Assume The Best Part 2 #leadership 05

In part 1 of this post, I began by telling the story about a lead pastor I knew once who accused one of the pastors on his staff of “only being in it for the money.”  

The pastor on staff had requested a bump in pay because of some challenges at home, and the lead pastor was taking it poorly.  “They just want to get paid.  They don’t want to work harder for the money - they just want to do as little as possible and still get paid more,” the lead pastor complained.  I happened to know the pastor who was asking for the raise, and I knew them to be a hard-working, sober-minded, humble servant of Christ.  The lead pastor’s characterization of them was so far off the mark that it was silly.  

What was happening here?  

The lead pastor in this scenario was exhibiting an ungodly attitude concerning the pastor requesting the raise.  This has nothing to do with a discussion about the merit of giving the pastor a bump in pay.  It has everything to do with the heart attitude of the lead pastor as he considered the request.    

In part 1 of this post, I discussed Theory X and Y leaders as described by Douglas McGregor.  He was most interested in casting a vision about leadership and the ramifications of our inherent beliefs about the people who work for us.  In part 1, I discussed the practical impacts of what leaders assume about their employees.   Personally, I’m more interested in how someone becomes a Theory X leader. That’s what I’m going to explore here in part 2 of this post. 

The lead pastor most likely wasn’t born believing that employees couldn’t be trusted to do good work and would try to get as much money for as little work as possible.  Something happened that led him to believe that a pastor asking for a raise was a sign of a greedy, disloyal worker.  

The lead pastor’s reaction had way more to do with his own view of the world than with anything the pastor who worked for him had said or done.

This story underlines the leadership value I’m discussing in this two-part post. 

Healthy leaders assume the best of their team.  

Healthy leaders look at their team and assume their employees want to work, they want to be here, and they want to do a good job.  They give their employees the “benefit of the doubt” when something goes awry, and they only conclude the employee is operating from bad motives when compelling evidence leaves no other possible answer.  Even then, they approach the possibility of resolution with grace and an eye toward the health of the employee. This attitude generally nurtures trust with employees and encourages good work.  

So, why does the lead pastor in my story view the pastor asking for a raise in such a disparaging way?  

Every one of us brings our unique perspective of the world into every situation.  It just happens whether we’re conscious of it or not.  The values we’ve learned and adopted from our culture, our family of origin, our peer groups, and every other entity that influences us are always there with you, helping you make sense of the world.   

The external interactions we have with the world - the things that happen to us - are just facts.  Someone cut me off on the highway.  Someone takes your seat at staff meeting.  Someone drinks the last of the coffee and doesn’t make more. Someone asks for a raise.  These are all just external facts - things that happened to us that we didn’t initiate.  

But, as human beings, facts are not that interesting to us.  Facts, on their own, have little to no value to us, because facts in isolation have no meaning.  

We love stories.  

The facts have to be given meaning for them to be something of interest to us, and we use stories to imbue facts with meaning. We use stories to make sense of what is happening to us. 

“The person who cut me off is an insensitive jerk!” is a victim story we tell ourselves about an external fact that’s rooted in what we already believe about the world, other drivers, and specifically, people who cut us off.  “They should’ve made more coffee when they took the last of it!  How selfish!” is a story that’s rooted in what you already believe and is likely a value that was instilled in you by your family of origin or your culture.  

The stories we tell are unique to us, and aren’t inherently true.  This can be hard to wrap your mind around - that the person who didn’t make more coffee may have grown up in a family or culture where that was normal and not a moral trespass. That can be hard to imagine. The story we tell ourselves about what the facts we encounter mean are an indication of the overarching narrative we’ve been telling ourselves all along. 

The story we tell ourselves about the facts we observe serves to augment and reinforce the over-arching narrative we already have.  Each story we tell adds to the meta-narrative of our lives. It’s a cumulative thing.  “That person cut me off,” leads to the story, “They only care about themselves!”, which begins to build a prevailing narrative about drivers that, in turn, informs our reactions to the drivers around us.  “Drivers in this town are just selfish people, and they don’t care who they’re rude to!”  What happens the next time someone cuts us off?  This meta-narrative about drivers informs our knee-jerk response.  Over time, we build a unique worldview that’s been shaped by thousands of little stories. 

The story we tell in the present is informed by the stories we’ve told in the past, and will influence the stories we tell in the future. 

Being cut off or finding an empty coffee pot in the break room are just external facts.  They’re things that happened.  The story we tell ourselves about what those facts mean has way more to do with us, than it does the people who committed these “facts”.  

When I was 19 years old, I got a speeding ticket for driving 60 mph in a 35 mph zone.  The person in front of me was driving 25 mph - 10 miles UNDER the speed limit.  I was incensed.  How inconsiderate!  As soon as the road opened into a second lane, I whipped around this person and gunned it - right past a police officer who was parked on a side street.  

The fact that I was stuck behind a person driving 10 miles under the speed limit was just an external fact.  It was something that was happening that I didn’t initiate.  But the story I told myself about what the fact meant is what compelled me to respond in the way I did, with the unfortunate consequence of a pricy speeding ticket.  

My response was a product of what already believed about driving.  When it came to driving, I believed that everyone was trying to get where they were going as fast as possible.  Every trip in the car was essentially a race to the finish line.  From this perspective, people driving below the speed limit were either intentionally making themselves roadblocks or were in some way oblivious to the point of driving.  

My ingrained assumption that everyone viewed driving the way I did, resulted in me telling a disparaging story about the person driving 10 miles under the speed limit.  They were intentionally slowing me down, or they were stupid.  It led me to rudely pull around them, gun ahead of them, making sure they knew how I disapproved of their driving.  

Even the language I used earlier in telling this story belies my driving worldview - I was “stuck” behind someone driving 10 mph under the speed limit.  “Stuck” implies thwarted progress, like a racecar boxed in at the Indianapolis 500.  I assigned malicious intent to the other driver that was not supported by the actual facts.  I have no idea if the other driver was even aware of me.  If they were, I’m confident it was immensely satisfying for them to see me pulled over by the police half a mile down the road.  

The story I told myself about driving was inherited from my father - my family of origin.  While driving, my dad was constantly scanning the road for people who were driving in ways he considered “wrong.”  He was trying to get where he was going as fast as possible, and anyone who deviated from my father’s extremely high driving standards was labelled a “jackass.”  Through all of my formative years, this was my model for driving.  My father didn’t intentionally teach me this way of driving, but I picked it up nonetheless.  

Each time I drove, I entered into my pre-existing narrative of the goal of driving - to get where I was going as fast as possible.  Every time someone failed to meet my expectations of their driving, I assigned meaning , and sometimes even moral value, to the facts that were happening to me.  I told myself a story about the facts that was informed by the narrative I inherited from my father combined with the hundreds of stories I’d already told myself about driving.  This new story then would add to the collective narrative, making it all the more likely that the next driving story I told would be a continuation of this competition driving meta-narrative.  

This is how we interact with the facts of life.  

You might think I’m making too much out of this little driving example.  The stories you tell yourself about your driving are harmless, and honestly, who really cares?

This is where it gets real.  

The stories you tell yourself about reality have a direct impact on your sanctification. 

Whoa!  Hang on now.  That’s just ridiculous!  What I think about driving has no bearing on my sanctification.  You’re taking it too far!  

I stand by what I’ve said. 

I tend to think of sanctification as the life-long process of aligning the whole of your being with God’s intention for you. God made you with a personality, desire, and gifting, all of which can be used for God or for self.  In this view, sanctification is the process of bringing all of these things into alignment with the personality, desire, and gifting (and everything else God has given you) that God desires for you.  

This is the idea behind Jesus’ Greatest Commandment:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

Matthew 22:37

Sanctification is us cooperating with the work that God is doing in us that will bring us into alignment with this verse.  We are becoming someone who loves God with everything they are.  

The stories we tell ourselves about the facts of our lives flow from deep within us, and they have moral trajectory that affects our sanctification.  As we tell stories of grace, forgiveness, and joy, we make a slight movement more into alignment with God’s desire for us.  As we tell stories of shame, judgment, and cynicism, we make a slight movement out of alignment with God’s desire for us.  This daily push and pull is what I believe the Apostle Paul was talking about when he advised us to:

“…continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”  

Philippians 2:12

Somehow, as we desire to follow Jesus, we're sanctified and we're being sanctified. It’s an ongoing process we participate in through surrender to God’s work in our lives.  But the process of sanctification is a life-long struggle - we do our best to join God in what he’s doing in our lives and we work out our salvation with fear and trembling.  We are constantly moving closer and further away from this heart alignment with God.  


We all feel the tension of the stories we tell ourselves. “Working out our salvation” happens moment-to-moment, day-by-day.  This could easily lead to a life of attempted sin management, where we try to determine the moral trajectory of every little story to ensure that we’re always moving toward God.  But the focus it would require to be mindful of every little story we tell ourselves is tremendous and unrealistic.  Most of us are not that self aware, and monitoring every little story can lead to a life of naval gazing, where lose sight of the importance of loving others.    

Sanctification, then, appears to be a life-long process that is more a matter of trajectory than precision.  The sum of all these little stories can be intuitively felt.  We’re oblivious to many of the little stories we tell ourselves in this life-long progression. Of the ones we are aware of, we struggle to understand their importance to our unfolding narrative in the moment.  It’s more likely that we’re able to take a step back and look at the broad trajectory of our storytelling over time. “This past week, I’ve really been critical of the people around me.  The stories I’m telling myself are turning my heart away from Jesus.”  This realization is a gift, and an invitation to tell better stories.  C.S. Lewis expressed a similar notion when he talked about our choices turning us into more and more “heavenly or hellish creatures.”

This requires that we pause to reflect on the trajectory of our lives and our storytelling.  We can see the “fruit” - a biblical metaphor for the outcome of our thoughts, behaviors, and actions.  If the fruit is good, we can reflect on the storytelling and actions that were involved so that we can be aware and try to intentionally move more in this trajectory.  “I really love the sweet relationship I have with my sister.  How did we get here, and what might I learn from the journey?”  

Likewise, bad fruit is an indicator of an unhealthy trajectory.  Reflection is essential to be able to name the “seeds” that were sown that resulted in this bad fruit.  “My best friend and I can no longer stand each other.”  The reflective question is, “What happened?”  What stories did you tell yourself about the facts of the relationship that led to this?  What actions did you take that might’ve contributed to this outcome?    

The stories we tell about the facts around us result in constant streaming of tiny shifts in trajectory.  The sum of all of these tiny shifts in trajectory over time becomes our worldview.  It’s more akin to water wearing down a rock over hundreds of years, than it is a conscious and willful process.  Our worldview is typically given to us or passively adopted without our conscious participation, like my father teaching me the purpose of driving.  These worldviews feel true, and, when left unexamined, we’re likely to continue in the same general trajectory.  We move through our lives guided by this unseen river flowing out our hearts, unconsciously interpreting the world around us through this lens.    

The story we tell ourselves either nudges us closer to God or further away from him.  

The lead pastor was telling a terrible, disparaging story about the motives of the pastor who was asking for a raise.  This story was flowing from an unexamined personal meta-narrative that ran like a subterranean river from the lead pastor’s heart.  It informed the lead pastor’s interpretation of reality, and influenced the story the lead pastor told themself as he engaged with reality. 

Somewhere along the way, the lead pastor had adopted a Theory X view of leadership, as mentioned in part 1 of this post. The stories his dad told at the dinner table, his experience as a young pastor, the advice of his mentors, the college he attended, the ideology of his hometown culture, his generational perspective, and an immeasurable host of other possible influences led to this moment.  The stories he already believed about employees asking for raises flooded his mind and informed the knee-jerk story he was telling now.  “Employees who ask for raises are greedy and want to get more money for doing as little as possible!”  As he told this story, it was a tiny shift away from God.  The comments made about the pastor asking for the raise were baseless and made in their absence.  This is slander, if not gossip, and possibly even lying - all sins that destroy relationships.   

This is where grace is so important.  We’ve all made knee-jerk assessments that flow thoughtlessly from our unconscious worldview, our brokenness, and our wounding.  We’ve all said hurtful things in the moment.  God’s grace reminds us that we’ve been forgiven much, and so we too can forgive.  When faced with such an obvious example as this lead pastor being hijacked by their worldview, grace gives us pause to gather our thoughts and look for a path toward redemption.  If we can see it, we can try to take the other person’s hand and move toward the light.   

The way the stories we’ve told influence the stories we tell and will tell is like an echo chamber.  Each story increases the resonance until all we can hear is the feedback of our broken narrative.  This raises an important question:

How do we break the cycle of telling the same destructive stories over and over again?


We need to be able to tell a different story about the facts.  

We need help imagining another way of looking at the situation.  Something needs to interrupt the feedback loop we’re stuck in to help us tell a different story about the same facts.  This is the key to breaking the cycle.  

There may be many ways of gaining this awareness, but the main way we gain this essential awareness is that someone challenges our worldview and helps us see another way of looking at it.  

My meta-narrative about driving - that it was a race and everyone was trying to get where they were going as fast as they could - was challenged by my wife.  She had made passive comments about my driving over the years, and I would insist that my driving was “safe enough” - until we had our first child.  

With my oldest son a mere infant, strapped into a car seat in the back, my beloved Becca let me have it in full-on “mama bear mode” (her words, not mine).  “Is this how you drive with our son in the car?  This isn’t a race!  Slow down, stop passing everyone, and put some distance between you and the other cars!  Think about your son!”  

Her impassioned plea broke my feedback loop. It shook me out of my driving worldview and forced me to reevaluate what was most important.  She allowed me to see it from her perspective, where the most important thing about driving was getting from point A to point B safely - especially for our child.  My love and respect for her and my desire to be a good dad broke the feedback loop and gave me pause to think about how I thought about driving.  

She even helped me tell a different story about the facts.  The person who’s driving slow may be driving ore cautiously because of a health issue.  They may have a car full of breakable items.  They may be having engine troubles and are just trying to get to the next exit.  These were all sanctified stories born from the exact same facts that had the moral trajectory of moving me a little bit more toward God.  Her stories extended grace, whereas my stories extended judgment.

This is the key to beginning to undo an unhealthy worldview - tell a sanctified story.  The person who cut me off just didn’t see me (we’ve all done that!).  The person who took my seat at the staff meeting simply didn’t know it was my seat, or grew up in a family or culture where seats have no owners.  The person who didn’t make more coffee was distracted because their child is sick, or they’re going through a hard time in their life.  All of these stories extend grace and help reform our internal narrative. 

The grace-filled story you tell is added to the cumulative narrative you’ve been telling and it will have some bearing on the next story you tell.  

When I finally stopped and reflected on my driving worldview, it was so obviously silly.  I’d insisted on my perception of driving, not because it made sense, but because I’d never really stopped to think about it.  It was the unexamined perspective I’d inherited from my family of origin.  

When we have this realization, it often leads to grace for others.  Because we see that we were unaware of our internal narrative, we can now see how others might have the same challenge.  Instead of seeing this as character flaw, we can see this as simply part of the human condition and show that person grace. This self-awareness is a gift from God, and an invitation to surrender your narrative to him.  

This is why I chose to challenge the lead pastor’s narrative.  It would be so simple to just condemn the lead pastor’s behavior and label him as an unrepentant sinner.  Many have argued that you should expect a lot more from a lead pastor, and I agree in principle, but grace is lived out in real-time, moment by actual moment in the specifics of a given situation. And judgment belongs to the Lord. In fact, this is a good example of the kinds of expectations we put on others that can lead to relational destruction as I mentioned in my Meet People Where They Are post.  

Even if the lead pastor is an unrepentant sinner, Jesus loves sinners.  

I had years of relational equity with the lead pastor and I loved both pastors in this scenario.  So, I spoke up and challenged his worldview, trying to tell a better story.  Despite my efforts, the lead pastor doubled down on his narrative and ended the discussion.  Even when this happens, there’s still hope.  The lead pastor might go home and think about my exhortation and soften his heart.  

Unfortunately, the lead pastor remained resolved in his perspective of the pastor asking for the raise.  He never told that pastor what he told me behind closed doors (which is another topic for discussion: integrity), but the things he did say to the pastor were quite hurtful.  The effects of the pointless relational damage caused by the lead pastor’s unwillingness to challenge his worldview and try to tell a better story linger to this very day.  

This is where we employ God’s expansive grace once again.  In the moment where I might think I’m somehow better than this lead pastor, I’m reminded that Jesus loves him every bit as much as he loves me.  I’ve been forgiven much, and so I have the opportunity to love much.  

Grace is the engine upon which the Gospel is realized.  

The good news is that when you become aware of the ungodly story you’re telling yourself, this awareness is a gift.  You can only surrender to God the things that you’re aware of.  The surprising grace of the Gospel is that you can begin to move toward God at any time.  You told yourself a story and behaved poorly?  Own it and ask the Holy Spirit to help you tell a different, more godly story. Apologize if the story moved you to action where you hurt someone.  

Seeking awareness is where the harder work begins.  Why did you tell THAT story?  What was it about the situation that resulted in the knee-jerk ungodly story you told yourself?  If it can be named, then its power over you can be diminished and healing can begin.  

The topic of uncovering these stories is too big for this post, and so I’ll finish here with a few questions. 

As you finish reading this article, what is your heart attitude toward the lead pastor?  Why?

What is your heart attitude toward the pastor asking for the raise?  Why?

What stories have you told about the things that happen to you that might be hurting you?  Ask the Holy Spirit to help you see them.