I'm surrounded by the most creative, wonderful, confident people I could imagine. One of them — probably one of my sharpest guys — told me if I didn't work for you I would go be a senior pastor because I don't think I could stand to work for anybody else. It's his way of saying you give me so much space to operate I don't feel the need to go to some other church so I can be the number one guy because I can't imagine having more opportunity or freedom. And I said, "Yeah, plus you don't have to take up the offerings so you've got it made. I fund all the fun that you're having over there on your side of the aisle!"

I say to young leaders all the time, "Don't look at me and say, 'You've got it made.' You have to look at your own situation and ask, 'How do I apply this principle, because the principle is the same whether you're starting alone or with two or three people. Figure out what you're good at, and do the best you can to stay there."

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When I do this talk publicly I juggle, and I talk abut how I can juggle three balls but I can't juggle five. So I juggle my three and I say, "Now if I try to juggle five guess how many I'll drop?" I'll drop all of them but one. If you watch me juggle five balls you would conclude Andy can't juggle but that's not true. I can juggle. So I'm going to juggle three and let two lay on the floor and somebody who sees me juggle three says, "You know, I can pick up the one." And somebody else says, "I can pick up the other," and before long all five are held. That visually says you just have to do what you are good at because good people love to work for good people. If people can't see what you're good at because you're trying to do everything, they won't join your team. It's just an extremely important principle and I think there is application at every level in leadership, whether it's a young leader or somebody who's been in leadership a long time.

Preaching: You talk about the place of courage in leadership and thinking about how that relates to not leadership in general but specifically pastors and the challenges they face.

Stanley: It's huge. Speaking from my limited view I feel like so much of the problem with pastors is they are just scared to death. They're scared of their people, they're scared of deacons, they're scared, they're scared, they're scared. You know if you're scared of someone you can't lead them; you can hardly even influence them. Here's the pastor who's been hired — I tell our business guys all the time, "You'd never go to work for an organization where the customers can hire and fire the president of the company they bought products from." But that's the church world. The people hire the leader and say, "We'll follow you unless we don't like the way you're leading us, then we'll get us another leader." What other organization can the clients and the customers hire and fire the leader? So the church is set up upside-down. It's an environment that is not conducive to leadership in some ways. Consequently to lead a church you just have to have a lot of courage because the group to which you're saying "follow me" can get together after you leave and fire you. Well, that's just the way it is. That's not going to change but it requires a lot of courage — otherwise we start bending toward the people that hired us and we're in trouble.