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Let's End This Era of Leadership, Part 3
Primus Inter Pares: How to Build a Team When You Have Nothing to Work With
By Jame Bolds
If you read Part 2, you know I'm not interested in piling on solo pastors. You're already carrying enough. What I am interested in is giving you a way out of a model that's costing you more than it should. And the way out isn't a bigger budget or a better denomination or a miracle hire. It starts smaller than that. A lot smaller.
But before I give you the research, let me rant for a minute. Because once you see this pattern, you can't unsee it. Consider this your warning.
My Observational Rant
Go look at a church staff page right now. I'll wait.
Notice anything? The senior pastor is usually ten to fifteen years older than everybody else, is the founder, and is almost always the most credentialed person in the room. Every time. And it's usually a he.
Now I want to be honest about my starting place. I'm a cynical academic. So here's my cynical academic question: why do we keep building teams where the person at the top is fifteen years older than everybody else?
I know, I know. Budget. Pipeline. We raise our own people from within. Sure. Maybe. But let me say what everybody sees and nobody says. The lead pastor almost never hires anyone as strong as he is. And he definitely doesn't hire anyone stronger.
I can already hear it. 'We hire from within.' 'We want our staff to have our DNA.' 'We believe it's the biblical model of 2 Timothy 2:2.' I call nonsense.
Look, 2 Timothy 2:2 is about faithful men teaching faithful men. It is not a hiring policy. It is not an org chart. And 'our DNA' is doing a lot of organizational work for a phrase that mostly means people who won't push back. That's not pipeline. That's not budget. That's a choice. A very deliberate, very consistent, very understandable, and very problematic choice. It is built to keep the leader in control. And it works. Until it doesn't.
Max Weber called this charismatic authority, a structure where leadership derives from the personality and perceived extraordinary qualities of one individual rather than from a system, a team, or a shared mission. Weber's point wasn't that charismatic leaders are bad. His point was that charismatic authority is inherently unstable. When the person is gone, the authority goes with them. The institution built around a personality does not outlast that personality. You and I both know that is already happening in churches across this country.
So what am I calling for? End the Great Man theory. End the Rule of the 49%. End command and control. Give away your authority and work as a team. A real team. And if you are a solo pastor grinding through your community with nothing but faith and a calendar, I see you. I have been there. You are my hero. Start small. Find some volunteers. Find someone for $125 a week who takes one thing off your plate. That is how it starts. One person. One chair. One conversation.
But First, the Theology
A critique I take seriously is this: my site is economic theology, but my evidence tends to come from organizational management rather than Scripture. That's a fair charge. So before the research stack, here's the biblical theological observation. Because it turns out the argument for team-based leadership isn't just smart management. It's ancient.
Acts 6 is the first recorded leadership crisis in the church. The Jerusalem congregation is growing fast, the apostles are overwhelmed, and widows are being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. The solution is not to find a better apostle. The solution is to build a team. Seven men, full of the Spirit and wisdom, are appointed to carry the practical work so the apostles can focus on prayer and the ministry of the Word. This is not a demotion of leadership. It is a distribution of it. The church grows precisely because the senior leaders gave authority away rather than hoarding it. That's Acts 6. That's the first organizational decision the church ever made.
And it looks nothing like the Great Man theory.
Acts 15 gives us the phrase I've been building this whole series around. The Jerusalem Council is convened to settle the question of Gentiles and the Law. It's the biggest theological argument the early church ever had. Here's how they handle it. Peter speaks. Barnabas and Paul report. And then James renders the judgment. Not Peter, who was arguably the most prominent apostle in the room. James, the local leader in Jerusalem, who wasn't even one of the twelve. The decision is then ratified by the whole council.
Read that again. Peter was first. James decided. The council confirmed.
That is not a flat structure where nobody leads. That is not a monarchy where one person decides everything. That is a team structure where the leader leads without hoarding. First among equals. Primus inter pares. In the text. Two thousand years before McKinsey wrote a word about it.
And here's the thing nobody preaches on: Peter didn't sulk. He didn't pull rank. He didn't remind everybody that Jesus gave him the keys. He made his argument, James made the call, the council confirmed it, and the church moved forward. That's what psychological safety looks like in the first century. That's what a real team does.
And 1 Corinthians 12 names the theological principle underneath all of it. One body, many parts. No one person is the whole body. The eye cannot say to the hand, I don't need you. The head cannot say to the feet, I don't need you. Paul is not writing poetry here. He is making an organizational argument. The body functions because each part carries its own responsibility. When one part tries to be the whole body, the body breaks down. The Duke data from Part 2 is just the medical confirmation of what Paul already knew.
The Research Stack
I want you to have stories and data to make this argument to your board, your elder team, your skeptical spouse, or whoever pushes back when you say you need people around you. So here's the research.
I. Safety First. In 1999, last century, Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson studied medical teams and expected the best performing teams to make the fewest mistakes. The opposite was true. High-performing teams reported more errors because they felt safe enough to say so. Nobody was hiding mistakes to avoid getting in trouble. My corporate psychologist wife was sitting on the couch next to me while I was writing this and said, 'Yes, of course. It's trust theory. People will trust you more if you're honest about your shortcomings.' She's usually right. I just don't always tell her that. Edmondson called this psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Google's Project Aristotle confirmed it was the single most important factor in team effectiveness. More than skill. More than experience. More than how smart everybody was. Here's the bottom line: a team that can't tell the leader he's wrong isn't a team. It's a fan club. And fan clubs feel great. They just don't move anything.
II. Mindshare. Social psychologist Daniel Wegner introduced Transactive Memory Systems in the late 1980s. No single brain can hold everything a complex organization needs. High-functioning teams build a shared cognitive system where each person carries specialized knowledge and everyone knows who to ask. The group ends up smarter than any of its individuals. I found myself a little convicted reading this. I've been the pastor who needed to know everything, be copied on everything, weigh in on everything. I told myself it was good stewardship. It wasn't. I called nonsense on myself. The research suggests it was a bottleneck. That's a kind word for what it probably actually was. Sometimes I couldn't get out of my own way. Don't believe me it just happened last week. Talk to Stuart about it... anyway.
III. Design Then Build. McKinsey studied over 100 global teams and found that nearly 75% of cross-functional teams are functionally dysfunctional. Three out of four. The healthy 25% had three things in common: clear roles, real trust, and distributed leadership. The senior leaders in those organizations weren't the hub of all activity. They were architects. They built the system. They didn't become it. Ron Friedman's research in Harvard Business Review found that of the three psychological needs driving team performance, relatedness is the hardest to build and the most important. You can train competence. You can create structures for autonomy. But you can't manufacture genuine connection. It has to grow. And it only grows in teams.
So before you build anything, ask yourself this: do you genuinely like the people you work with? Would you go to the beach with them on Saturday? Do you call them on a random Tuesday night at 9 o'clock to share something ridiculous that happened? You spend more time with your team than your family. Common sense says you actually have to like them. And remember, pastors, you don't hire a human doing. You hire a human being.
So. What Do You Actually Do?
The Latin tradition, rooted in the early church council structure, has a phrase for this: primus inter pares. First among equals. Not a flat structure where nobody leads. A team structure where the leader leads without hoarding. You're still first. You're just not alone. And the difference between those two things is everything.
a.) Name the chair, not the person. One page. One job. Specific hours, specific responsibility. 'We need someone with graphic design experience, three hours a week, one check-in a month.' Post it. Say it from the platform. 'We need help' gets zero response every time. I've watched pastors say it for years and stare into the void. Name the chair and the right person tends to find their way to it.
b.) Define reality in public. Say it out loud: 'I'm doing this alone and I can't keep doing it alone.' From the platform. In an email. Wherever your people actually are. That's not weakness. It's an invitation. And the people who respond tend to be exactly who you need.
c.) Find the person already showing up. Who sets up chairs without being asked? Who stays late? Who asks the kind of questions that make you think harder? Buy them coffee. Ask them something specific: 'Would you be willing to own this one thing?' Not help out. Own it. One committed person with one clear role changes your trajectory more than you'd expect. It really does.
In Part 4, I'll show you what this looks like in practice. What I'm trying, and I want to sit with that word, to build is a primus inter pares team. I'm doing it with Stuart Ross, Jennifer Bolds, Luke Dollyhite, Crystal Agnew, Charlie Self, Stephen Lentz, my attorney, my accountant, Jeremy Brown, and the boards of both Pathmakers Foundation and Victory Church.
Is it perfect? Really...No. There's a thing called humans that gets in the way. But we try. And when we try together, really together, it works. More than it doesn't. Considerably more.
I don't have all of this figured out. I want to be honest about that. I'm a development economist writing about team psychology, which is a little like a cardiologist giving dental advice. Directionally correct, probably. But here's what I know for certain: the leader who insists on carrying it all alone isn't protecting the mission. They're limiting it.
Name the chair. Define reality. Find the person already showing up. And then start building something that can outlast you. That's been the point all along.
Let’s create a path. I believe in you.
+PJB
References
1. Acts 6:1-7; Acts 15:13-21; 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 (ESV).
2. Amy C. Edmondson, 'Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,' Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1999): 350-383.
3. Daniel M. Wegner, 'Transactive Memory: A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind,' in Theories of Group Behavior, eds. Brian Mullen and George R. Goethals (New York: Springer, 1987), 185-208.
4. Ron Friedman, '5 Things High-Performing Teams Do Differently,' Harvard Business Review, October 21, 2021.
5. McKinsey & Company, 'Go, Teams: When Teams Get Healthier, the Whole Organization Benefits,' McKinsey Quarterly, October 2024.
6. Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 241-245.
Primus Inter Pares: How to Build a Team When You Have Nothing to Work With
By Jame Bolds
If you read Part 2, you know I'm not interested in piling on solo pastors. You're already carrying enough. What I am interested in is giving you a way out of a model that's costing you more than it should. And the way out isn't a bigger budget or a better denomination or a miracle hire. It starts smaller than that. A lot smaller.
But before I give you the research, let me rant for a minute. Because once you see this pattern, you can't unsee it. Consider this your warning.
My Observational Rant
Go look at a church staff page right now. I'll wait.
Notice anything? The senior pastor is usually ten to fifteen years older than everybody else, is the founder, and is almost always the most credentialed person in the room. Every time. And it's usually a he.
Now I want to be honest about my starting place. I'm a cynical academic. So here's my cynical academic question: why do we keep building teams where the person at the top is fifteen years older than everybody else?
I know, I know. Budget. Pipeline. We raise our own people from within. Sure. Maybe. But let me say what everybody sees and nobody says. The lead pastor almost never hires anyone as strong as he is. And he definitely doesn't hire anyone stronger.
I can already hear it. 'We hire from within.' 'We want our staff to have our DNA.' 'We believe it's the biblical model of 2 Timothy 2:2.' I call nonsense.
Look, 2 Timothy 2:2 is about faithful men teaching faithful men. It is not a hiring policy. It is not an org chart. And 'our DNA' is doing a lot of organizational work for a phrase that mostly means people who won't push back. That's not pipeline. That's not budget. That's a choice. A very deliberate, very consistent, very understandable, and very problematic choice. It is built to keep the leader in control. And it works. Until it doesn't.
Max Weber called this charismatic authority, a structure where leadership derives from the personality and perceived extraordinary qualities of one individual rather than from a system, a team, or a shared mission. Weber's point wasn't that charismatic leaders are bad. His point was that charismatic authority is inherently unstable. When the person is gone, the authority goes with them. The institution built around a personality does not outlast that personality. You and I both know that is already happening in churches across this country.
So what am I calling for? End the Great Man theory. End the Rule of the 49%. End command and control. Give away your authority and work as a team. A real team. And if you are a solo pastor grinding through your community with nothing but faith and a calendar, I see you. I have been there. You are my hero. Start small. Find some volunteers. Find someone for $125 a week who takes one thing off your plate. That is how it starts. One person. One chair. One conversation.
But First, the Theology
A critique I take seriously is this: my site is economic theology, but my evidence tends to come from organizational management rather than Scripture. That's a fair charge. So before the research stack, here's the biblical theological observation. Because it turns out the argument for team-based leadership isn't just smart management. It's ancient.
Acts 6 is the first recorded leadership crisis in the church. The Jerusalem congregation is growing fast, the apostles are overwhelmed, and widows are being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. The solution is not to find a better apostle. The solution is to build a team. Seven men, full of the Spirit and wisdom, are appointed to carry the practical work so the apostles can focus on prayer and the ministry of the Word. This is not a demotion of leadership. It is a distribution of it. The church grows precisely because the senior leaders gave authority away rather than hoarding it. That's Acts 6. That's the first organizational decision the church ever made.
And it looks nothing like the Great Man theory.
Acts 15 gives us the phrase I've been building this whole series around. The Jerusalem Council is convened to settle the question of Gentiles and the Law. It's the biggest theological argument the early church ever had. Here's how they handle it. Peter speaks. Barnabas and Paul report. And then James renders the judgment. Not Peter, who was arguably the most prominent apostle in the room. James, the local leader in Jerusalem, who wasn't even one of the twelve. The decision is then ratified by the whole council.
Read that again. Peter was first. James decided. The council confirmed.
That is not a flat structure where nobody leads. That is not a monarchy where one person decides everything. That is a team structure where the leader leads without hoarding. First among equals. Primus inter pares. In the text. Two thousand years before McKinsey wrote a word about it.
And here's the thing nobody preaches on: Peter didn't sulk. He didn't pull rank. He didn't remind everybody that Jesus gave him the keys. He made his argument, James made the call, the council confirmed it, and the church moved forward. That's what psychological safety looks like in the first century. That's what a real team does.
And 1 Corinthians 12 names the theological principle underneath all of it. One body, many parts. No one person is the whole body. The eye cannot say to the hand, I don't need you. The head cannot say to the feet, I don't need you. Paul is not writing poetry here. He is making an organizational argument. The body functions because each part carries its own responsibility. When one part tries to be the whole body, the body breaks down. The Duke data from Part 2 is just the medical confirmation of what Paul already knew.
The Research Stack
I want you to have stories and data to make this argument to your board, your elder team, your skeptical spouse, or whoever pushes back when you say you need people around you. So here's the research.
I. Safety First. In 1999, last century, Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson studied medical teams and expected the best performing teams to make the fewest mistakes. The opposite was true. High-performing teams reported more errors because they felt safe enough to say so. Nobody was hiding mistakes to avoid getting in trouble. My corporate psychologist wife was sitting on the couch next to me while I was writing this and said, 'Yes, of course. It's trust theory. People will trust you more if you're honest about your shortcomings.' She's usually right. I just don't always tell her that. Edmondson called this psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Google's Project Aristotle confirmed it was the single most important factor in team effectiveness. More than skill. More than experience. More than how smart everybody was. Here's the bottom line: a team that can't tell the leader he's wrong isn't a team. It's a fan club. And fan clubs feel great. They just don't move anything.
II. Mindshare. Social psychologist Daniel Wegner introduced Transactive Memory Systems in the late 1980s. No single brain can hold everything a complex organization needs. High-functioning teams build a shared cognitive system where each person carries specialized knowledge and everyone knows who to ask. The group ends up smarter than any of its individuals. I found myself a little convicted reading this. I've been the pastor who needed to know everything, be copied on everything, weigh in on everything. I told myself it was good stewardship. It wasn't. I called nonsense on myself. The research suggests it was a bottleneck. That's a kind word for what it probably actually was. Sometimes I couldn't get out of my own way. Don't believe me it just happened last week. Talk to Stuart about it... anyway.
III. Design Then Build. McKinsey studied over 100 global teams and found that nearly 75% of cross-functional teams are functionally dysfunctional. Three out of four. The healthy 25% had three things in common: clear roles, real trust, and distributed leadership. The senior leaders in those organizations weren't the hub of all activity. They were architects. They built the system. They didn't become it. Ron Friedman's research in Harvard Business Review found that of the three psychological needs driving team performance, relatedness is the hardest to build and the most important. You can train competence. You can create structures for autonomy. But you can't manufacture genuine connection. It has to grow. And it only grows in teams.
So before you build anything, ask yourself this: do you genuinely like the people you work with? Would you go to the beach with them on Saturday? Do you call them on a random Tuesday night at 9 o'clock to share something ridiculous that happened? You spend more time with your team than your family. Common sense says you actually have to like them. And remember, pastors, you don't hire a human doing. You hire a human being.
So. What Do You Actually Do?
The Latin tradition, rooted in the early church council structure, has a phrase for this: primus inter pares. First among equals. Not a flat structure where nobody leads. A team structure where the leader leads without hoarding. You're still first. You're just not alone. And the difference between those two things is everything.
a.) Name the chair, not the person. One page. One job. Specific hours, specific responsibility. 'We need someone with graphic design experience, three hours a week, one check-in a month.' Post it. Say it from the platform. 'We need help' gets zero response every time. I've watched pastors say it for years and stare into the void. Name the chair and the right person tends to find their way to it.
b.) Define reality in public. Say it out loud: 'I'm doing this alone and I can't keep doing it alone.' From the platform. In an email. Wherever your people actually are. That's not weakness. It's an invitation. And the people who respond tend to be exactly who you need.
c.) Find the person already showing up. Who sets up chairs without being asked? Who stays late? Who asks the kind of questions that make you think harder? Buy them coffee. Ask them something specific: 'Would you be willing to own this one thing?' Not help out. Own it. One committed person with one clear role changes your trajectory more than you'd expect. It really does.
In Part 4, I'll show you what this looks like in practice. What I'm trying, and I want to sit with that word, to build is a primus inter pares team. I'm doing it with Stuart Ross, Jennifer Bolds, Luke Dollyhite, Crystal Agnew, Charlie Self, Stephen Lentz, my attorney, my accountant, Jeremy Brown, and the boards of both Pathmakers Foundation and Victory Church.
Is it perfect? Really...No. There's a thing called humans that gets in the way. But we try. And when we try together, really together, it works. More than it doesn't. Considerably more.
I don't have all of this figured out. I want to be honest about that. I'm a development economist writing about team psychology, which is a little like a cardiologist giving dental advice. Directionally correct, probably. But here's what I know for certain: the leader who insists on carrying it all alone isn't protecting the mission. They're limiting it.
Name the chair. Define reality. Find the person already showing up. And then start building something that can outlast you. That's been the point all along.
Let’s create a path. I believe in you.
+PJB
References
1. Acts 6:1-7; Acts 15:13-21; 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 (ESV).
2. Amy C. Edmondson, 'Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,' Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1999): 350-383.
3. Daniel M. Wegner, 'Transactive Memory: A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind,' in Theories of Group Behavior, eds. Brian Mullen and George R. Goethals (New York: Springer, 1987), 185-208.
4. Ron Friedman, '5 Things High-Performing Teams Do Differently,' Harvard Business Review, October 21, 2021.
5. McKinsey & Company, 'Go, Teams: When Teams Get Healthier, the Whole Organization Benefits,' McKinsey Quarterly, October 2024.
6. Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 241-245.
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