Team

The Bible teaches us that it is not good for us to be alone, we need others. Researchers now know that we are wired to be with and interact with others.

Our culture teaches us to focus on personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely exist as individual organisms. Our brains are built to help us function as members of a tribe. We are part of that tribe even when we are by ourselves, whether listening to music (that other people created), watching a basketball game on television (our own muscles tensing as the players run and jump), or preparing a spreadsheet for a sales meeting (anticipating the boss’s reactions). Most of our energy is devoted to connecting with others.

The church and small groups can learn something from a Swedish tradition called Fika. Pronounced “fee-kah,” the Swedish culture of breaking for coffee involves a deliberate pause to provide space and time for people to connect.

In Sweden, work life has long revolved around fika, a once- or twice-a-day ritual in which colleagues put away phones, laptops, and any shoptalk to commune over coffee, pastries, or other snacks.

Swedish employees and their managers say the cultural tradition helps drive employee well-being, productivity, and innovation by clearing the mind and fostering togetherness.

Many Swedish companies build a mandatory fika into the workday, while the Embassy of Sweden in Washington holds one for staff weekly. IKEA extols the virtues of fika: “When we disconnect for a short period, our productivity increases significantly.”

“Fika is where we talk life, we talk everything but work itself,” said Micael Dahlen, professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. The ritual helps drive “trivsel,” he says, a term that means a combination of workplace enjoyment and thriving. The concept is so fundamental to Swedish workplaces that many companies in Sweden have trivsel committees.

Pro quarterback Patrick Mahomes had just limped his way through a last-minute, game-winning drive in the 2023 AFC Championship when he gave the credit for his performance to someone that even the biggest Kansas City Chiefs fans had never heard of. “Julie WAS the reason I was the guy I was on the field today!” Mahomes wrote to his millions of followers on Twitter that night. Her full name is Julie Frymer.

Who is she and why is she so important to the team? She’s the assistant athletic trainer. Frymyer had one of the NFL’s most important jobs in the 2022-2023 season: She was in charge of putting Mahomes through rehab for his injured ankle and getting the star quarterback ready to play for a spot in the Super Bowl.

Hobbling through a nasty sprain that often requires weeks of recovery, Mahomes wasn’t just able to play against the Cincinnati Bengals. He was fantastic. He was clearly gimpy, grimacing through several plays, but he was mobile enough to make several key plays, including a crucial run setting up the last-second field goal that sent the Chiefs to the Super Bowl to face the Philadelphia Eagles.

Mahomes going out of his way to praise her was the first time most people in Arrowhead Stadium had ever heard the name Julie Frymyer, but the Chiefs knew her value long before the guy with a contract worth nearly half a billion dollars, might as well have given her the game ball.

Two researchers have found that success comes with a trap: It can cause teams to rely more on their “stars.” This makes the team less adaptable and more likely to get stuck in old ways of doing things. And, ultimately, it increases the chances of failure the next time around.

They started their research by looking at pro basketball teams. They examined teams in the NBA across more than 60,000 games, spanning 34 years. Leveraging motion-tracking-camera data, they looked at how teams’ passing patterns and shot distributions changed after wins and losses. Here’s their conclusion:

We found that after winning, teams became more reliant on their star players. Teams passed the ball about 6% more to the stars, and their shot distribution skewed 15% more toward the big performers. Although doubling down is intuitive (“We want to exploit what worked before”), it ended up decreasing teams’ chances of winning the next game. The increased reliance on the star players made teams more predictable to the next opponent and easier to defend—and therefore less likely to win the game … Our studies suggest that success threatens teams.

Their recommendation? Focus on the whole team, not just the stars. The researchers concluded, “When teams succeed, the credit is less likely to focus on specific performers, but rather on the team. Likewise, blame is less likely to be attributed solely to the stars, so the team can get a clearer picture of what went wrong.”

Sounds like the body of Christ!

The final straw in Pitt’s 11-year relationship with Angelina Jolie came in September 2016, when they fought about his drinking while aboard a private plane. Now, Pitt is committed to his sobriety. Pitt told a reporter, “I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges.” After she filed for divorce, Pitt spent a year and a half in Alcoholics Anonymous.

His recovery group was composed entirely of men, and Pitt was moved by their vulnerability. Pitt said, “You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard. It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself.”

Astonishingly, no one from the group sold Pitt’s stories to the tabloids. The men trusted one another, and in that trust, he found catharsis. “It was actually really freeing just to expose the ugly sides of yourself,” he said. “There’s great value in that.”

In 2018 Rosalind Picard, an MIT professor and follower of Jesus, helped invent a simple life-saving device that can be used by persons with epilepsy. It looks like a smart watch, and it is sold under the name Embrace.

Epileptic seizures take 3,000 lives per year in the United States. Most epileptic seizures pose a risk of asphyxiation. This can be prevented if somebody nearby ensures that the person’s airway remain open and the person is resting safely. But some seizures are so deep that the person’s body can completely shut down for lack of signals from the brain.

There is one noninvasive intervention that works far better than any other. It can interrupt the misfiring neurons and establish normal brain function within a few minutes. Another person needs to speak to you and gently touch you, ideally calling you by name.

This intervention must happen within a matter of minutes for the person to survive such a seizure. This means that the only person who can come to the rescue is someone nearby. The Embrace device is designed to alert the nearest person on a list of people the user trusts, ideally including close neighbors. People often cling to their cell phones in case a loved one should call with an emergency, but for this kind of emergency, a cell phone is of no use. Only the nearest person can do anything about it.

Surviving this kind of episode is possible if you have a neighbor you trust to speak to you and touch you and call you by name. It is possible, that is, if you and your neighbor are living a fully personal life. If you’re willing to know and be known by your neighbors and depend on them at the moment of profound vulnerability.

Suzanne Simard writes about ecosystems from the viewpoint of adaptation and evolution. But her comments pique the interest of those who love the diversity and interconnectedness of the Body of Christ. She writes:

We can think of an ecosystem of wolves, caribou, trees, and fungi creating biodiversity just as an orchestra of woodwind, brass, percussion, and string musicians assemble into a symphony. Or our brains, composed of neurons, axons, and neurotransmitters, produce thought and compassion. Or the way brothers and sisters join to overcome a trauma like illness or death, the whole greater than the sum of the parts.

The cohesion of biodiversity in a forest, the musicians in an orchestra, the members of a family growing through conversation and feedback, through memories and learning from the past. Through this cohesion, our systems develop into something whole and resilient.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Members of the body of Christ, with different personalities, gifts, and backgrounds are “being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit” (Eph. 2:19-22).

When Tate Morgan initially conceived of the event now known as the Gambler 500, it was nothing like what it is now. Back in 2014, Morgan had an idea for he and several friends to stage an informal race out in the woods with cheap cars. He figured that racing 500 miles around the Mount Hood wilderness in $500 cars would be a fun way to spend a weekend. Morgan said explaining the name, “It’s a gamble if you’re going to make it, it’s a gamble which way you’re going to go. It’s never a gamble if you’re going to have fun.”

But in 2016, it quickly threatened to spiral out of control. After a video from the event got 10 million views on Facebook, Morgan was inundated with requests from people to join. Law enforcement thought the Gambler 500 was a ring of racing outlaws, and Morgan was threatened with felonies if he didn’t shut the event down.

Still, the attention came at a time when Morgan needed a distraction. He’d recently quit his job after receiving a cancer diagnosis, and wanted to be intentional about spending time with friends and family. “What the heck,” he thought. “What happens if we just decide to let everybody come?”

So as a way of turning the event legit, he decided to turn it into a massive land clean-up. This year participants collected abandoned boats, hot tubs, burned hulks of cars, bags of household garbage, and a literal kitchen sink. By the end of the day, Gamblers had filled five large metal bins with trash.

Morgan now works full-time doing Gambler events, coordinating between the Bureau of Land Management and various partner organizations. Not only does the location change each year, but the attention on the original Gambler 500 has led to similar events all around the world. Morgan allows other groups to use the Gambler name as long as they don’t make any money from the event and adhere to the central tenets of the event--have fun racing, be inclusive, and rally people to help clean-up the area. And now all these years later, he has no regrets. “Six years later, I am cancer free, and we have thousands of people out here.”

When the subject of locker room leaders is raised among the Tennessee Titans, a few names immediately come up. Names like quarterback Ryan Tannehill, safety Kevin Byard, running back Derrick Henry. One that almost never is mentioned, but should be, is inside linebacker Jayon Brown.

Inside linebackers coach Jim Haslett said, “Jayon kind of takes over. He’s a natural leader.” Even though Brown leads, he doesn't "lord" it over his teammates. In a recent interview, he said he's not much of a "yeller" and tries not to embarrass people. Then Brown (now in his fifth year in the NFL) gave some wise advice for leaders:

I just lead by example. I just try to be a guy that can be counted on, hold my teammates [accountable], and they hold me accountable as well . . . It’s just nothing personal. We all want the best for each other. We’ve all got the same goals that we want to hit. It’s just keeping everybody accountable at a high level so we get to be the best we can be.

Gregory and Heidi Whitaker, missionaries to Cambodia, tell about the spiritual journey of a man named Yang:

Yang’s son, Mabt, belongs to the Bunong people, a tribal group in Cambodia. Mabt met the Lord when he moved to a city to continue his education and stayed with Christian dorm parents. For years, he was the only believer in his family.

During one of his visits to his home village, Mabt prayed in his home, welcoming the Holy Spirit and breaking the curses of the mountain gods. He then began playing the guitar and worshipping Jesus. As he sang, the high shelf holding the family idol crashed to the floor, and the idol shattered. His father, Yang, rushed in, saying, “My son, what have you done? Now I will not believe in anything. Not in the mountain gods, and not in your God.”

Yang held to that statement for years, before his heart softened toward the truth and he slowly turned to the Lord. During that time, his vision deteriorated. Yang had lost an eye to trauma decades earlier, and now his remaining eye was becoming cloudy. Mabt approached us to ask for advice, and we referred Yang to Mercy Medical Center for evaluation. He made the daylong trip by bus from the province and underwent successful cataract surgery.

After Yang returned home with restored vision, he was able to read the beautiful words of the Gospel in his own language for the first time. Yang has become a follower of Christ, and freely shares his story with other villagers. “I received my sight back, and then I could read God’s words for myself, and now I believe Jesus.”

It took a team effort of the Body of Christ to touch Yang’s life--from dorm parents to Bible translators to medical personnel.

Most people don't know about Samuel Pierpont Langley. In the early 20th century, many people were pursuing the dream of flight. And Samuel Pierpont Langley had, what we assume, to be the recipe for success. Langley was given $50,000 by the War Department to figure out this flying machine. Money was no problem. He held a seat at Harvard and worked at the Smithsonian and was extremely well-connected; he knew all the big minds of the day. He hired the best minds money could find and the market conditions were fantastic. The New York Times followed him around everywhere, and everyone was rooting for Langley. Then how come we've never heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley?

A few hundred miles away in Dayton, Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright, had none of what we consider to be the recipe for success. They had no money; they paid for their dream with the proceeds from their bicycle shop. Not a single person on the Wright brothers' team had a college education, not even Orville or Wilbur. And The New York Times followed them around nowhere.

The difference was, Orville and Wilbur were driven by a cause, by a purpose, by a belief. They believed that if they could figure out this flying machine, it would change the course of the world. Samuel Pierpont Langley was different. He wanted to be rich, and he wanted to be famous. He was in pursuit of the result. He was in pursuit of the riches. And lo and behold, look what happened. The people who believed in the Wright brothers' dream worked with them with blood and sweat and tears. The others just worked for the paycheck. They tell stories of how every time the Wright brothers went out, they would have to take five sets of parts, because that's how many times they would crash before supper.

And, eventually, on December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers took flight, and no one was there to even experience it. We found out about it a few days later. And further proof that Langley was motivated by the wrong thing: the day the Wright brothers took flight, he quit. He could have said, "That's an amazing discovery, guys, and I will improve upon your technology," but he didn't. He wasn't first, he didn't get rich, he didn't get famous, so he quit.

The "marshmallow test" is a classic research project that illustrates our lack of self-control and delayed gratification. For the study, the researcher would give a child a marshmallow, and tell them that they could eat the marshmallow OR they could wait until the researcher would return several minutes later, at which time they would get a second marshmallow. Videos abound on YouTube featuring kids, in successive versions of the original experiment, waiting, playing with, and sometimes eating the first marshmallow, forgoing their chances of a second marshmallow.

In January 2020, the results of a new version of the experiment were released. In this new version, kids were paired up, played a game together, and then were sent to a room and given a cookie with the promise of another if they could wait for it by not eating the first cookie. However, some of the kids were put in what researches called an "interdependent" situation in which they were told they would only get the second cookie if both they and their partner could wait and refrain from eating. The results showed that the kids who were depending on each other waited for the second cookie significantly more often.

According to researcher Rebecca Koomen, "In this study, children may have been motivated to delay gratification because they felt they shouldn't let their partner down, and that if they did, their partner would have had the right to hold them accountable."

Possible Preaching Angle:

This research suggests that indeed we are better together than we are in isolation.

Abdul Kalam, former President of India, once shared this powerful example of a vital quality of good leadership. In 1979, he was the Project Director of a mission to launch a satellite into orbit. Preparations for the event had gone on for nearly 10 years with much anticipation of a successful launch.

The satellite launch vehicle went into orbit, but after a while, it started malfunctioning and eventually crashed. As Abdul Kalam said, "The satellite that should have landed in orbit, landed in the Bay of Bengal!"

Abdul Kalam says that he was dreading the press conference as he would have to give answers for the massive failure. At that difficult moment however, his Chairman, Satish Dhawan, went with him to the press conference and took the responsibility and the criticism, for the failure. He went on to affirm and support the hard work done by his team with an assurance that they would succeed the next time around.

Sure enough, the following year, the satellite was launched successfully as predicted. However, at that moment of resounding success, this time around, Satish Dhawan requested Abdul Kalam to handle the press conference that was to follow.

In a moment of failure, Satish Dhawan stood by his team and took the blame for the failure. In the moment of success however, he stepped back and let his team receive the credit for the effort. It was a lesson Abdul Kalam would never forget. A good leader stands by his team in times of failure but lets them receive due credit in times of success!

The Bible says, "Do not withhold good from those who deserve it, when it is in your power to act" (Proverbs 3:27)

Belichick & Saban: The Art of Coaching, is a documentary that offers an exclusive look at their annual coaching retreat, where Bill Belichick and Nick Saban have an in-depth conversation about their interwoven history and coaching philosophies.

As they converse about changes in coaching over the span of 5 decades, they land on the topic of social media. Belichick is not a fan of social media. He once told reporters that he was not even on “SnapFace.” Belichick and Saban have this exchange:

Belichick: I hate social media. We get rid of it whenever we can. Do things where you don’t bring your phone, you just have a conversation with the other person in the eye instead of texting back and forth. But it’s the way of the world . . . It still comes back to fundamental relationships and communication and there’s no cell phones on the field. You better know what your teammate’s doing, he better know what you’re doing or, you know, you’re going to get beat.

Saban: And I think because of social media, they're getting a lot of their positive self-gratification … without looking somebody in the eye, without developing a relationship with them. And I think that’s a critical part that they all need to develop and you need it to have a team.

Belichick: No question. Who cares how many likes you get from 2000 people you don’t even know? There are 53 guys in the locker room. Those are the 53 that matter.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Many people are trying to get your attention. You and I must be able to identify the 53 that matter. The dozen that matter? The four that matter? The One who really matters?

In 1943, a young pastor was offered the opportunity to take over a popular Gospel Radio program called Songs in the Night. Since the cost of keeping the program on air was rather high, the pastor, who had a large vision to reach souls with the gospel, told his board that he would be willing to forgo part of his salary to help defray the costs involved. The suggestion was eventually accepted by the board.

The young pastor then approached a well-known Gospel singer, requesting him to sing and lead the choir on the program. After initially trying to back out, the singer eventually agreed to help out. That decision would change the course of his life and ministry forever! He later said, “It was the beginning – the humble beginning – of an unbelievable journey…It was exciting to be a part of something wonderful unfolding”.

The Gospel singer was George Beverly Shea and the young pastor’s name was Billy Graham.

Possible Preaching Angles: Similarly, when we take decisions that seek to glorify God, He will lead us to opportunities and open doors that only He can bring about. The God- honoring decisions we take will surely determine our destiny.

An article in The Wall Street Journal notes that many corporate employers are realizing they’ve missed one of the most important traits of leadership: humility. According to several recent studies, humble leaders inspire close teamwork, rapid learning, and high performance in their teams. The article defines a humble leader as someone who tends “to be aware of their own weaknesses, eager to improve themselves, appreciative of others’ strengths, and focused on goals beyond their own self-interest.” They can be highly competitive and ambitious. “But they tend to avoid the spotlight and give credit to their teams … They also ask for help and listen to feedback from others, setting an example that causes subordinates to do the same.”

Humble leaders have linked to lower turnover and absenteeism. Another research study found that teams with humble leaders performed better and did higher-quality work than teams whose leaders exhibited less humility.

The article notes one company in particular that values humble leaders—the apparel company Patagonia. They start scrutinizing job applicants for humility as soon as they walk through the door for interviews. Managers screening new recruits follow up by asking receptionists, “How did they engage at the front desk?” If staff members report disrespectful or self-absorbed behavior, “that can be a deal killer,” he says.

The company also asks potential leaders to talk about their failures. “If they say, ‘Wow, let me think about this, because there are a lot of times when I’ve messed things up,’ that says a lot,” he says. “If they have to pick among a lot of humble learning moments, that’s good.”

Eric Schlosser's book and then movie, Fast Food Nation, exposed the dark side of the fast-food industry. At one point, Schlosser described a food-production plant that runs twenty-four hours a day, 310 days a year, turning potatoes into French fries:

Conveyor belts took the wet, clean potatoes into a machine that blasted them with steam for twelve seconds, boiled the water under their skins and exploded the skins off. Then the potatoes were pumped into a preheat tank and shot through a Lamb Water Gun Knife. They emerged as shoestring fries. Four video cameras scrutinized them from different angles, looking for flaws. When a French fry with a blemish was detected, an optical sorting machine time-sequenced a single burst of compressed air that knocked the bad fry off the production line and onto a separate conveyor belt, which carried it to a machine with tiny automated knives that precisely removed the blemish. And then the fry was returned to the main production line.

Sprays of hot water blanched the fries, gusts of hot air dried them, and 25,000 pounds of boiling oil fried them to a slight crisp. Air cooled by compressed ammonia gas quickly froze them, a computerized sorter divided them into six-pound batches, and a device that spun like an out-of-control Lazy Susan used centrifugal force to align the French fries so that they all pointed in the same direction. The fries were sealed in brown bags, then the bags were loaded by robots into cardboard boxes, and the boxes were stacked by robots onto wooden pallets.

What's the end goal? Millions and millions of French fries that look and taste exactly the same. We like uniformity; God likes diversity within unity.

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.