You Will Get Booed in Ministry
What an embattled NFL head coach can teach us about leadership resilience
This past Sunday the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the Cleveland Browns. If you don’t do sports, stay with me here; I promise this will also benefit you.
The head coach of the Eagles is Nick Siriani, who led the Eagles to the Super Bowl a couple of years ago but is embattled due to his very talented team’s underachieving since that run. On Sunday, the Eagles won, but the game was ugly and Cleveland isn’t very good. It’s Philadelphia, where the expectations for their professional sports teams are very high.
Siriani, in the waning seconds of the game, thought was a good idea to interact with some, shall we say, rude fans behind him. He didn’t like the booing he was hearing. Booing, of course, is a normal part of a professional sporting event, especially in Philly where they even booed Santa Claus and Hall of Fame third baseman Mike Schmidt.
If you’ve been to a football game, you know fans can get super rowdy. Mixed with intoxicating beverages, fans get rowdier They often shout things that shouldn’t be shouted. But . . . if you willingly took a lot of money to be the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles professional football team, you have to know that this is what you signed up for, right?
Sirianni, in his postgame press conference, tried to explain himself by saying he was upset with the fans booing. But I think what he did was highly unprofessional for a leader. I’ve never seen respected, future Hall of Fame coaches like Andy Reid or Jim Harbaugh or John Harbaugh or any Harbaugh do this. They coach, they ignore the rowdy fans and act like the professional leaders they were paid to be.
It seems like Siriani is a bit thin-skinned. It seems like he hears every single negative comment, even ones from liquored-up fans. This is not a good posture for a leader.
I doubt anyone reading this newsletter will be in the position Siriannis is in. We’ll never get paid millions of dollars to coach football nor will we have our worst, bad-faith critics telling us how bad we are at our jobs. But anyone in a position of consequence will have people who seem to be wearing our same jersey telling us how terrible we are. In the digital age, the bigger the position of authority or platform, the louder the critics.
I’ve written before about how to filter out good-faith critics from those you should ignore. There are people in your life (I hope!) whom you’ve permitted to tell you when you are wrong. Some folks will engage your work and offer substantive disagreement and feedback. This is good. But you’ll also have a lot of folks in the cheap seats who you think are on your team but whose sole motivation is to raise themselves by bringing you down. Don’t make the Sirianni mistake of letting these folks live in your head. Leaders need resilience.
I think of Nehemiah’s response to his bad-faith critics, Sanballat and Tobiah. My loose paraphrase is, “Bro, I don’t have time for this. I’ve got work to do.”
I’ve worked around leaders who were incredibly insecure and sensitive to every single negative remark. They could recite the meanest tweet from some obscure online troll. They injected these things into every conversation. Ironically this kind of response encourages the bad faith critics to keep booing. More importantly, it hurts our leadership and creates an uneasy work culture.
This isn’t to say we are somehow robots who are never offended or so thick-skinned nothing ever gets to us. We are human. We have emotions. We have the capability of being hurt deeply. But rather than dwell on every Sanballat and Tobiah we should, as Nehemiah did, continue in the work we are called to do. We need the self-control to avoid going into the stands like the Philadelphia Eagles head coach and getting on the level of someone too intoxicated to think straight. Part of the leadership role is acting professionally, filtering out the noise, and not getting all up in your feelings because someone with an agenda got mad at you.
You can’t sweat every taunt from every fan in the stands. In doing so, you get on their level and give bad-faith actors exactly what they want: attention. Instead, find your security in knowing and being known by the God of the universe through the death and resurrection of his son, Jesus Christ. And discover the mute button on social.
You will be booed. In ministry. In leadership. In life. The question is, how will you handle it?
A few housekeeping items:
I’m working on edits for my book on Christianity and patriotism with Harper Collins. It will be released in September 2025. I’m excited about the conversations this will generate.
I made my monthly appearance on SEBT’s Christ and Culture podcast with my friends Nathan Finn, Benjamin Quinn, and Kristen Kellen. We talked about the election, sports, hurricanes, and more.
My book, The Characters of Christmas, is now on sale on Amazon. Get it if you are planning your Advent season. If you have little kids, you’ll like Jesus and The Characters of Christmas.
If you live in the DFW area, The Land Center is hosting Carl Trueman for a series of lectures. You are welcome to attend. Register here.