Jesus had an amazing way of responding to people's questions. His answers often pierce through what's being asked to more important matters: what's on the person's heart and Jesus' own identity and mission .

For example, when a man asks Jesus to tell his brother to divide the family's inheritance with him, Jesus cautions the man to be wary of greed. Then he tells the story of the Rich Fool who dies on the very night he's contemplating his windfall profits (Luke 12:16-21).

When a Pharisee invites Jesus to dinner, a prostitute interrupts the decorous occasion by washing Jesus' feet with her tears, drying them with her hair, and anointing them with perfume. The Pharisee believes the woman's actions prove Jesus cannot be a prophet, because a prophet would never let a prostitute touch him (Luke 7:44-47).

In reply to the Pharisee's unspoken doubts, Jesus tells the story of the money lender who forgives two debts, one for five hundred denarii and the other for fifty. He then asks which person will love the money lender more.

The Pharisee replies the one who had the bigger debt canceled (Luke 7:42).

Then Jesus speaks to the Pharisee's discourteous reception of him and the Pharisee's doubts, which lie behind his behavior. He points out that the Pharisee has totally neglected the common courtesies extended to dinner guests. He has supplied no water for Jesus to wash his feet, he did not greet Jesus with a brotherly kiss, nor give him oil for his head. But the prostitute has transformed these common courtesies into profound acts of love. "Therefore I tell you," Jesus says, "her many sins are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little" (Luke 7:47).

Jesus not only answers the unspoken question of the Pharisee—"Is this man a prophet?"—by intuiting what's in the man's heart; he proclaims that he is more than a prophet by forgiving the woman's sins. In the process, he lets the Pharisee know that his own hardness of heart keeps him from being forgiven.

This pattern of questioning and transcendent response is found again and again in the Gospels, from the woman caught in adultery (John 8:3-7) to the Pharisees' question about paying taxes to Caesar (Matt. 22:17-22). Jesus knows the unworthiness of the woman's accusers and the power politics behind the tax question, and he points out to both groups that they should be most concerned about their own relationships with God.

The answer Jesus gave to the most pointed question he was ever asked contains the secret of his incomparable ability to answer the question behind the question.

In the eighth chapter of John's Gospel, the Pharisees are haranguing Jesus, questioning his authority on various grounds. Finally, in their perplexity, they come right out and ask, "Who are you?"

"Just what I have been claiming all along," Jesus replied, "When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am the one I claim to be, and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me. The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him" (John 8:28-29).

I do nothing on my own, Jesus says. I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me. Jesus proclaims here that his entire ministry—everything he taught, every answer he gave to a question—originated in his communion with the Father. The Son listened to the Father, communed with the Father, and out of this communion Jesus taught. Out of this communion he answered questions spoken and unspoken.

We usually think of Jesus' communion with the Father, his prayer, in terms of specific, dramatic instances. We remember Jesus' Temptation in the Desert, his retreats to the Galilean hills, the ecstasy of the Transfiguration, and the agony of Gethsemane. But in Jesus' replies that pierce peoples' hearts and proclaim his identity and mission, we overhear another aspect of his prayer: his continual communion with the Father—his prayer without ceasing.

We might say that Jesus never had a simple, two-way conversation. The Father and the Holy Spirit were always there as well. Jesus' conversation had a Trinitarian character. He brought the Father and the Holy Spirit's witness into the midst of every conversation.

As we pray, as we listen to God, we need to bring God's presence in Christ into the midst of our own conversations with other people. And into every circumstance, as well. We are not on our own; God is with us, but God cannot make his presence felt unless we invite him into the midst of our lives.

I find that when I keep soaking myself in Scripture, consulting with Christian friends, and prayerfully waiting on the Lord, he keeps clarifying what I need to do to make my relationships right with other people. He gives me insights into troubling situations I would never have otherwise.

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Should a boss ever become personal friends with his employees?  Some management specialists say no, believing it makes tough decisions too difficult.  I understand their point, but I think differently.  The most effective organizations I've been a part of have been led by friendship teams.

My experience of people enjoying each other's company while working together began with my family.  My parents played their appropriate roles as disciplinarians and moral guides, but that did not keep them from nurturing a close family culture of friendship.  I remember walking the streets of Corpus Christi on grocery company trips—as a four or five-year-old—Dad holding one hand, Mother the other, and being swung between the two up over every curb.  What exhilaration!  The three of us (and my brother Charles and sister Eleanor as they came along) used to travel Texas highways visiting the stores—I was regularly taken out of school for a day or two on selected occasions.  My mother prepared notebooks full of poetry and special stories for us to recite and read to one another.  I will always remember Dad's booming voice declaiming, as from ancient Rome, Thomas Babington Macaulay's "Horatius": 

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the gate:
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods . . .

When I finished my schooling and was ready to begin my working life, guess what I wanted to do?   Go into the family business, of course.  And I did, first managing a new store in San Antonio and then transferring to where the headquarters had moved, from the Valley to Corpus.

The 1940's-50's Baylor—and then southwide—Youth Revivals, which launched me into our subsequent and current ministries, were a team affair.  I was the only layman—18 years old!—in a remarkable group of preacher-boys.  We toured the cities of Texas and the South together, splitting up the speaking and leadership responsibilities—just a gang of fellows boosting each other, sharing our witness to the Good News.

The lay theological movement I've been a part of since then grew through the friendship team that led the Layman's Leadership Institutes.  From 1956 - 1975 these sessions took place in a wide variety of locations, gathering key businessmen and professional people from across the nation.  Duke McCall and Billy Graham with some of his team helped us get started.  The key people were laymen themselves.  Bill Mead, head of Campbell Taggart Bakeries, was pivotal in the effort, along with Fred Smith, Sr., vice-president of Gruen Watch Company.  There were many others, like the apparel industry executive Maxie Jarman (famous for his shoes), the oil company magnate J. Howard Pew, and the pacesetting surgeon J.V.D. (Jack) Hough.  As I played a key role in the sponsorship and leadership of these sessions, I grew close to many of these men.  Every new Institute brought with it a celebration of friendship.

Reprinted from an article in the Summer 2002 Connections.

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As a boy, I traveled with my father and listened to him speak at various personnel meetings. I remember how store employees gathered around, sitting on 100-lb. sacks of pinto beans or cases of merchandise, as Dad stood and hammered at his core beliefs:

“The customer signs your paycheck. The customer is your boss. We’re in business to serve the customer.”

Much later, I realized I’d heard from Dad the deepest lessons of corporate governance. The people who produce, market, and consume useful products share no small common grace—­we serve each other in trust. Such secure, unconscious, everyday business interdependences find their deepest roots in the West’s centuries-old Judeo-Christian ethical heritage. Cut off from these vital roots, one of the most dramatic casualties is our common and mutual trust. Goodness plummets and fear, guilt, self-doubt, negativity, and distrust spread within and among us.

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One of my earliest memories is walking between my mother and father when I was perhaps three or four years old. We stepped off the sidewalk, and as we approached the upcoming curb, I hesitated. My parents, sensing my apprehension, both pulled up on my hands and swung me above the low cement ledge. They made an exhilarating little game of it with each curb we encountered. This remains a crystal clear memory for me, the pure joy of trusting the grips of my mother and father as they lifted me over those obstacles.

People tend to respond to the trust we put in them. While I do not recommend naiveté, I know that in receiving my parents’ trust, I was enabled as a man to extend similar confidence to people I serve in my family, in the business community, and through our foundation. I know that the strengthened grip of trust among people, companies, and nations is traced to affirming others.

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A generation ago, as a young executive in my father’s grocery business, I was put in charge of advertising. I wrote an ad for one local market, saying we had the lowest prices in town (which I believed), but Dad unceremoniously vetoed my copy. He said, “You can say we have low prices, but if people found one little jar of pickles less expensive in another store, we’d be telling a lie, and it would destroy the customers’ trust in our company.”

My father, succeeded by my brother, built one of the largest privately owned regional supermarket chains in America by putting their force of character behind a now-threatened linchpin in our national community: trust.

We all know the painful effects of trust betrayed.  A sabotaging coworker fuels a suspicious, tense workplace.  A friend’s duplicity spreads uncertainty into other close relationships.  A cheating spouse erodes faith in a marriage.  Then come life’s pedestrian betrayals: repairmen who don’t show up, the auto mechanic who recommends needless repairs.

On the national level, political polemics seem to allow for no thoughtful middle ground. Negative campaigning is standard, personal, and vicious. Financial scandals roil Wall Street and rock millions of middle-class investors. Accounting fraud, tainted stock-market research, and undisclosed machinations for personal gain besmirch and poison the economic atmosphere. Lawsuits proliferate; trust plummets.

This leaves us with little but a question:  is it possible to revive prevailing trust in our homes, towns, businesses, boardrooms, and civic life? 

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At TheHighCalling.org and Laity Lodge, we are grappling with a problem that is individual and institutional and social and organizational.

We don't understand the priesthood that Christ has given us. Where does our priesthood come from? It comes from the Trinitarian God we worship. Somehow in Jesus Christ, the secret of our priesthood and the Trinity itself has been made open.

We are beginning to understand that the God we worship is the Three in One. He is both individual and social. He is both personal and organizational. And the God we worship is both the leader and the follower. You worship the Spirit of the Father and Son. You worship the Spirit of the leader and follower.

In Col 2:9 there is this staggering statement: "For it is in Christ that the full being of the Godhead dwells embodied."

The Holy Spirit in Jesus was the spirit of the Trinity. I do not understand how God can be Father and Son and Holy Spirit. I don’t understand how God can be as much Three as if he were not One and as much One as if he were not Three. This is the mystery.

I’ve read that Jesus favored the title “Son of Man” as a description of himself because he loved his followers. I am sure that is part of what you saw in the humility with which he related to everybody. The service, the responsiveness to what they wanted him to do, what they needed him to do. The sense of being so alive and yet the calmness that his human life was not demeaning to God.

Remember, he said, "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30).

Jesus had perfect humility, but he was also absolutely bedrock sure of his leadership. Jesus has both the spirit of a follower and the spirit of a leader. He has the Holy Spirit, the spirit of the Trinity.

And we can, too! When we learn to celebrate our priesthood, we are learning who Jesus is, who God is, who the Holy Spirit is, who the Trinity is—and, of course, who we are.

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What is Trinitarian Servant Leadership? Picture an equilateral triangle. One side is the Son, or submission, or servant. There is the Son, Jesus, the Son of God, submission and servant, that’s the side representing the cross. Another side is the Father authority, leadership, resurrection. The final side is the Holy Spirit, unity, creativity, and flexibility. It is all about the flexibility we need to relate most creatively to each other, in unity. Now the whole of life is this flexibility of servant leadership appropriate in each situation. This is the life in every believer. This is the God life that is in every believer when we are allowing Christ’s life to live through us.

The concept of servant leadership, which is a biblical concept, has two perils. One is that the servanthood of the leader renders him passive and impotent. As organizations become more truly democratic, the danger is that leadership gets lost or forgotten. A good example is that of the early Greeks, who founded democracy. It ultimately failed because in a totally egalitarian society, they did not allow for leadership. There was no one to provide an over-arching vision and direction. All went their separate ways, and the result was chaos, not freedom.

On the other hand, leadership can become authoritarian, insensitive, and tyrannical. The challenge is to find the balance between strong leadership and servant leadership. No one leads until someone serves.

Trinitarian Servant Leadership provides a model for merging three disciplines that I believe are vital in today’s business world: relational theology, behavioral science, and management strategies.

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If you keep up with what is happening in the business world, “faith in the workplace” is becoming a significant topic in our day. Our reflex reaction when we talk about the workplace is not usually about “faith.” We think about “toil” in the workplace, or “stress.” We think about the bottom line, about paychecks, and about profits in the workplace. We think about exhaustion, monotony, and boredom in the workplace. We think of competitions, rivalries, and jealousy in the workplace. We think of struggles in the workplace.

But recent bold experiments in opening the window of faith into the workplace have helped us see a new range of options and potential. Now we’re talking about enjoyment in the workplace, about meaning and a sense of fulfillment in the workplace. We’re talking about caring and servant leadership and teamwork and mutual support in the workplace . . . about motivation and productivity and excitement and excellence and unity and peace. The very things that make work a high calling.

An organization will not become healthy, in terms of human relationships, without leadership that puts a priority on human relationships. The source of all relational leadership comes from a relational God. Out of this principle arises the concept of Trinitarian Servant Leadership, which I hold is the maximum path to executive effectiveness in changing the culture of a corporation or institution. That style of leadership requires flexibility; and the healthiest flexibility comes from this divine source.

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Through servant leadership, we love the people around us appropriately. Servant leadership is what has driven us to the three values that motivate this organization, of which the Laity Lodge ministry is a part.

The three qualities are excellence, service, and unity. These are our values.  If you experience love and acceptance and encouragement at Laity Lodge or through the message of TheHighCalling.org, it is the spirit of God working through our efforts to live by these values.

We have emphasized this since the 1960s when Laity Lodge was young. Even then, we believed in the leadership potential of everyone who works with us. And today we believe in the leadership of every person who visits our website. In fact, everyone on the face of the globe is a leader.

The only question any of us face is this—what kind of leader are we going to be?

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Every organization, every institution develops a culture peculiar to itself. This culture is actually distinct from any individual in that particular organization. It can be either good or bad.

A good organizational culture builds you up. A bad organizational culture tears you down.

That is the reason the culture of your organization is so crucially important. Be very jealous of anything that might damage the progress you have made so far in the culture of your workplace. Work continually to improve the cultural ambience of the experience of those who work with you and of those you serve.

The culture of an organization is crucial to the health of the people who are involved in it. How's your health? Is the culture of your workplace therapeutic or destructive? What are you doing to improve the culture of your workplace?

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