In this episode, we continue our journey through the book of Numbers and explore what Israel’s tribal arrangement around the tabernacle teaches us about leadership, righteousness, authority, and the presence of God.

The opening chapters of Numbers show Israel responding to God’s grace with obedience—organizing around His presence, preparing for mission, and offering worship. From that structure, we discover two key leadership lessons.

First, God elevates the righteous—not the perfect. Looking at the story of Judah, we see a deeply flawed man who responds to correction with humility, confession, and responsibility. His transformation reminds us that God is not looking for flawless leaders, but for people who respond rightly to His discipline and allow their character to be formed.

Second, a presence-centered church is a well-structured church. God’s presence dwelt at the center of Israel’s ordered camp, and that structure included leadership, authority, alignment, and submission. Presence and structure are not enemies; they work together to create a culture where God loves to abide.

This podcast invites leaders to embrace correction, cultivate righteousness, submit joyfully to godly authority, and see leadership as a privilege. God’s church needs leaders who are humble, aligned, courageous, and willing to help build a structure that carries His presence well.

In this message, we continue walking through the book of Numbers through a leadership lens, focusing on how God forms His people around His presence, His faithfulness, and His call to holiness.

Numbers 1 opens with a census that may seem like a simple roll call, but it points to God’s covenant faithfulness to Abraham: “I will make you into a great nation” (Genesis 12:2; Genesis 15:5; Genesis 17:5–7). The 603,550 men counted for Israel’s army (Numbers 1:45–46) reveal that Israel’s obedience is a response to God’s grace and fulfilled promise.

From there, Numbers 2–6 shows Israel organized around the tabernacle—the dwelling place of God’s presence (Numbers 2:1–34). The tribes camp around the tabernacle, the Levites guard it (Numbers 3:5–10), and the people are called to protect the purity and unity of the camp (Numbers 5:1–4; Numbers 6:1–21).

This message highlights key leadership applications for the church today:

• Celebrate God’s faithfulness
Numbers 1:45–46; Genesis 12:2; Matthew 16:18
Celebration is not fluff—it is a faith-building response to what God has done.

• Center everything around God’s presence
Numbers 2:17; Exodus 25:8; Leviticus 9:23–24; Matthew 18:20; Hebrews 4:16
God’s people are not merely organized for activity, but gathered around His presence.

• Guard the unity of God’s people
Numbers 2:1–34; Philippians 2:1–11; Philippians 4:2–3; 1 Corinthians 3:16–17
Leaders help people take their place, resolve conflict, and live as one body.

• Protect and promote purity in God’s house
Numbers 5:1–4; Numbers 6:1–21; Exodus 19:5–6; 1 Corinthians 5:6–7; 1 Corinthians 6:19–20
Discipleship is not only about what people do, but who they are becoming in Christ.

Paul reminds the church that we are God’s temple and that the Spirit dwells among us (1 Corinthians 3:16). He also reminds believers that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). Together, these truths call leaders to cultivate a church marked by celebration, presence, unity, holiness, and mission.

This teaching calls us to be leaders who recognize God’s faithfulness, prioritize His presence, unify His people, and disciple others into deeper devotion to Jesus.

In this episode, we begin our journey through the book of Numbers and explore what it teaches us about leadership, culture, worship, and mission.

Numbers opens with God forming Israel into an army around His presence. The tabernacle is at the center, the tribes are ordered around it, and the people are enlisted for the journey ahead. This gives us a crucial leadership principle: the presence of God does not only call people into communion with Him, it calls them into partnership with Him.

For leaders, this means our responsibility is not simply to help people experience meaningful moments with God. We are called to help people respond to God’s goodness with worship, obedience, service, and mission. Leaders convert moments into momentum. They help people move from being recipients of blessing to becoming conduits of blessing.

This episode also explores the role of leaders in tending to the “soil” of people’s hearts so they can receive the “seed” of God’s Word. Rather than trying to solve every circumstance, leaders help people discern what Jesus is teaching them, how the gospel calls them to respond, and how to remain faithful in the middle of both hardship and blessing.

A presence-oriented church must also be a partnership-oriented church. If God’s presence is among His people, then His people are being formed, enlisted, and sent into His mission.

Listen to this episode to strengthen your leadership, sharpen your pastoral instincts, and grow in confidence as you call people to respond to God with both worship and partnership.

In this episode of For the Love of Leadership, Pastors Jake and James continue unpacking “The Jethro Principle” from the life of Moses:

Leadership doesn’t carry everything. Leadership makes sure everything gets carried.

Building on last week’s conversation, they explore what it really means for a church (or any team) to grow in capacity. It’s not just about one person getting stronger or doing more; it’s about multiplying leaders. Drawing from Exodus and the advice Jethro gives Moses, they show how true kingdom leadership is less about being the hero and more about making heroes out of others.

Key themes in this episode:

• Capacity as “our,” not “my”
  Why growing capacity means embracing your personal limits instead of trying to be indispensable, and how that shift frees you from insecurity and self-focus.
• Multiplication vs. self‑importance
  How the world teaches us to become the pinnacle of success, while Scripture calls us to multiply the life of Jesus in others.
• Using the church to build people (not people to build the church)
  Why waiting until you’re drowning to “find help” reveals a faulty mindset—and how to change it.
• Developing leaders before you need them
  Practical ways to start a leadership pipeline now, including:
  • Identifying 1–3 people who aren’t yet leaders
  • Bringing them into real problems you’re solving
  • Debriefing experiences so they gain wisdom from exposure
• Crockpot, not microwave leadership
  The Cathedral mantra: leaders are formed slowly. Jake and James discuss why “air-fried” leaders don’t last, and why time, process, and repetition matter.
• How to spot emerging leaders
  Concrete signals they look for, such as:
  • Spiritual maturity and how someone actually prays
  • Follow-through on simple instructions
  • Teachable hearts proven by change, not just words
  • How they talk about the church, themselves, and others
  • What other leaders say about them
• Empowering imperfect leaders
  The internal battle every leader faces: “I can do it better myself.” They unpack why that mindset kills multiplication and share stories—like handing pre-service prayer to Sarah and watching her innovate something better than what existed before.

Throughout the episode, you’ll hear honest reflections, practical tips, and real-life examples from Cathedral’s leadership context. If you’re leading at Cathedral—or anywhere—and you’re tired, overextended, or unsure how to raise others up, this podcast will help you reframe leadership around empowerment, exposure, and shared responsibility.

Listen in to be challenged, equipped, and encouraged to stop carrying everything yourself, and start building the kind of leadership culture where everything gets carried—together.

Leadership doesn’t carry everything, but leadership does make sure everything gets carried.

In this episode of *For the Love of Leadership*, we unpack a prophetic word our church received: *“We do not yet have enough campuses to contain all that God is doing through Cathedral.”* If God is going to expand us, how do we prepare as leaders without burning out ourselves and the people we lead?

We go to Exodus 18 and the story of Moses and Jethro. Moses is drowning in responsibility, trying to personally handle every problem among God’s people. Jethro steps in and says, “What you are doing is not good. You and these people… will only wear yourselves out.” It’s not just the leader who suffers when leadership is overwhelmed. The people suffer too.

From there, we talk about:

- Why margin in your life is not laziness, but often a sign of healthy leadership  
- The difference between being responsible *for* everything and personally *doing* everything  
- The trap of finding your identity in what you do, which makes certain things hard to hand off  
- How “hoarding responsibility” hinders the fruitfulness God is trying to bring  
- Why more campuses, more services, and more impact require more leaders, not more heroic effort  

We also get practical about delegation and development:

- Delegate *outcomes*, not just tasks: give people a hill to take, not just a checklist to complete  
- How task-based delegation unintentionally teaches people to stay dependent on you  
- Moving from “Can you do this one thing?” to “Can you own this area?”  
- Stopping the habit of being the “answer person” and learning to ask, “What do you think?”  
- Helping people see God in their problems, instead of simply solving problems for them  

Along the way we use a few everyday images:  
- A Formula One car that’s incredibly fast on a track but almost useless on normal roads, because it has no suspension  
- Crumple zones in cars and failure points in bridges, and why leaders need those built into their teams and structures  

This episode is especially for you if:

• You feel guilty when you’re not busy  
• You’re juggling marriage, family, work, and ministry and feel like you should “just push a little harder”  
• You know you should delegate more, but you either don’t trust others to do it “right” or secretly enjoy being the one who does it  

Our hope is that this conversation helps you shift from doing all the ministry yourself to developing people who can carry it with you. Because everything God wants to do in and through the church is already in the church. Our job as leaders is to mine the gold, empower the gifts, and make sure everything gets carried.

In this episode of For the Love of Leadership, the team continues their journey through Edwin Friedman’s influential book *A Failure of Nerve*, unpacking one of its most important ideas: emotional triangles.

Most leaders focus on strategy, systems, and structures—but Friedman argues that the real battleground of leadership is presence. The team explores what it means to be a “non-anxious presence” and how a leader’s internal stability can matter more than their best plans when it comes to navigating change, resistance, and what Friedman calls “sabotage.”

From there, the conversation turns to triangles—the idea that there is almost never such a thing as a simple two-person relationship. There is always a third factor at play: a past experience, a family pattern, an unspoken offense, a side conversation, or another person entirely. Using real-world examples from work, marriage, parenting, and ministry, they show how understanding triangles can:

- Reveal the hidden dynamics beneath recurring conflicts  
- Keep leaders from absorbing everyone else’s stress and anxiety  
- Help people take responsibility for their own relationships  
- Move conversations from merely fixing behavior to addressing root causes  

You’ll hear practical guidance on how to recognize when you’re in a triangle, refuse the pull toward mere peacekeeping, and stay present without over-functioning or rescuing. The team also shares some of their own practices for regaining peace—like intentional rhythms with family, prayer, and solitude—so that those they lead don’t become responsible for their emotional stability.

Along the way, they connect these leadership insights to Scripture and spiritual formation: how identity is shaped in community, why God’s questions in the Garden matter for our conflicts today, and how the kingdom of God offers us a new “family” with new values.

If you’re a leader in any capacity—at church, at work, or at home—this episode will give you language, tools, and a fresh framework for navigating relational complexity without burning out, shutting down, or trying to control everyone around you.

In this episode of the For the Love of Leadership podcast, Pastors Jake and James unpack a challenging idea from Edwin Friedman’s book A Failure of Nerve: truly healthy leadership prioritizes responsibility over empathy.

They explore how our culture has elevated empathy to a near-superpower and why, if we’re not careful, that can actually keep people stuck instead of helping them grow. Empathy—“feeling into” someone’s emotional state—can be a powerful starting point, but when it becomes the goal, leaders can lose themselves in other people’s emotions and abandon their actual responsibility to lead.

Key ideas in this episode:

• Compassion vs. Empathy
  • Why compassion (“to suffer with”) is Christlike and essential, but modern empathy can slide into emotional fusion and anxiety-sharing
  • Why “no one ever changed just because they felt understood” and why understanding must lead to calling people forward
• Painful vs. Harmful
  • How to distinguish between what is painful for people (change, correction, responsibility) and what is actually harmful
  • Why over-empathizing with people’s pain can unintentionally keep them immature and stall the growth of the whole team
• Self-Differentiated Leadership
  • What it means to be a self-differentiated leader: staying connected to people without being controlled by their emotional state
  • Two sides of differentiation:
    • Self-regulation – managing your own internal anxiety and emotional reactivity
    • Self-definition – being clear on your calling, values, vision, and responsibilities as a leader
  • How this mirrors God’s own stability and consistency, and how Jesus modeled this in His ministry
• Practical Tools and Examples
  • Real-world examples of responding to team members who feel overlooked, frustrated, or disappointed
  • Moving from “I’m sorry you feel that way” to “I hear your disappointment—let’s talk about how you can grow so you’re ready next time”
  • Simple practices: pausing, breathing, listening deeply, asking clarifying questions, and refusing to let others’ anxiety dictate your responses
• The Team You’re On vs. the Team You Lead
  • Why “the team you’re on is more important than the team you lead”
  • How losing sight of this can turn leaders into “protectors” of their people from the organization instead of leaders of their people within the organization

Throughout the conversation, Jake and James connect these leadership concepts to discipleship, spiritual maturity, and the character of God. This episode will help you:

• Care deeply without becoming codependent
• Stay steady when others are anxious
• Lead people toward maturity, not just momentary emotional relief
• Reflect Jesus more clearly in how you handle tension, conflict, and change

If you’re a leader in any context—church, team, workplace, or family—this episode will challenge how you think about empathy, responsibility, and your role in the growth of the people you lead.

In this episode, Pastors Jake and James explore what happens inside a team, ministry, or church when a leader begins to truly lead—take initiative, cast vision, and move people forward. Drawing from Edwin Friedman and grounded in Scripture, they unpack how anxiety, reactivity, and resistance often rise when change comes, and how a Christlike, self‑differentiated leader can respond.

You’ll hear how good leadership will always disturb the status quo, much like Jesus did (Luke 12:51; John 6:60–66), and why that disruption is often a necessary part of growth (James 1:2–4; Romans 5:3–5).

Through a biblical lens, they walk through four common symptoms in unhealthy systems:

• Reactivity – when people respond from emotion instead of wisdom (Proverbs 14:29; Proverbs 29:11; Ephesians 4:26–27) and the joy and play God designed us for (Nehemiah 8:10; Psalm 16:11) begin to disappear.
• Herding – when teams prioritize comfort and fitting in over obedience and mission (Galatians 1:10; Romans 12:2; Exodus 23:2), organizing around “what feels good” rather than “what is right” (Micah 6:8; Ephesians 4:14–15).
• Blame Displacement – when the focus shifts to “them” instead of “me” (Genesis 3:11–13; Matthew 7:3–5; James 4:1–2), avoiding responsibility instead of allowing hardship to mature us (Hebrews 12:5–11; 1 Peter 4:12–13).
• Quick-Fix Mentality – when leaders chase efficiency and instant relief instead of long obedience and real transformation (Jeremiah 6:14; 2 Timothy 4:3–4; Luke 9:23; Luke 14:27–33).

They also address:

• The call to be a non-anxious, steady presence in the middle of pressure (Philippians 4:6–7; Colossians 3:15; Isaiah 26:3).
• Why true change in a system or relationship often begins with one person deciding to show up differently (Romans 12:18; Matthew 5:9; Galatians 5:22–23).
• How to name tension in the room the way God does (Genesis 3:9–11; John 4:16–18), reducing fear and building trust.
• The power of questions, patience, and slowing down before responding (James 1:19–20; Proverbs 18:13; Proverbs 20:5).
• Rewarding and celebrating healthy, faith-filled responses as part of discipleship (Hebrews 10:24–25; Romans 12:10–11).

This message invites every leader—whether in church, family, workplace, or small group—to examine their own patterns, refuse to be ruled by group anxiety, and follow Jesus’ example as the Good Shepherd (John 10:11–16) who leads people through discomfort into growth, maturity, and joy in the Holy Spirit (Romans 14:17).

This leadership exploration challenges us to examine a critical tension we all face: the choice between maintaining comfortable peace and pursuing necessary progress. Drawing wisdom from Moses' journey with the Israelites through the wilderness, we're reminded that true leadership requires us to take people where they wouldn't naturally go themselves. The concept of being a 'well-differentiated leader' invites us to stay connected to our teams while not being controlled by their emotional reactions to change. We learn that our frustrations aren't enemies but rather divine invitations to initiate transformation. The biblical principle of 'be angry and do not sin' reveals that properly stewarded anger can become holy passion for kingdom advancement. This message calls us to recognize that everything we desire in our leadership sits on the other side of courageous choices, and that unaddressed frustrations eventually morph into burnout or apathy. Most powerfully, we're challenged to understand that when we lead to the lowest common denominator of reaction, we ultimately lose our highest performers and compromise the excellence that reflects God's kingdom.