Reconciliation, Cultural Intelligence, & the Church | Dr. A. Brian Leander | #iolglobal

Lead with Legacy™, the official podcast of IOL Global (Institute for Organizational Leadership), explores leadership that outlives titles and trends—rooted in integrity, conviction, and purpose.

In this episode, Amanda C. Chambers is joined by two special guests:

Dr. A. Brian Leander — author, practical theologian, professor at Berkeley School of Theology, and strategic partner with IOL Global

Dr. Jim Chambers — founder of IOL Global and lifelong leadership educator

Together, they share the story of how their relationship began, including a near-fatal accident that delayed their first connection, and how that partnership became a decades-long thread of mentoring, consulting, and calling.

They also discuss:

Why IOL Global was reopened as a legacy company

The heart behind “Serve God, Serve People”

Why cultural intelligence is a leadership responsibility in the church

What inspired Dr. Leander’s book Diversity-Oriented Churches

How reconciliation shapes leadership in diverse communities

Lessons from early church growth and organizational challenges

Leadership at the “confluence” moments when change is disruptive

Legacy as connection across dividing lines and generations

📘 Book + course resources 

Diversity-Oriented Churches: A Comprehensive Guide to Leading Ministries of Reconciliation - https://www.amazon.com/Diversity-Oriented-Churches-Comprehensive-Ministries-Reconciliation/dp/B0DK4JHVNL

Learn more about A. Brian Leander, P.h.D: https://www.abrianleander.com/

🔗 Learn more about IOL Global: iolglobal.com

If this conversation helped you, please like, subscribe, and share this episode with a leader who is navigating change with conviction.

#LeadWithLegacy #IOLGlobal #InstituteForOrganizationalLeadership #Leadership #FaithBasedLeadership #ServantLeadership #LegacyLeadership #ChurchLeadership #OrganizationalLeadership #CulturalIntelligence #Reconciliation #DiversityOrientedChurches #DEI #KingdomLeadership #StrategicLeadership #ChristianLeadership #LeadershipDevelopment #FaithAndWork #PurposeDrivenLeadership #BatesvilleArkansas

🎙️ Lead with Legacy™, IOL Global’s flagship podcast, features thoughtful conversations with leaders who are shaping culture, stewarding influence, and building legacies that matter.

Whether you are a business leader, nonprofit professional, entrepreneur, coach, or emerging leader, this channel exists to equip, inspire, and challenge you to lead well and leave things better than you found them.

🔔 Subscribe for leadership insights, honest conversations, and practical wisdom you can apply immediately.

🌐 Learn more at IOLGlobal.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Lead with Legacy, the official podcast of IOL Global. Here we will explore leadership that outlives titles and trends. Through conversations with faith-based and marketplace leaders, we will discuss integrity, conviction, and purpose. To learn more about us, visit us at iOL Global dot com. Hello, welcome to the Lead with Legacy Podcast. Today I am incredibly honored to be on with two very special guests. We have Dr. A. Brian Leander. Dr. Leander is an author, a practical theologian, a strategic partner with IOL, and a professor at the Berkeley School of Theology. I also have my dad, Dr. Jim Chambers, who is the founder of IOL Global. And for those of you who don't know, IOL stands for the Institute for Organizational Leadership. This company was originally started by my parents, Jim and Lynette Chambers. And it was started as Marketplace Resources and then turned into IOL and then IOL Global. And so I have reopened the company as a legacy company. We're going to talk a little bit about that in this session. So my first question for the two of you.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

I love telling this story. I don't know, it might have been about 20 years ago, maybe a little less than that, that I had finished up a master's in organizational leadership, and I thought, great, this is uh an opportunity to redirect myself. I my previous career was in the aviation industry. I'm helping to develop um terminals and relationships with all kinds of airlines and things, and it's a lot of fun. But I felt a sense of redirection. And so I finished my master's and I felt a calling towards leadership development, bringing leaders, particularly church leaders. What would it be to go alongside church leaders and help them to really think of themselves as organizational leaders? And then I thought, surely there must be somebody else doing this kind of work. And uh maybe I can find someone to mentor me. And then uh I found nothing for a while. And then it turns out that as I continued to search, I found Dr. Jim Chambers uh having um the good fortune that he lived in Georgia where I was at the time, and not not not very far away from where I lived. And I reached out and I was really super excited, and I thought he would surely pick up on the first ring when I called, and uh that is not what happened. I left several messages, and then I was a little discouraged because there wasn't very many other people who were really doing this as a consultant coming alongside these leaders. And then I got a call from your lovely mother, probably about two or three months after I left the messages. Your mother was very clever. She says, It is good to meet you. I just want to let you know, first of all, that uh we would have called you back sooner. But Jim was in a near fatal auto accident at just about the time that you called, and he was unable to take your call.

SPEAKER_02 3:09

And he was.

SPEAKER_00 3:11

And I'll let him tell you more of the story about what he was going through at the time that I called, but she was gracious. She said that once Jim is able to speak with me, he would he would be happy to call me back. And I'm gonna leave the rest of it to him just so he can kind of let y'all know what was really going on that I didn't, you know, I didn't know what was going on with him.

SPEAKER_01 3:30

Well, yeah, that was 2005, April 2005. The calls came in before that. But um I was on my way uh to a meeting in Tennessee when I had a a really bad accident and and uh put in the hospital for months on end with surgeries and all of that. So I didn't know anything about the calls until much later. But I was trying to, from the couch in my house where I'd been laying, make phone calls back to people and connect, and that's when I was able to reconnect and get connected with Brian, and then through a set of circumstances where I was able to I lived through that, thankfully. And then uh I remember going over and meeting with Brian and met with his family. I actually met his wife and kids, and it was like, you know, just an immediate connection. I realized once I met the family, I thought, wow, this yeah, this is a great relationship. And there was just something there that was, you know, hard to explain, doesn't match any normal patterns, but it was just a connection spiritually and emotionally almost immediately. And I said, I remember sitting in his house watching the girls play, and uh the uh girls were there, and and then um I thought, well, we got to do something together. And so that's when we started trying to find ways to work together. Anyway, it was just a very special time for me as well.

SPEAKER_02 5:01

Yeah, so I remember too. Um so I was working, I worked off and on with Iowa as I was growing up. And so I would have been about 24 at the time, I think. So that tells you how old I am now. And um, and I remember um I we we had our offices there, and I remember putting files together for Brian for him to go out to to his different um consulting jobs. And so yeah, it's been a long, long relationship.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Brian attended, I think he attended one of our very first consulting orientations where we had a group of people come in and you know everyone was just really impressed with what the Lord was doing in his life. And so then he and I took on some projects together, some churches that he brought to the table, and that was really positive, a wonderful experience working with some of the people that he already knew. And then that gave him an opportunity to kind of shadow me around and uh try to avoid my bad habits of consulting. But I think he learned all the good stuff and was able to filter out all the other stuff. I do remember one great trip we took, Brian, to uh Savannah together. Yes, that was a great trip to go over and connect with a large church client there in the Savannah area, and then we were able to come back and do some help with their reorganization. So it was just a lot of really good fun connections. And then, you know, just one last thing was what was exciting to me is Brian really wanted to go back to school. He was trying to work, trying to figure out, you know, what can I do? I got a family now. You had what, two girls and a son? Three girls, three girls and a son. And so it was like, I don't know what I can do, I don't know if this is possible, whatever. So we just talked through that, you know. I'm sure he talked to other people as well, ended up making, I think, the right decision to go back to school, make whatever sacrifices were um necessary to get his education done. And that's really paid off because it prepared him to get out into the real world and add value in an academic way as well as all his practical experience. So it was just great to be a part of that whole dialogue and watching what happens. Got a whole list of those people at IOL over the years that have decided to go back, pursue their dream, and they had to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to do it. But that's what leadership is about. It's not about position and title and hey, call me this and call me that. What most people don't understand is that the sacrificial journey that you have to make. You know, you have to say no to a whole lot of things in order to say yes to the things that God is calling you to do in terms of leadership. So I was glad to see that. And then I just followed his career, you know, all the way as he's gone. So we just stayed connected, sometimes closely, sometimes not so much.

SPEAKER_02 8:01

Yeah. And and we get we're gonna get to have another podcast with the two of you and one of your former clients from one of the churches that you worked with a long time ago reached out and asked if we could do a podcast. So that's pretty fun, actually. So we're gonna talk a little bit about what worked and what didn't work during that time, um, and how you kind of adjusted from there. So, real quick, you're both doctors um and and not medicine doctors. And so tell us really quickly what kind of doctoral degree you each have.

SPEAKER_00 8:28

So I went back to school after getting a master's in organizational leadership, and I went back to school and got a PhD from organ PhD in organizational leadership from Eastern University.

SPEAKER_02 8:39

Which makes the next question I'm gonna ask after this one really, really interesting as well. Dr. Chambers, how about you?

SPEAKER_01 8:44

Yeah, so mine was I finished um seminary. I did a couple of degrees in um in uh seminary language and literature. And then I just felt like, well, I went down to Emory to go to school in a PhD program in Atlanta, and I just didn't fit into that program. And so I ended up going down to Florida and getting a uh an EDD, a doctorate in higher education, applied research. And so I really shifted my focus to education, learning, and how organizations, how learning organizations are put together. So that became a real passion for me in doing that. And then I've done postdoctorate stuff after that.

SPEAKER_02 9:22

So both of you have been really, really strategic leaders for me. And I'm not really sure that I would be where I am today without the two of you. I know definitely without my, not without my dad for a few reasons, but Brian too, because I think following him over the years, seeing his interaction with my family, with the business, um, with his clients, with his family, and how he cherishes them and loves them. I think that is such a huge embodiment of what a leader is in learning and growing and developing. So that brings me to this question, Brian. We are now, IOL and you, um our team, are now serving in the strategic partnership together. And so let's talk about what made that feel aligned for you, how you reached out, why you reached out, and how we kind of got to this point where we are now.

SPEAKER_00 10:07

So, as Jim said, he and I that have had periods over the last 20 years now where we would speak more regularly, and then periods where we would go maybe one or two years and not connect at all. But the connection is always live. And the proof of that was that when I had my first book in manuscript, I had already gotten a contract, but I sent the proof off to Jim. And I thought, okay, just before this gets published, let me uh have Dr. Che first uh take a look at this and let me know if there are gonna be some challenges, pitfalls. And and of course, because he is a mentor to me, I was looking for some affirmation. I'll I'll admit that, okay.

SPEAKER_02 10:46

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

And and to him, it all made sense. Jim has a way of using the economy of words to say exactly what he wants to say when he wants to say it. So I felt affirmed that a book that that is challenging perceptions around diversity, equity, and inclusion in churches would be received by my mentor well. And that prior to that, I had not spoken to Jim directly in a few years. But not only did he affirm it, he immediately did what I call the Jim Chambers thing. He's very strategic. So he saw forward and and asked me questions related to what does this mean for you going forward. And as he was able to ask those questions, I felt the connection back to IOL. And I thought of asking him, what does IOL mean to him going forward? And that is where we saw a back together again, a legacy path, uh, passing things on to you, you developing IOL into something beyond even uh Jim's original vision, and it aligned with what I wanted to do professionally going forward in terms of becoming a voice as well as a strategic planning consultant, but a voice around leadership development for churches in this time and the time going forward.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

Yeah, I think it's good to it's good to go back and reflect a little bit. So the original vision of IOL was I was serving at Mount Perrin um church in Atlanta at the time as one of the pastors there, and um mostly doing teaching, education, leadership, development in some areas. And when I was exiting from there, my real heart was, and I had a lot of I had had a lot of clients before I left, helping them with their with the organization, the way churches were organized, the long-term planning, and so on. So the original goal uh of IOL was simply to um to be a helping agent. That's that's really all it was, was just to be uh help, to help churches, to help later it expanded into corporations, government, military, all other areas. But the original vision was to just be a helping agent for those who needed just a little assistance to do what they felt like called to do. So turning it over to Amanda after we closed it down for a while after Lynette's passing, just didn't have the heart for it anymore. I was just kind of going through Amanda was going through grieving our son. We went through a long, a long period there where we just didn't feel like we had much to say anymore about it. But then turning it over to her, what's interesting, the company is now moving in a in a bit of a different direction. But the original purpose of just helping leaders, helping organizations fulfill their vision, that's our goal. We're we're like in the scripture where it talks about the gift of helps. You know, there's this whole gift of just coming alongside, supporting, encouraging, providing services that help someone else achieve their vision. That's what IOL started out as, and that's what it's back to now. So when Brian reached out to me about the book, Mann and I were just in the process of discussing the future and whether she wanted to take on the role that she has now or whatever. So Brian was an absolute immediate connection. There's a couple of other people that we'll have on the podcast that fall into the same category, but Brian was on my uh front burner because of his book and what I saw, the potential there, which really excited me. I mean, it it just, you know, it couldn't be a better timing. Churches need to wrestle with this. So that kind of gives you a little background perspective. And we started out, excuse me, as a helping organization. That's our vision, that's our goal. Our original mission statement was to improve the organizational effectiveness of our clients. That's all. That's all we're here to do. So Brian coming back on board as a client, that was exciting. But Brian coming on as a partner again, working together, that's what really kind of brought me back into the mix.

SPEAKER_02 15:09

Yeah, and I can speak to that a little bit too, because it's very much the same mission. Um, you'll hear me speak a little bit about this on some other podcasts, and and we've all talked about this as well as excuse me, when um I finally made the decision to do this, to kind of take over the company and and kind of re reignite it. I just really felt the Holy Spirit was saying, you know, I want this tagline to be serve God, serve people. That's been the mission all along, right? But I want you to, I want you to be the catalyst that says it. And it was a little scary in the beginning, you know, because I've been in corporate for a long time now. There was a little wrestling there, but you know, listening to that and and working through that and getting that in our mission statement, in our tagline, it's true. That really is what we're here to do is to serve God and serve people. Um, and so God has just really blessed that and brought just the right people and just the right times. Brian and I were connected on LinkedIn and I had just put one little ad out saying, hey, or I think I sent him a message that, hey, you know, I was doing this. If you knew of anybody that, you know, might be interested in in talking to me, let me know. And he immediately was like, I want to call with you. Let's talk about it. And he was talking about his book, and it's gonna show up backwards, but it's diversity and oriented churches. You can see it in the background with him. It's amazing. And I'm gonna let him speak a little to that. But the strategic partnership that we we chose to enter in here was just so logical. It was so God driven. Um, it was so kingdom driven. We're trying to move towards today's day and age and do some more online teaching, online learning, but expand from that and get a more human and personal touch. And and we'll speak more to that later. Brian will be back on and we'll talk about some of the things that we're launching for him in the next couple of months. But we're taking what IOL originally was, which was amazing, and we're kind of ramping it up for today's age, um, the digital age, the age that we're moving into with AI, utilizing the resources that we have there, but also putting a really human element to all of that as well. So I am going to lead into your book, Brian. What led you to write this book, Diversity Oriented Churches, and what leadership challenge or challenges, because I think there's a few in there, were you hoping to address with it?

SPEAKER_00 17:25

So I was led by wanting to to do a doctoral dissertation that I thought was relevant and and also uh consistent with the what I believe to be maybe the unique thread that runs through my life. And so I was at Eastern University back in 20 uh finishing up my dissertation in in uh 2014, working on it beginning around 2009. And um uh it was a study of of churches that were identifying themselves in their mission statement as multicultural, multiracial, multi-ethnic, or multi-ethnic. I was just curious, who are these leaders, right? Um, that were clearly departing from what um is attributed to Martin Luther King, the saying that Sunday morning being the most segregated hour of the week, something was happening within these churches that was attracting, retaining, developing people who were all kinds of diversity, not only visible diversity, but also invisible diversity, right? So I wanted to know who these were, what what was motivating them and what was sustaining them, both spiritually and organizationally as well. So that's what the dissertation became a study of these churches. And then I was done in 2014. It was the first mixed method dissertation that was allowed in the in the program, and that was really, really helpful. Um, but it left me with questions that needed to be further answered beyond a doc doctoral dissertation. From 2014 all the way to 2024, just about I was doing field research. I was not only embedded in in diversity-oriented churches, I was grow, I had grown a network of leaders now relationally, who were giving me even more insight into their leadership challenges and and successes, as it were. So by the time I was ready to write the book, although it took much longer than I had hoped, it was much richer in the sense that it now was able to give comprehensive structured guidance to future leaders or card leaders who were also feeling called to leading diverse theorems of churches.

SPEAKER_02 19:42

Yeah. And I I love it. We've talked a lot about this off camera, but it's so timely where we are right now, right? It's the information that you have in this book speaks so deeply to I wouldn't even call them struggles. I would just say that it's differences that we're running into. And you and I have talked about like me and my own church, we're going through some of this stuff right now. And I I've I've gotten an opportunity to have some conversations with people about these same things because there's some shifts and some changes. Good, good shifts and changes. But how do we navigate them? How do we go through them? And how do we do that with grace and with dignity and as Christ would? And I love how this book speaks to that and tells us it's it's like a roadmap that tells us how to best deal with these kind of situations. And I don't think there's a situation that you don't hit in this book, as difficult as that is. So I appreciate it and I'm excited. So tell us a little bit, you and Dr. Chambers can speak to what are we doing with this book now? Where are we at with it?

SPEAKER_00 20:40

Well, I'll I'll say this so that we so that folks can understand the genesis of the book theologically. One of the first things I observed from these pastors that was leading is that they were motivated by something in the scriptures. And they all, as I interviewed them, they were motivated by the same thing. They were motivated by their interpretation of Paul's use of the term reconciliation. Yes. And so they had a theological grounding for how they behaved as leaders. And I know Jim can speak to that, and I'd love for him to talk about that, right? So they weren't just practicing leader as pastor, it took them beyond the title and the role. They were practicing leadership now in an even more apostolic prophetic way, because they were trying to bring life to something that they believed was a mandate, right? And so that's what I learned. And the book then begins with that, begins with the spirit of reconciliation. And it says, okay, here's what reconciliation can look like in practice, in a way that includes all kinds of people, in the same spirit of go into the world and make disciples of all nations and baptizing them, as we saw in the book of Acts, right? In within the DNA of the church was a seed planted within one people group. Group, the the the Jewish people group, but immediately look at how that's that seed spread. And I think over the course of 2,000 years, we've lost perspective around what church growth is in a global, inclusive everyone, all the world looks like. So every time we hit a threshold, so we'll look like, oh, there are some people who are not necessarily as included, it causes some disruption. And I think we're at a threshold again in our time that God is calling us into inclusion of all kinds of people: visible diversity, invisible diversity, socioeconomic divers, sexual orientation is a big hard wall that people are really wrestling to get over. And some people are not wrestling to get over that. And so the book challenges them to construct that wall in the spirit of going to all the world and making disciples.

SPEAKER_02 22:50

It does. And you and I talked about that too. Of like, you know, this is this is deep stuff, but it's so good because it talks to the heart of what Christ is teaching us to do, right? And what the apostles were teaching us to do, to be kind, to be generous, to reconcile with everybody. It's not just the people that you want to reconcile with, you know, it's just like, oh, we're friends, we can be good, you know, but this person over here. No, that's not really the option. Um and it and it speaks to like if, you know, if I don't like the way that person's living, it it gives you again a roadmap on how to deal with that. How do we navigate that within the church? How do you help other people navigate that within the church? Because they might not be very good at it. And we have to navigate multiple levels, right? To get people to see and understand. So we won't give all the secrets of the book, but um, we'll let Dr. Chambers speak a little bit as well.

SPEAKER_01 23:41

One of the things you touch on in the book, which is pretty interesting from my perspective, is the cultural intelligence as a leadership responsibility. If you look at Acts, we don't have to do a Bible lesson here, but if you go back to Acts and following the uh birth of the church, as it starts, as you mentioned, to branch out beyond Jerusalem, beyond just Jews into the Gentile world, the issues that come up aren't necessarily heavily theology in the Paul's epistles. What they are are cultural differences that run amuck. So we don't have to, we can maybe on another podcast we can have that discussion, Brian. I know we've had it before, you and I, but the first issue, the very first issue that happens in the early church is organizational, not theological. The way it was organized wasn't working for the people that needed to be served. So they had to fix the organizational issue. That throws people off. You know, when I used to do a lot more, a lot more uh speaking at seminaries and Bible colleges and things like that, people would get a little upset at me because they want to talk about theological problems in the early church. And I'm like, no, it was feeding people. That was a problem. And underlying the organizational problem was the cultural differences in what was happening. You had male and female in the Jewish culture, you had the differences of Gentiles and Jews, et cetera, et cetera. So, anyway, without going into the weeds, so the issue was organizational. Underlying that was this massive cultural issue that had been dividing people. We we sometimes think that in modern America that we have a lot of division, which we do. And that's why I fully support this book. How we got here is a mess. And yet, when you study ancient history, which has been a part of my life for so many years, this has always been an issue. It's always been around. And it it comes down to simply whether it's male and female struggles, whether it's black and white, brown and yellow, green, whatever, you know, aliens from outer space. Anything that doesn't look like the people in charge becomes an issue. And so in our modern culture, we're wrestling with some of the same kinds of things. And cultural intelligence is probably one of the, I think, the key factors in this discussion in this book. Let me, I'm gonna back up just a minute. So I grew up in a multicultural uh neighborhood, but we were all poor. We were all poor. We all lived in a housing project, we all went to inner city school, we all rode the bus, you know, the city bus. We didn't have busing, but we were, you know, my best friends were black, brown, yellow, whatever. You know, we were we were we all lived together, we stayed all night with each other, we ate dinner, we ate breakfast, we hung out with each other. And until this, till the civil rights movement then really began to to take place. And I remember around 1967, 68, watching buildings burn, watching people riding in the streets, and so on. And I remember one of my closest friends, Larry Beale, who was uh African-American young man. I'd stayed at his house, he stayed at my house, we hung out with all our friends together. I remember him looking at me, and he just had tears in his eyes. We, you know, we grew up together. And he said, I guess do we have to hate each other now? Is that what we have to do? Is this what this is coming to? That we're gonna hate each other. You know, we've we're basically wearing each other's clothes, hanging out together at school, you know, going to gym class, playing music, doing all these things together. And then all of a sudden, the world is saying that, you know, because you're one color and you're another color, we didn't have those issues around where we lived. I think it's primarily because we were all poor. Poverty doesn't have, doesn't discriminate, right? But where I'm going with that is we had to work that out in our neighborhood. We had to go through that. It was a good thing because even though we didn't experience some of the discrimination and challenges that was going on in the other parts of the country, we were kind of a little microcosm of ourselves. We we were able to deal with that and and we had to deal with it. My entire high school experience was going to class with uh National Guard people standing in the hallways. It was crazy, my last two years. But I think those cultural differences, when they bleed over into the church, and that's why we were so segregated as a society. And now, not just now, but it's been coming for a while. There's been a wave for some time of cultural diversity within churches. And people have been trying different methodologies, different models out there. I could point to a number that I've been involved in and looked at. But now, where we are right now, I think Brian's book and the discussions that it that it brings about, if it does nothing else, it brings us back to the table to have an honest and open uh discussion about issues that uh need to be dealt with. And how do we lead forward? How do we lead forward now in uh in this new environment, not only with ethnic cultures, but you know, the whole sexuality issues and the woke environment and all of that. We can't just close our eyes to that. We can't just say, well, we're not gonna deal with it and go back to what's comfortable. It's uncomfortable. That's why I bring up the issue of what happened in our community. The civil rights movement disrupted everything in our community. It was painful. I lost my scholarship to the university because of it. It was a painful time for a lot of people, but we got through it and we're better for it, and it leveled the playing ground, as it should in many respects. There's it still goes on. There's still lots of things that need to be fixed. But something had to happen in order for to be a catalyst for change. I think this book is a good point for leaders in churches as a catalyst for change, and that's why I'm very excited about it.

SPEAKER_02 29:39

Yeah, and I I want to speak too to the the cultural intelligence. It talks uh about this in the book. And, you know, Dr. Chambers was talking about it. And I I've recently had a personal experience of this with a dear friend of mine at our church who she so I don't for everybody who doesn't know, we live in pretty rural Arkansas, just circumstances in life kind of brought us here. Um, and it's very different from where I was raised. I was raised in north of Atlanta, where everything was very cultured, culturally diverse. I also grew up in a family where, you know, we had cultural diversity. Um, one of my very best friends growing up was from Jamaica. So things just didn't really click with me for a while. I was here and I was like, said to somebody one day, I'm like, I there's only white people here. It's really weird. Like, what's the deal? You know, like where's everybody else at? And there's a beautiful lady, which she will be on the podcast at um sometime soon as well, who is highly accomplished, has has worked for people in the White House and now owns two businesses. And she and I have been able to connect here in this environment. But we we go out and we we sit and talk about how here, still in this age in in 2026 that we're now in, there's still such a divide in some places. And she's so unique to me and so wonderful to me because it kind of, and we both told each other the same thing at the same time. Like it brings home because it just feels normal and natural. And that's as it has as it should be, right? Together in these conversations at church, at home, at work. Um, we shouldn't have those divides between color. We shouldn't have them between class, we shouldn't have them between male and female, between the issues that we face with sexual orientation. Because your opinions um aren't the same as mine, doesn't mean that we can't sit and have really good conversations. Because you don't look the same as me, doesn't mean we can't have really good conversations. And so that is one of the things that I really love about this book. We are currently working on some courses for this book, which is really exciting. We are diligently working on this. Um, Sloane, who is a part of our team as well, she couldn't be here today, but she is learning the process of instructional design, and we're working really hard to make some really phenomenal courses that Dr. Leander is going to record about these topics. And so we'll have some more discussions in the future about those courses and the book and what's gonna come after that because we have a lot of exciting stuff coming.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

Yeah, I'd like to let me weigh in for a second about the courses, because when I saw what we were doing and that bringing Brian in, letting him record some courses on this, it took me back to uh the beginning because of my background growing up in a highly diverse community. And then I, you know, was a pastor for a while in in diverse neighborhoods, and then as a college professor, you're interacting with all kinds of people from all over the place. And so for me, it just was kind of this is normal life, you know, the way the way the world is. There's different kinds of people, and we all interact. But for a lot of leaders that I began to interact with when IOL began, there was nothing for them. There was a book that was written up in Wheaton by a white guy and a black guy who wrote a book. I think one of them's named Brian was was Washington, is one of the guys' name. And they wrote a book, they did an experiment where they were co-pastoring a church or something, and it was fascinating. It was the first time I'd ever even read anything where anybody talked about this at all. And I remember reading that, I still have the book, and I I read it several times, and I I just trying to, you know, understand how could we get that information out there to help people who don't have a background in diversity. So when I saw that we're doing these courses, I was really excited because as a leader coming up, I had nothing to go on. Nothing. You might talk about it over coffee at a conference, or there might be some discussion at a meeting or something among pastors, but there's nothing formally available. So Brian doing this work both at Berkeley and um and and online, it's gonna be a I think a pretty significant resource for pastors going forward.

SPEAKER_02 33:53

Yeah, I agree. We're really, really excited and truly honored to be able to do the work with you because I think it's pretty groundbreaking and timely. We're gonna wrap up because we're getting a little long. So we we're gonna ask the Brian your two questions. Um the first question is gonna be name a leader that you admire and share briefly why that leader has influenced you.

SPEAKER_00 34:13

So I'm gonna be preaching this Sunday to a wonderful church here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was invited uh to to preach a sermon that will be reflective of Martin Luther King's uh letter from jail. So being ref reflective right now, I can only uh tell you that among the few leaders that I really admire, uh right now my mind is frontly fixed on Martin Luther King. I think that there is a great deal of courage that is required of a leader who knows that they are in the confluence of a range of flows, a place where things aren't as clear and that their leadership is going to be disruptive. And not everyone has that calling upon them. Some people get to lead going down the river and just follow the current. And then there's some people who lead at the point where the river meets, another river meets the ocean, where direction isn't as clear. But what is clear is depth of the water, danger that is in that space of confluence. And I dare let me just say this. I think when I when I first was about to launch the book, I sent out a note to some friends on LinkedIn. I said, Is this a good time to write a book on DEI? Maybe because they're my friends and they love me, they said no, there's no better time than now.

SPEAKER_02 35:39

Yeah, I agree.

SPEAKER_00 35:44

And I'm just a reporter of it. This has been happening for a long time. Movement, call it a human rights, call it a reconciliation movement, is happening right here, right now. And Jim and I and you, Amanda, have been called to be in the middle of it. And I had no idea this would happen 20 years ago when I reached out to Jim.

SPEAKER_02 36:03

I had no idea this would happen a year ago. So here we are. All right. Uh well, thank you for the answer, and I love it. Last question, and then I'll let you guys kind of wrap up with any thoughts that you have. When you think about your legacy as a leader, what lasting impact do you hope that it will have on people or institutions?

SPEAKER_00 36:19

Until you've asked that question, I don't think I've ever thought about my legacy. I think because I'm in the middle of it all the time. I'm at I'm in the middle of, again, that confluence and looking around, kind of hoping to find company. I found company 20 years ago across generations. There I say Jim's a little older than me. And then, of course, you're a little bit younger than me. So I found intergenerational company in this space. So I think maybe that's what my I'm hoping my legacy can be, that I am a connector of people across dividing lines.

SPEAKER_02 36:52

I love that. That's a really good answer. All right, do any of you guys have some closing thoughts or things you'd like to say before we wrap up?

SPEAKER_01 36:59

Well, I think I went to a lecture once, been about 15 years ago, and a friend of mine was giving the lecture, and he said something that resonates with me about what Bryant's saying. This is hard to think about your legacy when you're in the middle of, when you're in the middle of it. It's a little different when you're older like me and you've stepped back from it. But what he said was he said, one of the great tragedies of history, he's a history professor, one of the great tragedies of history is that the people that are awake at the moments of epic proportion tend to be asleep. And I had to take that home with me that night and think about it. He said, what happens is something significant is going on in the world. And every once in a while, something does happen of significance, of global significance, let's say. And unfortunately, most of the people and many leaders are simply asleep. And his point of the lecture was if you want to be in leadership and you want to leave something behind, try to stay awake, try to stay, pay attention in class. And class meaning, you know, the whole scope of life. And so, you know, we've been through this last, I guess, five years or more of I think confusion about DEI, a lot of confusion, a lot of misinformation, a lot of phony, baloney nonsense. We need to get our heads wrapped around the good parts and reject the nonsense out of it. This book that's that is now out that Brian wrote on diversity in churches is a great first step historically of sorting out what the truth is about it. And I have had conversations with people who say, well, just throw the whole thing out. Let's just forget the whole diverse the DEI thing is such a mess. It's got so convoluted, it's become such a political football for everybody on all sides. Let's just forget the whole thing. Absolutely not. We cannot forget the whole thing. The idea is this is important to all of us. We just need to sift through what's real and what's nonsense. And I think the book does that. Congratulations, Brian. I know I've said that before, but I think you were able to do that, filter through it, sort it out, and I'm excited to see what comes from it. Because I think it is a historical moment. You didn't create it. I didn't create it, but we need to stay awake. We need to keep our senses and stay awake in it. And I'm excited about it.

SPEAKER_02 39:22

I'm excited too. And I want to thank you both for being on here. I think we're probably gonna have some more discussions later because we have a lot to talk about, but I won't keep people any longer today. Um, because we're gonna kind of treat to keep these short um and interesting. So thank you both for being on. If anybody wants to get a hold of Dr. Leander, his information will be at the bottom of this video recording. And we'll have information about how to purchase this book, diversity-oriented churches, how to get online and connect with him on LinkedIn and on his website. Same thing with Dr. Chambers. You can connect with him on LinkedIn and you can connect with us at iOLglobal.com. Um, if you have interest in being on this podcast, if you have interest in um what we do and how we're doing it, we would love to talk to you. So please feel free to reach out anytime. And thank you guys for being on the podcast. I appreciate you so much.