Church Staff

The unheralded Florida Atlantic University men’s basketball team made it all the way to the 2023 NCAA Final Four. How did they make it that far, especially considering they had no superstars? They relied on teamwork. Nine players on this Owls team averaged 15-plus minutes during the season, and the starting rotation has changed several times.

"We really don't care who starts as long as you just impact the game," said sophomore guard Alijah Martin, who started 20 games that season. Another starter said, "It's probably the first team I've been on where really nobody cares about their stats. I feel like across the board, any game it's just a whole bunch of selfless guys just trying to get a win."

"If you feel like it could do better for the team, why not serve and make that happen?" another player said. "There's been many opportunities and many times when guys offered up their spot for somebody else. I feel like that just reflects on the type of people we are as humans, and it shows on the court."

This selfless team spirit was exemplified early in the season between a fifth-year senior named Boyd and Michael Forrest, who lost his starting job to Boyd because of an injury. When Forrest returned, Boyd offered to give up his starting role. May declined to make the change. Where that might have affected the dynamics of some teams, FAU continued to win. Forrest said, "It doesn't really matter who starts, who finishes, it just matters about what you do on the court. Everyone's just playing to win. Everyone's playing for each other. So that's really what the difference is."

Do impressive-sounding, inspirational job titles make us feel better about ourselves? Can they change our behavior? Research suggests that job titles have the power to improve our well-being and sense of control, and shield us from feeling socially snubbed. They might even encourage us to apply for a job in the first place.

Since a powerful-sounding job title can signify social status, it’s not surprising workers aspire to them. But a fancy title isn’t always about status. Simply making a title more fun can influence behavior. After attending a conference at Disneyland and upon discovering that employees there were called “cast members,” Susan Fenters Lerch felt inspired.

The former CEO of Make-A-Wish Foundation returned to her office and told employees they could create their own “fun” job title, in addition to their official one, to reflect “their most important roles and identities in the organization.”

Researchers interviewed these employees a year and a half after Lerch’s decision. They found that their “self-reflective” job titles reduced workers’ emotional exhaustion, helped them cope with emotional challenges, and let them affirm their identity at work. Researcher Daniel Cable said, “The titles opened the door for colleagues to view one another as human beings, not merely job-holders.”

Researchers have also found that giving an employee a more senior-sounding title can make them act more responsibly by making them feel happier at work. Sociology professor Jeffrey Lucas found that giving high-performing employees a high-status job title could stop them from leaving. He carried out two experiments and discovered that workers with important-sounding job titles “displayed greater satisfaction, commitment, and performance and lower turnover intentions” than those who didn’t.

“However, as far as job titles go, it's important that people actually perceive the titles as conferring status. In other words, fancy titles that people perceive as being nothing more than just that would be unlikely to have positive consequences.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

This attitude could apply to valuing church staff, elected church officers, and volunteers. Do we follow Paul’s example in giving affirming titles those who serve with us? He publicly appreciated them and called them “fellow workers,” “beloved brothers,” “faithful ministers,” and “true partners” (Phil. 4:3; Col 4:7).

After NASA Apollo 11's incredible feat of three men on the moon in June of 1969, astronaut Michael Collins said, "All this is possible only through the blood, sweat, and tears of thousands of people… All you see are the three of us, but underneath the surface are thousands and thousands of others." According to author Catherine Thimmesh there were about 400,000 others who helped with the Apollo 11 mission.

In her book Team Moon, Thimmesh shares stories of these hidden heroes—spacesuit seamstresses, radio telescope operators, parachute designers and others who made it possible to get men to the moon, get them home, and let the rest of the world watch while it happened. At Kennedy Space Center, some 17,000 engineers, mechanics, soldiers, contractors and other workers set up the enormous missile for the launch. Then there were the "Two Bobs"—the guys in Houston monitoring just how little fuel was left in the lunar module during its descent to the surface. Team Moon also included a 24-year-old "computer whiz kid Jack Garman" who helped work through worrisome computer glitches during the Eagle 's landing. The computer code that ran all the systems was developed by a team of software engineers at MIT' led by Margaret Hamilton. Roughly 500 people worked on the space suit, including one seamstress who commented, "We didn't worry too much until the guys on the moon started jumping up and down. And that gave us a little bit of an eyebrow twitch."

No wonder astronaut Neil Armstrong would later say that as he took his first step on the moon he immediately thought about all those 400,000 people who had given him the opportunity to make that first step.

In an audacious display of teamwork, 58 Indian Army Service Corp (ASC) soldiers set a world record when they collectively rode one motorcycle in excess of 1200 meters. On a runway of Yelehanka Air Force Station outside Bengaluru, driver Subedar Rampal Yadav piloted a 500 cc Royal Enfield specially engineered with a massive platform to accommodate Major Bunny Sharma and his platoon, bedecked in the national colors of saffron, white and green.

Nicknamed the Tornadoes, this ASC stunt team is internationally known for their feats of derring-do. They currently hold 19 different world and national records, and with this latest ride they broke their own previous record of 56 men, set back in 2010. It was formed in 1982, for the purpose of touring to promote national integration and adventurism.

The combination of balance, coordination and cohesion required for such an endeavor does not necessarily come easily. Only after twice wiping out — in spectacular fashion, no less - did the team make a successful third attempt.

Potential Preaching Angles: It's amazing what you can accomplish when you work together, true teamwork requires humility (like sacrificing desires or like personal space), future-oriented leadership requires a higher point of view

In their book, Known, Dick and Ruth Foth write that:

During the Great Depression, nine ordinary young men from the University of Washington accomplished had an extraordinary dream. They labored together in effort and accountability, as an embryonic rowing team, to take on much stronger rowing programs like Cal Berkeley and Harvard and Yale. And they won.

In his magnificent book The Boys in the Boat. Daniel James Brown describes what the boys' coach saw as they worked with and for each other: "He … heard them declare their dreams and confess their shortcomings. … He learned to see hope where a boy thought there was no hope. … He observed the fragility of confidence and the redemptive power of trust."

Brown details the grueling training schedules, early mornings and late nights, the lack of money, and the desire to quit. He examines the lives and the challenges of each of the young athletes and their years-long striving for victory. Then he tells what the coach discovered as nine friends fought for their dream:

He came to understand how those almost mystical bonds of trust and affection, if nurtured correctly, might lift a crew above the ordinary sphere, transport it to a place where nine boys somehow became one thing—a thing that could not quite be defined, a thing that was so in tune with the water and the earth and the sky above that, as they rowed, effort was replaced by ecstasy. It was a rare thing, a sacred thing, a thing devoutly to be hoped for.

In 1936, those nine young men took their rowing shell, the Husky Clipper, to Hitler's Germany to take on the world in the Olympics. And they brought home the gold. Shared dreams push us to excel.

In his book about famous sports team captains titled The Captain Class, Sam Walker examines the hidden forces that create the world's greatest sports teams. Here's one of his surprising findings about one of the characteristics that makes for a great team captain: they took care of tough, unglamorous tasks. In other words, they were rarely stars. They did the grunt work.

Walker gives the following example:

In 1962, when Brazil won its second consecutive World Cup, its team's unquestioned star was Pelé, arguably the greatest soccer player of all time. The prevailing view is that Pelé's brilliance, expressed by the 77 goals he scored, was the team's driving force. But Pelé was never made captain—nor did he lobby for the job. The team's primary leader was Hilderaldo Bellini, a tough and humble central defender who, during a nine-year stint with Brazil, never scored a goal.

Bellini was a functionary, not a star. While Pelé attended to the pressures of celebrity, Bellini took care of the daily, hourly grunt work of unifying the team. He cleaned up their mistakes with his fearless defense, often leaving the pitch bruised and bloodied, and calmly urged them forward when their confidence sagged.

Walker concludes, "The captains on my list were rarely exceptional talents. … The leader's job wasn't to dazzle on the field but to labor in the shadows of the stars, to carry water for the team, to lead from the back.

Dr. Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology and the scientific adviser for Pixar's film Inside Out, claims that human touch is the "the foundations of human relationships." He explains, "Skin to skin, parent to child, touch is the social language of our social life … The foundation of all human relationship is touch. There are four years of touch exchanged between mother and baby … In the social realm, our social awareness is profoundly tactile."

Keltner was one of the co-authors for a study that looked at "celebratory touches" of pro basketball players, including "fist bumps, high-fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles." The researchers discovered that teams who players touched one another a lot did better than those teams whose players didn't. Keltner has concluded that touch lowers stress, builds morale, and produces triumphs—a chest bump instructs us in cooperation, a half-hug in compassion.