By: Alyssa Jones
Many Christian leaders believe they are running their organizations on mission, strategy, and faith. Dr. Dave Jones spent 25 years building a Christian advertising agency before he was willing to admit that was not always true, and that the real operating system running most faith-based organizations is not vision. It is Fear, Lust, Anger, and Pride.
Dave calls it FLAP.
And his new book, Plan to Win, makes a case that is harder to argue with than most leaders will want to admit.
The Problem Is Not Strategic. It Is Motivational.
When a Christian leader brings Dave a marketing problem, he rarely starts with the marketing. He starts with the question that most leadership consultants skip entirely:
What is actually driving this decision?
The answer, more often than not, is one of four toxic motivators.
Fear creates risk aversion, hoarding, and the kind of defensive messaging that signals to every reader that the organization does not trust God’s provision.
Lust, not in the narrow sense, but in the broader biblical sense of craving created things above the Creator, shows up as the compulsive chase for more clients, more revenue, more recognition, and the willingness to manipulate to get it.
Anger produces blame cultures where failure is punished rather than coached, and where the unspoken message to every team member is that grace has conditions.
Pride refuses counsel, dismisses feedback, and quietly shifts the hero of the organization’s story from the people it serves back to the organization itself.
None of these is strategic. All of them are motivational.
And that distinction, Dave argues, is where most Christian leadership frameworks stop short.
Why These Four Toxic Motivators, and Not Others
It is a fair question. Christianity has long catalogued the Seven Deadly Sins. Dave chose four of them. The choice is not arbitrary.
The first reason is practical legibility.
As Dave puts it, try applying gluttony or sloth to a board meeting. It does not translate.
Fear, Lust, Anger, and Pride are immediately recognizable to any executive who has sat in one.
They show up in the exact decisions leaders make every day, the budget cut driven by scarcity thinking, the product launch rushed because someone needed a win, the team member sidelined because their failure made a leader look bad, the strategic plan nobody questioned because questioning was never safe.
The second reason is biblical genealogy.
All four trace directly to Scripture’s account of where human brokenness began. Fear was Adam’s first response in the garden after the Fall. Lust is named explicitly in 1 John 2:16 as belonging not to the Father but to the world. Anger drove Cain to murder, Abel after his expectations went unmet.
And Pride was Satan’s original sin, the decision to say, as recorded in Isaiah 14, “I will make myself like the Most High.” Dave is not creating a framework for leadership; he is tracing an ancient pathology back to its source.
The third reason is physiological.
Drawing on the work of Henry Wright, Dave points to the hypothalamus as the physical mechanism he connects to the emotional responses FLAP describes. He treats the pattern as something rooted in the body, not only in the will.
That framing is why he argues FLAP is not a character flaw but a brain-body pattern calling for ongoing attention rather than one-time correction.
When leaders understand that the stress response following a bad quarter is a physiological event and not a verdict on their faith, the work of managing it becomes less about shame and more about discipline.
The Cycle That Makes It a System, Not a List
What separates FLAP from a checklist of sins is that the four motivators do not operate independently. They form a self-reinforcing loop. Fear leads to anger when threats materialize. Anger fuels pride as a defensive mechanism. Pride intensifies lust for validation and control. Lust deepens fear as leaders become attached to outcomes they cannot fully control.
Dave describes it as a fast-acting, cancerous, malignant tumor. That is not rhetorical excess.
It is a structural observation. Each element of FLAP feeds the next, which is why organizations can deteriorate so quickly and why the damage often looks systemic rather than traceable to any single decision.
A leader who is afraid of losing a major client will make angry, reactive decisions when the relationship gets rocky.
That anger gets dressed up in pride: “I know what this client needs better than they do.” That pride produces lust for the wrong kind of wins, the ones that look like trophies but erode the mission.
And the trophies, once gone, deepen the fear. The loop closes.
The Counterargument Worth Taking Seriously
Some will argue that self-awareness frameworks, however sophisticated, are insufficient tools for organizational transformation. They are right. Dave does not stop at diagnosis.
Plan to Win is built on the premise that recognition is the beginning, not the destination.
Each toxic motivator has a specific biblical antidote.
Fear is replaced by Faith,
Lust by giving and love,
Anger by forgiveness and patience,
Pride by humility.
These are not generic virtues.
Dave attaches each one to a mechanism: a seven-step implementation process called R7, a discernment protocol he calls Holy Spirit Intelligence, and a free assessment at plantowintoday.com that helps leaders identify which toxic motivator is dominant in their decision-making right now, not last year, not in theory.
The book’s argument is that a defined process limits how much emotion drives a decision.
A clearly written, God-given vision, seven to eleven words, no conjunctions, specific enough to shape a Tuesday morning decision, becomes the filter through which every choice is made. When vision is in place, FLAP loses the steering wheel. When vision is missing, FLAP runs the show by default.
There is, Dave writes, no neutral.
What This Means for the Christian Leader Building Something Real
The most useful question Plan to Win leaves the reader with is not “Do I have FLAP?” Every leader does. The question is which one is driving right now, and whether the leader knows it before the decision is made or only after the damage is visible.
Dave spent 25 years serving more than a thousand Christian ministries and businesses. What he found, repeatedly, was that the leaders who built organizations that outlasted pressure were not the ones with the most talent or the most resources. They were the ones who had learned to recognize when FLAP was in the seat and had the discipline and the process to take the wheel back.
That, more than any framework or assessment, is the argument at the center of this book. You can build something that matters. But you cannot build it on Fear, Lust, Anger, or Pride. You need a vision strong enough to beat them. The book is a guide to building one.
Plan to Win by Dr. Dave Jones is available for purchase on Amazon.
