EMQ » April–June 2022 » Volume 58 Issue 2
By Michel Hendricks
Conflict among team members is often cited as the primary cause of missionaries leaving the field and returning home. Most solutions include improving communication, conflict resolution training and personality tests to understand each other. These can be helpful but often they are not sufficient. Might there be something more foundational?
[memberonly folder=”Members, EMQ2YearFolder, EMQ1YearFolder, EMQLibraryInstitution”]The simple answer is love. We would all agree that if missionaries loved each other well, many problems would either disappear or be resolved in healthy ways. The real question becomes: How? How do we learn to love like Jesus loves? More specifically, how do I love people who drive me crazy or treat me harshly? How can they love me when I’m selfish and perfectionistic? It may surprise you to hear that a little neuroscience will help with our understanding of love. Afterall, God who inspired scripture also designed our brains. We would expect the Bible and the design of the human brain to fit well together.
The human brain was designed with love in mind. From the Bible and brain science, there are three important elements of love that will keep our relationships healthy. A Jesus-like love builds joy, gives others rest and space, and motivates people in a healthy way. These are all learnable, so let’s take a look at each of these key skills.
Joy
Our right brain scans our surroundings six times a second, faster than we are aware, looking for one thing above all others. That thing is relational joy. Interestingly, the neurological definition of joy agrees with the biblical definition. Joy is what you feel when someone’s face and eyes show you that they are glad to be with you, that you are special to them. Joy is largely non-verbal. Our brains scan our surroundings for glad-to-be-with-me-faces wherever we are, and these joyful encounters act like fuel to our brains.
We see this definition of joy in the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24–26:
The LORD bless you
and keep you;
the LORD make his face shine on you
and be gracious to you;
the LORD turn his face toward you
and give you peace.
God’s face shining on us agrees with the neurological definition of joy. God designed our brains for joy, and he wants us to live in the glow of his delight. This blessing expresses a joy that can be paraphrased, “May you feel the joy of God’s face shining on you because he is happy to be with you!”
We not only experience joy from God but with one another too. Building joy with God and others is an essential part of loving our teammates. Being intentional to let our faces and eyes shine on our team members fills everyone’s joy tank with an emotional fuel that give us energy for relational resilience. When joy is low, almost nothing in life works well – even good things. The first skill to build emotionally resilient teams is joy.
Rest and Space
I mentioned above that our brains are designed with love in mind. I’m referring specifically what is called secure love. A secure love bond between people has two primary features: we build joy together and we let each other rest. We do not overwhelm others. The joy/rest cycle is established in the first months of a baby’s life, and we thrive with people who are excited to be with us and who also know how to read the non-verbal signals that we need some space and rest.
This delicate balance between joy and peace keeps relationships in a healthy zone. This balance is essential for healthy marriages, families, communities, and teams. Too much joy without rest and people get worn out. Too much rest and our love runs cold. We can only build joy to the level that we let people rest.
Jesus was very careful to let his disciples rest. God gave us a day of rest and even teaches us to let our land rest. One of the greatest curses that God can put on a person is to not let them rest. To people who hardened their hearts against God’s loving entreaties, he declares, “So I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest’” (Psalm 95:11).
Despite this warning, many ministries are designed to wear people out. We use guilt and manipulation, often citing our vision and mission statements, to motivate our people to ignore their need for rest. We create a frenetic team culture that will eventually cause relationships to fracture. When we miss the signals that another person is needing a break, we cause them discomfort and our trust is damaged.
Fear – Short Term Motivation
Often the inability to let ourselves and others rest is an indicator of a bigger problem: toxic motivation. Our brains have two motivation systems. Fear is designed to be a short-term motivation for danger avoidance that is meant to last no more than 90 seconds. Often we hijack this short-term motivation system to use as our long-term fuel. I was counseling a pastor who complained about how many tasks he had to juggle. I asked him how he managed, and he replied, “Adrenalin is a hell of a drug.” Without realizing it, he was telling me that he was a fear motivated pastor.
Long-term exposure to fear hormones is bad for our bodies and health. It puts our brains in a place where creativity and the relational aspect of problem solving are absent. We get stuck into the back of our brains, like lizards. We are reactive and rigid. We end up acting less than human.
Here are some indicators that your team might have toxic motivation at work:
- Threats (stated or implied) are used to motivate people.
- We focus on negative outcomes.
- Control becomes more important than understanding.
- We hide our weaknesses instead of sharing them to get help.
I was on a mission team with an organization that received financial support directly proportional to the number of evangelistic encounters our team had. Each month we had to fill out an evangelism tally form and put a number down which was sent to the leadership team. We had to keep track of every opportunity we had to share the gospel and had a target number we were expected to achieve each month.
What do you think this did to our motivation system? From my perspective, it tilted our team towards fear motivation, and we spent a significant amount of time and energy combatting a fear driven team culture. Joy and rest were often neglected, and the burnout rate of missionaries in this organization was high. The good news is that there is a better motivation system that is suited for long-term use.
Long-Term Motivation
Our brains were designed with a higher motivation system that sets us humans apart from other animals. Our identity is central to motivation, including both our individual and group identities. When we have a culture of healthy motivation, we often ask the following questions: How has God created me to bring his light to our people. What unique characteristics of my heart will be valuable to our team? What are the desires of my true heart?
When each member brings their unique heart characteristics to the team, and we affirm them in each other, we start the long slow burn of healthy motivation. Fear motivation burns quick and hot, but it runs out quickly, like lighting a piece of newspaper on fire. Healthy motivation starts up slowly and keeps on going, like a large oak log.
We not only find motivation from our unique identities, we also need a well-developed group identity. Our brains calculate six times a second who we are and how we act in each situation in which we find ourselves. The calculations include the following questions: Who are we as a people and how do we act in this situation? What does it look like for us to act here? What is it like for our people to handle this problem?
Group identity is one of the lost skills of discipleship, and it is crucial in forming our character. Here are some examples of group identity affirmations:
- We are a people who clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, and when we lose our clothing, we ask our community to help clothe us again.
- We are a people who are always curious what God is building in others.
- We are a people who are slow to speak and quick to listen.
- We are a people who love our enemies and bless those who curse us.
As we create teams that operate in secure attachments of love, our joy and rest allow us to live in the hearts Jesus gave us. As we operate from our unique identities and build our group identity, we are on the way to forming a team that will not easily lose heart.
For more information on joy, rest, character formation, and group identity, read The Other Half of Church: Christian Community, Brain Science, and Overcoming Spiritual Stagnation, by Jim Wilder and Michel Hendricks. Life Model Works has developed many exercises to help build healthy teams. See lifemodelworks.org/consulting-services/ for more information on how we can help you.
Michel Hendricks, MDiv, Denver Seminary; BS, University of Colorado, Boulder (Michelhendricks@lifemodelworks.org), is a pastor, teacher, missionary trainer, inventor, and author. He is the director of transformational consulting at Life Model Works. He is the former pastor of spiritual formation at Flatirons Community Church in Lafayette, Colorado. He has also served in Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Kenya, South Sudan, and Uganda. He and his wife have three adult children.
EMQ, Volume 58, Issue 2. Copyright © 2022 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
