Justin R. Lester (speaker) presents a short spoken pitch for a TEDx talk describing his journey from imitating church leaders as a child to intentionally embracing his authentic self as a pastor. He frames "playing church" as a model for applying gamification, creativity, and innovation to leadership, nonprofit and community work, emphasizing intergenerational cohesion, humor, selective dismissal of counterproductive elements, and building trust. The piece functions as a call-to-action to bring playful, game-like dynamics into organizations to foster creativity, growth, and sustained resources.
Chapters
Hey, everyone, my name is Justin and thank you so very much for clicking onto my video today. Let me tell you about what I want to talk about at TEDx. Check this out. I play church every Sunday. Let me tell you how as a kid, I imitated pastors and people in church all the time. I grew up in the church. I always imitated how they sung, how they dressed, how they'd walked, everything, realizing over the course of my life that I was becoming who I saw, but I was not becoming who I am. Then life hit me. Transition hits. Life hits. I got married, had a kid, and I decided that. I decided to stop living somebody else's life and live my own. Let me tell you this, though. I still play church and I pastor a very large church. And I want to take my time today to show you how to play church or just play with your business and life. I'm not asking you to do anything crazy. Rather, I want to remind you who you are through gaming. No, like for real gaming. Like your gamification. Really the tenants of gaming, gamification, a culture of innovation, creativity and sustainability. Your business will never be the same when you play this game. I want to talk about let's play church and playing church together. I've taken churches from small numbers to large numbers, sustained resources, and realized the importance of fostering cultures of creativity, innovation and dreaming within my own innovation, my own leadership team. And through this time together, I would love to engage with how we all can bring the child back in, all of us. By playing. Playing with your business. Playing with those you work with. Not in a weird way, but in a way that fosters the best in them. To not reimagine, recreate, but to create something new. Too often our world is all about repetition and conformity, not creativity, innovation. And in the community I've been in as a pastor, where I've not, I've had to leave paid and a lot of unpaid people. And we've had cohesion, we've had humor, we've had success. How do we do it? There's a couple things I'll bring up. Number one, essential dismissal. There are some things and people that have to go. There's cohesion, intergenerational cohesion. You've got to work with different generations, no matter how old or how young they are. There's something the baby can teach us and there's something the senior can too. There has to be humor. If you don't have humor, you'll go grayer faster than I already have. I think gamification brings collaboration. I believe gamification brings us creativity, and in the end it builds trust. It gets back to sitting on a soapbox in my backyard on the deck, trying to be like the preacher I saw on tv, realizing it's much easier to be myself. I can play a game at the same time. Hope to hear from you to foster something playful in our community and our environments. Taking technology and gamification, merging it with nonprofit leadership and executive leadership to build a world we want to stay in. Hope to hear from you soon. God bless you.
