Bringing the Good News

One of my favorite verses in the Bible is Isaiah 52:7

“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news, who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness, who publishes salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”

Just a few years ago, I got to travel to Liberia and take a few books with me.  On this trip, one of the things I was going to do was to meet some people at the Monrovia Bible Institute (MBI) to see their library.  This school has been devastated by war during the 1990s as was the entire country and it was just getting back on its feet.  MBI was founded by an African American mission agency (Carver International Missions) and was in the process of starting up their classes again. 

When I got in contact with them for their first time and suggested that I might be able to bring some books for their library, they were delighted.  They were particularly excited that they would be able to hand pick the resources that I was bringing.  I had taken books to lots of places around the world and did not realize how meaningful these books would be.  All I could bring with me was a carry-on suitcase filled with reference books – it seemed like a pretty meager gift at the time.

On the day that I went to the Carver campus, I could see that it was bustling with activity as they had a K-12 school (Carver Mission Academy) functioning again and lots of kids in classes.  They took me to the library and I was encouraged to see that not all of their books had been stolen or damaged.  What I had not envisioned was that the library would have so few books available and that the ones they had would be so dated.  With no Christian bookstore in the country since 1996 and many missionaries just returning after the war, it was not surprising that they would have had a lack of current resources, but it was still overwhelming to see.

I put my small suitcase on a table and proceeded to show them what I had brought.  As I took the books out one by one, I will never forget the looks on the people I met that day. You would have thought that I had unpacked gold bars and not academic reference books.  Everyone in the room was smiling from ear to ear and some were nearly tearful.  They were particularly excited when I took out the Africa Bible Commentary that had just been published.  This book was written by Africans for Africans and they had never seen it before.

This small suitcase and its contents were so much more impactful than I could have imagined.  Today, the Carver team can get great Christian resources again in Monrovia as the CLC store re-opened last September.  Reference books are a major part of the product selection being offered and there are now many options to choose from at reasonable prices.

I love to be the one who brings good news, whatever that news may be.  The reality though is that I will only be able share the good news of the gospel in person with a limited number of people in my lifetime.  The books that I help to publish and distribute, though, may have a far greater impact.  They will get passed from person to person and last long after I am gone.   They never get tired, worn out or grumpy like I do.  A book placed in the right hands can change a life forever. 

The Power of Simplicity

As you will see from the picture in my blog this week, I got to cross off one of my bucket list items.  That’s right; I got my picture taken with the Chick-fil-A cow.  That may not be a big deal to most people, but considering how much chicken I have eaten in their restaurants over the years, I deserve some kind of life time achievement award.  For now, I will just have to settle for my picture with the cow. 

Our paths crossed this week at the Chick-fil-A Leadercast event.  The Leadercast is a nationwide simulcast of John Maxwell’s day of leadership training that he and other prominent teachers lead each year.  I had gone to this event a couple of times in the past and was really excited to be able to attend at the location sponsored by my friend Angela Piperburg at the Enterprise Center at Burlington Community College.  What a great location and what an impactful day it was.  Several other CLC folks attended with me and we hosted a book table with resources from the various speakers.

The keynote speaker, Andy Stanley (pastor, speaker and leadership expert), was particularly helpful in bringing clarity to the day’s theme – SIMPLY LEAD.  He told the story of starting his church in Atlanta and putting three critical questions on a three by five card.  He used those questions to simplify everything he did.  He has kept that card with him and looks at it regularly.  During these past seventeen years his church has grown extraordinarily with thousands attending every weekend.   His organization may be far more complex today than at the beginning of his ministry, but his mission and vision are crystal clear.  He challenged each of us to do the same and I am taking a leap of faith and going to that in the rest of this blog post.  So here it goes:

Question #1:  What is it that you do?  (this is meant to clarify what your organization does, not you personally).  As I thought about this question I was overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude to my grandfather and others of his generation who started CLC.  Of all the things they could have done to advance God’s kingdom, they picked one thing.  For over seventy years CLC has made evangelical Christian Books, Bibles and other resources available to the nations.  There were other men in that generation, who held crusades, started Bible translation ministries and harnessed the power of the media to spread the gospel.  While Ken Adams was a good speaker, loved technology and certainly wanted to see the Bible translated, he chose a different path.  The simplicity of Christian literature distribution to the nations was a big calling and one that defines us to this day.  What a blessing to know what you are supposed to be doing each and every day.

Question #2: Why are you doing it?   There are many reasons that we do what we do, but the two most important reasons were enshrined in our mission statement – so that people may come to faith and maturity in the Lord Jesus Christ.  The dual purposes of seeing people come to a saving faith and then growing as Christians is why we do what we do.  The Christian literature is simply a tool that God has given us and a powerful one.  Over the years, these two things have motivated generations of people to serve in this ministry as they witnessed the power of the gospel impacting people’s lives one book at a time.  If C.T. Studd wanted to run a rescue mission within a yard of hell, he was going to need a supply tent.  CLC has been that supply tent for countless ministries and churches that are pushing back the darkness in their corner of the world.

Question #3: Where Do I Fit In?  Another way of phrasing that question was, “What is my unique contribution and core responsibility?”  He encouraged each of us to develop a one sentence job description for ourselves and our direct reports.  I will be working on that in the days to come, but have to say that this was critical question for me.  As the National Director for CLC USA, I have a complex and challenging job.  It is easy to let one aspect of the job dominate the others even when it is not my core responsibility.  As I have thought about it, my core responsibility and unique contribution is to be the Chief Inspiration Officer of our organization – the CIO rather than the CEO.   I have the privilege and joy of communicating what we do and why we do it over and over again in a thousand different ways to many different audiences.  My goal is to motivate our team to achieve our goals, to dream bigger dreams and to have fun doing it. 

Taking a day out of my normal routine to meet the cow, eat lots of chicken and hear many motivating leaders was well worth the time.  I would encourage every leader at any level to make the time to attend one of these events in the future and commit to significant personal growth and development.  It will make you a better leader and a better person.  If you are serious about this, the event takes place again next May 9^th – put it on your calendar now.  You will be glad you did.

The Beauty of God

There seems to be a trend these days to create a God that fits our image of what we think he should be.  If he seems too harsh, then we must have misunderstood a certain passage of scripture.  If he seems too loving then we must have forgotten to read whole sections of the Old Testament.  Whatever the case may be, we seem to be more and more comfortable imagining a God who we would be happy to meet us for a drink at Starbucks who would want to talk about everything that is of interest to us.  Really?

As I was looking at some incredibly beautiful flowers recently, I was struck by the reality of their fleeting time here on earth.  Each year, we enjoy the arrival of the cherry blossoms on the trees on our campus and watch the daffodils peek out of the undergrowth.  It is such a miracle that you can know that this will happen every spring no matter what has happened in the months before. Despite their beauty, it is also a little bitter sweet that the blossoms fall off and the flowers of the daffodils will disappear just as miraculously as  they arrived.

While I am often envious of my friends who live in the ever temperate climate of central and southern California, I am coming to have a new appreciation for the four seasons we experience here in Pennsylvania.  I even wonder if the incredible beauty of the spring and fall would be so meaningful if it were not for the winter and summer that precede these two seasons?  What I do know is that it takes a pretty creative God to display His very nature in the leaves and flowers that I so love.  He is the creator of all things and the sustainer of life itself.

It seems that in this ever increasing desire to create a God in our own image, we really want a God that would make our lives a little bit more like Eden or at least like Santa Barbara.  Life would be so much better if it were sunny and 72 degrees every day.  The reality of our world is a little more gritty than that and I think God wants it that way.  He allows the rain and the snow in our lives to prepare us for the growth He desires to see in us.  His harvest of Godly character in us is only accomplished by our learning to embrace all the seasons.

The truth is that I serve a God who allows leaves to die, flowers to disappear and grass to turn brown.  In doing so, he prepares us for the miracle of the first bulb bursting out of the soil, the trees budding again and the grass growing so fast that it seems to need cutting every other day.  He is not a God that can be controlled or manipulated to be more like me.  In fact, He wants just the opposite.  He wants me to be willing to die so that He can breathe new life into my every fiber.  What a scary prospect.

He is not a safe God, but He is good.  Oh what a beautiful God he is!

Great Expectations

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is one of my favorite movies of all time.  My brother and I have watched it so many times that we can practically quote the entire thing and yet I still can’t help laughing every time I watch it.  At a pivotal point in the movie, the main character, Clark Griswold, is in bed with his wife Ellen and she turns to him and says,

“Honey, you set standards that no family activity can live up to.”  

I love his classic response, “When have I ever done that?”

Deluding ourselves into this kind of thinking is a major part of everyday life.  I start the day assuming that I will eat right, exercise and lose five pounds.  Somewhere along the way, I consume a burger, fries and that irresistible birthday cake in the office.  Still determined to get to the gym, I get changed into the right outfit and then remember the errands I promised to run for Deb.  No wonder I wake up the next day two pounds heavier.

How many times have we made a plan to complete our important “to do” list of activities and gotten to the end of the day with none of them checked off?

This week, I realized that I have been treating God with a similar attitude.  I keep setting false expectations for Him.  The problem is not that I expect too much of Him, but that I expect too little.

Do I really believe what it says in Ephesians 3:20?

“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us”

For most of my life this has been a pleasant benediction to hear at the end of a great sermon and not a promise to cling to like my life depended on it.  So this week, I am determined to ask myself a different set of questions:

•  Can I believe God that my children will not just turn out OK, but that they will have a passion for His Kingdom that impacts all their life choices?
•   Can I believe God that my marriage will not just be better than average, but that it will actually become a picture of the bride and groom portrayed in Ephesians 5?  Can I really love my wife the way Christ loves the church?
• Can I believe God that the church I attend will be more than a comfortable place to go on Sunday?  Can our church really change the community we live in?
• Can I believe God that He will not just take care of my needs, but that He will transform my desires?
•  Can I believe that the God I serve really does hold the keys of death and hades? Can I trust that His word is true and does not return void?

I fear that many of us have settled for a God that fits in a safe “natural” box as our conference speaker, Fred Hartley, said this past week.  May I not be afraid of His supernatural power and instead learn to live with great expectations of His work in my life each and every day.

My Team

One of the great joys of my life has been to work alongside the amazing people that serve in CLC USA each and every day.  For the last eight years it has been my privilege and deeply humbling experience to be their leader and to watch our ministry grow and develop.  This weekend I was re-elected by these dedicated servants to serve them as the National Director for another four years.  I can’t imagine a more challenging or exciting task that the Lord has called and prepared me for.

Each year we have an annual team gathering that we call “conference”.  CLC USA has been holding this event for over 50  years and a lot has changed in that time.  While the world that we live in today would seem very strange to those very first conference attendees, our purpose and core values would be very familiar.   Our books, people and methods have changed, but our commitment to the spread of the gospel through Christian literature remains rock solid.  As we gather again this weekend to have celebrate what God has done in our midst during this past year and dream about the future, we do so on the foundation of sacrifice, fellowship, holiness and faith that have sustained this ministry for over 70 years.

I will be posting pictures from this dynamic time together as a extra blog post next Wednesday.

An Unlikely Journey

For many years, I never really knew where home was.  I knew where my house was, I knew where my parents were from, I knew where I was born, but I was never quite sure about home.  I had been born in Philadelphia, but moved overseas with my parents at ten months old.  They were missionaries with CLC and I ended up living in four different countries before I was fifteen.  As a fifteen year old, I left home to finish high school at a boarding school in North Carolina and stayed with my grandparents in New Jersey during the summers.  This nomadic life was a rich and wonderful experience but often left me feeling deeply un-rooted.

This feeling of un-rootedness is actually fairly common amongst missionary kids and was probably true for many of the kids I grew up with.  By the time I attended Messiah College near Harrisburg, PA, I was determined to have a place that I could call home once and for all.  In God’s providence, I found my wonderful spouse, Deb, during my college years and we settled down in the suburban Harrisburg area with a subtle determination to put down roots.

We were blessed to be able to establish ourselves professionally and move from an apartment into a house of our own within a few short years.  So much seemed to be falling into place – even our five year plan to wait and start a family.  Despite this, I could not escape the nagging feeling that something was just not right about our situation.  What was I missing?  We both had great careers, a house of our own, a church we loved, and a new son on the way.

The missing link was God’s plans for our lives.  Everything up to that point had been motivated by our career aspirations, the expectations of friends and family, my desire for deep roots and the desire to please God by what we were doing.  In a blog post for another day, I can share about how God got ahold of my heart and gave me a new dream.  He gave me a dream of an eternal home where moth and rust cannot destroy and thieves will not break in and steal.  This dream, however, was not going to be fulfilled in the safety and security of a good paying job, where I got to call the shots.  Instead, it required complete surrender to His will for me and my family.

 It also required selling our house and moving onto a mission campus where we would never own a house again.  In the irony of God’s love for me and my family, it also meant that one day, we would move into the house that my grandparents and parents had lived in on this mission campus.  We would ultimately live for the majority of my adult life within a few minutes of the very hospital that I was born in.  I would get to live in one place for a really long time, become a member of a local church where I would one day become an elder and I would serve as the leader of the US branch of the ministry that my grandfather had founded.

So where is home – it is wherever God calls you to serve.  Nothing is more unsettling that trying to put down roots in a place that God has not planned for you to go – Jonah found that out the hard way.  The most satisfying place to live is in the center of God’s will, wherever that is.  For me and my family, that has been a missionary campus near the city of Philadelphia on a hill in a house that we will never own.  What a journey this has been so far.

Incarnational Leadership

Recently I saw a quote from Mike Hyatt that I really liked,

“If you are going to be an effective leader, you must be able to enter into your followers’ world. In fact, if you are going to influence anyone for anything—whether it is your boss, your employees, a client, your spouse, or even your kids—you are going to have to get really good at incarnational leadership.”

Ironically, one of the best examples of this type of leadership has come from the new Pope Francis.  Zack Hunt, a new CLC author had this to say about him in a recent blog post,

“It’s almost as if Pope Francis is pressing the reset button, not just on the formality of the papacy, but the church itself and what it means to really be a follower of Jesus.  From his decision not to wear the papal cape at his unveiling, to holding a Holy Thursday service in a prison rather than a basilica, to paying his own hotel bill and avoiding the luxury of the papal apartment, to his most audacious act so far – washing the feet of two girls, one of whom was Muslim – this pope seems to be doing everything he can to, well, be like Jesus.”

Just mentioning the new Pope as an example has probably put some of my reader’s teeth on edge as we Protestants have a long history of pointing out all that is wrong with the Catholic Church.  While, I am not about to defend the theology of the Catholic Church, there is something refreshing about a new leader being accused of militant humility.  For far too long, we evangelicals have rightly been accused of arrogance and pride in our approach to a whole host of issues.

In my own life, I have realized time and time again how important it is to walk in other people’s shoes before coming to conclusions about them or their motivations.  It is easy to judge people that we do not know or do not understand.  I have been convicted recently in this national debate about same sex marriage that I don’t actually know any gay men or lesbians in my life.  Just making that statement was hard to do and probably shows my lack of awareness as there may be people in my life who are gay but are afraid to let me know.  I am certainly opposed to same sex marriage, but would love to understand more about why that issue has become so important to so many people.

As we enter a new era in our country when evangelicalism is simply one of many dominant forces but not necessarily the primary one, a call to incarnational leadership seems more critical than ever.   As my grandmother used to say, “Actions speak louder than words”.  Maybe it is time for a lot of us to tone down the rhetoric, stop the posture of attack, defend and destroy and try on some of this militant humility for a change.

It is interesting and ironic, that while the national debate in evangelical circles has been raging about same sex marriage, another moral issue has seemed to slip under the radar.  A recent report from the CDC says that today, “About 48 percent of the women surveyed lived with a partner as a first union, compared with 34 percent in 1995.”  The same report stated that, “Three of four women in the United States have lived with a partner without being married by age 30, an increasing trend that suggests cohabitation is now a regular part of family life.”  Interesting how we in the church seemed to have overlooked this trend while fighting over any issue involving homosexuals and they were happening at the exact same time.  If these stats are even somewhat accurate, there are probably quite a few young women that have grown up in the church that are choosing this option.  So is the new norm really just a cultural acceptance of homosexuality as another life choice or is it that the church is failing to convince young people that Biblical moral standards have any real meaning in their lives?

As more and more younger people leave the church, I wonder if it is just a rejection of institutional religion or if it is also about a rejection of the leadership model that has been espoused for so many years.  If more us in roles of influence choose a path of authentic repentant humility and service, what might that look like?  How could we begin to change the culture one act of love at a time?