellent,
strong individual performers in a various ministry area is they can unintentionally build silos,
maybe not because of ill intention. I think it can be, you know.
Eddie Rester 12:54
No, not at all.
Chris McAlilly 12:57
I don't necessarily think there's anything ego wise or ill will wise. It just there's a gravitational
pull that can come when something's going well and it becomes, and people can just by the
virtue, by the nature of how work happens. They get absorbed in their lane, in their domain,
and then try to essentially build, you know, some of the most successful leaders in, you know,
Christian organizational culture in these para church ministries and you have to kind of do
everything. And I think learning to see, you know, that alignment actually is good for
everybody. You know that if everyone's aligned in a shared direction.
Chris McAlilly 13:48
I love it that you brought in kind of a theological framework that I think is helpful one body with
many parts, you know, is the way Paul talked about it in 1 Corinthians 12. And then also, I love
the image the theological or biblical image that's there in Ephesians, you know, one Lord, one
faith, one baptism, one God and Father. All all of us are given gifts to be used for the building
up, for the work, you know, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building of the
Body of Christ. And that's, that's a biblical image of a healthy leadership culture. And I think
that maybe kind of pushes in the direction of another thing. I think building a healthy staff
culture and church culture that you would say a lot, because I think if you don't have, I don't
know any church that has unlimited resources.
Eddie Rester 14:39
Correct.
Chris McAlilly 14:39
And so you can't staff enough people to do all the things, and so you have to build a strong lay
leadership servant culture. One of the ways that youm like a simple phrase that you would
often use very early on was "we're at our best at our church, when everybody finds their place
to serve". How does that help to create and foster health and vitality in a in a church?
Eddie Rester 15:04
Yeah, I think one of the things I would also say before we get to that, is that when you build a
healthy staff culture, healthy leadership culture, even if that's if you're a single pastor, there's
two staff peoples, but you've got a tight knit group of lay leaders, when you build a healthy
culture around alignment and trust, ability to do conflict well, a cohesion in there. What
happens is that bleeds out. It bleeds out into the rest of the system, the rest of the church. So
when people see two staff members figure something complicated out, or come to a place
where they're shifting resources among departments or areas, then the stat, then the lay
people think, Oh, this is who we are. We make sure good things happen across the life of our
church.
Eddie Rester 15:54
When that bleeds out, then people buy into that. People want to serve. People want to be a part
of a healthy system and when everyone is using their gifts to serve, you're going to discover
people you never thought who want to serve in amazing ways. One of my favorite stories in
Hattiesburg happened, we had this great senior adult group that really want to do a lot of stuff,
but we couldn't staff that. We couldn't afford to bring another staff person on. We kind of put it
out one Sunday morning that we really needed somebody to help coordinate, that we had a
twenty seven year old young woman say, "so my favorite core memories are going to visit my
grandmother in her last years. I would love to work with senior adults."
Eddie Rester 16:40
And so we released her, she found her place to serve, and released and did incredible things.
Took them to New Orleans, you know, all this stuff. But it was that idea that everybody, even a
twenty seven year old, has a place to serve. And I think when we put that out there, we're
always surprised that people say, I do want to serve the kingdom, and here's my gift, and it's
not what you would think it would be. And it builds the body.
Chris McAlilly 17:11
Yeah, so building up the body of Christ. So we've started, you know, we've kind of listed some
things, efficient meetings that are purpose driven. I think one of the things that that does is just
it shows the whole team that you value their time. You know it, and that time's important, and
we got to get stuff done. And then doing whatever the things that have to be done in a way
that is aligned, rather than siloed, recognizing limitations that staff can't do everything. You
had to build a healthy servant culture, and that that those things can kind of build on
themselves. That people want to be a part of healthy systems. What are some of the
resources? I mean, I could name some of them that I know for you that are important. Patrick
Lencioni's work has been important. So you know, one of the books that we read early on when
we were working together, was The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. For folks unfamiliar with that
framework, maybe, kind of, do you mind kind of, you know, laying that out?
Eddie Rester 18:10
Patrick Lencioni is, he's a Christian, but he's also a consultant for organizations and businesses.
And what he understands is that the advantage that an organization can have in a crowded
field is that if you have a healthy organization top to bottom, you will have the advantage over
unhealthy, unhealthy groups. And he has laid out over the course of really, twenty five years
now, kind of a path and a pattern for organizations, even churches, and The Five Dysfunctions
of a Team, I think is his best work. He has some other stuff about silos and teamwork and how
to hire people. But in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, he says they're, if you think of a
pyramid, that there are five levels to the pyramid, and they represent the five dysfunctions,
and on the way to the top, you have to conquer or deal with the five dysfunctions, and the base
of the pyramid is the absence of trust.
Eddie Rester 19:07
When you can't trust your fellow teammates, then you're going to silo, then you're not going to
work together. Then when something goes wrong, you're going to say to people, that was
never my idea. I was against that from the beginning. That was, that was Chris's idea, because
I didn't trust Chris's idea to do that. Once you begin to talk about trust and when, when I talk
about trust, Chris, it's not, I want to take them and hang out with them at Thanksgiving. I want
them to be a part of my family. That's not trust in an organization. Trust means you believe
that the other person has the best interests of the church at heart. But you may have different
thoughts on how to move forward. So it's the other person has the best interest of the church
at heart.
Eddie Rester 19:52
So trust after that, it's the absence of conflict. So learning to fight, well, learning how to mine
for conflict, because when you do that, then everybody puts their thoughts on the table. And
you may discover a better path forward. So it's not fighting for fighting sake. It's having conflict
so that you can find the best solution. And when you do that, when everybody has had a
chance to put their ideas on the table, find the best solution, then people are willing to commit
to that, even if it wasn't their idea, even if it wasn't the direction they were heard. They fought
it out with you. They'll make a commitment to that.
Eddie Rester 20:27
Once you know what you're committing to, you can hold people accountable to it. And then
once you can hold people accountable, you get to live towards results, team results, not just
results for one organization. So that's, that's the pyramid trust, healthy conflict, commitment
and buy in, accountability, and results. And what I've found over time is, if you can get those
bottom two right, the rest flow naturally.
Chris McAlilly 20:51
What - I have tons of thoughts and tons of questions, I wonder, conflict is hard. It's a hard thing.
It's hard in every family. It's hard in every organization. People have different styles of conflict.
People come at conflict differently. What are some of the things that you've learned, you know,
in your extensive, almost three decades of ministry experience?
Eddie Rester 21:18
I'm old, yeah.
Chris McAlilly 21:19
What have you learned, you know, what have you seen in terms of, how do people deal with
conflict well? You know, what are some of the things that can help if people are struggling
through a conflict that they're going with, you know, another person right now? Like, what are
some of the things that can help? And then, you know, if you're really stuck in a conflict, kind
of, what, you know, wisdom would you offer?
Eddie Rester 21:42
Yeah, I think one of the things I've learned over time, and we had somebody come in and work
with our staff here in Dallas, who I think said it pretty directly, is that when you let conflict
linger in a church staff or an organizational staff or in leadership, it moves from being about an
issue to being about the person. So the longer you don't deal with an issue or a problem, the
more likely it is, instead of you thinking this is a problem, you're going to think he's a problem
or she's a problem. And so you make it very personal over the course of time.
Eddie Rester 22:19
And when, she said that Dana Brandel was her name, when she said that, I mean, alarm bells
went off for me because I thought about people over the course of my ministry, when I didn't
deal with the issue, eventually it became about them, not the issue. So that's one thing I would
say. The other is something that you said is that everybody handles conflict differently. One of
the most helpful things I've done on staff is different personality assessments, but personality
assessments not just so I can know how I work, but so I can know how others work. When I was
at OU, we did the DISC assessment, the conflict DISC assessment.
Eddie Rester 22:56
And one of my favorite stories to tell about that Chris, is I learned that the difference between
you and me is that I'm going to sit and I'm going to grind it out in my own brain for a while,
sometimes alone and sometimes not telling people how I would get to something, get to a
decision, or get to an understanding of things, which was great. I had to have that time, but it
was also problematic because I wouldn't tell people how I moved from A to D. You, you Chris
McAlilly, you like to talk your way through things. And so I had to learn with you that one, I had
to be more clear about how I was getting to things. The other thing was, had to learn that if you
called me at 5:30 at night, you probably had something that was swirling through your head,
and you needed to simply get it out and talk about it for ten minutes, and then we'd move on.
Because you were, you were more of a verbal processor.
Chris McAlilly 23:52
This is true. My wife would agree. Yeah, so the DISC inventory, I will say. So you know, the
relationship at the point that the DISC inventory came into the team, was one at which Eddie
was making that decision for the team. And so I was receiving this from Eddie, who was in the
senior leadership role. And I have to say, I initially had resistance, personally, just because I
don't know, I just was like, man, another leadership tool. You know, we're going to do it again.
The DISC inventory was one of has been one of the most helpful things in terms of helping me
understand that not everybody on the team is like me. It helps you see outside of your own way
of processing the world.
Chris McAlilly 24:36
And so I think it's helpful to just kind of lay that out. So there are four categories. There's
dominance, which is the D, influence, which is the I, steadiness, which is the S, and
conscientiousness, which is the C. And you know, each person has a different set of priorities,
motivations, fears, and limitations. And you know, the person who's more D oriented is going to
be oriented towards results and taking action. They're motivated by winning and success and
competition. They're afraid of losing and being taken advantage of. But you'll notice self
confidence and directness in them, and you're probably already thinking of someone, but the
limitations are impatience and sometimes some insensitivity.
Chris McAlilly 25:22
But a person who's steady on a team is going to prioritize support, maintaining stability,
collaboration. They're motivated by stable environment, appreciation, cooperation. They're
going to fear a loss of stability and change and a loss of harmony are offending others. They're
very patient. They're team people, they're listeners, they're humble, but they're going to overly
accommodate, sometimes on the team, and they'll have a tendency to avoid change and be
indecisive. And that's super helpful, because those two people often get in conflict with one
another because they're polar opposites.
Chris McAlilly 25:57
But helping - I think the tool helps you think through, you know, we're different, but we need
one another. We actually need a balanced team. A team without these is not going to get
anything done. A team without steadiness is maybe going to go off the rails. You need both
people that are going to be, you know, oriented towards, you know, extrovert type people,
more introverted people. You need a balanced team.
Eddie Rester 26:25
A couple other assessments that I've become familiar with over the last couple of years, one is
"The Working Genius", also done by Patrick Lencioni, and it isn't just who you are and how you
work, it also talks about the flow of work and how different people are more important in
different parts of the flow of work. So if you're brainstorming, if you're really trying to think and
dream, there are people that you need in that conversation, and there are other people that
that's going to drive them absolutely nuts. There are people who are tenacious, who are going
to drive things across the finish line, and for them, that's what they're going to do, but other
folks who like to dream that may drive them crazy. And so that's one, it's great. It's a pretty
simple one. The other one is the Thomas-Killman Conflict Indicator, and we did that one on us,
on the staff here recently. And it really begins to help you dig down into, how do you fight? How
do you do conflict? What do you need?
Eddie Rester 27:28
And one of the things I realized was, you know, I'm a collaborator, which means I want
everybody's input. I want to make sure everybody's getting their piece of it. One person on our
team is a shark. That's the animal related to it, and they like quick decisions. And what I
realized was, sometimes I need the shark to tell me, "stop asking for opinions, Eddie, make a
freaking decision." And he's done that for me. And it gives, now I've been able to give him
freedom to say, "Eddie, is it time? Is it time to make a call on this?" And so I think the joy of
doing these things is not just so you can tuck it away, but you got to keep talking about it on
our staff here, we talk about the working genius and the Thomas-Killman instrument every time
we have an all staff meeting. Every single time.
Chris McAlilly 28:16
So come back to the efficiency of meetings. How do you talk about these frameworks and use
them to build team culture while also getting stuff done?
Eddie Rester 28:23
Yeah, so in an all staff meeting, we have different meetings, you know, I'll tell you how we do
things. Two times a month we have what's called an equip meeting. It's really team leaders for
our different areas. Once a month we have all staff, that's everybody. So in all staff, we do
some calendaring, big picture calendaring. We may do, just making sure that things that are
coming up, everybody different areas, knows what's coming and what their piece of it is, and
how we farm those things out. And typically, we spend the last thirty minutes going back to,
okay, we did the working genius.
Eddie Rester 28:56
Let's get back in our groups, the Ws, Ds, Es, Is, Gs, the widget is what it spells. Everybody get
together, then we have an activity that does that. Just kind of a reminder of what it is, what it
means, how they work with other people. Because if you just do it and then you try to refer to
it, a year later, nobody's going to remember anything about it, and it's not going to begin to
change it. Change is very slow in a team. How you work together, very slow. It takes years to
change the culture of a team.
Chris McAlilly 29:28
Yeah, if you don't...
Eddie Rester 29:30
Go ahead.
Chris McAlilly 29:30
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's one of the things I've realized through time, is that we're still
kind of, you know, Eddie has left the team that I'm still on, you know, three or four years ago,
we're still using some of the concepts that we talked about. It's still part of the team
conversation. It's still kind of in the background, but we've also built upon we don't just dwell in
it. We're moving forward and able to kind of think more about how to be results oriented, hold
one another accountable, because there's a base level of trust. And, you know, it doesn't mean
that things are always perfect.
Chris McAlilly 30:06
You know, there have been, you know, hard conflicts through time. You know, some that I've
created, or that, you know, we've created from a leadership side, and there's some that that
just kind of happened because you're people, and you're working with with a team. I think
another thing that we've talked about through time is just how family systems can affect team
culture. So if somebody doesn't know family systems theory and kind of you know, how is it
that, how is it that that can help you kind of view how to build a healthy team?
Eddie Rester 30:35
So the way I think about family systems is that I think about a spider web, and that when you
tap on one part of the spider web, it impacts the whole web. So a lot of times you think that,
well, this is just that person, or this person, or that department, or this area of the church.
Family systems tells you it's all together, and that you can't easily separate things. I think,
sometimes in churches that are complex or siloed, the mistake I make, and that often leaders
make, is you just let things move on their own, not realizing that it's going to move everything.
Guy named Aubrey Lucas, who's the president of USM (University of Southern Mississippi) in
Hattiesburg, Mississippi, forever, incredible leader, one time, we were talking about launching a
site in a restaurant to attract young adults.
Eddie Rester 31:35
And I knew if Aubrey Lucas would speak for this in church, it would all be okay, because if
Aubrey Lucas told the church, let's build a rocket and go to the moon, people would have said,
alright, Eddie, I want to be on that committee to build a rocket and go to the moon. That's the
power he had. But he stood in front of the church, made the case for what we were planning to
do, and he said this. He said, "and what you need to know is, if we do this, it's going to change
us here." And so he was trying to make sure people understood that it wasn't going to be this
thing we were doing down the street, but it was going to change how the church, the main
campus, lived and worked. He was one hundred percent right.
Chris McAlilly 32:16
Yeah, that's, yeah. That's so fascinating. But just because, you know, people are, we're
interconnected. We're part of different systems that connect us with one another. Someone
was telling me, I think it was Millie, my wife, and I were talking about either a book or podcast
she was listening to that was talking about team culture, staff meetings, and she was a
manager in a, kind of a hospital setting, so she has some experience managing teams. And one
of the things that she said that this podcast was suggesting is, I can't remember that the word
or phrase, but essentially was like conditions. Everybody had an opportunity at the beginning of
the meeting to go around and name the condition that they were in when they enter the
meeting.
Chris McAlilly 33:00
So for me, sometimes, right now, I've got three kids, and so there could be, you know, a couple
days ago, I was coming to work on a team meeting day, and the night before, my daughter had
a hundred and three fever, and we didn't get a great night's sleep, and that impacted the way I
showed up to the team. And I think that that's another thing that can happen, is, especially if
you've been working with a group of people for a long period of time. You can get so gnarled up
in a particular conflict or a way of viewing a person, sometimes it's helpful to get out of the
office, go play, go you know, go on a long road trip together. You know, where I've seen this be
really effective is when a group of people from a team go to a visitation, you know, for a
funeral, and then you begin, you know, you talk about other things, you begin to see people
from a three sixty dimension. And that can give you more charity and more grace with
somebody who may be, you know, get under your skin, because they just have a different way
of view in the world than you do.
Eddie Rester 33:57
We did as part of one of our staff days away recently, we did Patrick Lencioni's Trail Guide for
the Five Dysfunctions. You tell your story, and you tell, you know, where you are in the birth
order, and you tell what was the biggest challenge of your years growing up. And it doesn't
have to be a deep, dark secret, but what was the big challenge. And we went around the room,
forty people. And took us, you know, hour and a half, but everybody was locked in. And
afterwards, people said, I didn't know. I've never known. And it creates that softness of heart.
So you're dealing with a human and not a problem, not a competitor, but another one of God's
children. Chris, I think that's so important to see people as they really are. And I've forgotten
about that. I think we talked about that at some time. Kind of check in, how's your temperature,
what's the weather? And that's brilliant.
Chris McAlilly 34:58
Yeah, it's so good. I think, you know, I think I've, one of the things that shifted when I went from
being an associate state and then moved into a senior leadership role, was I began to realize,
like, now, I have two congregations. One is the staff. They're, really a church. It's, you know, for
us, it's more like a small group, and so creating space for the team to express gratitude, you
know, is something that I think I realized is super important. For people to check in and share
prayer requests, just like you would if you were just a regular, small group. You know, this
group, people are making church happen for other people most of the time. And so it's
important, like to the extent that we experience what the church is. It's together.
Chris McAlilly 35:44
And so making sure, I don't think this is the group of people who are doing church for everyone
else, but making sure this group of people also is nourished and they receive life, life giving
things, spiritual gifts from one another within the context of the church. That's congregation,
number one for me in leadership, is to make sure that that group of people is fostering healthy
Christian community. And then we're doing that also for others, always mindful that like all the
work that there is to do is not something that we're to do, but we're to be encouraging and
empowering and equipping and releasing the gifts of the team. We had a meeting this morning.
The woman on our team who leads congregational care, Barbara Camp, who is, I haven't met
many living saints, but I think of Barbara as a living saint.
Eddie Rester 36:34
She has gone on to perfection.
Chris McAlilly 36:35
She absolutely has. And so it was really cool. She's, you know, experienced some health issues,
and she's now through them, and she came back in, she's all fired up, and she's got that bright
light that makes her who she is. And she invited her team, her congregational care team. So it's
a group of women, and I'm there, I'm the only man in the circle. And everybody goes around
and they worship at different services. Not everybody knows one another on the team, but
everybody has been asked by Barbara to serve on the team. And it was people on the prayer
team, and people who take flowers, the flowers from worship, and you know, break the flowers
up and take them out to assisted living facilities, and those who write cards for birthdays of
people that are ninety, and everybody got to share their little piece of the work of the Body of
Christ. And I got to say, you know, I showed up to the hospital a couple weeks ago and
somebody was dying. And you were here before I got here, you know, and you were here after I
left. You are the hands and the feet of Jesus, you know. You are our church. You are the body of
Christ.
Chris McAlilly 37:42
And I'm here to say Praise God, because we got too many people around here. Everybody
needs a kind of one on one connection that you can offer. And I think that's been a huge shift
for me, because, you know, when I started in ministry, I was serving a church of twenty people,
and I wanted every single person to feel a personal connection with me, and I've had to learn
that I can't bear the weight of that for everybody. And I've had to learn that if everyone on the
planet, you know, everyone in town, even everyone in our church, is going to receive the love
of Jesus, I don't have to be the one that offers it to everyone, I just have to equip a power and
release other people to live fully into their gifts, and that helps me from over functioning.
Eddie Rester 38:30
Well and it's healthier for the body of Christ when people are using their gifts to serve the
church and the world faithfully. It's a much better model, no matter how big or small the church
is. The last thing I'll say is something you just brought up, is the impact of gratitude on a team.
And this is where I suck.
Chris McAlilly 38:50
You're not good at it.
Eddie Rester 38:51
I'm not good at it. I am not good at it.
Chris McAlilly 38:53
You're good at humor.
Eddie Rester 38:55
I'm good at humor. But humor and gratitude are two completely different things. And the power
of gratitude is you give a person value for the gift that they've offered. And I think it is, for me,
it's an underused gift. I've got someone here on staff. I confess that to them. And so this person
on staff now is my how do I say? I'm not sure how to even name this my "gratitude monitor". I
get an email or a whisper of, "hey, you should really tell people this." Or "Did you remember
this? This group of people went out and did that?" I'm like, thank you. Because I get moving, I
get moving real fast, and so slowing down to show gratitude is critical. And let me tell you
something as a leader when I am reminded or sometimes of my own regard, remember to show
gratitude. It's electric, because it allows people to know their gifts and their work matter in the
kingdom of God. And I, you know, and Chris, we're recording this during pastor appreciation
month, I'll tell you, I appreciate you.
Chris McAlilly 40:02
I appreciate you too.
Eddie Rester 40:03
Thank you.
Chris McAlilly 40:04
I will say I do think gratitude is a superpower in personal life and in team cultures. I also think
that, I mean, I'm not naturally funny. I'm just not. I'm very not funny. You are one of God's truly
funny people. I think of you as being a funny person and you infuse that into the team. And
that's something that we lost when you left, because I'm not as funny as you are. But, you
know, talk about the way humor can be used within the context of a team to build health.
Eddie Rester 40:36
You know, humor can, let me say this on the front, humor can also be used to deflect, and
that's one of the things I continue to have to reflect on in my life. Am I being funny for the sake
of being funny, and that it's adding to what I'm doing, or is it something that I'm using to
protect me? So that's I'm going to put that out there. The older I get, the more I realize that
there's a line sometimes I cross. But I think humor allows people to release, and allows people
to lean in a little bit, particularly if it's self deprecating humor, or if you're close enough to
somebody to kind of point out an occasional flaw and our friend Cody Hickman, who produces
this podcast, but you know.
Eddie Rester 41:18
And then it allows other people to release their humor as well, and so that it just kind of
provides a looseness to the team, so that you can deal with serious things and you can laugh. I
was in a Bible study Tuesday morning, and one of my associate pastors is, like six two, two
forty, and was talking about playing football. And so I was able to say, well, in my time as first
trumpet at Akron High School, and he just gave people a moment of, we were talking about
really deep subject. It gave people a moment to kind of chuckle and then dive back in. So it's
kind of that air in the room sometimes, when you come up for air.
Chris McAlilly 41:56
Yeah, I like that. It's, I think it's an underutilized skill, but I think it is a crucial skill that I see
within the context of executive leadership that really helps a team. I think maybe as we come
to a close here, the place to step back, especially for folks who are in leadership that are trying
to navigate this and try to create culture, and they're trying to build teams, I think the thing
that I've realized, and this is something that this was wisdom that you offered to me as you
were leaving, and you didn't offer it to me, you told it to my wife. You told my wife to remind
me to pace myself. And I think part of the... I think that's, you know, that was really wise. And I
see now how wise it is, because it's hard to sustain personal health within the context of
building healthy teams. So what have you learned? What are you learning about how to make
sure that you're staying healthy? And I think that's physical, emotional, spiritually, healthy as
you seek to lead a healthy team.
Eddie Rester 43:02
I had a counselor one time when I was not pacing myself, and I was I was gasping, and he told
me this. He said he knew me well. He knew knew the congregation I was serving. And he said,
"Eddie, the church will love you, but the church will not take care of you. You have to take care
of you." And he was absolutely right that I have been loved well by the churches I've served,
and it's been amazing. I love every church I served, and I felt well loved by those churches, but
I also realize that the responsibility for taking care of me was not going to happen by anybody
else on staff or staff parish, or they could say it, but I had to live it. And so I would say to
leaders, take that responsibility, take thou authority, is how we say it in ordination, our
ordination vows, because if you don't, then you know, you talked about being tired, showing up
for a staff meeting. That was a one day thing. You recovered. You got sleep the next night. You
gave your little girl three Benadryl, put her to bed. You got a good night of sleep the next night,
right?
Eddie Rester 44:11
That's right.
Eddie Rester 44:11
Okay. But if that's the consistent way you were showing up for staff because you were over
functioning, then you will eventually wear your staff out, or they will come to resent. There will
be emotional unhealth that emerges because you're not taking care of you. Again, everybody
in the system affects everybody else in the system.
Chris McAlilly 44:35
So how do you do that? I mean, how do you take care of yourself? What's like... for somebody
who's like, I'm struggling to kind of figure out a first step.
Eddie Rester 44:44
If you're a pastor, let me say this to pastors, pick a day to write your sermon and write your
sermon. What I used to do, I used to do the Saturday night specials, which meant all I worked
hard all week, and then Saturdays, I was grabbing moments to try to write a sermon, and then
Saturday night, at eight o'clock, I'm writing a sermon. And so I didn't have a weekend, I didn't
have a life, and it was misery. And so I think putting up those boundaries of Tuesdays are going
to be my, I'm going to meet with people all day on Tuesdays, but then I need green space in my
calendar the rest of the week.
Eddie Rester 45:19
Wednesday mornings, I'm going to write a sermon. You can tell me you need to meet with me
on Wednesday morning, but unless it's a just five alarm emergency, I'm not meeting with, I'll
see you at noon. I'll see you at lunchtime on Wednesday. So I think it's just saying I'm going to
I'm going to control my schedule, instead of letting my schedule control me. I'm going to create
green space, that I need to read and write and that I need to do the things I need to do.
Because you could fill up no matter how big or small your church is, you could fill up every hour
of your day meeting with people. And that's okay, but meeting with people means that you're
shifting to other administrative and things that you've got to do as well.
Chris McAlilly 46:05
Yeah, that that's, I think, a really good word. Pick a day to write your sermon, you know, control
your calendar. Don't let it control you. So much of ministry, I think people's experience... people
project under the church that they should, that pastors and churches should be responsive and
reactive to their needs in the moment, and almost like volunteer firemen, you know, and I do
think that there are absolutely moments where that is, people are in crisis, and you're going to
be interrupted, and you could lay out the best schedule and the best plan, and it's gonna blow
up because somebody absolutely needs the body of Christ to show up for him in that moment.
And at that moment you have to go and do the thing. You have to pick up the cross and go and
do it.
Chris McAlilly 46:47
But most weeks, you can create structure. You can create boundaries. And I think the thing that
I've, you know, been able to kind of figure out over the last couple years, that's really, really
helped me is just figuring out a time to go to the gym, physical health, just incorporating that
into my life. I had a mentor, friend, you know, supervisor, who said that she got to a place in
her life where she had to say, "I'm not going to allow the church to dictate my health." And I
think for me, it was like, okay, so there's always more to do than I can do in any one day. And
then I always feel an urgency and sometimes a guilt if I don't get there right at the beginning of
the day to start everything. But all of my entire life, I'm more physically, mentally and
emotionally and spiritually healthy. If the first thing that I do is drop off my kids and go to the
gym, and it's a 30 minute window. It's not like, I'm not gonna, you know, I'm not...
Eddie Rester 47:53
Powerlifting for two hours?
Eddie Rester 47:55
No, I'm not gonna do a two hundred mile, you know, ultra marathon, but I am maintaining the
discipline. I do think it's a physical and spiritual discipline to make sure that I'm staying healthy
so that I show up in a good headspace, hydrated, like as rested as I can be, so I can be my best
when I come to the team. I think that's been a great conversation on team health. I enjoy doing
these conversations from time to time with you, Eddie. Just thinking, well, about, you know,
what it means to be different aspects of leadership. I think we should do it again. What do you
think?
Eddie Rester 48:30
Yeah, I think so it's good for me to reflect and to think about things done well, things that are
changing and shifting, things that I will never do again, so thank you.
Chris McAlilly 48:39
What do you want to talk about next?
Eddie Rester 48:41
Here's the thing I'd love to hear from folks. If there's a topic that somebody wants to hear more
about or suggest, email us. It's what's the email address for the Weight?
Chris McAlilly 48:54
Yeah, you just go to the Weight and on the website, yeah.
Eddie Rester 48:57
theWeightPodcast.com, there's a link there. Send us a topic we'd love to talk about it.
Chris McAlilly 49:04
Yeah, or just drop something on social media. We'll pick it up and see it and we would love to
hear what you think about this conversation, and we'd love to know what you want to hear
about next.
Eddie Rester 49:11
[OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like,
subscribe, or leave a review.
Chris McAlilly 49:20
If you would like to support this work financially, or if you have an idea for a future guest, you
can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]