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The Be The Church Podcast is for spiritual leaders who want to be challenged to lead like Jesus in everyday places—at home, in your church, at school, and in the workplace. Hosted by Be The Church founder Joel Wayne and Chapel Pointe pastor Luke Bilberry, each episode features bold, authentic conversations with business and ministry leaders that are rooted in Scripture. You'll learn how to expand your spiritual influence and leverage your leadership to advance the Kingdom of God. Let's be the church together! For more information, visit bethechurch.org/podcast.
God has raised up specific people to be certain leaders, but God has then also raised up everybody to influence others. It's a great commission to empower them.
Michael Rubino:When you read servant leadership literature, they do everything but quote the scripture. I mean, they're just paraphrasing biblical principles.
Joel Wayne:I've read before and said, wait. Is that John? Or Mark?
Michael Rubino:Is that In one of the gospels?
Joel Wayne:Yeah.
Luke Bilberry:Yeah. Welcome to Be The Church podcast, where we are passionate about helping equip local churches to raise up spiritual leaders. It's it's what we're called to do to advance the kingdom of God, and we're grateful that we get to be the church with you to do it together because God is on the move all across the world and his Kingdom is coming. It is here. It's now.
Luke Bilberry:It's about Jesus. And so we're grateful that we get to have a conversation about spiritual leadership. And so really glad to have Pastor Joel and Pastor Michael Rubino back with us to chat about something that we are all very, very passionate about. It is what we're giving all of our time and energy and what we feel called to right now is to raise up spiritual leaders and to release them to do even more than we could have ever imagined for the sake of the kingdom all across the world. And so I love Pastor Joel, why don't you help us define what is spiritual leadership?
Joel Wayne:I think you probably need to speak of what it's not as well, and even what we've made leadership. Today, leadership is, maybe you guys disagree, but it seems to be this word that is elevated above where it should. God gives everybody different roles, different responsibilities in the kingdom of God. And now today, everybody wants to be a leader, right? To me, I think about when someone says, and I hear frequently, everybody can be a leader.
Joel Wayne:I get what they're saying, I do, I Everybody has influence. Everybody does have influence. Everybody can impact somebody else. I get But not everybody is a leader's kind of saying, you know, I laugh at this, there's no such thing as a dumb question. Yes, there is.
Joel Wayne:Put that down. There's some dumb questions. And again, I get what people are saying, but God has raised up specific people to be certain leaders, but God has then also raised up everybody to influence others. It's a great commission to empower them. And so when you look at spiritual leadership, how are we encouraging, teaching, equipping, embracing for others lead others, for disciples to lead disciples, to allow them to emulate the teachings and practices of Jesus Christ?
Joel Wayne:Yeah, Yeah. That, I mean, that plays with discipleship, so is spiritual leader discipleship. It is. It is. It is.
Joel Wayne:Is. What I say is spiritual leadership is actually born out of, birth out of, it comes from healthy discipleship.
Luke Bilberry:Right. You look at Jesus' model, and maybe, Michael, you can unpack this a little bit, like the biblical model that Jesus would have done to raise up spiritual leaders, make disciples, maybe something for you to kind of unpack for us, but that's what he does, is he, there's the disciples, but we hear about a few different ones that he is called to specific roles with even in his group of disciples. Right? And so there is this level of spiritual leadership and discipleship going hand in hand, but we spiritual leaders. So why don't you kind of unpack a little bit more?
Luke Bilberry:What are some characteristics of spiritual leadership and how do you see Jesus doing that?
Michael Rubino:Yeah, you know, what's great about this topic is that the church co opted a lot of secular mindsets regarding leadership over the past maybe thirty years, only for the secular world and the academic world to co opt the biblical version of leadership. So right now you can't go through a bookstore without picking up transformational leadership, change leadership, leadership. Servant leadership. And when you read servant literature, they do everything but quote the scripture. I mean, they're just paraphrasing biblical principles.
Joel Wayne:I've read that before and so wait. Is that John? I've read that before. Or Mark. Is it
Michael Rubino:in one of the gospels?
Joel Wayne:Yeah, yeah.
Michael Rubino:And so basically, this is going to sound overly simplified, but sometimes the most profound things are simple. Spiritual leadership is spiritual at its foundation. So spiritual leaders aren't self serving, they're self sacrificial. They don't lead from the tower, they lead by example from the front. I think these are some of the things we're seeing now, whereas you had this great leader syndrome in the church where pastors were untouchable and you couldn't talk to them, they didn't, God forbid, did any actual work.
Michael Rubino:And I think we're deconstructing that in a beautiful way. Because when you see Jesus lead his disciples, he's side by side, but not everyone, not everyone, he chose 12 primarily invested in three, doesn't mean the pastor is responsible or a leader can lead everyone. But they lead by serving and modeling and doing, not simply teaching.
Joel Wayne:So let me go ahead and say that's part of the reason our understanding of spiritual leadership is convoluted is because we believe that pastors are to be leading everybody in the church. And so now we don't have the people sitting in the church actually carrying the responsibility that they have. We're outsourcing it. We're outsourcing something that every person is called to. And you know, we can speak about that as well.
Joel Wayne:I think part of it is defining it for your congregation because everybody's in a different part of that journey.
Luke Bilberry:Right,
Joel Wayne:right. Everybody's, so I look at spiritual leadership, and according to Scripture, you're going to go, well, you serving? Right? I want to know, in my church, I want to know how many people are utilizing their area of spiritual giftedness to serve. I want to know that.
Joel Wayne:I know how many people serve every Sunday. I know if people are coming more and more into that group, you know, how many are we adding? But then we want to know if people are giving, and then we want to know, are they in any type of group? Like we start to measure it, but everybody's in a progression of spiritual growth. Transformation is a continual process.
Joel Wayne:That's what is someone's process, growth in becoming like Jesus?
Luke Bilberry:So maybe let me kind of unpack a few things or have you guys unpack some data that we're getting from Barna says that 39% of Christians are not engaged in any form of discipleship. So have we made a mistake, the system we've built, have we made discipleship, this idea of come intend on a Sunday morning? And to what degree are we, the church leaders, the spiritual leaders, needing to redefine what discipleship looks like? If we're spiritual leaders and we're going be held responsible to the Lord Jesus for his disciples, for making the disciples, what are some things that we may need to retool and rethink? Like you're talking about, we're going to measure these things, we're going to look at these things.
Luke Bilberry:But it seems like we have a crisis of 39% of people are saying, I'm not involved in any form. These are Christians saying, I'm not informed in the discipleship pathway or process.
Michael Rubino:Well, we've made it a program. Like, there it is. Like, we've made it a program, teach this course, talk about this for a season, then move on. There is nothing deeper than discipleship because discipleship doesn't have an I've arrived moment. It's a process.
Michael Rubino:As we've said, if you've done ten weeks, you're a disciple. Or if you do, like we were just talking before we started recording about different types of people that are involved in discipleship. But what the one or two things we're doing is not the totality. Like some are serving, some are teaching, some are learning, right? Some are good at giving, but there's a kind of a totality of these things should all be happening simultaneously.
Michael Rubino:And how to measure that's difficult, it's messy, which is probably why we don't focus on it.
Joel Wayne:Many people know Andy Murray, right? So let's go to some things that he wrote about decades ago. He often spoke of complete surrender. If we really want to go at just a, hey, a follower, a disciple of Jesus, a spiritual leader is going to have complete surrender of everything. They're fine, and we could all preach this, right?
Joel Wayne:Their finances and their time and their energy, the way they raise their kids, but that's still ambiguous in many regards. We have to start, I think more clearly defining as a leader for the people that I am leading, this is what I'm asking you to do that is biblically rooted and grounded. And I'm asking you to do this. And that's just part of the process. It may not be everything,
Michael Rubino:but it's And it can't be everything, right?
Joel Wayne:I was just telling the story here, we've got a guy who, newer to our ministry, and here he is, and he steps in every Sunday, he comes out at 8AM, so we have hundreds of come to 8AM to actually free up spaces for the other services to follow, which is wonderful. And then he drives one of our shuttles up and down the street so that we can add additional vehicles and cars, and then he breaks down all the chairs so that our worship venues here can be used for students later in the evening. That's servant leadership. That's a part of it. Don't beat that down.
Joel Wayne:Celebrate that. Yes. And then I've got another guy, was like, Why more involved? He goes, What do you mean? Well, he's here every week for worship, but he's on the fourth rendition of walking through something I did over three years ago, which is challenging people to walk through the Gospel of John with their employees or their people at work.
Joel Wayne:He's on the fourth round. Wow.
Michael Rubino:Yeah,
Joel Wayne:that's a win. Another He's It looks different, but that's a win. And we need to define what the biblical win is.
Luke Bilberry:Yeah. I want to kind of circle back to that just a little bit as we really kind of think about this idea of taking the wall. What does it mean for us to go over the obstacles as we drive down in this? But spiritual leadership, man, there's highs and lows in the midst of everything. And we're thinking about, like Ephesians four eleven tells us, it's to equip the saints.
Luke Bilberry:Our job as spiritual leaders is to equip the saints, the disciples, for the work of ministry. And we get to do that. And so as we're walking that path forward, we're going have some wins and we're going to have some failures. We're going to misstep. I think it would be helpful for us, for you guys, to maybe even share a moment of vulnerability at a time that you you were trying to lead in a Godward direction.
Luke Bilberry:You were trying to be earnest in that, but even you made a misstep because we can learn from our failures. I think that's one of the greatest teachers we have is failure, right? Is we look at our mistakes and go, Oh, okay, I now know how to not do that again. When you think about spiritual leadership, again, what is spiritual leadership? Sometimes it's easy to find what it's not, and we can define it by looking at our failures and doing.
Michael Rubino:We learn much more from our failures than our successes. At least that's my story. And so I think probably my biggest failure, and there's probably a handful, but I'll just pick one out for the sake of brevity, was through a season as a leader where someone did not do it as good as I thought I could do it.
Luke Bilberry:A little pride there, sir.
Michael Rubino:100%, that I would not release it. And what I was doing, number 100% pride, is I'm this talented in this many areas, which was not true. And part of it was being overly protective and not being willing to slow down to bring people with me. So part of what I was doing was running over people to reach new people.
Luke Bilberry:So you weren't bringing, you weren't especially leading.
Michael Rubino:Was bringing no one along with me. So if you look behind you and there's nobody following you, you're not leading.
Joel Wayne:Not a leader.
Michael Rubino:And that was one of my big moments where I recognized that I had not brought anyone along with me on this journey. And while some things were going well, it eventually all crumbled inward because I didn't have a strong enough foundation. So that was my failure.
Luke Bilberry:There's a ton to learn in there. I appreciate it. One, thanks for sharing that vulnerability because I think it's to a degree, everyone has a certain leadership capacity. And if we're trying to create a new system of discipleship, a spiritual leadership, if it's all on us, then we're living back into that program. Right?
Luke Bilberry:We're living because I'm not raising up, we're not releasing new leaders, We're not getting new ideas and new inputs from the people that God has given us this kaleidoscopic grace to make this beautiful thing in our congregations and in our communities.
Michael Rubino:Right? Jesus sent out the seventy two two by two. I'm pretty sure he could have done it better.
Luke Bilberry:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Michael Rubino:Pretty sure like he could have went, but that I had to model myself after him more.
Joel Wayne:He sent
Luke Bilberry:those guys out and he got the report back, you know, and they worked with him.
Michael Rubino:And he allowed them to fail.
Luke Bilberry:Yeah, that's good. Well, what would you say, Pastor Joel? What are kind of some of those spiritual leadership moments where you've stumbled and you've learned a lot from?
Joel Wayne:I remember at First Church, it's very similar to yours, Michael. At First Church, I'm in lead pastor. Was 29, I think when I went as a lead and I'm going, I didn't know what was going on. Let's just be honest, you act all cool.
Michael Rubino:Oh yeah, but you don't know, You're terrified.
Joel Wayne:And I had nothing, nothing was I trained in by seminary. Right. So I go
Luke Bilberry:You probably had a good book collection,
Joel Wayne:I did have a nice book collection.
Michael Rubino:Systematic theology books
Joel Wayne:are tight.
Michael Rubino:Yeah. But leading people is
Joel Wayne:a And little I had a realization one day of looking around me and go, where are they? And it was very similar to you. And I recognized they weren't there because I wasn't worth following. And in that moment just was, and I speak about it quickly because it keeps me from getting overly dramatic or tearful on it because I wasn't leading them well. I wasn't providing the clarity for them to feel like that they were actually winning, not for themselves, but just to be like Jesus.
Joel Wayne:Like showing up at church isn't a win for me, it's not. And so even with leading staff, I had to change that. So leading people, leading staff, leading my home, it caused me, I was so grateful for that because I had two kids at the time, I have more than that now, but I go, it caused me to parent differently. How could I know that I was a good parent? And so all of a sudden I started different expectations for my children.
Joel Wayne:And I started to raise them with, you're going to be a leader of men strong and gentle. And I started to raise them with certain scripture that they had to know cause I wanted it to be engraved on their heart. Well, same with lay leadership, same with people at the church, I had to start defining with clarity what the expectations were. And by the way, I found out in that moment, I won as a leader, they won as a follower, the church won as the bride of Christ, and so God received glory.
Luke Bilberry:Yeah. Yeah, that's really good. One of the things this is not a I'm gonna catch you off guard with this question, so I apologize for this. One of the things I've noticed about your leadership, Pastor Joel, is that you have a unique ability to see beyond the exterior for the people around you. You have this unique I believe it's a gift that God has given you to see past people's failures and mistakes, and you see them for who they can become in Christ.
Luke Bilberry:Can you unpack a little bit as a spiritual leadership? What does that look like to call to the depth of another person's soul to step into the fullness that God has called them? Whether it's understanding grace, whether it's having people that are around you, like there's something unique that I think God has been doing to your leadership that I think is worth exploring.
Joel Wayne:Yeah, no, one, thank you. It's very kind of you. I look at it and go, I know that the majority of my life for a while was defined by my failures and by my weaknesses and by my inadequacies, right? People come up to me like, Hey, that was a great pastor. Was a great message, I great don't hear, I say thank you, say the right thing, I really am grateful that they're being kind.
Joel Wayne:I don't hear it though in my heart. All I see, like you can't critique me more personally than I critique myself. So I think that's Satan and a stronghold, honestly. But as a result, what I do is I go, man, I think majority of people are defined by certain things. And if we can examine, if you can look at other people and go, man, they're defining their life based on a lie.
Joel Wayne:They're defining their life based on things that are not biblically God oriented truth, right? And help them redefine. I don't know if there's a great Isn't that what Jesus did? Yeah. I'm not saying I'm anything like that, but isn't that what Jesus did?
Joel Wayne:Yeah. With Peter, even when he started to just think?
Michael Rubino:It's a great example,
Joel Wayne:And I go, if I can do that, just my job is not the number of people, my job is to do that for whomever God has put around me. If I can do that, I've lived a good life. And so for me, it's a matter of helping people go, man, I'm defining this on loss, I'm defining this on being told that I wasn't good enough in the past, I'm being defined by all these other things. And if we could start learning to be defined by the truth of scripture, everything changes.
Luke Bilberry:Yeah, you've said before in certain leadership conversations that the call calibrates everything.
Joel Wayne:Yes.
Luke Bilberry:And I think, Pastor Michael, what I'm seeing from your church and what you guys are communicating is once you guys have clarity on calling, everything else lines up in that every decision, every action step begins
Michael Rubino:It to clarifies everything.
Luke Bilberry:And so I'm wondering for us, when we think about spiritual leadership, y'all can give me some feedback on this, but what I'm hearing y'all say is that spiritual leadership clearly knows what God has called them to and in doing so, was going to make a pathway for the other people to follow behind.
Joel Wayne:Yeah, because we say clarity breeds confidence. Yeah, yeah. Clarity breeds confidence. There's this confidence, this energy of, No, no, no, is what God has called you to. You don't have to be defined by your previous failure, but you can be defined by the other gifts that you have and the other people around you.
Joel Wayne:And it gives you this confidence. And the church is better all for it. And we see it over and over again, right?
Michael Rubino:Oh, without a doubt. I think this is why when you say spiritual leadership is birthed or born out of discipleship, if you jump straight to leadership and you don't first hit discipleship, which gives you the spiritual part of leadership, then you default to all these
Joel Wayne:You're gonna make it about self.
Michael Rubino:Right. You know, I'm gonna probably date myself, but like, you know, all this stuff came out of the Lee Iacocca, great man, leadership, I'm in charge, like bold, strong, you know, three piece suit, make sure my tie is right. Like, and we just defaulted to that in the church because there's a certain point in church history, if we're being honest, we just stopped doing discipleship, at least here in North America. And so we defaulted, we said we don't need discipleship because we have strong leadership, We shook the spiritual point So out of if you want spiritual back in leadership, you got to put discipleship back in the church. That's foundational.
Luke Bilberry:The discipleship is not just content absorption. A life that's lived in step with Jesus by the power of Holy Spirit walking with you, that deep John 15 abiding aspect. So why don't we kind of begin to land this plane with this conversation again? Some of the stuff we have, these ideas we're talking about, a lot of it's unscripted. And as I'm hearing you guys talk and just kind of just processing this, I'm thinking about Peter.
Luke Bilberry:I'm thinking about his journey, right? And he gets to this moment in John 21. Jesus and Peter sitting on there and he says, Hey, Peter, do you love me? Right? And we know this Of
Joel Wayne:course I love you.
Luke Bilberry:And then feed my sheep, he gives them the next step. Do you love me? Feed my sheep. Do you love me? Tend to my sheep.
Michael Rubino:Right?
Luke Bilberry:What would you say in who we're talking to, whoever's listening this idea again, what's that next step? Because we've all had moments of failure. We've all had moments of mistakes, but we all know that God is calling us to more as a disciple. And for many of us, that's that's what we're here for is Be the Church is to see more spiritual leaders raised up to take the next tier, to lead the next group of disciples. And then that would raise up another spiritual leader who leads another group of disciples.
Luke Bilberry:Right? This is implanting churches across the world. It's in our current churches and revitalization work here. But what would you guys say to someone out there to help take a next step?
Michael Rubino:I'm gonna say something that might sound counterintuitive, But if you want to go on a journey of spiritual leadership, you got to choose the right spiritual leaders to follow. Practice your followership first. That sounds counterintuitive, but you'll never be a good leader if you don't learn how to be a good follower.
Luke Bilberry:Can you give me a little bit more on that? If I'm looking for a good spiritual leader follow-up, give me a couple like three boom boom booms.
Michael Rubino:So I look at guys that I respect their ministries, right? There's a few key guys that I will refer to their ministries and there's people in my local church. So I'm just lay elders, lay people, who I just respect their walk and I will just learn from them and with them, whether it doesn't have to be Bible teaching, it could be life teaching, right? So I look big picture, people that I love what they're doing and God's moving in their life. And then locally, I find some people.
Luke Bilberry:You're looking for the fruit of their life, you're testing them, walking in men and worthy of the gospel.
Michael Rubino:And then I just try to sit and be humble and just learn and that makes me a better leader.
Luke Bilberry:That's cool. What would you say,
Joel Wayne:I'm going to say one share, share with one and then sacrifice in one area. So what I mean by that is this, if everybody would recognize, if we need to share the gospel, our love of Jesus with one person, you can just say, Hey, can I tell you what God did in my life? If you're not willing to share with one person, either you're learning about how little he means to you, or maybe he means a lot. You can't be too crass in this. And you're learning how inadequate you are to actually speak about them.
Joel Wayne:Yeah. It's one of the two. So one, share with one. The other piece is to sacrifice something and evaluate if it's actually sacrifice. Evaluate if it like, what are you sacrificing in terms of time, like where it hurts?
Joel Wayne:I think sacrifice almost always hurts, doesn't it?
Luke Bilberry:It's like, it's inherent in the word, but we
Joel Wayne:don't think about it.
Michael Rubino:We don't think of it that way. But if you don't want to sacrifice, you'll never be a spiritual leader. That's a good word.
Joel Wayne:So I go, if we can share with one person, if everybody in our church shared with one person, either you're gonna learn about one, what he means to you actually, or just where you're inadequate and you can learn how to share better. So there's a both. Some people just they're too insecure or maybe they've just never done it, but they love Jesus. So it's gonna show you, does he mean enough to you or you just need to be trained up in that.
Luke Bilberry:Give some experience, stretch those muscles.
Joel Wayne:Yeah, and you can do it. You gotta
Luke Bilberry:do it. Yeah, you guys, you got it, you got it, go do it.
Joel Wayne:Yeah, go do it. The other is the sacrifice. What's one thing that you can truly sacrifice? And that may be the dollar, but it also may be, man, my church needs somebody ten hours a week right now. I don't know how I'm going to find it, but I'm going to do it for the next four months.
Joel Wayne:Sacrifice something in order to better do it. Because I think those are Christ like traits.
Luke Bilberry:It reminds me of like, you know, the pastor talks about, you know, to bring a sacrifice of praise, but we just show up at Inflict sacrifice. In Western context, sometimes we just show up for church, the program, but what does it actually mean
Joel Wayne:to me? Stop labeling sacrifices and it's
Michael Rubino:not quite the same thing.
Joel Wayne:I had to go to service at 08:00. I'm like, so?
Luke Bilberry:Yeah, exactly. And that feels like that could be a whole conversation in and of itself. But here, want you, we wanted to invite you to take the wall today. So you hear that from Pastor Joel, share with one sacrifice, one thing. We also want you to click and we've got a PDF to help you think through, are you a spiritual leader?
Luke Bilberry:Here's some questions for you to think about and to honestly evaluate the sphere of influence that you have and some steps that you can take to be a spiritual leader. So we're really excited to give you this resource to equip you with that, and we are blessed that we get to be the church with you. As always, if we can do anything for you, we're here to serve you because we're in this together. Let's go be the church.