162- Help for Leaders- Finish Well! (with Dr. Richard Clinton)

162- Help for Leaders- Finish Well!

Welcome to podcast number 162. Dr. Richard Clinton is our guest today. Richard has pastored churches for more than 40 years and is an expert on the subject of Christian leadership.

So I've asked him to join us and help us understand about leaders finishing well, and then the formation of a leader during the lifetime of ministry that they are engaged in. 

So really, really thankful, Richard, that you're joining us today, and glad to have you on the program. This is gonna be really rich.

And by the way, this first session is gonna be session one of two, it'll be part one of two parts. So thank you, thank you very much, Richard. Well, thank you, Bill, for having me, and I'm looking forward to engaging with you and talking about leadership.

I know it's a subject that's really, really a passion of yours. It's a main ministry passion right now. You were telling me earlier.

Well, I learned about your father by reading his, I guess, would you call it his opus? I don't know. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, okay, all right.

So that book was called The Making of a Leader: Recognizing Lessons and Stages of Leadership Development, which I thought was excellent. And then I had the idea, an idea came into my head. Man, I wonder if he'd be willing to come on and talk with us about leadership development, and finishing well, and that kind of a thing.

And I sent the email through one of the websites, and you responded, and were very willing to be part of it. And I was blessed and surprised at the same time. So thank you, thank you again.

Yeah, my dad is, he's still alive. He's finishing well, which is fantastic. But he struggles with, like many do in older age, memory issues, and he doesn't do online stuff, or talk, or do any ministry at all.

He's just living with my sister, and we're so proud of him, and for his lifetime of ministry and service. So it's my job, kind of, part of my job is just to honor him, and so it's easy to write emails and say, yes, I can answer questions or share. Well, you didn't dishonor him, you joined.

At the hip with him in this ministry of leadership development, and that's great. I have an ongoing relationship with two older pastors that have retired, one is named Cliff, and the other is named Tyler. Tyler is in the Columbus, Ohio area, and Cliff is in Carlsbad, California.

But as I was telling them, as we were talking on one of our monthly Zoom meetings, I was just telling them about how your father's book, The Making of a Leader, has impacted me and helped so much in what I do in ministry, and Cliff piped up, he said, oh, you mean Bobby Clinton? I said, Bobby, so apparently Cliff knew and knows your father, which is great, and he's finishing well, too. He's still going well, so that's awesome. So let's go ahead and dive right in.

We're gonna be talking about finishing well. That's the subject at hand, and I loved Appendix C of your father's book, because it connected really well with what I wanted to know and what I wanted other leaders to know about finishing well, and it was a summary, but I learned from your father's research, and your research as well, I'm sure, that as he researched, as you both researched biblical leaders, that only 13 of 49 biblical leaders that were studied, that could be studied on the subject, actually finished well. That means that, what, 36 didn't finish well.

Yeah, it's staggering, isn't it? Yeah. You know, if I were God, and I were gonna write a book that was supposed to capture the story of God interacting with human beings, I probably would have picked more success stories and kind of pushed those other stories to the side. But that's the biblical record that we have, and that's what kind of started and caught our attention decades ago now about the challenge of finishing well.

And the reality is, finishing well is not a guarantee. So we jumped into that research, and we've been doing it ever since. So why is that the case? Richard, why is it that it's not a guarantee that finishing well, it would seem like if you've got momentum in ministry and in life over 40, 45 years, that it would be easy just to sail on into the sunset and finish well.

What's the question? Yeah, well, I think there's two big, there may be even theological issues. One is that God gives us free will. He lets us choose, and those choices affect how things go with us.

And so the big first thing is that God doesn't just demand or tell us, and we have no option. We always have an option of responding to God. And so that leads us into the second part of it, which is theologically, we're in a battle.

We're in a war, as the Bible calls it, in which we have enemies of God who are actively resisting God and his purposes and his plans. And they try to influence Christian leaders to not make good choices. And so it's in the context of the battle that we see that there's a lot of things that can happen along the way.

And of course, we have God, we know the end of the story, but the journey has been captured historically by so many people that the journey is full of these choices. And to finish well, we have to make good choices all the way through. So free will and spiritual warfare are the key antagonists to the thing, really.

Exactly, exactly. So I'm glad you brought up spiritual warfare because it's always been my contention that the primary purpose of the armor of God is that we remain fixed in our position in Christ, Ephesians one through three, and that we remain focused on our walk with Christ, Ephesians four through six, and that the enemy is always trying to take us off course in both of those areas. But we put on the whole armor of God, and we're able to withstand in the evil day and having done all to stand.

So what happens with the leader that doesn't get that and doesn't protect himself or herself from those dangers? Well, let me go back a little bit. One of the things we asked the question of the leaders who finished well, we said, well, what is a good finish? What does it look like? What are the characteristics? And that's what you saw in that appendix. We started making general characteristics of what it looks like when a leader finishes well.

And so the primary characteristic, the first one is that their relationship with God stays good and connected and vital and strong and vibrant right up until the end. That's one characteristic. A second is that they continue to learn all the way across life.

Their learning posture is good there. And we all know that we need to keep learning because circumstances change, people change, context change, and we're always having to apply the truth of God in new phases and seasons of life. So that's a second one is they have that learning posture, which allows them to continue to grow and learn.

A third characteristic was they allow their character to be shaped into Christ-likeness. We know God wants to do this, but it takes cooperative process. We have to choose to allow the Holy Spirit to move in our lives in a way that we become like Him.

That's God's design and it's His plan. And we have to make choices in our character, character choices that get reflected in the way we live. A fourth characteristic is what happens to us under pressure.

A leader who's finishing well, they maintain their convictions and beliefs under pressure. And, you know, of course, the times and seasons in which we live, you know, the pressure we're facing now is very different than 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. And, you know, are we going to maintain the convictions and the beliefs and especially the promises of God that He's made to us? Are we going to hold on to those and be faithful to those? So that's a characteristic of a leader who's finishing well as they maintain their convictions and beliefs.

A fifth characteristic is that the leader accomplishes the purposes that God's designed them for. In Ephesians 2.10, we know that all of us are being handcrafted, hand shaped to accomplish the purposes that God has designed us for. And so the fifth characteristic is the leader actually is doing that.

And then the sixth characteristic is one that they, the leader has this sense, it's more of a sense that they're fulfilling their calling. They're fulfilling what God laid out before them. And that's a growing sensation over time.

We call that fulfilling their sense of destiny, their God-given calling and sense of destiny. And so those are the characteristics that we saw. Now, not every leader has all of those characteristics, you know, manifested powerfully, but the majority of leaders who finish well are doing those things.

That's how they get there. So then we ask the question, well, what happened to the leaders who didn't make it? What happened to them? And what kind of things? And, you know, you could probably make the list off the top of your head. It's like the enemy hasn't had to be all that creative.

He's used the same stuff for a long, long time. And so we began to identify the barriers or the things we have to overcome in order to finish well. And so there's things like finances, that, you know, the use and abuse of finances, the abuse of power, pride, inappropriate pride, self-centered pride, sexual misconduct, and all of the different ways that gets manifested.

And then family relationships and complexities. If you think about some of the things, you know, Solomon is the classic, you know, example in the Old Testament of someone whose family complexity took them out. David didn't do that great either, to be honest.

And so family, and we're all seeing that, especially in our day and age, where we're seeing how complicated and complex family systems are. We've learned a lot about that in the last decades. And so we know all of the stuff that's there.

And the enemy uses family dynamics and issues in all kinds of ways to try to limit or block leaders from finishing well. And then a sixth barrier that we first identified was what my dad simply called plateauing leaders. They just, they get complacent and they stop growing.

And, you know, they think they're doing fine, but in reality, once you stop growing and you're plateauing, you're not actually going level, you're going down. And, you know, you've been in ministry long enough to have seen what happens when leaders and pastors plateau. They tend to get stuck.

And then since then, those were the first six my dad identified in his original research. Since then, there's a lot of practitioners of this stuff out there around the world. We've added two more since then.

And one is emotional wounding, psychological wounding. We've seen this, just the stuff that, the trauma and pain and hurt that happens to people, they get stuck in that and they can't get out of it. It blocks them often from finishing well.

And so there's a whole thing, you know, involves everything from burnout to drop out, to all the kinds of stuff that happens to leaders along the way, emotionally and psychologically. And then the eighth barrier we've identified is, we simply call it hyperactivity or busyness, burning the candle at both ends. And they just, they flame out is what usually happens in those situations.

So those are the eight things we've identified that we have to be aware of. That the enemy uses to try to block or limit leaders from finishing well. And so just by being aware of them already helps us.

One of the things when I'm working with leaders, I ask this question quite often is, you know yourself better than anyone else. You know the ins and outs and the depths of yourself. Where are you susceptible? Where are you vulnerable? Take a look at these eight things we've listed.

What are the things that you're most vulnerable in? Where are the areas? And then encouraging people to then get help in those things. Through accountability and mentoring and coaching and all the kinds of things that can help us get through that. So that gives you an idea.

Yeah, that's a great overview. Boy, that's, so the six. Yeah, that's the 35,000 one.

You're right, it's 35,000 feet. So the six positive things that a leader can do and then the eight detractors are really what you've been talking about. So would you say generally, Richard, that if a leader is proactive and exercises his will, his free choice in doing the six, the six positive things, you know, always learning and maintaining a relationship with Christ and the things that you mentioned, I'd have to have you repeat them to remember exactly.

But if he does, if a leader does that and focuses on these things, for the most part, he's going to be guarding himself against the negative things in the list of eight. Is that a general statement, do you think? Yes, yeah. And, you know, what we found is then my dad went and developed what he called enhancements.

What can we do to enhance our chances? You know, and the two biggest things that come off of there, you're already familiar with. One is the more perspective we can have along the way about our journey and our walk and what happens, the better we'll be. We won't, most leaders when they get surprised by things is when they have the hardest time.

But if we can anticipate and we can recognize God and we can recognize ourselves and we can recognize the enemy's part more clearly through perspective, this greatly enhances our chances. So that's what we've been doing with the whole thing we'll talk about in the second podcast is the development of a leader. How does it happen? That's what we primarily do is try to give leaders perspective on their lives, which will help them be ready to make better choices along the way.

And so that's one thing. The second thing is getting mentoring help, getting the kind of mentoring help that we need. You mentioned your two friends.

I mean, that's exactly the kind of thing we need. Those people who will journey with us, who love us, who we can trust with anything. They ask us all those hard questions and we can answer them honestly.

We can share ups and downs and ins and outs. That probably this mentoring dynamic is the second thing that we think is probably the most necessary thing to help us finish well. And a lot of times we're blind to things and that's where a good mentor coach or a person who's walking with us, they can see things that maybe we don't see.

So those are the two things that are really powerful that can help us. Yeah, I'm thinking about the leader that plateaus or perhaps the leader that's caught by surprise at that last stage of life and they're not ready for it because they hadn't anticipated it. They didn't know any of the characteristics that belong to that phase of life.

And I'm thinking, isn't that just like the enemy to keep a person preoccupied with something else so that they're not planning toward their future? I mean, when we're adolescents, we're thinking about preparing for being a teenager. When we're teenagers, we're starting to think about what it's gonna be like in our 20s to begin adulthood and that kind of thing. But why is it that when we're in our 50s and 60s or even our 40s and 30s, we're not thinking about what's life gonna be like when I'm 60 or 70 or 80? What do I wanna be when I grow up kind of a thing? Yeah, that's... And we get caught by surprise.

Yeah, you're right on target. And I've been a part of this group down in Charleston that does special retreats for pastors. And what caught my attention, they invited me to come and share and be a part of it.

And it's called the Old Dudes Retreat. And man, it is fantastic. And it's targeting pastors and leaders who are either just about to retire or have just recently retired and are asking questions like, what's next? And who am I if I'm not that? And all those issues come up and the amazing environment they create in this, and they do a wonderful job running it.

And the atmosphere they create, you're surprised, I'm always surprised at how much pain there is in people who've been in ministry for a long time. There’re so many painful moments, many of which were out of their control, things that happened to them. And boy, those things are things that we have to really... That's when we really need help to process, to go through well.

And that's a big part of finishing well. Yeah, it's on my mind right now because this has been a huge thing for me in the last three or four years. I was introduced to a man by the name of Bruce Hebel, Dr. Bruce Hebel.

He got his doctorate at Dallas Theological Seminary, but he has written a book called Forgiving Forward. And when I was living, we were living in East Texas at the time, and he presented basically an outline of his material because he was gonna do a Forgiving Forward seminar to help people learn how to forgive. And what you're saying connects me to that thought.

Yeah. Is that so many of these wounds, they don't have to linger in our hearts if we can learn to forgive well and forgive instantly. And so I'm doing a little infomercial for that book.

That's good. No, that's really... It's huge. And he talks about how that parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18, when his servant wasn't forgiven by the forgiven servant, the king demanded that he be delivered to the torturers until he should pay all that was due him.

And so here was the thing that surprised me as he laid out his discussion. What is it that this forgiven servant owed his master? And if he paid it, he'd be delivered from the torturers. And it wasn't the huge amount of money that he had previously owed the king because the king had forgiven him of that debt.

So what did the king want? What the king wanted was just for that man who had been forgiven of an amount that was unpayable, for him to forgive his guy who owed him an amount that was payable. That's all he wanted. The minute he forgave that person, he would be released from the torturers.

And the torturers are those... There's a demonic entity or there's a demonic influence about from that. We think that we're affecting the person we've not forgiven by withholding forgiveness, but we're not. We're affecting ourselves.

We're the ones that are being damaged. Anyway, sorry for the deviation. I just think that that's a big thing.

That is huge. When I work with leaders who are in the process of trying to finish well, and I talk about acquiring skills that you need, learning to forgive and living a lifestyle forgiveness is in the top three. If you don't do that, your chances of finishing well are very slim because you're going to get stuck and it won't put you in good places.

So maybe we could go back. We've been at 35,000 feet with the six things and then the eight things. Maybe we could go back a little bit and pick one or two from each list and focus on that.

I don't know. However you want to do it. I'd like to take a little bit deeper dive into the things that a leader can do to ensure that he finishes well, and then maybe a little bit at what typically are failures.

Yeah, I think the one thing that's becoming Christ-like is we all have our own stories and we've all taught on it and we all teach on it. We talk about the fruit of the spirit and these things and we all make jokes about, well, which one are you working on? Which one do you need the most? Ask the person who knows you well. But when you look at that process of transformation that Paul talks about in Romans 12, for example, and the whole book of Romans, but you talk about this whole transformation.

And you ask the real tough questions of, how do we become Christ-like? This one characteristic of becoming Christ-like is one that I think involves what we call in Clintonese. At Fuller, we used to get joked about, we developed a whole language of Clintonese to speak about God's shaping of our lives and all this stuff. But we call it deep processing.

It's the deep moments in life where we most learn how to be like Christ. It's this suffering. And I can remember, and heavyweights in Christian history have taken this on, the problem of pain and C.S. Lewis and the suffering and all of the topics.

But basically it comes down to, how are we going to respond to the very tough stuff that happens to human beings? Living in a fallen, broken world, stuff's gonna happen. Now, not the same stuff happens to every person, but we do know stuff is gonna happen. How do we respond? And I remember my grandmother, she was the brightest light in our whole family.

And just her faith and her person were shaped by such deep suffering across her lifetime. And of course, as a kid, it's just your grandmother. You don't really pay attention.

But later in life, as I thought about it, and she had to make a lot of very hard choices in the midst of very difficult physical suffering, emotional, psychological suffering, all kinds of things. And she was always a model to me. And I always wondered, how could she be so gentle? How could she be so loving? How could she be so kind? How could she be? And I just, I don't know the moments at which she made all the choices, but looking at how pain, what we do with our pain, that's where you make those choices.

And so when I talk about becoming like Christ, it happens a lot in deep processing and in those shaping moments of our lives. And especially in the circumstances that we don't have control over. If you do something and you suffer a consequence because of it, that's difficult or hard, you at least can look back and go, well, that wasn't a very good choice I made, that wasn't a thing.

But the stuff that you have no control over, that's really the hardest times. And you have to look at the person of Jesus. You have to look at how he went through that.

And you look through the passion week and what he faced. How did he make those choices? And that's where we really need good people around us to help us process those things and learn to make those decisions. So that's a little bit of a deeper dive.

I think that I have a manuscript in my computer, I've been working on it for about 30 years. And I keep thinking, I'm not ready to write this, I'm not ready to write this. But how does God actually do this stuff? And so, for example, one of the chapters I've been working on for about 12 years now, especially, is the issue of grace.

What does God's grace? I understand what it means as a position. I understand what it means in terms of our theology, in terms of salvation and all that stuff. But how do you become a person of grace? And live as a, you know, it's like the son forgiving servant.

It's so easy to not live that lifestyle of grace and not be forgiving, et cetera. You get the feeling, wow, and I would love this. I call that default mode.

We don't want to stay in default mode. Yeah, and how do you do that? And I was deeply touched along, you know, all of us have those marker moments in our journeys. But I remember reading a book called The Outpouring of Grace, which was talking, you know, about a situation in Wales where God came and did some powerful stuff and moved in ways.

But I loved it. I never forgot the title of that. That was a fantastic title.

And I thought, wow, I want to be one of those people in my life that at the end of my life, people say, wow, that guy was full of grace. And he shared it. He shared it.

He shared grace. He was gracious, you know. So I think about that.

You know, you mentioned not many of us think about the end. My dad used to do a little thing in his classroom called the tombstone exercise. Back in the day when we used to have tombstones.

And he says, what do you want written about you? Yeah. At the end of your life, what do you want to be on your tombstone? And every student had to, you know, he had a little image of a tombstone. They all had to write it out and turn it in as an assignment.

And that always caught my attention. What do I want to see? And then the point of that was that, so how do you make that become a reality? And he said, it's one decision at a time. Yeah.

Your ultimate testimony, what's said about you at the end of your life is made one choice at a time. It's the idea of where our treasure is, there will our heart be also. Exactly.

If my treasure is to be like Christ and my treasure is to glorify the father by what's written on that tombstone, it's going to happen. My heart's going to follow. Yep.

Yep. So a lot of times we just have the wrong treasure. Yeah.

I have mine right over here. I have it where I see it all. A friend of mine took mine and made it a nice picture.

And I look at it quite often. Is there a meme on the picture? Are there any words or just a picture? No, it's a picture with, you know, here lies Richard Clinton, you know? Kind of like an Ebenezer Scrooge moment. Yeah.

Here's what people said about him after he was dead and gone. Cool. And, you know, I've been working on that now for about 30 or 40 years now since I did that exercise.

I can't wait to see the book. Yeah. It's going to be good.

Write it, write it, write it. Yeah, I'm working on it. There's about six or seven, you know, we talk about our spiritual lives as being, you know, a mile wide and an inch deep, you know? And I thought, well, maybe we should take about five or six of these topics and go deep with them.

Go deep, real deep. Yeah, because we need it. We need it.

We need it. We need to be anchored as the, you know, our faith needs to be anchored. Well, I know you... So the wind and the waves don't toss us.

Right. On your website, you've got a book or two, if I remember, on finishing well. So yeah, that's a start.

Yeah, there's a mountain of material in there. So anyway. Yeah, that's really good.

That gives you an idea of that. That's the one I'm thinking a lot about, Christ-likeness, that characteristic. And then I think a lot about the first one on perspective, on giving, you know, because I've had that story maybe 10,000 times or something where we've helped leaders get perspective, you know? And if you help them later in life, the one thing you'll hear all the time is, I wish I would have known some of this before, you know? And I'm like, it's not too late.

You're still alive. We can gain some ground. Well, this is where I think the enemy is trying to keep leaders from finishing well, because we don't tend to... A lot of us don't tend to see ourselves as mentor capable.

But we are. We are capable. And we need to be ready to be mentors, because if there's anything that's needed today, it's that in terms of passing this on to the next generations.

Exactly. My goodness. And yeah, and you know, we, of course, we've written a lot on mentoring and taught a lot on mentoring over the decades now.

But the simplest definition of a mentor is a helper. Someone who helps another person. There you go.

We can all do that. We can all do that. Yeah.

Yeah, instead of putting it into some special classification or whatever. I'll never forget sitting down at a men's retreat with the guy that was leading the retreat for our church. And he said, you know, what I'm going to do next? He said, I'm turning 50.

And the Levites were only allowed to work until they were 50. And after that, they had to retire and start working with the up-and-coming Levites. He said, that's what I'm going to do.

And he did. Yeah. For the most part, he did that.

He had organized his life to be prepared to be a helper or a mentor to the next generation. I think that's awesome. It's one of the hugest things we can do.

But anyway. Yeah, I love it. Good.

I like it. I like it. So let's just do one and then we'll wrap up this podcast.

Just do one from the list of eight things that keep a leader from finishing well. You know, I think we all know the big three and so much has been talked about them. I think we don't need to say much about sexual misconduct or finances or the abuse of power.

But I think one that if I go deeper on it, the whole issue of I've seen so many leaders struggle with is this, the pride thing. And it's so insidious in the way that the enemy tries to get us. And, you know, you look at it in the pronouns we use about my ministry.

You know, for example, well, my ministry is really, you have a ministry. And often, you know, you listen to it and they talk about, well, you know, yeah, I grew the church, really, you grew the church. You know, and there's things that happen in terms of the way, say, we use authority, the way that, you know, leaders need to use authority.

It's a part of the leadership responsibility. But how we use authority is such a huge issue as it relates to this barrier of pride. And I've seen a lot of leaders, you know, really struggle with authority.

Because the reality is most of us don't have very good models, you know. And so we tend to, you know, turn over leadership in a way that, you know, if you think about the pyramid, you know, where do we put the leader? We put them at the top. And we think about top-down leadership.

And if you look at the gospel, and you look at Jesus's model, he flips it upside down. He does. Yeah.

And we all know that. We've all taught on servant leadership. We've all taught on these things.

But, you know, that's where we have to really, we really have to watch out. This whole thing. And I remember, I can't remember who it was, but I remember back in the day, there was someone teaching about being very careful not to take the glory of God onto ourselves.

You know, and I can remember, I remember one way that God talked to me earlier today. You know, I remember, I was talking about that movie, The Jesus Revolution. You know, and Lonnie would give a word of knowledge or whatever and say, hey, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Well, you know, that was kind of a model for us in the early Vineyard days, we were learning how to give words of knowledge, because that's what we were taught to do and pray for people. And I can remember early, you know, I thought I had this amazing word of knowledge. And I gave it with as much confidence, which was never very much, but I gave it with as much confidence.

No one responded. I was so humiliated, you know, and I just thought, oh, God, why did you that, you know, I was getting all mad at God and all this stuff. Well, as soon as the meeting was over, this lady comes up to me and goes, well, that was for me.

I just didn't want to admit that it was for me and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I almost wanted to go, hey, everyone, the meeting's not over. Here's the person that was the, you know, I wanted to somehow look better.

I wanted to look like I didn't miss it. I didn't make a mistake. And I can just remember in that moment, God, the Holy Spirit says to me, really, is this about you or is this about me? Praise the Lord.

And I never, I mean, that was a big turning point for me because I quickly realized that that is, that's a danger part for me because I wanted people to go, wow, there's a person that gets words of knowledge that are accurate and he's connected to God. And all that other stuff we do. And that was just one of many times God has had to say, hey, really, this is really about me.

Give me glory. Let me get the glory. And we just have to always keep an eye on that.

You know, I don't know how your experience has been, but you've probably seen some of those things along the way. I've seen it in myself and I've seen it in other leaders like you have. And, you know, a strong senior pastor led church model tends towards that type of abuse if we're not careful.

And Calvary Chapel certainly has that. I'm happy for that ability to lead as a senior pastor within our tribe, but there are just inherent dangers to it. So I remember we lived in one community and the community itself was a pretty conservative community.

I'm not talking about political conservatism, but conservative in lifestyle and being under spoken and that kind of stuff. And they didn't like any kind of ostentatious displays of self. It just wasn't part of their world.

But it was way too much part of my world because I was from California and that's what Californians are known for. So I had to figure out what's going on here. Why is this uncomfortable for me? And that's exactly what I realized is that I wanted more focus on myself than I should have had.

And I shouldn't even have been concerned about it. So that was a great thing. And then we moved to Texas from there and Texas is another world altogether.

But it was the same kind of thing on steroids, you know, just, it ain't about you. No. So there's been a lot of challenges to the old ego here and they all are wounds to the heart that are necessary.

And I'm glad. Yeah. The other way that pride comes in oftentimes is, you know, we get trapped in this comparison game.

Oh man. Where we compare ourselves to other people or other people's giftedness or other people's results or whatever, you know, whatever it is. Man, if you've ever, if you've ever been a pastor of a small church, which I've been my entire history, I've always, I've planted five churches and I've always been in the small church and God moves me on before it gets good.

There you can hear the little bit of, oh God. But yeah, you know, and I look at these people who just seem to, it just works for them. And, and, and I always look at that and go, God, that's just not fair.

And I'm like, where did I get the idea that ministry is supposed to be fair? Yeah. Right. I don't know where that came from, but it's not very helpful.

Yeah. And so the comparison thing is really, that was another whole thing I had to get really trained and continue to have to get trained in. Yeah.

I like what Carl Vader's wrote in one of his books on, on the small church. And he doesn't call them small churches anymore. He calls them normal size churches because of the average size church.

It's normal, you know, it's not something to be. So let's, let's move towards a wrap up here, Richard. I know you have things that, that you say to pastors routinely and things that come up themes, but what's on your heart right now? A prophetic word to the heart of the pastor that's listening to this podcast.

I think, you know, a lot of what really comes to my heart is just the words of Paul that echo in my head all the time. You know, he, he talks about, um, you know, when he's writing to Timothy in second Timothy, you know, I fought the good fight and I finished the race and, uh, you know, I've remained faithful. This is, I would love for more leaders to be able to say that, you know, I wish we didn't have to fight, you know, I wish none of us had to fight, but the reality is ministry and finishing the race is, um, you know, it involves fighting.

And so my word, you know, to the pastors in my, what's in my heart is that, hey, learn to fight well, you've got to learn to fight well. That armor passage, it took me, I don't, it took me way too long to figure that out. Really, to be honest.

I mean, it, it, I was in ministry way too long not to have been armored every day. You know what I mean? And I just, uh, and so that's one thing that's on my, my heart. And I think, you know, to fight well, you have to know what you're fighting.

You need good discernment. You need to understand who God is and what God is like. Um, this is a huge passion for me right now.

Um, I've been working hard on this for a long time and I've written on it and published on it. And, but what do we really think God's like going back to A.W. Tozer and, you know, his famous thing about what you really think God is like in the deepest part of who you are is the most important thing about you. I remember his knowledge of the whole, and I'm just thinking like, wow, when I first read that, I thought that can't be the most important thing about me, but it really is because life flows out of what we perceive God to be like.

And, and most leaders don't have very healthy biblical images of who God is and what God's like. Wow. That's, yeah, we need to work on that.

And, um, and so that would be the second thing, you know, um, because your leadership is going to flow right out of that. And, uh, and so I would say one area of fighting is fight for that accurate biblical image of who God is and what God is like. You, it doesn't happen automatically.

Yeah. Yeah. It takes time to invest.

And, uh, so those would be a couple of things that are right on the, the, the top of my heart, you know, I always would say to leaders. That's great. I appreciate that so much.

So many thanks to you, Richard, for giving of your time to glean from your experiences. There are many, uh, sound and helpful leadership resources available, uh, for you, uh, who are listening at clintonleadership.com. That's all one word clintonleadership.com opportunities to be coached as a leader books written by Richard and his father, J. Robert Clinton, leadership courses, other resources, downloadable manuals, numerous articles to strengthens one serves. So, you know, lots of ways to, to, to, to go further with this material, but man, amen to the idea of finishing well, let's do this.

Let us do this. Let's what'd you call the, uh, the, uh, retreat down in Charleston. What'd you call it? Yeah, it's not my language that they came up with.

They called it the old dudes retreat. I think we should do some of those for Calvary chapel. Let's do them.

Let's do them. Yeah, absolutely. Old dudes retreat.

I think it'd be well attended. Boy, I'd love to do that. Let's get that going.

Well, thanks again. And Poimen Ministries for you listeners is all about spiritual health and vitalized revitalization, perhaps churches. So wait for the announcer to help you with how to get in touch with us.

And until next time, part two of this discussion will be on spiritual formation over the life of a believer. And so we're looking forward to that as well. God bless you all until next time.