So when people see the leader modeling a vision,
they're living it out, and then they cast a vision,
guess what, it has authenticity on it.
It has what we call spiritual authority on it
because that person's already living it.
They're living out the vision
that they're casting a vision for.
When I graduated from University of Georgia,
I was 22 years old, and immediately I went with an organization
where I had to go out and raise up my own salary,
raise up my own funds to live.
So I quickly learned how to make phone calls,
close the call, share my vision of what I was gonna be doing,
and asking people for money.
And that sounds crazy, but that's what I did,
and I loved it.
I really had fun doing that,
and then later become a missionary to Japan.
Spent almost 10 years in Japan while in America,
and then in Japan, had the privilege of starting
a lot of different leadership teams,
both on the university campuses in America,
but also university campuses in Tokyo, Japan,
as well as Okinawa, Japan.
And then coming back to the United States
and running a Bible Institute.
So I was challenged to start a Bible Institute
with the Association of Vineyard Churches.
Vineyard was a kind of quasi-Jesus movement denomination in the 90s,
and they're still around today,
but I worked with the Vineyard Bible Institute
and became the director of that.
Had to develop a team, had to build a team.
And then here in Colorado Springs,
started a church in 1994,
and that church grew into the thousands,
a multimillion-dollar budget.
And then 10 years ago,
started the road at Chapel Hills in Colorado Springs,
crossed town from the other church,
and this church has grown into the thousands
and has a multimillion-dollar budget.
Now, all of that, everything that I've done,
involved maximizing the impact of the vision
that God had given through building teams.
And so that's what I wanna talk about today.
I wanna talk about the building of teams
with organic leadership,
because there's a lot of people with a lot of vision.
I mean, visions and dreams that people have
in nonprofits, Christian world, corporate world,
business world, are a dime a dozen.
There's so many.
But very few actually get carried out,
mainly because the leader of the vision
doesn't know how to develop a team around him or her.
And so they're only as good as how much stamina they have
and how much weight of responsibility
they can carry on their shoulders as a lone wolf.
I call them lone wolf leadership.
I'm not talking about that here, though.
I'm talking about where you build teams,
you're not on your own, but you've got a clear vision,
and you have the ability to invite people into that vision
and they desire to follow you.
So that's how we build a team.
So how do we do that?
How does an organic leader build a team?
Number one, model the vision.
Number one, model a vision that God's given.
A leader is the first person of the vision.
Jesus modeled what he was building, Matthew 4.18.
And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee,
saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and Andrew his brother,
casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen.
Then he said to them,
follow me and I will make you fishers of men.
They immediately left their nets and they followed him.
Going on from there, he saw two other brothers,
James, the son of Zebedee, and John, his brother,
in the boat with Zebedee, their father, mending their nets.
He called them, and immediately they left the boat
and their father, and they followed him.
And Jesus went about all Galilee,
teaching in their synagogues,
preaching the gospel of the kingdom,
and healing all kinds of sickness
and all kinds of disease among the people.
Then his fame went throughout all Syria,
and they brought to him all the sick people
who were afflicted with various diseases and torments,
and those who were demon-possessed,
epileptics and paralytics, and he healed them all.
So Jesus called these early disciples
to come and follow him, but he was modeling something.
He was modeling what the kingdom of God looks like,
not just teaching, but he was also modeling.
He was healing the sick.
He was casting out demons.
He was moving through village after village,
preaching the kingdom and proclaiming the kingdom,
and then demonstrating the kingdom to them.
So the number one.
Most important aspect of organic leadership is modeling, doing what you want your vision to do.
And that's the first and the best example of this is always the leader himself.
Unless you want to be called a hypocrite or you want to constantly be in turmoil on your team,
you've got to be the model of it.
So the character of the leader through modeling the vision is vitally important.
That's what Jesus did.
So they had no idea what they were...
He just said, come and follow me.
I want you to notice that.
He said, come and follow me.
So the very first thing that the disciples were called to was not a vision,
but to the leader himself.
They were called to follow Jesus.
So often in organic leadership, that's the first thing is the actual gifting of the leader.
Do you realize people don't follow you because of your vision?
They follow you because of you.
They follow the leader.
They follow the gifting of that leader.
So he has to embody that vision.
And so if you have someone who says, come and follow me,
and they're constantly lying, cheating, messing around,
who cares what their vision is?
Nobody's going to follow that person.
And so it's the actual character of that person modeling what they believe that really, really matters.
So that's number one.
When I talk about organic leadership, I mean organic character.
I mean a leader who's modeling the integrity that he believes in.
He's calling people to himself first.
And so in every church I've planted, in every ministry I've started,
people came initially because they wanted to be with me.
In other words, we became friends.
I was modeling something that they wanted to be around.
Well, number two follows.
And I'd say in most of your books that you read on leadership,
they would say that my number two is their number one.
And they would say, cast the vision.
I'm making that number two.
Cast the vision.
So there's a vision to be given to others about where this ship is going,
where this company is going, where this church is going.
Cast the vision.
But listen, the first one I said was model the vision.
So I happen to believe in organic leadership that modeling is more important than casting.
So when people see the leader modeling a vision, they're living it out,
and then they cast the vision, guess what?
It has authenticity on it.
It has what we call spiritual authority on it because that person's already living it.
They're living out the vision that they're casting a vision for.
If you're excited about this vision, like even take Empower You.
Empower You, this ministry that we started, we model that by being excited about it.
And we start showing some of the testimonies that we have and the podcasts that we've done
and the series that we're promoting.
And we always pick people here at Empower You, which are people that actually model that well.
So we are pretty picky and choosy about who we have doing shows on Empower You
because they have to be living it out.
They have to be modeling it in their lives.
So we've got some terrific teachers that could be doing a series on Empower You,
but for various reasons, we don't necessarily see them modeling what they're talking about.
So it's really important to model it first, but then second, cast the vision.
Jesus said, come and follow me.
So his is unique in that he's calling people into kingdom of God salvation,
but he's showing them what it looks like.
It's healing the sick.
It's casting out demons.
It's demonstrating the kingdom of God to others.
Organic leadership, living, growing, vital, dynamic leadership is, first of all, model the vision.
Be the vision.
But then secondly, cast the vision.
You got to share what the vision is.
And when I started all the ministries in Tokyo and then all the ministries in Okinawa
and then planted the Vineyard Bible Institute in Southern California
and then planted my first church, Mountain Springs Church, here in Colorado Springs.
And then 10 years ago, the road at Chapwell's.
I cast a vision and I modeled that vision.
That's organic leadership.
You know why that works?
Here's why it works.
It truly comes from the heart of the leader.
He's not grandstanding.
He's not posing.
He's not creating something to please the people.
So that's why I'm calling it organic leadership.
It's not contrived.
It's not programmatic.
It comes from the leader.
You're around someone who calls themselves a leader
and they say they're this, over here,
this is the vision or this is what we believe in,
but you observe in their life
something completely different over here.
Man, book it out of that organization yesterday
because you've got a situation
that's gonna eventually crumble
because it has to be in the heart of the leader.
He's modeling it because it's truly in him.
So that's really key.
And so in my next episode,
I want to give you three more aspects
of this building a team with organic leadership.