Why Zuckerberg’s Superteam Should Challenge Your Church’s Leadership

What's up, everybody? It's thattech pastor. Welcome to tech with that tech pastor, where every single week we try to dive into, I don't know what's going on in the world of tech, what's going on in our world, and how it merges with the local church. So I'm grateful for you guys for tuning in each and every week, and thank you to those of you who subscribed on Spotify and itunes and are faithful to come to us on YouTube as well. Super awesome. As I thought about what to talk about this week, and normally we like to spend our time going through the top five news stories that I think are important to talk about, and then a tool, a prompt, and a challenge each week. This week was a little different. I thought about taking time to actually talk about what happened with Facebook and Zuckerberg. If you guys have heard about Zuck Bucks and his new superintelligence team, I thought it was important to talk about it. And I want to look at hiring in our churches. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about job descriptions and hiring and engaging, and I have some jobs I actually created on my website. I wanted to take our time today to actually take a look at and dive a little bit deeper into what's happened with Zuckerberg, what's happened with Facebook, what's happening with the superintelligence team, and what that means for hiring in our churches. Welcome to tech with etechpastor. Today we're focusing on Zuckerberg and what this means for hiring in our churches. Welcome. Let's have some fun. Thank you guys for tuning on in today. If you guys haven't heard the story, let me give you a little bit of the story and I'll play a video, too. Zuckerberg has poached some of OpenAI's best minds, and he's calling what a lot of people have coined the super team for super intelligence. I think there's a lot our churches can learn from it, but here's a video to explain what's going on.

It's almost like investors are saying 100 million isn't enough. Deirdre. To make it too right. Make it billions. It doesn't matter. Just spend as much as you can. And that really at the core of this is that this talent spend, it's a new signal to investors. Just like capex spend in the first few years of the race, no one wants to be the first to pull back because cutting comp doesn't just risk losing talent. It risks Signaling that you're losing momentum. And now an internal Meta memo suggests that Zuckerberg's war on talent is even more aggressive, even, even bigger than we thought it was. It says that Zuck has upped the number of researchers poached to 11, coming from the buzziest and earliest AI native firms, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind. And this is part of a major reorganization that puts Alexander Wang and Nat Friedman, two of the highest profile hires of the past few weeks, at the head of a new group at Meta called Superintelligence Labs.

So short term here, short, short, sorry, Short form here, TLDR for this, Zuckerberg has personally recruited at least seven. Sorry, eight senior from OpenAI. They're not interns. They are taking people who've helped train and launch GPT4. Now, this is vital because he's also done that with the person who assisted with designing the iPhone 2. He's offered massive signing bonuses of up to $100 million in some cases. And one person called it Zuck bucks. Now, we mentioned this last week, and that's why it's been, it's gone so quickly. He's assembled a secret talent list to build out Meta's new AI division called Super Intelligence Labs. So now Meta is creating a whole new organization inside of Meta for focusing on building human level artificial intelligence. And they're doing it with OpenAI's own people. So this matters to tech. And let's talk about what it matters to tech first before we get to the church. It matters because the tech pool is very tiny. And when it comes to, even for me as an African American male, none of the people on this team, one, are female, two, or even African American or anything other than white and Asian. Two thousand researchers, maybe in the world, are doing this type of work that can handle what OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic are working on. So when Meta poached talent, they weren't just expanding, they were resetting the job market and they were taking away intellectual capital from their competitors. So this shifts the entire power dynamic to once again, it's who has the most money. So Zuckerberg isn't waiting at regulation. He wasn't raising on open sourcing, he wasn't waiting on licensing. He bought innovation by buying the right people. So it matters to Meta and OpenAI. So for Meta, this is a comeback moment. So Meta missed the initial AI boom. Just like Apple, who's just completely missing the mark. Completely. OpenAI and Chat GPT grabbed all of the headlines. That's why Open AI and ChatGPT just drove it right. Google dropped Bard and then they dropped Gemini, and then now they came back out again with Gemini. Flash and Veo is doing amazing now. Meta said, instead of us trying to build it, we're just by the people who did it. And so they took the shortcut. They bought the brains. And OpenAI, on the other hand, is feeling the heat. Their chief research officer said it felt like somebody broke into their house. And Sam Altman isn't just worried about competition. He's worried about trust, morale and continuity. There's only so much the NDA is going to cover, because you can't cover an NDA somebody's entire brain. So with all of that, what does it mean for our churches? I think this is important because we're going to learn from this. Oftentimes the things we do in our churches and our businesses are things we've seen in the world first. They're about five to 10 years behind. So let's pivot to the church. If Meta will pay $100 million for one person, how are we treating our pastors? How are we treating our staff? And how are we treating the people who work in our churches for free? How are we treating the worship leader, the youth director, the deacon who prints bulletins at 6am, the sis running her live stream on her cracked iPad and has no clue what she's doing, but she's doing her very best. How are we? How are we building? I like to call our kingdom coders. I think too often we treat people who work in church as disposable. But the truth is, when people don't feel valued, they will leave. And if it's not for money, it's going to be for culture, it's going to be for care, it's going to be for clarity. And I think what you see here with this move from OpenAI to Meta is these individuals know they're brilliant, they know they're vital, they know they're building something amazing and they're going to go where they're valued. Listen, one of the reasons we see a lot of churches that are folding or volunteers that are leaving is because of value. People stick around in space to work for free or less because they feel valued. People will go places where they need to make more because they don't feel valued. Someone will make more money in a bad culture or make less in a good culture. So I'm not saying to pay people cheaply. I'm saying we gotta, I think, evaluate hiring, evaluate our practices, and Evaluate how we value people. They were working at OpenAI all this time, probably making really, really, really, really, really amazing money. And Zuckerberg said, you're worth more than that. If Jesus can come down through eternity, Bible tells us in Philippians he left the right hand of the Father, came to earth and died for us. If Jesus was humble enough as a servant, Ken himself out to come for all of us, maybe we need to be humble enough to celebrate people around us. If Jesus can be humble, I think we can too. So here are 10 lessons I want to give you on church hiring, culture and retention. Before I do that, I want to tell you about something. So this August I'm having a conference here in Napa, California called Theotech. And Theotech is a first of its kind conference where we're coming together to merge theology and technology. A conference for the courageous. We have individuals from LinkedIn, Apple and Google coming in to speak with us and engage with us. Even the leader of the black AI think tank is wanting to speak as well. We're going to have a preach a hackathon on Friday. People from givelify and Glue and pushpay and right now media will also be here as well. It's going to be really a lot of fun. It's not a bunch of sales pitches. Rather it's organizations and companies and people who I believe are going to leave an indelible mark on our communities, indelible mark on our future, and indelible mark on our culture. So if you want to come, here's what I want to do. I want to give you a code here for the month of July called Friday, each and every Friday. But for you and my podcast, you also guys get this user code Friday, you get $150 off your ticket comes down to 249 and you'll be able to come on out. So please come on out to theot this summer, August 13th, the 15th, in that beautiful Napa Valley, California. I would love to have you in the place as we have some fun diving into the merging of theology and technology in a conference for the courageous. Alright, let's talk about it. What are 10 lessons for church hiring? 10 lessons for culture and retention. I think we can learn from this. So first of all, I think we have to, number one, value people beyond their function. I want you not just to love the greeter or the people in your team because they're friendly, but love them because they're family. Right? Affirm their calling and not just their performance. Number two, I think we Pay attention to retention. If your best people are tired and discouraged or ghosting meetings, you're already too late. Don't wait for the resignation text. Let me tell you this. This whole movement called quiet quitting. People will quit before you have to fire them. Pay attention to retention. Offer training and not just tasks. One of the worst things I've seen is if we have give people in meetings just a list of things to do. Meta is building a career. I think oftentimes churches just build calendars. We start giving people, start giving people development tracks. Start giving people classes and books and skill training and see them become different. Don't just task them, train them before. Make it personal. Zuckerberg recruited some of these individuals himself. Can you imagine that the owner of Facebook, of Meta, of Instagram, the leader of this whole movement, he's had a whole movie made about him, was going and finding people intentionally? Don't be afraid to personally invite someone into deeper service. Some of the best volunteers I've had to walk alongside me at my church were not the people I did a mass volunteer call for. They were the ones that God said, go talk to them. And I did. It'd be amazing how many people just wanted a ask 5. Know your mission. To clearly attract the right people, the mission answers questions before you even have to ask the question. People stay where they know they matter and people stay where the culture, the vision, is bigger than them. If your culture is not bigger than your people, your people are going to leave. Be loud about purpose. Be loud about vision. Be loud about mission. And do not apologize for it. Because if a team cannot say the mission in one sentence, it's too long. Black pastor. And you're looking for a GPT that is catered to you to help you craft sermons and do pastoral care and do work. Well, I got made one for you. It's called Pastor GPT and it's made for black pastors and black church leaders by a black pastor. In here you have formative space, formative ways to engage with your preaching, your teaching, your pastoral care. All for black congregations, Black people and black pastors. Now, anybody can use it, but it's crafted especially from black people to have a space to do their own thing and to engage holistically as black individuals. So please go to pastorgpt Co and take a look at it. There's subscription models. There's a free model where you get five conversations a month. There's the first tier where you get 50 conversations a month, and a second tier where you get up to 150 conversations a month. Take a look. Try it out. The goal of it is to give black pastors and church leaders a space to bleed black pastors and church leaders. I look forward to engaging with you in what Pastor GPT can do for you, for your future, for our churches and for all the gospel. Number six Build teams, not silos. Do not isolate the creatives from the preachers or the deacons or the developers. Think cross functionally. AI teams do. The team that meta built is not a team just of one linear thinking. It's a team of people from all across the map. It's something that Jesus did. Jesus didn't have a group of just techtants or stonemasons or carpenters. Jesus did not have a group of just fishermen. Jesus didn't have a group just of tax collectors. He had a cross functional, cross skilled group that worked together. Number seven Celebrate their contributions often give people space to experiment. So whether it's the youth podcast or sermon series to brainstorm or a tech upgrade, people need room to dream. And may the church be the place that people can dream. Right? If creation is God's signature, may the church be the place where we sign off and see God sign off on our creativity. Number nine, I want you to build pathways and not parking spots. Don't just appoint people and leave them stuck for 10 years, but force them to grow. Put deadlines, put end dates on serving in a certain ministry. Make you a move every couple of years. Revisit roles every couple of years. Ask people what's next for you and people are going to be insulted by it. Don't get me wrong, I pastor an older church and people get insulted when I come to them and say, hey, I want to move you here. What's next for you? What they may think because of my age oftentimes is I don't like them. I'm trying to kick them away. Really for me, it's you've outgrown something or you haven't grown enough to stay in it. What's next for you? It's absolutely okay to move out of a ministry to another one. And to those of you listening to this, it's okay to move on from one church to another as well. 10. Lastly, don't guilt people into staying. If somebody needs to move around or step back, bless them. One of my colleagues put it like this. Send them into their destiny. People leave better when they're loved. Well, so scarcity doesn't build a kingdom, generosity does. Those are my 10 things I want you to think about. I think the future is so interesting for churches and hiring and volunteer practices. I think here's the bigger vision. I think we have to ask this question. What would it look like for us to build our own superintelligence labs in the church? A couple of years ago, a church I know of in Chicago brought in some of the top people. I mean they had the top like of the top 10 singers in the country, had three of them. They had four of like the most popular, biggest trending preachers in their locations in their church. It didn't last long because the leadership obviously just could not maintain that and all of them are doing well in their own right separately. But what would it look like to build our own superintelligence labs in our churches? Like not just to automate tasks, but to gather the smartest, most spirit filled people to ask how can we serve better? How can we build deeper relationships, how can we use our gifts for good? I think churches need digital teams. They need super intelligent teams to mix wisdom and discernment and relationship and consistency and continuity and engaging with the Holy Ghost. Like think preacher plus content creator plus coder plus deacon plus disciple, all working as one person. I think we need that in our staffs. We don't just need one linear person, we need adjacent cross skilled people. And this ain't new. I mean I told you before, when Jesus gathered his disciples, he didn't gather just one group of people, he gathered a whole bunch of people. He gathered intentionally a skeptic, he had a traitor, he had thunder brothers. And what did he say? I don't call you servants, I call you friends. I think the church doesn't need more staff and these covenant partners, people who don't just want to roll, but they want to reason. So I want to challenge you to do a team check for your week. Here's my challenge for you. Identify one person on your team or your ministry who's doing the work of five people. Celebrate them this week, Identify them, number one, number two, celebrate them. Ask them how they're doing, invite them to lunch, invite them to learn. And then number three, post a short reflection or email to them to tell them thank you and engage with them and challenge your team around you to do similar things. Alright, so that's my main thing I want you to do. Zuck is changing AGI, but I think we're building something a lot bigger called the Kingdom. And the Kingdom does not run in chips and data. It runs on people. It runs on purpose. It runs on the presence of Jesus Christ. So ask yourself this. If someone came to your church and asked your best volunteer and offered them $100 million, would they still choose to stay at your church? If they would, why? If they wouldn't, why? This isn't just about AI. It's about how we lead, how we solve problems, how we change the community, how we build the kingdom of God, and most of all, how we're good stewards of the body of Christ. Stewardship is not just your money. Stewardship is your people as well. So that's it. That's tech with that tech Pastor, I wanted to take time this week to really engage what happened with Zuck and what happens in this world. There's a lot going on. I would love to say that one day in AI is like five years. This week was no different. Alexander Wang moving. All those individuals moving from OpenAI, all those who moving on from DeepMind to Meta. Zuck just bought the brains. I wonder what he's building. All right, come back next week. Tell someone about the podcast like and subscribe. Let's build something better together. All right. God bless you. Have a great week.