Trust as the First Faithful Practice
Lencioni says vulnerability-based trust is the foundation of any cohesive leadership team. The church already has a word for it. Confession.
Patrick Lencioni argues that the foundation of any cohesive leadership team is trust. He distinguishes between two kinds. Predictive trust, which sounds like “I trust you to do your job competently,” and vulnerability-based trust, which sounds like “I trust you with what I do not know how to do.” The second kind, he says, is the one that makes a leadership team actually function.
For people of faith, that distinction should sound familiar. The church has a word for vulnerability-based trust. We call it confession.
The Church’s First Practice
James writes, “For this reason, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous person is powerful in what it can achieve” (James 5:16, CEB). The early church practiced confession not as a private legal transaction but as a public spiritual one. Naming what is broken, in community, out loud, and then receiving prayer and healing in response.
That is vulnerability-based trust as a sacrament. It assumes a community where people are safe to admit what they cannot do, what they got wrong, what they are afraid of. It assumes a gospel that meets us in those admissions rather than punishing us for them.
The whole Christian life starts there. We do not begin by claiming competence. We begin by acknowledging that we are not okay, that we cannot save ourselves, that we need grace. Christian community should be the safest place on earth to be honest about what is hard.
And yet.
Why Church Leadership Teams So Often Fail at This
Walk into most church leadership meetings, including ones I have led, and watch what happens. The pastor performs confidence. The lay leaders perform deference or expertise. The staff perform competence. The room is full of people who know each other’s names but have rarely admitted out loud that they are uncertain, scared, or in over their heads on something that matters.
That is a failure of theology, not just team dynamics. We have built leadership cultures that contradict the gospel we preach.
I do not say that with judgment. I have done it. The temptation is real, especially for pastors. We are trained to project pastoral confidence. People look to us for steadiness in hard moments. The instinct to perform competence is not unfounded. It is just incomplete. There is a moment in every leadership team’s life when someone needs to stop performing and start being honest, and the rest of the team needs to receive that honesty without exploiting it.
When that happens, the team becomes capable of work it could not do before. When it never happens, the team stays stuck.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Vulnerability-based trust does not mean dumping every personal struggle into a Board meeting. It means three specific things, none of which require trauma to be useful.
First, naming what you do not know. “I am not sure what to do here. I have an instinct, but I want your read.” When the most senior person in the room says that, something shifts. Permission opens up.
Second, admitting you got it wrong. “I made the wrong call last month, and here is what I learned.” That sentence is harder than it sounds. It also signals that this room can survive imperfection.
Third, asking for help in front of others, not just one-on-one in the hallway. “I have been carrying something I cannot carry alone, and I need this team’s wisdom on it.” Said out loud, in front of the team, that request changes the room.
These are not management techniques. They are forms of confession. The same Christian practice that has been forming believers for two thousand years, applied to the room where leaders gather to lead.
What Is Hard About This
I want to be honest. This is not a quick fix. Church leadership cultures have a long memory. A team that has been performing competence for years will not become a vulnerability-trusting team in one meeting. It takes time, repetition, and someone going first. Often that someone has to be the pastor. Sometimes it has to happen more than once before the team believes it is safe.
The other hard thing is that vulnerability without integrity is dangerous. People who confess loudly without changing their behavior burn out the trust. People who exploit others’ admissions burn it down. Vulnerability-based trust requires a base of mutual care, the kind the gospel forms in us when we receive grace and pass it on.
A Question for Between Now and June 24
The McPherson First Leadership Board takes up Discipline 1 on June 24. In the May reading discussion of the introduction, the Board named something the framework circles around without saying outright. One member observed that this group has learned to disagree with love. Another said the Board has grown more transparent over time, not less. Both descriptions name the trust foundation Discipline 1 is about to put into language. The framework is meeting them where they already are.
Between now and the June 24 meeting, sit with one question.
Where is vulnerability-based trust missing in a community I lead, or am part of? What would it cost to start there? Who would need to go first?
Maybe the answer is a household. Maybe a small group at church. Maybe a staff team. Maybe a Board for another organization. The question scales.
The next post lands June 24, the day of the Board meeting, and picks up the other four behaviors of cohesive teams: constructive conflict, commitment, mutual accountability, and focus on results. Each one builds on trust. None of them work without it.
For now, the simple practice. Confession. Said out loud. In front of others. With grace meeting the admission.
That is where the cohesive team begins, and it is where the church has always begun.