Resilience is a quality we manage to both ignore and misunderstand. We ignore it because it implies the presence of difficulty or pain. It is a reminder that we are vulnerable beings in a world that we do not ultimately control. We misunderstand it by confusing it with bravado, stamina or brute strength, even though it is none of these things.
Pastor Léonce B. Crump Jr. is a former NFL player and co-founder, with his wife Breanna, of Renovation Church in Atlanta. He is the co-author, with Ryan T. Hartwig and Warren Bird, of The Resilience Factor: A Step-by-Step Guide to Catalyze an Unbreakable Team (IVP, 2023). Crump and his co-authors make the case that resilience is one of the most important keys for contemporary Christian ministry, and one of the most important character qualities for a leader or a team to pursue.
Outreach editor-at-large Paul J. Pastor sat down with Crump to hear some of his personal story and unpack the concept of resilience for ministry leaders, all of whom, sooner or later, for better or for worse, are likely to need it.
Let’s begin with your story. Tell us about your early life, and how you began your career.
I was born and raised in Louisiana in a semi-religious home. It was not a devout Christian home by any stretch of the imagination. I would describe us as “part-time Catholics.” My dad wasn’t really settled spiritually, though, and experimented with everything from the teachings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses to those of the Mormons.
Anyway, my late younger brother and I had a basic moral upbringing. Be a good man and take care of your business. But despite that, there was deep hidden pain beneath the surface. When I was about eight years old, my mother started having terrible dreams. Dreams that turned out to be memories. She reached out to my grandmother, who said some horrible things to her in response, and the resulting internal crisis sent my mother over the edge. She attempted suicide, and miraculously the Lord preserved her life. It was the hand of God, and she knew it. She became a personally believing Christian shortly after that.
She would take us to church, while my dad would stay at home. This went on for quite a while until one of his friends began to share the gospel with him and invited him to his church. When I was 15, my father became a Christian. About a month before, I had become a Christian too.
Shortly after, I went from Louisiana to Oklahoma University to wrestle and play football. I joined a fraternity, and in the fog of college life I tried to live on my terms and lost Jesus for a little while. It turned bad though, and everything came crashing down at once. But the Lord never gave up on me. I rededicated my life to the Lord under the leadership of a man named Mike Wilson. He planted a small church between two bars on the corner of the campus. The church never grew that large; it was never going to grow large. But he was an exceptional pastor. He shepherded me, discipled me and raised me up in leadership and in the faith. He was the one to call me into vocational leadership.
I started helping him lead the college ministry there in Oklahoma. Then, I graduated and ended up first trying to make the Olympic [wrestling] team—I fell short by just a couple of matches—and then I went to the NFL.
Pastor Mike was instrumental in that as well. One of his childhood best friends was a sports agent at the time, and Mike said, “Hey, you gotta come and look at Léonce. He’s only played one season in Oklahoma, but he’s got all the tools.” So the agent came and worked me out. I ended up signing with the Atlanta Falcons first, then was traded to the New Orleans Saints where I did the bulk of my time in the NFL.
“Resilience is the ability to be firm and flexible at the same time. Firm in your convictions but flexible in your method. Firm in your vision but flexible in your application.”
In the middle of all that, I met Breanna at a local church my parents were attending. I knew right away I was going to marry her. I had no doubt in my mind. I had my first conversation with her in January, we were engaged in September and married in December.
We [began] ministering together. She led worship at a college ministry I was helping with. She’s one of the primary reasons I decided never to go back to football. In fact, my sports agent would joke all the time that she cut my career short, and to some degree, it’s true.
I was sitting at a crossroads at the time trying to decide if I wanted to spend the next 10 years of my life spread thin across multiple teams, or did I want to start a life with Breanna and work in ministry? Did I want to build something with someone? I knew I was called to ministry. So, together we chose that path.
Where did that lead you?
We moved to Tennessee for a couple of years in order to lead a college ministry. That was a key inflection point. My wife and I were in a town where the population was overwhelmingly white—over 99% in our area, if my memory is correct. I was one of two people of color in a church of almost 1,700. It was a challenging place for me to serve. The pastor’s heart was in the right place—he wanted to reach everybody—but we still faced serious challenges in this first ministry experience.
There were several significant lowlights and one highlight, all of which had to do with race. I had cornrows at the time, and I was a pastor on staff. One of the elders walked up to me and said, “When are you gonna cut that rapper hair?” Then one of my college students called me the N-word to my face. (He ended up getting saved and becoming an incredible partner in ministry. But that’s another crazy story!) Then, one of our other elders told his daughter that she couldn’t attend our college ministry because my wife (who is white) and I were unequally yoked.
I’m at a loss for words.
It was painful. But against all that hatefulness—cloaked in the name of Jesus no less—we saw a move of God. What started off as three languishing college students in this church of 1,700 grew to a couple hundred students inside of a year. They were all white, and they were all Appalachian country people. I could not have been further apart from them sociologically. But we found common ground at the foot of the cross. That really became the heartbeat of my call. It became the operating system of everything I wanted to do.
“Leaning into a storm forms a certain kind of person. If we want to be rooted and strong, we need to have resilience formed in us. And that requires difficulty.”
I realized that if God can do this there, then he can do this anywhere. If he can do it in Tennessee with me, then he can do it anywhere. That was a significant inflection point in my life and in my ministry.
And somehow that experience only clarified our calling. Breanna and I felt the call to plant Renovation Church while we were there. So we moved to Atlanta. We didn’t have a sending church or a team, and we didn’t have any money. We just felt that call of God, picked up and moved to the city.
This obviously brings us to the core topic of resilience. Talk about that concept. What is resilience, and what does it mean to be resilient in ministry?
As simply as I can put it, resilience is the ability to be firm and flexible at the same time. Firm in your convictions but flexible in your method. Firm in your vision but flexible in your application. Those two qualities together form the first aspect of resilience.
The second is the ability to learn lessons through our challenges, and then apply them to our future. I don’t hear a lot of people talk about resilience that way. In fact, Warren Bird and I, going back and forth on this book, started with him and me realizing that resilience is more than just being tough. It’s more than being able to take a punch. It’s more than being able to get knocked down and get up again. It’s also, who are you when you get up again? How do you take the lessons of the punch to the face and apply them to the future? Resilience involves that too.
Presently, especially on the other side of COVID-19, resilience is the key ingredient for not just surviving in ministry, but thriving.
We all want this quality, but developing it isn’t like taking a class. To what do you attribute your own growth in resilience?
We learn resilience, usually from watching others. While I had amazing experiences in sports and ministry, it was my parents that made all the difference to me.
Growing up, wrestling was my primary sport. But it almost wasn’t. In fact, I lost my first wrestling match. I tried to quit right then. But my dad said, “No, son. You finish this year. Learn all that you can, and at the end of it, if you don’t have a passion for this, then you don’t have to do it anymore. But we are not going to quit in the middle because we took a loss.”
It was cultivated for me over my whole lifetime. It was modeled for me. My family went through a lot of challenges over the years. I watched my parents be resilient people. They both came out of extreme poverty. By extreme, I mean my father was still using an outdoor toilet in high school. My mother’s roof was so worn that snakes would fall through it in the middle of the night.
My parents endured incredible hardship. But they didn’t just push through it; they actually became different people because of it. I think that, even if it were subconsciously, they worked that into the DNA of myself and my little brother.
One moment that stands out is directly related to my mother’s suicide attempt. I watched my mother face a horrid reality, virtually lose her mind as a result, regather herself, integrate her profound pain, and apply it not only to how she parented us but her own future career. She moved from journalism into clinical psychology on the other side of that tragedy.
“In our team, we fight against just keeping the peace. We really try to get to the core of things. This allows everyone the opportunity to grow.”
I watched my parents really work to rebuild their marriage on the other side as well. There were many tension points in the marriage that were unnamed and unidentifiable until those things surfaced. Today, they’ve been married for almost 50 years. But that was an inflection point for them. They had to decide if they were going to remain married, who they were going to be, and how they were going to rebuild. As their children, we were absorbing more than we understood. That absorption becomes understanding later in life.
During that same season, my dad lost his father. He was pretty certain that his father was not a Christian. So he went through a season really wrestling with whether he had really done all that he could to see my grandfather come to faith. There was a lot of guilt and grief that I watched him navigate, process, integrate and grow from.
The way they communicated with me [also] mattered so much. They would say things like, “Hey, we’re gonna get through this,” and “There’s always hope on the other side. You just gotta keep moving forward.” So simple. But that confidence mattered.
That is a good illustration of the core principle you mentioned—being “firm and flexible at the same time.” Tell us more about that.
I sometimes picture resilience with the image of a firmly rooted tree. I read this article years ago. Basically, a group of scientists grew trees under a dome. The trees grew tall; they sprouted leaves and branches just like trees outside of the dome. But every time they got to a certain size, they would just fall over—which wild trees obviously didn’t do. The scientists couldn’t figure this out at first. They had the right conditions, but the trees kept falling over. What they discovered on the back side of that experiment was that trees need the tension of the wind to deepen their roots and grow strong. Basically, trees need storms. What we might think of as weakening a tree—the wind—is making it stronger.
But our proclivity is to avoid storms at all costs. We don’t want to be in the storm. We don’t want to have to navigate real challenges. I am not a masochist by any means, but I have come to understand that leaning into a storm forms a certain kind of person. If we want to be rooted and strong, we need to have resilience formed in us. And that requires difficulty.
Fortunately difficulty is in good supply for most ministry leaders. Let’s talk about how resilience relates to ministry, especially in the context of a team.
Anyone in ministry knows that it is always harder than we imagined it would be. I could tell you plenty of horror stories, challenges and difficulties that we have faced over these years since planting our church here in Atlanta. I cannot say enough how crucial and critical resilience is to ministry, especially on this side of COVID-19.
What I have seen over these years of recovery from COVID-19 is that the men and women who have survived and are rebuilding ministries on the other side all have resilience as a key ingredient of their character. This is no shade or denigration on anyone who decided to walk away. Ministry burnout is real. I have thought about walking away more times than I can remember. Sometimes, I hear the Spirit of God in my heart asking me very pointed questions like, Have you lost vision for this place? Sometimes I hear my dad’s voice saying, Hey, son we don’t quit in the middle. Those things have kept me moving forward through some pretty large storms.
In general, the same dynamics apply to individuals and teams in terms of being resilient. But on a team, you have to talk about it. How many blows can a team take before it begins to fracture their unity and perspective, before they begin to lose that sense of cohesion? I have seen it happen. People who I never thought would stop serving together went their separate ways. I have found that it’s because they did not have resilience as a value in the team itself. It wasn’t a conscious value.
Expanding that further, I would say it is the same for churches. There are ways to cultivate resilience in the church. For example: How do you handle scandal? How do you handle conflict? How honest are you about the finances and the overall state of the church? Every one of those moments where it would be easy to downplay, spin or make something tough sound less than it is actually is a moment to build resilience in your people. It gives them an opportunity to say, Yes, I know this is going to be hard. I know this is going to be costly, but I’m in. We’ll go forward together. It’s facing that choice together successfully that matters.
“Trust is built when there is an opportunity to have a catalytic moment where someone shares their story, where you see into that person.”
One of the things I have experienced while traveling and talking with other pastors is that one of the great losses that people are navigating right now is not what you might think it is. Many churches are running at about 60% of what they were pre-COVID-19. But the loss in numbers is affecting them less than the loss of predictability.
I feel it too. Before COVID-19, I knew with relative surety that if I pulled “this” lever, “that” would happen; as I press “this” button, “that” would happen. I knew that new families moved into Atlanta during the summer. I knew that fall was going to be our growth season right up until the week before Thanksgiving. And then I knew we would taper off through December. We’d have a big bump at Christmas, it would go quiet again until the first of February, and that would run hard through Mother’s Day. It was a fairly predictable pattern. Now, there is no predictability.
This year, on Labor Day weekend, we had our highest attendance in the month of September. And one of the highest in the fall. How can you predict that? We grew during the summer, but we have not grown that much during the fall.
This is the firm and flexible piece, right? I could just be firm and keep doing what I know to do and hope that it will produce different results. Or I could be flexible and have no grounding, or any kind of plumbline that helps me to navigate. Or I can work to be both.
Being both allows me to maintain conviction and integrity. That’s the word, integrity. I maintain the integrity of the substance while folding and bending around and into the new reality. That’s been the hardest part on the other side of COVID-19.
Is there a different dynamic when you are leading a team? What have you learned about cultivating resilience in your team members?
I would say it’s the same as how I explained the congregation, only in a microcosm: inviting conflict and then inviting reconciliation. That builds spiritual maturation/growth on the other side of that. Putting challenges in front of us that feel impossible and that we know will be costly and stretch our capacity. And then deciding to take that on as a team. Ensuring that we have a consistent understanding of shared language and behavior.
One of our team values is radical candor. That costs. It costs to operate with other adults in the realm of radical candor. Because we live in a world where you don’t say what you are actually feeling or how that actually affected you. Instead, we just try to keep the peace. In our team, we fight against just keeping the peace. We really try to get to the core of things. This allows everyone the opportunity to grow. This allows us to build resilience together.
One of our ethics is that we move toward the conflict. Whether it is on the team or in the church, we move toward the conflict. We don’t put it off, we don’t look at our calendar and figure out how to stay busy for the next 90 days. These are all temptations, but as we have grown as a resilient team, the people who are with us in 2023 (I keep mentioning COVID-19 because that was a big transition for us) are people I believe I can run with forever.
We worked hard to grow that quality in our team even before Warren, Ryan and I wrote [The Resilience Factor]. There were themes that were already percolating in our team that ended up fleshing themselves out in the book.
Trust must be critical to this.
There is a huge element of trust. I think the quickest way to begin to build trust is through shared story. We extend trust by sharing our stories. When trust is extended, there is an opportunity to keep it or to violate it. That, to me, is at the core. We are building relationships here. Real trust is not built through trust falls or stuff like that, nor through hours and hours of repetitious sharing. Trust is built when there is an opportunity to have a catalytic moment where someone shares their story, where you see into that person. Where you see what makes them tick and how they are wired. Then, that trust is kept. It’s built out as you’re working in the trenches together and showing predictability of character and behavior. That is how trust is formed and, eventually, how resilience is formed as that trust is tested and proven over the course of time.
“What we want to do is integrate the difficulty, learn from it, and become better. We want to build a stronger team.”
Forgive a football player for making a football analogy, but this is Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski. Brady knew what would happen if he threw the ball in Gronk’s direction. He knew. This was [Michael] Jordan and [Scottie] Pippen. You watch these guys together in these old videos, and there has never been anything else like it. As far as dynamic duos go, there has never been anything like Michael and Scottie. That’s because time in the trenches, shared story and predictable patterns put them in a place where they trusted each other absolutely without hesitation.
I mean, the ball would be going to [an empty space]. There are old games I’ve watched where Michael is passing the ball to no one, and suddenly Scottie’s there to get the ball. He knows that Scottie’s going to be there to get the ball because