Leadership Lessons from a Previous Pastor (and Professor)

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend the 50^th Anniversary of Park Crest

Baptist Church. This is the where I served while attending Baptist Bible College in Springfield, MO. The guest speaker for the day was the former pastor, Gary Grey. Pastor Grey was the pastor while I attended this church. Pastor Grey was also my Pastoral Theology professor.

I have been privileged to serve under and with many great men of God. There many lessons I have learned from each to help me become the man I am today. One of the greatest lessons I learned from Pastor Grey was leadership. I was reminded of that this past weekend. Something else I was reminded of was his great one-liners. If twitter would have been around 20 years ago I am sure he could have rivaled President Trump as the king of 140 characters (now 280 characters).

After this weekend, I pulled out a few notebooks I kept from my undergraduate years at BBC and attending Park Crest and found scores of great quotes I heard from Pastor Grey either at church or in class. These are some of my favorite. There is no order other than how I found them.

Enjoy and be challenged (and tweet away #leadershiplessons).

• Never explain things so they can be understood, always explain things so they cannot be misunderstood.
• There are some things we need to be instructed in and some things we just need to be reminded of.
• Those who are closest to me will determine my success.
• How to be successful – work! Because you have so little competition.
• If the horse is dead, please dismount.
• Insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
• Man said, “I can do the same thing at 60 as I did at 16.” Responder said, “You didn’t do a whole lot at 16.”
• Excuses are exits on the highway of life.
• More people suffer from inferiority than superiority.
• Our gamble for gold so many, and gamble for God so few.
• It is better to try and fail than to fail to try.
• If it is in the pulpit, it is in the pew.
• It is easier to comfort the afflicted than to afflict the comfortable.
• Change is good if it is good change.
• People will put up with change as long as it doesn’t affect them.
• Success is like riding a bike, either you keep moving or you fall over.
• If someone says something unkind about me, I must live so no one will believe it.
• You don’t have to be a cannibal to get fed up with people.
• Plan something good at the end of something good.
• Loyalty – making others successful, anything less than that is building your own kingdom.
• You can always measure a man by what it takes to stop him.
• If it were easy everyone would do it.
• The will to succeed is important, but what’s more important is the will to prepare.
• True leadership must be for the benefit of the followers, not the enrichment of the leaders.
• There is but one just use of power and it is to serve people.
• Failure can be divided into those who thought and never did and those who did and never thought.
• Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.
• A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.
• One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.
• I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
• The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.
• A big man is one who makes us feel bigger when we are with him.
• A ship in a harbor is safe but that is not what ships were built for.
• He who never walks except where he sees other men’s tracks will make no discoveries.
• I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
• You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.
• A wise leader inspires and motivates, rather than intimidating and manipulating.
• Asking “who ought to be the boss” is like asking who ought to be the tenor in the quartet? Obviously, the man who can sing tenor.
• A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.
• The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.
• You must live with people to know their problems, and live with God in order to solve them.
• My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.
• Failure is an opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.
• All glory comes from daring to begin.
• Don’t spend $1.00 worth of time on a $.10 decision.
• A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but out to be.
• When rejecting the ideas of another, make sure you reject only the idea and not the person.
• It isn’t the incompetent who destroys an organization. The incompetent never gets in a position to destroy it. It is those who have achieved something and want to rest upon their achievements who are forever clogging things up.
• A leader is a person with a magnet in his heart and a compass in his head.
• To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.
• Success does not consist in never making a mistake but in never making the same one a second time.