Emir Caner on leadership and inspiration

Answering the Call

Gary Myers: Hi. My name is Gary Myers.

Joe Fontenot: And I'm Joe Fontenot.

Gary: We're the hosts of the Answering the Call podcast.

Joe: And this is the podcast where we talk to people who are answering God's call. Today our guest is Emir Caner. He's the president of Truett McConnell University.

Gary: He talks about leadership, it's challenges, and where he finds inspiration.

Joe: And so, here's Emir.

Joe: Dr. Emir Caner, you are the president of Truett McConnell University and you've been there for 10 years now, since 2008. So it's really great to have you here. I had a question for you first. We're going to talk about some leadership things, but every single email and then on your website you say three words. Truth is immortal.

Emir Caner: Yeah.

Joe: What does that mean?

Emir: I did my dissertation on Balthasar Hubmaier, who is my hero of the faith, not only for his strengths, but for his weaknesses as well. Ended up living his life the last 14 months before he was arrested and ultimately martyred for the faith, he had baptized six to twelve thousand people, and that's if you can imagine a church that baptizes 150 a more a week, and published 17 books at the same time. Ultimately was arrested and burned at the stake outside the gates there in Vienna, Austria. So his slogan I have plagiarized now some 500 years later. 'Truth is unkillable' is the literal translation from the German. Truth is immortal is the popular translation. It just reminds people that while truth can decay and truth can diminish, it can never die, because like the resurrection it will raise itself like our Lord. And as long as our Lord is raised from the dead, truth itself cannot die itself.

Joe: That's a pretty comforting concept, I think, especially since we live in a truth is relative world. You know, truth is not only here, but it's immortal. So, I have a question for you. I was looking at your career and so forth, and something strikes me as kind of interesting, and it's specifically about leadership. So there's a lot of talk about leadership in the world, and all this kind of stuff, but I think a lot of time leadership gets generalized. So for instance, one of the things I found, came across, was this idea that there's a difference between being like number two, and being number one. In an institution, an organization, I'm talking kind of about responsibility and direction, not like in an ego sense. And you take the difference between number two and number three, and it might not be much. What is the difference between number one and number two? This is something ... You know, you're currently the president of Truett McConnell, that institution, but you've not always been at the top, in that case, and so you've had kind of both sides. Can you talk a little bit about some of the things that you've learned in the process of that?

Emir: Yeah. Some of it's experiential. I had never intended to be in the spot I am. Never thought I was qualified. Many days still don't think I'm qualified to do so. But before this position at Truett McConnell University, I was at Southwestern Seminary, and helped found the College at Southwestern that's now Scarborough College. I think the number two, the greatest difference, and I gladly fit into that, is I wanted to give unfettered support to my president. And as long as everything, of course, was ethical and theological, even if we disagreed, and ultimately you do. In any position of authority you will disagree with those are in authority, my goal was to prop him up to encourage him and to do what God had put him in that place to do in every way possible, whether it was recruiting students or fundraising, whether it was in the classroom or sitting with students in my office like I do.

 In some ways there aren't many differences. I think the largest difference is the enormity of the task becomes clear from the chair because you start to realize, "Oh gosh. I've got 300 families who rely on me in order to make a living. I have 2900 students who have a desire in their life, and a call in their life, and in some minute way I am responsible for them as well." And so there is a gravity to the situation that you wake up and you realize ... If you don't realize at that point that you are inadequate, you are probably arrogant, because there is no possible way. The best piece of leadership advice I've ever received came from Dr. Charles Stanley. When he was asked how did you get where you are today? Right? He started first at Atlanta in 1971. Now he's got a potential audience of over a billion. His answer is, "I don't know. All I did was one step at a time." And I think that's a crucial issue of leadership is that those that I wish to emulate most never intended to be there. They only intended to follow the Lord, whatever the path was. And that was truly helpful, because when you get to the chair you start to recognize there's no way of doing this without the grace of God. And not in part, but really in whole, because any decision you make has an impact on every student. And the decisions you make will have an impact not just for tomorrow, but for decades to come. So that's also the joy of the situation, because then you get to see graduates. You get to see them do things far greater than anyone could have dreamed, and that's the joy of it. 

Joe: Was there a time when you looked at leadership, the way you described it here is almost as follow-ship. You are here to serve. You're here to follow. The one foot in front of the other on the path that God has laid out for you. Was there a time when you looked at leadership more in a, I would almost say stereotypical way? Like a lot of people look at the leader and say, "The leader has a plan, has a path. They're going. We're going to follow them. When I get to that position, I'm going to be the one making the direction." But kind of what you've described is something a little different in the sense that you were here to follow God, right? And so has that become like a change in your life? Did you always look at it like this?

Emir: I just really never saw this coming. When I got called to ministry my dream was just to preach the Word. And I think that's enough. It's not just, it is the primary goal even to this day that I do. And then all of a sudden I was asked to become professor of church history and Anabaptist studies at Southeastern Seminary. And that's all I dreamed about in life was just to do that, and I got to do that for years. And then all of a sudden I got a call from Southwestern to say, "Would you think about taking this on?" I'd never seen that coming. So I gladly did that, and we purchased a home. My wife and I had a great church out at Forth Worth. Our family was growing, and young, and I thought, you know, this is it. This is where everything will happen.

 And then an email came in from a trustee at Truett, and thought, "No. I don't want this." And trustees can tell you even 10 years later, I waited until the very last minute to say yes, because there was no possible way in my mind that I could be what Truett needed. But when you get the unction of the Lord, you have to say yes. And so here you are 10 years later. And there is. There's a great joy. It's not hard living in the mountains of North Georgia. 

Joe: Right.

Emir: Right? It's a beautiful place. It's a contagious place. So many of our students not only come, but they stay because of the mountains of North Georgia. But no. I think there is, Luther Rice Seminary has a professor who wrote a book on followership, and I guess that's part of it. I would only add most books on leadership are written of the perspective that those who have succeeded. I read a lot from those I can learn from who those who in the worlds eyes have failed, but they haven't. There was a missionary out in South America in the 19th century, I think about 1857. They found his diary. He went out to a remote island trying to win the tribe to Christ, and never did. Never won one to Christ that we know of to this day. But his diary says it all. In his diary, his last diary before he starved to death was, "I am overwhelmed by the goodness of God."

 And I think you can learn just as much from that faithful servant as you can from the successful story. In fact there's a great danger of only looking to those who ... They love the stories of Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill. They failed, they failed, they failed, but then they succeeded. But I wonder, would you really read Lincoln, or Churchill, or anyone religious life if they had just failed? And as a church historian, that's what I do. I love to study those who are the forgotten, are the grassroots. 

Joe: What are some of the main things you've learned from those forgotten?

Emir: You know, as a church historian, history ... Less than 1% of history is ever written down. And history that we read, in fact, if you study church history in terms, even as you teach in Baptist life, Evangelical life, Protestant life, we still only teach it from the perspective of the successful. So you teach the church fathers nearly as cleanly as Roman Catholicism teaches of the church fathers of Jerome, Augusta, et cetera. But I look for the grassroots. And it's one of the reasons why I'm a free churchman. It's a reason why I studied Anabaptistica. Why they are our forefathers spiritually, and I would say historically as well is these are the forgotten. They were meant to be forgotten. They were martyred to be forgotten. But those, I think, are the true heroes. And you really can translate that into modern day church life. Where if you think about it, you walk into church, all the accolades goes to the person with the limelight. But the forgotten heroes of the backrooms, of the 3-year-old Sunday school, of the deacon who goes to the hospital. That's part and parcel of how we should look at church history.

Joe: I think we're at a little bit of a disadvantage in the one sense of everybody puts the emphasis on the winners, right? Whether it's the person whose standing up at the front, you know, on and on and on. How does a person spot the forgotten who are not "losers" right? But they're the people that are being faithful and so forth, but the world has not validated them?

Emir: Many times you can't, right? Because the eradication of history stops you from doing that unless you move into oral history, or you find some forgotten documents. But that's exactly what we should do. When you got The Evangelical Theological Society, there are many good papers being done, but sometimes you sort of get tired of the regurgitation of Martin Luther for the 17th hundredth time of the ... It just becomes insane that they think they found something. I love when you'd stated grassroots you find things you never thought.

 So for example, with Anabaptistica, one of my professors came over to the States, studied at Georgia Tech, got his bachelors/masters in PhD in aerospace engineering. And he was an agnostic, didn't believe, and then he got saved. And all of a sudden he did a master of divinity and doctorate, and did it in Anabaptistica. He's Italian, French Italian, and so he decided to go study the archives. And that's where I tell people they are. They're in the back rooms of families. They're in the archives of libraries. Every book written about Italian Anabaptists, and they were heretics. All of them. And they basically repeated secondary history over and over again. Well this French Italian then went into the archives and studied, and it was all a myth perpetuated by those who wanted to eradicate their history, call them heretics, because in the medieval times you had to prove heretics in order to put them to death. But you ultimately found is while there were some heretics among them, the vast majority of Italian Anabaptists were orthodox. They were Trinitarian, they were salvation by grace alone and so forth, and they were martyred for the faith. And so when I do my Anabaptist tour, like I'll do next summer, we go to Venice. No one else has done this in an Anabaptist, or the Mennonites don't do this. So we go to Venice. We literally go to the place where they would take the Anabaptists at night quietly, whole families, put them out into the water, drop them underneath the boats, let them drown, come back to dock, nobody knew them again. And one of the honors of being a theologian or historian is being allowed to tell the story of those who are forgotten, just like those guys. 

Joe: That's amazing. Do you think those forgotten people still exist today?

Emir: Yeah. You know-

Joe: I mean are alive today?

Emir: They're not only alive, but they need to come more to the forefront of, for example, how we do issues of church planting, or ecclesiology. If you go to conferences, there are a lot of conferences on church planting. But church planting in urban Atlanta is radically different than doing church planting in the mountains of North Georgia. And there are different heroes for different situations. And the forgotten man who is sitting out in First Baptist, Lizard Lick, North Carolina, which is an actual city-

Joe: It is.

Emir: ... is doing as faithful work as the urbanite or the suburbanite that's in the larger church. And I think we've forgotten that the backbone of Southern Baptist life is not merely made up of the megas, but is made up of the smaller churches, and the yeoman's work that's out there, that a man that's in a community of 500 baptizing 30 is just as extraordinary as man that's in a community of 100,000 and baptizing 300. And those are the forgotten. Those are the ones I love to preach for, because you walk in to this remote location. I remember a few years ago I drove up, they didn't even have a parking lot. And they had this auditorium that sat about 300, and you pulled up to grass, and it was packed, and I went in. And doing that, being in Georgia, preaching under watermelon sheds, and old revivalist. I preached at a revivalistic facility that had had a revival service every year except for once since 1812.

Joe: Wow.

Emir: Those are the forgotten too many times, but I think we have to realize or maybe even re-realize what it means to have that differentiation between the segments of Southern Baptist life as we unify under theology.

Joe: How we tell the difference between one of these forgotten heroes, the person whose doing the good work, and perhaps the world is not recognizing them, versus someone who is not, and they're basically sowing the seeds of, or getting what they're sowing. In other words, the difference between someone who is being faithful to the gospel, but not seeing anyone come forward, versus the person who is not being faithful and not seeing? You know what I mean? How do we know the difference between what the world is miscategorizing and what the world is categorizing correctly?

Emir: Yeah. You know, I often ask the question in class when I teach on Adoniram Judson, would we talk about him if he had left after five years? Before he saw a convert? Before he saw people come to faith in Christ? And I don't think we would have talked about him. I don't. But the reason I don't think we would have talked about him is not because he was a failure, but because he walked away too soon. The faithful stay faithful. And that's how we need to consider who are the heroes of the faith is not merely by the recognition of success by numbers. I do worry sometimes that we diminish that so much that we're paying the price for it, right? Numbers do mean something. He who wins souls is wise. It's the recognition that someone cared enough to look at me as a Muslin and say, "I want you in church, and I want to you to be saved."

 On the other hand, the faithfulness is the reason why it's the ending as much as matters as the beginning. I think God rewards on the beginning as well. But the recognition comes, and I tell students, your greatest part of ministry is not when you're 20, 30, or 40. Your greatest ministry should happen when you're 50, 60, 70, 80 years old, because you're building upon the blocks of God's call that at one point you were a pioneer taking down trees, and now your faithful service, you can look back and see God's hand to such a degree that even if God doesn't do anything from that point forward, there's a joy and gratitude that lives within your heart that gives others who are doing the same calling, and encouragement to walk faithfully. 

Joe: Yeah. That's a very different kind of thinking. That's a kind of thinking that looks 20 to 30 years into the future, not a kind of thinking that looks two years into the future. I mean of course, we always consider-

Emir: Yeah. I worry that Southern Baptists are into fads. But I worry about because just like parachute pants, they're going to go out faster than they ever came in, and for good reason.

Joe: Sure.

Emir: So when I hear statisticians and some leadership pundits say, "But you got to reach the millennials," my mind is okay, I get that. I understand the technicalities, but the millennial generations now gone. Right now you're dealing with another generation. Another generation. The fact of being faithful does not segregate a population into generations, whether that's an ethnic segregation, or whether that's an age segregation. Instead, the person sits in a neighborhood and says, "That 98-year-old in the nursing home is just as important as the 19-year-old in a college right over there." And many times we see successes reaching the younger and we forget what it is to reach the older who are closer to eternity in so many ways as well. And thereby we designate success by the sex appeal instead of by the sacrifice. That's part of what I think can be a problem with an evangelical life. It's not a denigration. We got to reach the youth, right? When in Georgia the number one number of those who are baptized as a youth is zero, we recognize we have a problem with the youth. But the statisticians never say what the number one number is for the older either. We concentrate so much on one generation, we forget the next, and that is not biblical in any regard.

 So I think the recognition has to be, all right. If you win New Orleans, then you've got to reach those who are in your community, whether that's in Slidell, or whether that's in an urban community. Whoever's around you, God's put around you. In the mountains of North Georgia, it's going to be different. But we have to be in some ways a generationalist church, one that cares as much as about one age as the other. 

Joe: You know, leadership obviously is about hard choices. We all know that, hard decisions. You said in an interview back in 2011 that a decision for Christ, this is talking about Muslims, could end in being kicked out of the family or even death. You didn't, if I have this right, you didn't have really much of a relationship with your father for most of your adult life because he was a Muslim. You became a Christian and he basically disowned you.

Emir: Right.

Joe: Do you think that Christians in America, and I'm talking about people, not Muslims, not your situation, I'm talking about just a person who grows up in a "Christian" home, nominal or whatever. Do you think Christians in America have it easier?

Emir: Let me go back on something you said first, because I want people to hear this because when you're reaching out to Muslims, and I've taught Islamic evangelism so much now for the better part of two decades. I think people make ... There's a misnomer out that somehow you got to know Islam well to win someone to Jesus, and it's just not true. It's helpful. It's supplemental, but it's not essential. Those who know Mohammed well are not necessarily those who win Muslims to Jesus. It's those who know Jesus well that will win Muslims to Jesus.

 On the part of America Christianity, I would say we all have it far easier, not merely other Americans who didn't grow up Islamic like I did, but all of us including me, because while I was disowned by my father, I didn't pay the price that so many are paying across the globe. That usually happens, the demarcation line is with baptism. And at that point of baptism they see you as never returning. By the way, the statistics say that 75% of Muslims who become Christian go back to being Muslim. 

Joe: Really?

Emir: Because of the heavy pressure. Because the fact that Islam isn't merely a religion, it's a 24/7 socioeconomic development of religion that involves every part and aspect of your life from the economy, to how you dress, to who you marry and so forth. But those across the globe, and you're starting to see this incredibly rambunctious powerful movement of God in places like Iran. And why I think that's happening is because the persecution is leading to others coming to faith in Christ, just like in the Anabaptist movement in Europe in the 16th century, just like the persecution under Communism, under my wife's country all the way through the Soviet Union in the 1940's through the 1980's is true of Islam today.

 The great persecutors of the church day are still Communists in China and North Korea and so forth, but are also, it's Islamism. Not all Muslims, because some Muslims come to America in order to leave the traditional elements of the faith. Not radical. I think people forget, it's not radical Islamic theology to put to death someone who leaves Islam. It's traditional. Mohammed said, "Whoever leaves the Islamic religion, kill him." Comes from Bukhari's Hadith. So that's why 85% of Egyptians say that anybody who leaves Islam should die. It's not radical, it's traditional. So it is. But it's where the church also seems to be growing most. I would just add one other thing. I always hear people say that under persecution the church grows the most. And that's true many times in history, but philosophically doesn't have to be true. Our greatest moments in American history with revivals came when we recognized our dependence of God came when we were polarized as a nation. It didn't come under persecution. It came under different elements. Freedom can birth revival just as well as persecution. It's just a matter of what is God's will in that regard. 

Joe: As leaders, what can we do to help people get to that realization, which I think is the key. As you were saying, persecution brings that realization that we need God, but there are other things that can bring that realization that we need God. As leaders, how do we get people to understand, or how can we shepard people to that point? What can we do?

Emir: Yeah. I tell my students there's an old cliched phrase that says Christianity is not a crutch, it's a wheelchair. You cannot be semi-dependent on God, you've got to be fully dependent on Him. I think we wait for God moments. You know, essentially I tell my children, of whom I have three, you have to learn in one of two ways. You either learn through knowledge, which is to desire scripture, right? The reason God wrote his revelation is that we would read it and follow it, period. But unfortunately we are stubborn and fallen creatures, and so the only other way you learn is through experience. So the two ways that you put that into a person's life is that you preach it faithfully from the pulpit instead of opinionations and things of this nature that become so popular in today's pulpits. You faithfully expound the Word of God verse by verse, book by book. You will hit every topic if you touch every verse.

 For the second part, which is I would say is the majority of our church members, its experience, which means there are going to be God moments where they recognize they need God. There will be a loss of a job, loss of a family member, a brokenness in their heart and their mind. And that's at that point where the pastor, the shepard has to walk in, and he can do one of two things. He can either assuage their conscious and miss the God moment, or he can like a Barnabas convict and encourage at the same time and allow them to see a dependency on God that will become the pilgrimage. And it is. Revivals are an instant. And I study them faithfully. But faith becomes a pilgrimage. Far after the first great awakening was over, people were still walking faithfully with the Lord. They just weren't seeing the numbers they did under Jonathan Edwards in New England, or Charles Finney's Ohio, whatever it may be. That's just part of what I think it's going to take in America, and if we don't learn through this too, I think the intervention of God is just a matter of time, whether we want to see it as a cause or a permission, it really doesn't matter at this point. But when we put ourselves outside of the umbrella of God's protection by disobedience, what else is going to happen besides the consequences of disobedience that happens to a person or a nation? 

Joe: I've one last question. Anything you would do over?

Emir: Ha! Golly! What would you not do over? I don't know. In some ways, as a historian, I would say no because your scars tell your story. In other ways, any disobedience to God, you'd always want a redo on that. I think the greatest mistake I made young in ministry was I thought I was teachable, but I wasn't as teachable as I thought I was.

Joe: Oh, that's interesting. How did you recognize that?

Emir: You don't. You wait.

Joe: In retrospective?

Emir: In retrospect. It wasn't as if I was obstinate. It wasn't like I was obtuse in any way. It's just that my confidence outweighed my humility. And looking back, I think most ministers would say, "I wish I had listened more and spoke less." In particular, one of the things I did, and even wish I would do more is, when I got called in the ministry in the 80's, I made it a point to listen to older preachers and actually to attend conferences where I thought, if this jokers near 90, I'm going to show up because he doesn't have long on the Earth. And so I would hear people that no one else today hear, because they're gone. Right? They've graduated to glory and their time with Jesus is now at hand. And I would encourage that of students is if you find those who are older, and they have been faithful in their walk, go listen to them. You'll catch far more than you know. One of the people I bring into Truett, and every time he just rolls his eyes at me, is Junior Hill.

Joe: He was here not too long ago.

Emir: Yeah. He's 80 years old. Every time he'll wrangle and go, "I don't know why you want an old codger like me." But inevitably after he's done preaching, the line out the door of students is much longer than he can stand. And it's because the students recognize it's not merely he's grandfatherly, I think there's a recognition of the intangible faith that he has walked with the Lord for decades and decades. And that's what I wish I could even do more is just listen to those who have walked the faith for so long.

Joe: Well, thanks so much Dr. Caner for coming on the podcast. It's been great talking with you.

Emir: Yeah. It was good being here.