Jeremy Stalnecker | Identity Beyond the Uniform: Faith, Trauma & Leadership

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm James Spencer, and I'm joined today by Jeremy Stalnecker. Jeremy is the Executive Director of the Mighty Oaks Foundation. We'll talk a little bit about what that is throughout the episode. He's also the author of several books. One is March or Die. It's also the name of his podcast on Life Audio Network. He wrote a book called Offensive Faith and then Leadership by Design. And so we're going to start off talking a little bit about leadership. We'll get a little bit of Jeremy's story. And then we'll dive into what the Mighty Oaks Foundation does. So, Jeremy, welcome to the podcast, man. Thanks for being on. No, thank you. It's awesome. Looking forward to it. Yeah, absolutely. Why don't we start? Why don't we just tell us a little bit about your background and the Mighty Oaks Foundation and sort of your general message of what you generally talk about with folks on the podcast and in your speaking engagements and such. Yeah, so let me talk for the next three and a half hours because I've got a lot to say on all of those. I'll give you a 30,000 foot, right? So I was raised in a Christian home. My dad was a pastor for about 35 years and started a church. And I always joke, and it's only like half of a joke, and for ministry people that will understand this, that the thing you learn growing up in a pastor's home is that you don't want to be a pastor, right? That's what I learned. I'm like, oh, man, I love Jesus. I'm thankful for my parents. But I remember watching my dad. He was starting a church. So my mom was working full time to kind of keep things moving. My dad would work all night. He'd come home and then do the church thing during the day. And a lot of respect for them, but I knew that's not what I wanted. So I went to my dad when I was about 14 years old. I said, Dad, I realize that the family business is kind of ministry, but would it be okay if I did something else? And he said, You need to do whatever God wants you to do. I said, Well, I think God wants me to enlist in the Marine Corps. He said, God cannot possibly want you to enlist in the Marine Corps. That's not God talking. That's something else, right? But he's very supportive. And I ended up going to college and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. Did a number of things. My last deployment was to Kuwait at the beginning of 2003 and January 2003. And then March 19th of that year, the war in Iraq started. We were the first infantry battalion into Iraq, made our way to Baghdad. And all that was involved in that came home, left the Marine Corps. It's crazy. So leading in combat, a month later, I was out of the Marine Corps. I was working on a church staff. You know, God, they say, has a sense of humor. And I guess he does. But used the local church and used people in that church to really speak to my heart. My wife actually became a Christian during that time. I could tell all that story. And it's great what God did in that time. But left the Marine Corps, went to work on the church staff. No real Bible training or anything, but I had leadership training. And so my pastor said, Hey, we're getting this thing going. He had started the church a few years earlier and it was growing quickly. And he said, I don't need more seminary-trained guys. I need someone who understands leadership, who can do project development stuff. And we're trying to get into a building and all that, right? So that's what I did. Bottom fell out of my life. I struggled a lot with identity and all the issues that veterans coming home from combat often struggle with. The things that we're dealing with at Mighty Oaks. Yeah. In the process, I almost lost that job. Probably should have lost my family. And God did a work, brought the right people into my life and helped me get back on my feet and understand identity in Christ and understand what it meant to really live out the Christian life and to have hope and purpose and direction beyond service. These are issues that so many service members deal with. I know who I am in the military. I don't know who I am outside of that. And I was struggling with that. Thankfully, I was in a great environment, had the right people around me, and was able to get back on my feet. Eventually, I pastored a church, pastored for about seven years up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Fantastic. Yeah. God really did a work in my life, my family, and taught me a lot during that time, of course. But it was during that time where I met Chad Robichaux, who, he and his family were starting the Mighty Oaks Foundation. I kind of bought into this, the only person who'd ever struggled after combat was me, kind of that mentality, right? Like, no one felt the way that I did or experienced things the way that I did. And so I walked away from all of it. I didn't talk to anyone that I served with. I just kind of, that needs to be back there. But I met Chad through a mutual friend, actually a Marine that I had served with, and ended up spending time with him. He was getting Mighty Oaks going. He said, Hey, I, Chad, for those that don't know him, he's a professional MMA fighter, was a force recon Marine. God did a miraculous work in his life after severe post-traumatic stress disorder. So he started Mighty Oaks to reach out to other veterans who were struggling. But, like, we needed curriculum and a plan, right? And all that stuff. And so he said, Hey, man, will you help me with this? It was during that time that I realized I'm not the only one who's ever dealt with this. I'm not the only one who struggled with this. In fact, I sat with some of the Marines that I had served with, hadn't talked to them in 10 years, and started to hear stories of suicides, of broken homes. Again, all of these issues that we talk about around veteran and first responder now, issues and that was the catalyst, right? That was the thing that kind of opened my eyes to, you're not done. When you put the uniform in the closet for the last time, that was not your end of service. You promised to take care of these guys and you have a responsibility to continue to do that. And God really used that moment, that conversation in that time to lay that on my heart. That was in 2012. Mighty Oaks was just getting started. Now we serve about a thousand folks a year through one of our five-day programs where we deal with issues of trauma and post-traumatic stress and those issues, but from a faith perspective. Your trauma doesn't have to define you. You don't have to live or wallow in what happened in the past. You need to find your identity in Christ. These are the things God worked in my life all in through. Find your identity in Christ. When that identity is firmly found in Christ, then you can accept the hope. That's not a hope so, but a confident assurance in who God is. The fact that he has a purpose and a plan for your life and you can move forward in that. And so, again, about a thousand folks a year. And then we do a lot of speaking and we've, man, God just opened some crazy doors for us to speak to active duty units, thousands and thousands of active duty troops every year. Now, police officers, firefighters, and yeah, it's been quite a journey. When you think about, you know, the PTSD, I don't know a ton about it. And so I guess I wonder when you're working with these guys, you know, obviously they're in high stress situations in combat, you know, scenarios. They're away from their family. They have each other. They have sort of a mission. They have a real goal and a purpose. Is part of the issue or how big a part of the issue is they exit the military and everything sort of destructures. You know, there's a lot of looseness to life. You just don't have, like on a daily basis, you know, I'm, you know, feeding dogs and cats and, you know, taking out garbage, but it just, it seems like it would just be so loose and so unstructured and so many other things coming at you all at once. Is it, is it, how much of it involves a loss of just basic purpose? Yeah. I mean, I think, I think that is the issue. And, you know, so, so I would, I would pause to say trauma is real. The impact psychologically, emotionally, even physically. This is something that more than 20 years of active combat has, has allowed us to understand because so much has been researched and studied. This is real, right? And if you had asked me in 2003, when I was struggling, is this trauma or what is it? I was like, no, that's, that's PTSD is for people that are weak, right? That's not real. No, it's absolutely real, but being able to deal

Now can't hold down a basic job because what they understood to be leadership isn't leadership in this new world or this new environment. The most dangerous time for a police officer is the first three to five years after they retire from the police department. Most dangerous meaning, you know, the most suicides take place. The most even health-related deaths take place in the first three to five years when a police officer leaves a police department. And again, this is all tied to that purpose, clarity of mission, you know, those things that you just talked about. Yeah. So when you're working with those guys, do you try to help them re-anchor in a purpose? Yep. You know, sort of give them, help them understand what that new purpose needs to be and how they can adapt and sort of maybe bridge some of the skills they brought out of the military back into sort of civilian life. We start very much with identity and purpose. One of the unique aspects of our program is that we're not a clinical program. We don't have physicians or clinicians speaking to patients. We don't have teachers or pastors speaking to students. Everyone who is involved with our program, particularly our five-day program where people are there for the entire five days, they've all come through the students first, meaning they have a similar military background, combat background. They served or are serving as first responders, police officers, firefighters. And they came to us because they were struggling the way that everyone else sitting there had struggled. They understood a new identity, an actual identity in Christ and what that means for them and their life and their family and how they function, how they see the world, you know, all of these issues. And so when they stand in front of a class, they do teach classes. We have classes. But what they're doing is leading with their testimony. So we have a class, you know, a lot of classes, a class on character, you know, these other issues. But if someone's teaching, for instance, a class on character, what is character? From the Bible, what does that look like? They start the first 15 to 20 minutes of that class is them telling their story. I came here because of, I heard this class taught by someone else. This is what I realized as I heard that class and how it applies to my life right now and how I was able to move forward in spite of that. So it's very much a peer-to-peer environment where we can say, I know where you are because I've been there. I've struggled the way that you've struggled. I don't have it all figured out, but I've learned how to move forward. And so it starts with understanding. I thought I knew what I was doing in the military. I had my entire identity wrapped up in this uniform that I wore as a police officer, a firefighter. But that doesn't translate into the rest of life because it is not immutable. Only a relationship with God is something that will not change. So we start there and then work beyond that. What does that mean? And so the identity piece is absolutely fundamental. You can deal with the rest of it if you know who you are. You can deal with the rest of it if you have hope and if you have purpose. But the rest is very, very hard to deal with if you don't. And so, you know, we've been extremely effective as a program. People, even clinicians, ask, how in the world do you do what you do? A lot of answers to that, but fundamentally it's because we start on a foundation of faith and build up from there. Instead of just adding faith where it seems like it might work or help. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Do you find, just a couple more questions about this. I'm kind of interested. So I met or I had a lady on the podcast who did ministry to military wives. And I guess we could say military spouses. But she would do mostly military wives. And one of the things she talked about was people don't really understand fully the stressors of what it's like to be a military family. So when a husband or I suppose a wife is deployed, there's a complete absence in the home. You basically become a single parent. There's oftentimes where you can't reach the person. You know, your calls are kind of scheduled around whatever's going on in the battlefield. And so, you know, she was trying to work with and counsel local churches to say, hey, look, just go watch somebody's kids while they can go to the grocery store by themselves. Like give them that break. Right. And just like little release valves were really helpful. And as I think, you know, as I hear you talking about sort of that reentry, it just strikes me that the family dynamic must be really challenging in a way. If someone's been away from home for a long time serving in the military and then they're coming back. There's expectations now, I would assume, from the spouse to the person coming back. And it's like, why aren't you plugging in? Why aren't you helping? Why aren't you, you know, and you could see the same thing for police officers or whomever. Right. First responders. How do you, is that a right assumption? Am I sort of framing that the right way? Is that a dynamic that actually exists? And if so, how do you help them sort of navigate that? That's pretty layered. There's a lot to that. We have our program is a men's program and a women's program. So separate, separate programs, same structure, but separate programs for a lot of reasons, right? Obvious reasons. And one of the things that we do, we have programs for veterans, service members, first responders and spouses. And we include spouses in that. Some of those are men, but most of those are women. So our women's program, and we have a session going on right now, will be about 50% spouses. So they didn't serve in the military. They were married to someone who served in the military because of really the same reason that we have the programs for veterans. It is understanding your identity, understanding your purpose, your calling, you know, something that is bigger than service, right? Because so many spouses find their entire identity and family members as well, but spouses for sure find their identity in being a military spouse, being a first responder spouse. All the work, the jobs, the, you know, filling those gaps that come along with that, the moves, all the stuff that is very unique to that environment. So they find their identity in that. And then you see spouses who have a service member that was injured and now their identity becomes caregiver. So their whole identity is wrapped up in this military experience, good, bad, or otherwise. And it's important for us to help them get to the place where they realize that's something that you do, but that's not who you are. And so you found your identity in service. You found your identity in all these things that are great things, but man, that's going to end someday. And when that ends or changes or shifts, the kids get older, they leave the house, your spouse gets hurt, comes home, retired. When that happens, these shifts will happen. If your identity is wrapped up in that, you're going to have real problems. So, you know, it's the same message. Find your identity in the immutable God, in a relationship with God through Christ, understanding what that is and outlining that. And then moving into the purpose that he's created you for. And this season, he's given you the skills, the abilities, the opportunities to do this, this thing that you're doing. But understand who you really are fundamentally, right? So that's one layer. And I think that's a very important layer. But yes, the service member coming home, again, out of that environment where everything makes sense, where because of whatever's on their shoulder, you know, whatever rank they're carrying, people will respect them. Irrespective of who they are as a human, they respect the rank. Roles are clear. Responsibilities are clear. Structure is clear. Then you come into a home environment where, man, that's not the case. People sometimes in your home don't respect you. Right. Simply because of what you do at work, right? Like anyone who's married and has kids understands that. And so, yeah, it's a completely different environment. This is why a lot of service members will request deployments again and again and again. I know a lot of guys who deployed, you know, six, seven, eight times to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan because that environment makes sense. The home environment does not. So they come home from a deployment. They put in for what the military called the hot fill. You know, they need someone to go on another deployment. And they'll say, I'll do that. And a month later, they're back on deployment because that makes sense. And you come into this kind of wild world of home and marriage and family and, yeah, you know, the world. And it's like, man, this is not like that. I feel comfortable over there. I feel completely lost here. So talking about that, being very honest about that, and putting people in communities with others who have dealt with the same thing and navigated that helps a lot as well. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. 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feeling much more confident, competent, and respected at work because I understood what I was doing there. And then I'd come home and it was like, I don't know what to do with all these little kids. I was an only child. I'd never changed a diaper. You know, I was like a complete, you know, newbie at that. And so my incompetence just shown through every place I went. And so I started spending more time at work. And so you can kind of see how that even that dynamic when you're not really rooted in that identity, when you're not really, you know, living your life from that, from the position of that identity, how that can seep in in other areas as well. Well, it's fantastic work you guys are doing. I mean, I love, I love the, it sounds like it's a fantastic program and very much needed. Like I said, I haven't had a lot of experience with military. My family wasn't a military family. I had sort of a distant uncle who's in the military, so I don't, I'm not as familiar with it. I've gotten more familiar with it now. We live in a military town and so, um, we, I go to church with a lot of retired military and veterans and those kinds of things. And so we have a military ministry and it's always sort of fascinating to me, but it's not exactly an area that I have a lot of lived experience in. So, yeah, and you know, you, you mentioned this a minute ago, but sometimes it's the church just coming around people. And this is, this is a question I get a lot from pastors and from church leaders. How do I help people if I've never served in the military? You know, how can I possibly relate to them? And that's a fascinating question to me because as a pastor, as a ministry leader, there are a lot of people that you help that you don't share an experience with because you know how to use the Bible, right? You apply the Bible to these circumstances. I understand the question. I understand the heart of the question, but you mentioned the guest that you had on, Hey, just love people and just encourage them and support them. Do with them what you would do with anyone else in your church that's going through a unique situation or circumstance and, and God will use that. And it's cool to see it in a church, particularly in a church environment. Yeah. It's been interesting to watch. I mean, I think there's an itinerant aspect to people in the military that kind of move in, move out. There is that dynamic. And so it is different, but they have folks who are sort of retired military running it and they've, you know, they are live here permanently now and so they engage on the military base and all that kind of good stuff. It's, it's been a good program. So yeah, appreciate what you guys are doing in my new Oaks. But why don't we pivot now and talk a little bit about leadership. I had mentioned before the podcast, I teach a leadership course at Wheaton college on biblical and theological foundations for leadership. And so, you know, my background's Bible and theology, so they don't let me teach the practical leadership stuff. They just have me do the more theoretical stuff. So just theoretical Bible stuff. That's right. But one of the things I always encourage and I, I say, you know, leadership is just a specialized form of discipleship. In other words, it has to emerge from discipleship. And if it doesn't emerge from discipleship, we're probably not situating it in the right place. How do you think about leadership from that biblical and theological perspective? Where does it, where, how do you, how do you frame it out? Yeah. So, you know, several years ago I was, I was struggling with an understanding of leadership. I was in the Marine Corps, um, as an infantry officer. I went to what I considered to be probably the best, one of the best leadership schools in the world. Uh, it's called infantry officer course. It's the place where infantry officers go before they go out to the fleet, right? So you learn how to lead. You learn how to lead in a very specific environment. And so I learned that and then went into an infantry world and then went into combat and watched this like super type a, super aggressive leadership. And it's the loudest guy who seems to be the most confident. That is the leader. Now there's positional leadership. Like someone has the rank of leader and you follow them because you have to. But when the bullets are coming your direction, it's the guy that seems like he knows what he's doing. That's the leader you follow. Right? So that's leadership. It's like super aggressive, super type a and I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. Um, played sports growing up. This makes sense to me. Okay. So then I left the Marine Corps and came into a church environment. And, um, my pastor is a, um, the pastor that I work for is a huge reader. And so I made it my goal to read every book that he read, which I never was able to keep up with him. But he'd read a book. He talked about it. I get it. He read a lot of leadership books and business books and those kind of things. I started to read all these leadership books and Um, then I started to read books on what's called servant leadership or spiritual leadership. Some of them are great. I'm not disparaging all of them. Some have been very, very helpful, but this, this concept of spiritual leadership or servant leadership, the conclusion I took after coming out of the Marine Corps, reading these books, you know, I'm fresh to this like new view on leadership was that spiritual leadership, servant leadership, when pastors are writing about it, is, is really manipulation, but you attach God to it. Because if you can attach God to it, right, you can get people to do stuff. Yes you can. And so, and so it's like, Hey, God wants you to do this. It's not that I want you to do this, it's God wants you to do this. And so I was really, really struggling with that. And, um, you know, ended up reading some better books on spiritual and servant leadership, but I was, I was having a hard time with this like confluence between what I had seen in the Marine Corps and what I was dealing with in ministry. And how do I take that and bring it over here? And the conclusion that I came to was that what we learned in the Marine Corps was a way to lead. It was a technique, but it wasn't fundamentally leadership. I wasn't a leader because I was in the Marine Corps. I was doing leadership the Marine Corps way and it worked, but that didn't make me fundamentally a leader. This is why I believe so many who can come out of that environment leading well struggle when they find themselves in a new environment, a home environment or a work environment. They think they're leaders, but what they they knew was how to lead in that environment, not how to be a leader. Yeah. So I started studying this and thinking about it. Um, and the book that I wrote on leadership, it wasn't supposed to be a book. It was more just me trying to like map out an understanding of how this is supposed to work. And I came to the conclusion that if we're created in the image of God, then we're all created to lead if, as long as we understand leadership correctly, that this idea of servant leadership, I always go to Philippians chapter two where, you know, Jesus in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but humbled himself and came obedient unto death. And he did what we needed him to do for our benefit. This is to me the reflection of Ephesians five where Paul tells husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church. It's absolutely sacrificial. So in all of that, I developed for me a working definition of leadership. And this is what I talk about when I talk about leadership, is leadership to me fundamentally. And you, you teach on this so you can disagree with me, but this is, this is me looking at it from my perspective, right? Leadership is fundamentally taking people from where they are to where they need to be. So taking people from where they are to where they need to be. That has nothing to do with technique or tactics or a strategy around leadership or a particular, um, personality type or you know, it doesn't have anything to do with any of those things. But fundamentally, what is leadership? It's leveraging the gifts, the abilities, the opportunities that I have been given by God to steward over. It's leveraging those things for the benefit of the people that God places in my life. That's it. Now there are techniques that work in one place and don't work in another. There are, um, you know, personality types that will do this different than someone else might. But fundamentally, a leader in the image of God reflecting the life that was given to us in the example of Jesus Christ is recognizing I've been given what I have, not for my own benefit, not to get people to do what I want them to do, but to help them use the word discipleship, to build them, to disciple them, to help them go from where they are right now to where they really need to be and use everything I have to make that happen. So that's, um, simply that's how I view leadership. And I think that's something that is portable. That works in every environment. It doesn't have again anything to do with what you did over there. You do over here. It works in the military. It works in a home. It works in a business setting. Um, you know, that leads to a conversation about the difference between leadership and management. And so there are a lot

As part of it, and at some point, I think as I reflect it back just on my leadership experiences and organizations and those kind of things, I don't really remember the goals we hit. I remember how I was changed through the process of working with and alongside and underneath all these different people and struggling together to do something that we felt that God was calling us to do. So that's sort of how I've kind of toyed with it, but I like the distinction between leadership techniques and being a leader. I think that's really important. Yeah, very good. You know, when you bridge out of the military and you're sort of embedding back into another structure, it seems intuitive that some of that wouldn't work as well, but what do you find from your military experience, from that military leadership training, what aspects of it do you find really carry over well? Maybe not in every situation, but in a lot of them. Yeah, I think the things that are, I guess, universal are the importance of hard work, number one. You know, focus around a mission. If you're going to accomplish something, you need to know what it is you're trying to accomplish. And you know, as you mentioned, even if you fall short, that's okay. You got closer to that goal. You moved further along than you would have otherwise. Someone said, and I've repeated it a lot. I can't remember where I first heard it, that success should never be the goal. Growth should always be the goal because if success is your goal, there are so many factors attached to that that you can't control, but you can control whether or not you grow, right? You become more like Christ. You become more of the person that you were created to be. And so it's hard work. It's focus around a mission. It's clarity around the mission. One of the things the military does really well is, at least in my experience, is communicate the mission well. And I don't think we're always good at communicating the mission. We know what we want to accomplish. We have an idea of where we're going. We just don't do a very good job of disseminating that down to the other people that want to be a part of it and want to help, but we haven't given them the tools they need to do that. So, you know, it's hard work. Leaders need to work hard. It's clarity around a mission. It is having the ability to communicate that mission down line, down to the people that need to know it, or up if you're in that position where you need to communicate it to leaders above you, but having clarity around the mission that you can communicate well. And then just the structure. And this is, I think, where military people sometimes struggle when they go into a different environment. Some work environments are very structured. Some are not. Ministry environments typically aren't nearly as structured as a military environment. And so it can become very frustrating. A lot of military folks lack flexibility, and so they see things very black and white. This is the way, but if you can move beyond that and help an organization have the structure it needs to function well and to clearly identify those lanes of communication, those lanes of leadership, that can be a huge asset. So it's basic leadership principles that military folks have seen play out in real-world environments. It's not theory. It's, you know, I've seen this happen. I've seen when it's done well, and I've seen when it's not done well, and if I can bring that into, let's say, a workplace environment, there's a lot of power in that. Again, the other side of that, though, is just a lot of frustration. This is part of why I almost got fired in my first ministry job. I just got so frustrated. Like, I'm around these guys who aren't my friends today, but back then, we were all in our 20s, right? And they had all been to Bible college, and they knew all kinds of stuff about, you know, whatever. And I didn't know any of that stuff, but I knew how to lead people, and I knew how to get things done, and I knew how to, you know, be on time, and I knew how to do that stuff. And so I got really frustrated, and then, unfortunately, really vocal about my frustration. I always joke I got thrown out of my first church staff meeting because people were being stupid, and I let them know that. And that's not how it works on a church staff, right? But, yeah, so it's the good and bad, but the structure, understanding mission, understanding clarity around mission, being able to communicate that can be super powerful if you're in a place where you can leverage those learned skills. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? 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I've heard you talk about persistence, you know, like achievement happens through persistence, and I'm wondering, maybe just comment on that, and then how do you think through failure in leadership? Like, I've always, one of the things, you know, you talked about the spiritual manipulation. Let's tie everything up to God, and then, you know, we can move people toward that. And I think one of the things that I've found that diminishes that manipulative aspect is just a consistent recognition that failure is possible, and that if failure is possible, it doesn't mean necessarily, it could very well just mean that God is going to use something or someone else in order to accomplish whatever task we had been accomplishing. I think we get a little too consumed with just, we have to continue when maybe we don't. And I don't know exactly how to articulate that. I mean, I've done it in different ways in different leadership settings. You don't want to telegraph, hey, it's okay if we fail. Let's just go out and try our best, you know? Right, right. But at the same time, there has to be this healthy realization that all of our efforts are just that, our efforts. And that ultimately, you know, it's sort of like we plant the seed, God makes it grow, right? I've often thought about that in terms of a leadership philosophy, so I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it. Yeah, well, you know, I talk about persistence and the importance of it. My podcast is called March or Die. I wrote a book called March or Die, and it comes from a story. But the principle of that is we'll always come to these crossroads, right? We come to these moments where we're moving forward, something pops up in front of us, an obstacle, a trauma, a trial, a difficulty, whatever. We could throw failure in there. And then I have to make a decision. Am I going to give up? Am I going to stay where I am and die, you know, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, hopefully not physically, but am I going to quit moving forward? That's death. Or am I going to be committed to putting one foot in front of the other and marching, you know, continuing to move forward? And when I talk about that, I often talk about how marching is an intentional word on my part because when you march, and for anyone that has, it's one foot in front of the other. It's very deliberate. It's very consistent. But you don't always know where you're going. You don't always know how far you're going to go. You don't know where you're going to end up necessarily. You just know you're going over there, right? Unless it's a parade or something. But most of the time it's just, it's movement. It's movement. And I view success and failure very much the same way. The movement is the part that's important, not necessarily accomplishing some fairly arbitrary goal. One of the realities that set in on me when I was on a church staff, you know, this is many, many years ago, was that we have big days and big pushes and spend lots of money to reach people with the gospel. And there are 7 billion people on this planet and we could reach every person in our city and it doesn't even register as a percent of the people that need to be reached with the gospel, right? Like this isn't our work. It's God's work. So our call is to be faithful. Our call is to work hard, to be consistent, to be smart, to leverage what we have to reach as many people as possible. But if I could say it this way, it's all kind of a failure, right? If reaching everybody is the goal, then we're never going to do that. We never completed that goal. Yeah, we never completed it. Yeah. So the goal and the measure of success needs to be, did we use every resource that we have? Did we leverage every opportunity that we had? Did we do the absolute best that we could to pursue what we believe God set in front of us? If the answer to those questions is yes, then, you know, we could use the word success. We were successful. Charles Stanley wrote a book on, on leadership and success. I think it's called success God's way

To me, spending time in prayer, getting around other people, allowing God to use whatever he wants to use to motivate me to speak to me, to lead me, to guide me, and then having already made the decision to follow that. I'm going to pursue God. I'm going to pursue God. And then God will open doors. God will direct paths. That's God's job. That's not mine. The Bible's clear on that. And so my job is to keep moving for his honor, for his glory, to do what he sets in front of me. That is success. Failure is stopping. Failure is saying, I'm not going to do this anymore. Now, your other point, though, and this is much more nuanced, and you need people in your life that can help you with this. If we set out to accomplish a goal and we don't meet it, we can step back and say, well, we did what we thought we were supposed to. We leveraged everything that we had, and so we were successful. But does that mean you don't continue to try to pursue that goal, whatever that goal is? I guess that would be very situationally dependent, and you'd need the right people to be able to take a 30,000-foot view of what you're doing and say, look, I think you've done all that you can. I think you maybe need to change some things. Or let's swing at it again and see if there are some adjustments we can make. Let's do that. As a person, this is why it's so important to have a mentor in your life who cares about you but isn't emotionally moved by what you do. They're not bought in. You can make a good decision or a bad decision and won't impact their day at all, but they do care about you, so they'll speak truth. You need those people in your life. I think organizationally, you need some mentors, too, who can look at it and say, uh, yeah, maybe we should find another way or do something else. Yeah, it's almost—C.S. Lewis has an awesome quote. It's, sometimes the most progressive man is the one who turns around first. But you're right. I think that is an area of real discernment, and I just think sometimes we get a little too caught up when we're leading. We sort of neglect that moment of reflection, that moment of discernment to sit back and say, are we supposed to be doing this? Are we really equipped to do this? Is this, to your point, is this the best use of our talents and resources that God has given us? Or, you know, should we rethink this? And I think that's actually a pretty good question for an organization to ask. I agree. Yeah, I can remember—I was a consultant in a church when I was just out of seminary, and we were planning for a youth conference, and we were going through all the success metrics, and everybody was kind of, like, just sort of bored with it, you know, because they're, you know, it's all ministry folks. And I said, well, what if we—what if we thought it through and said, at the end of this, we want to keep asking the question, how much of this did we accomplish without God? Yeah. Right? Like, how often do we just sort of run on autopilot, do the task, you know, but we weren't really—we were just doing what we know will work. We're pulling the right levers and pushing the right buttons, but God is nowhere in this, really. Yeah, that's good. We just got down into administrative tasks, and it actually helped. I mean, the conference went fine, but I think the folks who were involved with it were given a new perspective on the way they ran their program and how God was really involved in it. And that was one of the early, I think, moments where I was like, I've got to kind of rethink some of this leadership stuff. That's good, man. And so, you know, one of the principles that I teach when I'm talking about resiliency is, and I make this statement, success in any area of life is directly connected to how well we handle unexpected change. Success in any area of life is directly connected to how well we handle unexpected change. I'll tell a story and make the statement that everyone knows that when you're fighting, the enemy gets a say in how the battle unfolds. And so there are those moments where, man, this unfolded different than we thought, and so we can dig our heels in and get run over, or we can adjust to a set of circumstances and a situation that's changing. And that's exactly right. Man, I love Hebrews 11, 6. It tells us we can't please God without faith. Well, why is that? Because otherwise, we're just doing it on our own. And, you know, to your point, we should want God to work, not just do the things that we know we're capable of. And sometimes that requires stepping back, reevaluating, asking God if he wants us to go forward. So there's an awful lot to that, but I think ministry people tend to get caught in this mindset of, we'll just keep doing the same thing, just keep grinding it out, keep... Sometimes you have to ask why. Why? Yeah. I think that's why, so when I thought about leadership and thought about structuring a course on leadership, I talked about it in terms of emerging from discipleship. And the basic thesis was that discipleship opens up opportunities beyond anything we could ever ask or think. And so as we plug deeper into our following Christ, imitating Christ, obeying Christ, walking faithfully, all those kind of, you know, sort of terms that we could pile up around that, we're, as we follow God, he's going to do things that we can't do. And we can't force him to do those. Right. But as we follow him, he's just going to do them. That's right. And so on a very basic level, it's like we can accomplish more, whatever that more might mean. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Not necessarily bigger and best or whatever. And oftentimes the way we think about it, but we can accomplish more. Something of greater significance, of more aligned with what God wants if we allow our leadership and the way we're leading to emerge out of that discipleship, full dependence on him. And so it's, it really, it seems like we resonate a lot on that. And I'd be kind of interested to hear. So I usually, we're kind of getting toward the end of the episode. And so I usually ask my guests just one question at the end to see what they say. So it's kind of the pop quiz at the end of the show. Yeah. But so the question is, what do you think the church needs to be doing today in order to be and make disciples more faithfully? I'm sure there's a pantheon of things you could name, but just, you know, that, that one thing that sort of strikes you, that comes out of your passion and your heart. I mean, to me, it's the same thing that the church, you know, should have always been doing. We've moved away from it largely. Again, there's some great churches out there, but it's faithfully preaching and teaching the word of God. What people need from us as ministry leaders is not more motivation. You know, not a lot of what comes out of a church service typically. They need to understand immutable, unchangeable truth because the world is changing so fast. Things have gotten so confusing, hard to understand. What people need and what they are not going to get anywhere else is a, thus say at the Lord. And there are a lot of ways to do that. This isn't a, you know, necessarily a heavy hand, but it's, let's look at what the Bible says and let's understand how this applies to the life that we're living today. To me, that is discipleship. And that is the difference between discipleship being a program and discipleship being an understanding of, I need to go to God's word and I need to learn how to apply that to my life and live that out. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. Well, Jeremy, thanks man, for being on the show today. Really appreciate it. Where can people find you? Where can they find Mighty Oaks? Throw a couple of websites out there and we'll put them in the show description as well. But just where can they find out more about you and your ministry and all that kind of good stuff? Yeah, I appreciate it, man. It's great. Great conversation. We need to do it again. Maybe we'll do it on the March or Die show next time. That'd be great. I'd be happy to. Yeah. Same conversation. Let's do that. But to find out about Mighty Oaks and, you know, kind of all that we're involved in, just go to our website, MightyOaksPrograms.org. MightyOaksPrograms.org. Our program is free. It doesn't cost anything to attend. We cover the cost of travel. So if you're a veteran, first responder, or active duty service member or spouse, as I mentioned, we'd love for you to apply and we'll get you to a program. So check that out. MightyOaksPrograms.org. Other things there, resources, etc. And then for me, probably the easiest way, honestly, is just social media. Just look up my name. There aren't too many Jeremy Stalnickers out there. So look up my name and I'm pretty active on, you know, all the socials. And there are a lot of other places you can find me there. But, yeah, I'd love to connect. So thanks for the opportunity. I appreciate it. And check out March or Die, right, on Life Audio Network. Check out the March or Die podcast on Life Audio. And we have a