Transcript: Becoming a Redemptive Leader: Surrender, Suffering, and Trusting God’s Timing // Rev. Dr. Nicole Massie Martin, Soulfire International Ministries

Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast

“Becoming a Redemptive Leader: Surrender, Suffering, and Trusting God’s Timing“

May 19, 2025

Dr. Nicole Martin

Intro: What if true leadership isn't about climbing the ladder but carrying the cross? Well, in this powerful episode of the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, Dr. Nicole Martin, the COO of Christianity Today and author of Nailing It, challenges the triumphalist model of success and invites us into a redemptive, surrendered leadership. From redefining power and performance to the joy found in suffering with Christ, this conversation will inspire Christian leaders to lead with presence, not just performance. Don't miss this transformative dialog that just might change the way you lead.

Welcome: Welcome to the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, your home for open, honest, and insightful conversations to help develop your leadership, your team, and build a flourishing workplace culture.

Al Lopus: Hi, I’m Al Lopus, the co-founder of the Best Christian Workplaces and author of Road to Flourishing, the go-to research-based, Christ-centered guide to building a flourishing workplace culture. My passion is to equip Christian leaders like you to create engaged, flourishing workplaces, where people thrive and organizations make a significant Kingdom impact. And if you'd like to learn more about my book, opportunities to have me speak, this podcast, or recent articles I've written, I invite you to visit allopus.org. That’s A-L-L-O-P-U-S dot org. Let’s journey together towards building workplaces where your faith, leadership, and organizations flourish.

And I’m delighted to welcome the Rev. Dr. Nicole Massie Martin to the podcast today. Nicole's the author of Nailing It: Why Successful Leadership Demands Suffering and Surrender.

Through the conversation, listeners will hear Dr. Martin redefine success, learn why surrendered leadership is more powerful than performance-driven leadership, also to embrace suffering and discover how setbacks and struggle can shape deeper influence and resilience, and thirdly, to lead from identity—gain confidence to lead from God's calling, not comparison or applause.

I think you’re going to love this interview with Dr. Martin. But before we dive in, this podcast is proudly sponsored by the Best Christian Workplaces’ Employee Engagement Survey, the most-trusted employee-engagement survey for faith-based organizations. With thousands of leaders already using our platform, each new participant strengthens the growing network committed to flourishing workplace cultures. What makes us unique? Well, we're the only research-based, biblically grounded employee-engagement survey designed specifically for Christian-led organizations, providing insight and transformation through a Kingdom lens. And today's guest reminds us, leaders can't afford to ignore what's really happening in their culture. Dr. Martin says, “Transformation starts with awareness, and God can only transform what you're willing to examine.” Well, that's exactly what our Survey helps you do. So don't wait. Now is the ideal time to gather actionable feedback from your team to begin building a healthier Christ-centered workplace. So visit workplaces.org to learn more and to start your journey today.

And if this is your first time with us, welcome. We're honored that you're here. Each episode is crafted to bring you meaningful insights that equip and encourage you in your leadership journey.

And now, let me tell you just a little bit more about the Rev. Dr. Nicole Massie Martin. She holds degrees from Vanderbilt University, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Dr. Martin's the founder and executive director of Soulfire International Ministries, which accelerates thriving for pastors, churches, and younger leaders. She's got decades of executive experience in the church and Christian nonprofits, and serves as a chief operating officer now for Christianity Today. Prior to her role at Christianity Today, Dr. Martin served in a variety of leadership and executive capacities, including the senior vice president for ministry impact at American Bible Society and as executive minister at The Park Church, and also as the assistant pastor of ministry and leadership development at Gordon-Conwell. She serves on several nonprofit boards. She's also active in her local congregation in Maryland at Kingdom Fellowship AME Church. Her most recent book is Nailing It: Why Successful Leadership Demands Suffering and Surrender.

So, here’s my conversation with Dr. Nicole Martin.

Dr. Martin, it’s great to have you on the podcast. I’m looking forward to our conversation today.

Rev. Dr. Nicole Martin: Thanks for having me, Al.

Al: Well, let's start off with your own leadership journey. You're currently serving as the COO at the well-known Christianity Today and have held leadership roles at American Bible Society and other Christian organizations. So what's been some of the key turning points or growth factors in your own leadership journey, just to help us get started?

Nicole: Yeah. Thanks, again. This is going to be an exciting conversation, and I’m really grateful for the work of Best Christian Workplaces and how that’s affected even my own sense of flourishing in the workplace. So, thank you, again.

Key turning points, I think there are several. So I'd say one is just the decision to balance confidence in my gifts and skills, and surrender in gifts and skill. So when I first got started in ministry, this is post-seminary, I entered in church ministry as a minister of singles and young adults. And I was super confident. I just knew, I knew all the tricks and the trades. I had studied, you know. I'd read everything, and I felt like if you've read it and studied it, then you know exactly what to do. So I came in with this, you know, slight arrogance in my own gifts, only to realize that reading something and doing something are two very, very different things. So I had to make decisions in that early stage to be confident that what I had learned was sufficient, but also to surrender what I thought I knew so that God could allow something new, something more vibrant to come from my life. So that was a major turning point at the start of my career.

I think another major turning point was when I was working at ABS, I started to realize that while I could go pretty far by myself, it was absolutely better to go with a team. This is the old African proverb: you can go fast alone, but you can go farther together. And I recognized that in building strategy, for example. I could sit at home, and I could come up with a strategy that I thought was pretty decent. But when I got people in a room, when we started to vet ideas together, when we started to dream and imagine together, that's when I saw something emerge that made me proud, that made excited. So that was another major turning point.

And then, I think, when I first started at CT, I started as the chief impact officer, and people would ask me all the time, “What in the world is impact?” But it just, it gave me room to think about what it really means to be part of an organization that's not just measuring quantitatively how many people you reach, but measuring qualitatively the difference that you make. And that became a major turning point even today to think about, what is my life difference, my impact, my depth, and not just what are the superficial numbers that we can count?

Al: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Qualitative depth. I love that. Yeah, great.

Well, at Best Christian Workplaces, we focus on employee engagement and leading flourishing workplaces. And through assessment and practical tools, we've come alongside leaders who want to shepherd their flock well. We like 1 Peter 5:2-3, “Shepherd the flock that God has entrusted to you,” so that the flock can flourish. So in your book, and tell us a little bit about it, but in your book you start with the idea of the importance of redemptive leadership. And again, you've already kind of given us a hint with the surrender word. But, you know, start with the idea and the importance of redemptive leadership of leaders being incarnational and how this posture can increase engagement. Flesh out an idea of redemptive or incarnational leadership. What are the kinds of qualities that you're reflecting on, talking about?

Nicole: Absolutely. I love both of those words, by the way, redemptive and incarnational. I think that is not just core to leadership, but it's core to our lives with Christ. So, my book is Nailing It: Why Successful Leadership Demands Suffering and Surrender, and it's the idea that our lives are not built only on this triumphal, overcoming, victorious view of ourselves. It's not just about this resurrection reality that every day gets better and every road gets higher. Our lives are actually built on the depth of Christ, the deeper moments, the valleys, the parts where it feels like we're being crucified. And this is what I think redemptive leadership builds on.

Traditional leadership suggests we go up and up and up. We start selling the shoes, and then we become the shoe-store manager, and then we become the general manager, and then we own the shoe store. But redemptive leadership says, “Well, we started selling shoes, and then we lost a few clients. And then we rose a little bit, and then lost a bit of something else.” So it's the ups and the downs that God redeems. And the cross shows us that as we cling to the depths, as we cling to and own and recognize the lower moments of our lives, then we can see the real fruit and the development and the shaping that comes from a life with Christ. And when we use that phrase incarnational leadership, I'm suggesting that the people we lead today are not always flourishing. They're not always thriving. They are struggling to care for parents and themselves and children at the same time. They're struggling to make ends meet and to make sense of a nonsensical world. And they're bringing all of that to the teams that we lead and the workplaces where we lead. So as we become more attuned to crucifixion and our own carrying of our own crosses, then we can have incarnational leadership and be with those who are suffering and those who were going through difficult experiences. Because when we can be with ourselves, then we can be with them, and we can show them that Christ is with them in those low moments. So I get excited when I think about what incarnational leadership looks like today because I think we desperately need that.

Al: To be with, not just to lead, but to actually be with. That’s fascinating. So, redemptive and incarnational.

Well, as you look at the landscape of leadership now in our culture—let’s just continue this theme—why is this conversation about redefining leadership important? What cultural leadership trends are you trying to address in your book?

Nicole: Well, you know, no book actually covers it all. I think I was trying to take a stab at what I felt were the issues that were most pressing at the time. And one of the first issues that I found was just this imbalance of triumphalism and trauma. We have, in our world, this sense of triumphalism with the American dream, of American exceptionalism. We think of ourselves as the greatest of everything. And this pursuit of greatness can be helpful at times, but it can also be harmful, especially when it comes to the cost. And I'm suggesting that there are things we need to redefine because the cost is too high for Christianity.

For example, the cost of a worldly sense of power is too high. The world would suggest that power is to be hoarded and amassed, and power is to be wielded over others. But Scripture gives us a view of power that comes from God, that is distributed by God, that flows through the power of the Holy Spirit. When Christ tells His disciples that “you will receive power,” it is not power to be great. It is power to be His witnesses. And this is what, I think, we need to redefine. I have to come to a place where I crucify and forsake my sense of power so that I can live into a power that is given through me for the glory of God. I have to redefine my sense of scale, for example, this idea that every good thing has to be scaled to be better, faster, cheaper. I have to redefine that so that I can get a sense of God's depth, of God's mission, of impact. I have to redefine my sense of performance, this idea that the world says you must always perform on a stage before all of your followers and those watching. And I can redefine that by crucifying it so that what is resurrected is a sense of God presence.

So I was trying to address these things that really the world said would make you wonderful and redefine them according to the cross so that what we can see is not just me being wonderful, but Christ being glorified.

Al: Okay, yeah. Particularly reflective since we're recording this on Easter Monday. We've had a chance to reflect on this, and it's fresh for us. Yeah. Wow. So, crucifying triumphalism and wielding power; and in a better, faster, cheaper scale; and looking at it from a cross standpoint. Wow. Okay.

Well, you know, part of leadership is having the power to influence an organization. And I think John Maxwell would say that's the definition of leadership, is the influence. So as human leaders, we can be part of a healthy exercise of power or unhealthy abuses of power. Pastors, we know, have been accused of abusing their power. So talk about healthy distribution of power and how it's based on a certain view of God and others, and describe what you see as a healthy power dynamic at work in an organization. I know that our listeners, the leaders of Christian organizations, are very interested in your thoughts on this.

Nicole: Yeah. Well, I really do believe that Scripture is true, that God has given all of us power by way of the Holy Spirit. Every single one of us has an element of power. And this is why I talk a little bit about the social bases of power, because the question isn't, do I have power? Am I powerless? The question is, what kind of power do I have, and how do I operate in that power to glorify God?

So in the social bases of power, you'll see some people have informational power. They have a sense of knowing something that no one else knows. How do you use that information to glorify God? Others may have a referent power, where they are older on the team or maybe they have a degree or they have a title that gives a certain level of respect. The question is, if I have this sense of power, how do I use it for the glory of God?

So once we identify our power base, then I think another step is surrendering that power to God so that His power can be glorified through you. And I talk about what it looks like to have surrendered will, surrendered words, and surrendered works. And I think, obviously, Jesus models this so well, but it's so important to say every context might shift the way that we show up in this level of surrender.

So for example, if I am leading an organization and I know I have a mission to accomplish, my surrendered will says, “God, I know what we're going to accomplish. But I surrender my way of doing it. I surrender my will, my desires of getting this done. I give it to You and ask that You show me how You want this done. Give me Your will, not mine.”

If I'm on a board, for example, and maybe I'm a participant on the board, I don't have a position of power in terms of my role, my surrendered words might look like, “In this conversation, how can I glorify God with what I say? How can I listen so well that my response doesn't just give me a pat on the back, but helps to elevate and glorify God?”

And then, surrendered works. That's probably the hardest and the easiest prayer because many times in organizations, we do have a sense of what we want to do with our hands. We want to make things happen. But surrendered works says, “God, I give this process to You. We've got so much work to do, but we give the work to You; and we surrender the timing to You; we surrender the way that it gets done. But we also surrender the results.” And I know some people may say, “Well, this is just a perfunctory thing you do in prayer,” but, really, it's a position of our hearts. Power isn't just about what happens as an outcome; it's about the posture of our hearts and our minds. So I think as we approach power with an intent to glorify God, then God honors that intent through our words and our will and our works.

Al: I like that. So our intent, you know, and as leaders, is that our intent? You mentioned informational power. So if we have information, you know, that gives us power in how to use that. You also, you mentioned some of us are older, so we might be thought of as wiser, but how do I use that for God? is your question. And then, you didn't mention positional power, but that's certainly another type of power that everybody has, and yeah, how do we use our position for the glory of God? And then, you know, surrender our will, surrender our words, surrender our works. I love that. Yeah, great. Wow, thanks.

So, yeah, as we're driving, as we’re running on treadmills, whatever we're doing at this point, listening to this podcast, you now, these are reflective words for us to think about. How are we surrendering our will or words and our works for the glory God?

Well, one pressure on both leaders and workers in our culture is the speed of change and the perception that there's never enough time, never enough time to work at the pace that we would like. So, you know, what would you see leaders dealing with in terms of this issue of speed and pace in the workplace? Can you give an example of what it looks like to handle this well? I'm dying to find out.

Nicole: My disclaimer is what I've written in the book is a work in progress. I'm literally figuring some things out as we walk with God together. But I do think it's important for leaders to know the distinction between our time and God's time, and this biblical distinction between Chronos and Kairos time. And I reflect on Ephesians, making the most of every moment. I think there is a sense that if we follow our clocks, our chronological time, that we will always kind of be chasing it. Time is like money. It's, like, you just never have enough. You grasp at it, and it slips right through your fingers, right even before you can get a hold of it. So it's not uncommon for leaders to feel like they're always behind—behind on deadlines, behind on the next thing, behind on vision, behind on mission.

So it’s so important for us as Christian leaders to resist the pull of being dragged along by a chronological sense of time and lean into a Kairos time of God. This is the time where God says He will redeem the years that the locusts have eaten. There's a sense of God performing things in time that don't make sense for our regular time. So even today, you know, as I'm thinking about a project that I have due with my team, there's a part of me that's like, “If we're going to get this budgeting done, we got to start in July because we need the budget done in September because we need to present it for the board in November.” And that matters. That's good. But there's another part of that that says, “God, I trust that You're able to redeem lost time. And, as needed, accelerate whatever time is necessary so that You can get done what You need to get done.”

I mean, when we look at Jesus in Scriptures, He's kind of—I don't want to say irritating. That is not the thing to say of the Lord—but it is a bit nerve wracking to watch Jesus on how He views time. He waits two days to go and see Lazarus. You know, He drags His feet when it comes time for prayer, and people have to come looking for Him. So He's not in a hurry. And yet at the same time, He knows when it's the time to go to Jerusalem. He knows when it’s time to leave and head toward Galilee. He knows when it's time to select the disciples. And the way that He knows that is He's following the pace of God.

So I think what this looks like is, “God, I surrender my sense of time. Help me to set my clock on Your pace.” That is the difficult, necessary work. I need to set my internal clock on the pace God, which doesn't always make sense, but it's always right on time.

Al: And sometimes there's people in between, what we hope to get done in a timely basis.

Nicole: Yes. Always people.

Al: And, of course, we know God cares about people.

Well, people usually get promoted into leadership roles because of solid performance, demonstrating the ability to get things done. That's what we want, isn't it, oftentimes? And even from childhood, we're usually rewarded for good performance. I know that was my case. So, you suggest a need to be transformed from performance-based leadership to presence-based leadership. So tell us a little bit about that. You know, it doesn’t mean that there's no standards, I know, or evaluations. But what's different in a ministry or workplace when leaders focus on presence-based leadership? Love your thoughts.

Nicole: Well, I remember when I was going through my doctoral program, I focused on redemptive leadership, and we read numerous books on high-performing teams. And the emphasis was, if you can get your team to perform high, then they will serve better. They will be better once they can do something great together. And while that may be true in many cases, it's also not the only truth. I think the other part of that truth is people perform better when they know who they are, when they can be respected and embraced as whole people. And this is where I think Christian workplaces have the advantage, because in a secular workplace, we may not be able to ask how you're doing. How's your family? In a secular workplace, on your performance review, you may not have an organizational value that values integrity, for example. But when you come to a Christian workplace, you can actually set up your values in a way that looks at the whole person, which suggests to employees you are not just here because of what you do; you are also here because of who you are. And our assessment of our work together isn't just about outcomes and outputs; it's also about an inner work, an inner transformation, an inner dedication.

I remember talking to Pete Scazzero about this. This was at the time he was pastoring his church New Life Fellowship. And he said part of their evaluation process is about how well people actually use the Sabbath. He said, in that church, when they get to the end of the year, and they're doing a performance review, and they come to a minister or a staff leader who has not taken vacation, they get points off for that because part of their value is we value rest, we value Sabbath because we believe we can become better people when we have time with God.

If we can get to that place as a Christian workplace of starting to see people as whole people, I think we'll reach out to a generation that doesn't just want to be a cog in the wheel; they want to be a part of something. They want to be seen for who they are. And we can say to them, “Hey, I want you to thrive as an individual because as you thrive as individual, then we thrive as organization.”

And I've actually had a lot of kind of debate on that with other people. They've said, “Well, when you focus more on presence, when you focus on the whole person, then you're basically giving people an excuse to slack off. If you tell them, ‘Oh, take time off,’ you're telling them, ‘Don't do the work.’” I don't think that's true. I think that the call to Sabbath, the call be with God, the call to be whole in Christ actually makes us better, makes us more efficient performers on the job. So I think the two really do go hand in hand, performance and presence.

Al: Yeah. Nicole, I couldn't agree with you more. In our research, we've identified eight keys that lead to employee engagement and a flourishing workplace. The number one key is Inspirational Leadership. And within Inspirational Leadership, the first question that comes out in our factor analysis is, “Leaders exhibit the fruit of the Holy Spirit.” So how do you do that? Well, it's because you've done the inner work, as you said. You've done the inner work. Another question is around compassion or transparency or all of those things. That's at the core of effective leadership, I believe. And yeah, I love the way that you use the word presence because you're present. Yeah. And you're able to look at the whole person, the person that you're working with. Yeah. That's fantastic.

Well, Nicole, as you sum up the thoughts on the importance of sacrificial and resurrected leadership, you focus on the key Christian distinctive by saying, there's clearly no silver bullet that will make leadership suddenly healthy and humble. But there is one factor without which all leadership fails: the person of the Holy Spirit. And sadly, Christian leaders, they overlook this essential. So how have you seen the Holy Spirit animate leadership, both in your own experience and other leaders, who are the ones that you interact with, and maybe even those that you work with at Christianity Today? What does this look like?

Nicole: One of the ways that I have seen the Holy Spirit moving through and animating my own sense of leadership has been in this earlier tension that I mentioned, which is the tension between knowing what you might do, but also yielding to what only God can do. And I remember when I first became COO at Christianity Today, I knew I had to lean into the budget. And I admit I had some kind of cursory knowledge of finance and budgets for organizations—I've done some of that work through churches before—but never in that way and never with that team. And I remember pulling everyone together in the same room, and the only Scripture that I could come to was 2 Chronicles 20. And this is where Jehoshaphat is looking for the Lord to defend him and his people against the attacks of the enemy. The enemy is clear in their offense. They're saying, you know, “We're going to annihilate you,” and yet, Jehoshaphat, who knows how to fight, still went open-handedly before the Lord and said, “God, we do not know what to do. Our eyes are on you.” To me, that was a pivotal moment because it almost democratized the team, that while we had finance experts on the team, while I was in a position of leadership, while we had a consultant in the room, and while we had people with historic knowledge and institutional knowledge at the table, we set the playing field as a level space when we all together say, “God, we don't know what do. We have a sense of our knowledge, but our eyes are on You.” And I saw the Holy Spirit move through our team to bring a collective wisdom and knowledge in the budget and that process that gave all of us confidence, not just in ourselves, but in the power of God at work. And I think that's what it looks like every day: making room for the Holy Spirit to move through you and your team so we can all look back and say, “This was the Lord's doing, and it's marvelous in our eyes.”

Al: Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah. Yield to the Holy Spirit and see what God can do through us. And when we bring humility to the table, it just draws everybody together, no question about it.

Well, this has just been a great conversation, Nicole. Thanks so much. You know, I think back to some of those turning points for you of surrender and how that works with kind of the other side of confidence, both sides of the same coin in a way. And how, yeah, we can go fast alone, or your point is we can go further together, so working together as a team. And then, also, you talk about we're developed in the valleys and in the crosses in our lives, and that's where we can grow. It's just not about everything is always up and to the right, but it's those crucibles that we experience that really develop us. And so leaders, if you're feeling you're in one of those spaces right now, you're being developed, and God is very present with you. And I love your points about the cultural trends that we're seeing, how we've got to avoid this triumphalism, or it's all about greatness, but to actually let the Spirit flow through us, to wield power—not to wield power but to let the Spirit flow through us, not to be all about scale—and we all talk about scale, don't we?—but rather to perform through God's presence. Yeah. How can we do what we do to glorify God? to keep that at core and at the front of our minds. And to really be present for others, to do the inner work, as you say, so that we can be present for others because, again, together we're going to go further, no question. So, this has just been a great conversation.

How about anything else you'd like to add that we've talked about, maybe a bottom line to this conversation.

Nicole: I think the bottom line is this is a daily process, but it is one that can be filled with so much joy. Sometimes we think of resurrection and suffering and surrender as a painful process that is just, you know, sackcloth and ashes. And yes, we have to be honest that there's definitely part of that. But the joy of surrender, the peace that comes with surrender, the joy—I mean, this is why Paul says, “I want to know Him, the fellowship of His sufferings.” When we really get to fellowship with Christ in the sufferings, there is such joy and glory and excitement in resurrection. And I would say, let's reclaim that joy. Let's reclaim the joy of resurrection because we understand the cost of crucifixion. And as we anticipate what it might look like to be with Christ one day forever, we can do that when we know that these light and momentary trials are nothing compared to the eternal glory we will have one day with Christ. If we can set that in our view, then it doesn't even matter what it costs because it's all worth it.

Al: We may feel like it's Friday, but Sunday's coming, right?

Nicole: Yes, indeed. Indeed.

Al: Nicole, thanks so much for your contribution. This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate your vision for helping leaders be rooted in Christ so they can lead redemptively. So, thanks for taking your time out today and speaking into the lives of so many listeners.

Nicole: Thank you so much for having me.

Al: Great.

Thank you so much for listening to my conversation with Dr. Martin. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

You can find ways to connect with her and links to everything we discussed in the show notes and the transcript at workplaces.org/podcast.

And if you have any suggestions for me about our podcast or have any questions on flourishing workplace cultures, email me, al@workplaces.org.

And as Dr. Martin reminds us, true leadership doesn't come from control. It flows from surrender, self-awareness, and spiritual depth. If you want to lead with greater authenticity, compassion, and Kingdom impact, start with examining the culture that you're shaping. Ask hard questions, invite honest feedback, and take intentional steps to align your leadership with God's call, because transformation starts with you. What will you surrender today to become the leader God is calling you to be?

Well, keep listening to our weekly podcast as we continue learning from leaders who embody inspirational leadership in action. Next week, I'll be joined by Michael Martin, the president of ECFA, as we explore a vital topic: how can boards truly support and sustain flourishing leaders? From governance best practices to spiritual encouragement, you won't want to miss this insightful conversation that will challenge and equip Christian boards and executives alike.

Outro: The Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast is sponsored by Best Christian Workplaces. If you need support building a flourishing workplace culture, please visit workplaces.org for more information.

We'll see you again next week for more valuable content to help you develop strong leaders and build a flourishing workplace culture.