Mission Leader

By John M

During my eighth grade year I was living in a Muslim country, attending a school with a number of Muslim classmates. My parents encouraged me to take part with them in a fast. The goal of our fast was to know God better through denying ourselves of something as basic as food for a short time. This is a fitting story since it is now Ramadan season, the same time of year in which this story occurred.

During Ramadan Muslims are expected to take part in a daily fast. For a Muslim, the fast provides merit for working one’s way into heaven. I had never fasted before so I was curious. I also thought this would be a great opportunity to open doors with my Muslim classmates. When I made the decision to fast I had no idea the opportunity that God would provide.

At my school, those who fast are allowed to remain in the classroom, avoiding the cafeteria where other students would be eating. So during the lunch hour I stayed in our classroom with my classmates who were fasting. They turned to me and asked, “Why on earth are you fasting. It’s not mandatory for you?” It blew their minds that someone would voluntarily take part in a fast. They were miserable about not being able to eat all day. The only reason that they were fasting was because they had to. Through our conversation I was able to share my Christian beliefs. This was the first time my Muslim friends had heard directly from a Christian what it is that we believe.

When I returned home from school I was so excited to tell my parents what had happened at school. Fasting became a cool opportunity to share my faith with friends, who otherwise would never have heard. It was my first time to be able to sit down and clearly explain my beliefs to someone who was not a Christian. The chance to explain the Gospel to these two friends not only gave them a view into Christianity, but it also helped me in my walk with God. My faith was strengthened as I acted on my own faith and my own convictions rather than those of my parents.

In the end the little rumbling in my stomach was nothing compared to the awesomeness of getting to share my faith with some of my Muslim classmates.

When has God blessed you in ways you didn’t expect because of an act of obedience?

Today I am attending a Gospel Coach training event led by Scott Thomas of The Journey Church in St. Louis. Scott created this discipleship/shepherding/coaching approach while he was leading Act 29 (Mars Hill) coaching/mentoring network. Before coming to the event I read his book, Gospel Coach attempting to thoroughly drink in the essence. In short – it was different than I expected.

First as I put down the book after turning the last page my thought was, “This is discipleship!”

My second thought – “This is a shepherding.”

I was reminded of my friend Keith Spurlock, who in 1976 knocked on my dorm room door. Before long, we were meeting at 7am on Saturday mornings. Before long, I had a prayer notebook. I had a Bible Study plan. I was journaling my reflections from God’s Word. I was being discipled and coached and I didn’t even realize it.

I highly recommend the book to those who are looking for handles for discipleship and influencing others toward living a gospel-centered life. I heard one pastor in the training say that as a pastor, he had been looking for twenty years to find the magic bullet for influencing and shepherding his church leaders.  There is no magic bullet, but Gospel Coach is a good tool if you need handles and processes for an approach toward discipleship/shepherding/coaching.

I can’t help but thank the Lord for Keith who took the time to coach me as a young college student.

A great friend, Drew Cline has developed a robust web site that you need to visit. I just read his latest post on Transparent leadership. He’s also in the process of developing a new emerging church in the Franklin, TN area.

Here’s an excerpt from his recent post.

Many business books talk about leading strong, making decisions and staying the course, even if you’ve made a bad decision or regret how you’ve led, don’t show weakness, but keep your head up and keep going in the same direction. That’s not good leadership, that’s arrogance and a HUGE lack of awareness – in fact it’s sin.

Read Drew’s Entire Post on Transparent Leadership

David Watson is a friend who has done great work locally and globally as a Church Planter, a Strategy Coordinator, and as a trainer of Multiplying Mentors.  David has been an over-achiever in about everything he has done, mainly church planting.  His words are worth taking to heart.

Check out his recent blog on Leadership and Spiritual Multiplication.

There seems to be some confusion regarding the various roles leaders must play if they hope to succeed. For me, success in a leader is defined by having a vision, accomplishing the vision, and making more leaders who can have a vision, accomplish the vision, and make more leaders who… and so on.

When I am evaluating leaders I always look for three generations in the room – myself, the person I am mentoring, and the people he or she is mentoring. If you cannot see three generations, then the leadership model is probably new, flawed or broken. Leaders make more leaders as a natural part of leadership. Some are more intentional that others, but all real leaders produce more leaders.

In the reproduction of leaders we have to work through information/knowledge transfer, skill set transfer, and capacity building. Information/knowledge transfer is the primary function of teachers. Skill set transfer is the primary function of coaches & trainers, and development of capacity is the primary role of mentors.

Yesterday I spent an amazing day in OK City at lifechurch.tv.

Three leaders from their Innovations team invested all day in three of us from the IMB’s Emerging Leaders Team.

I’ve been on staff at Saddleback and another mega church so the enormity of 26,000 attending dozens of campus each week was not what impressed me.  Mass and metrics just don’t float my boat.  The thing that blew me away is their ethos of frugality, efficiency and free and broad distribution of everything they own for the expansion of the kingdom. They bleed this value!  Hurray!

These guys are NOT interested in royalties, book deals, or record labels.  Instead they have a team of diginovators (my word) who invest themselves in producing digital inovations for their church – but not just for their own.  They develop these tools with the end in mind of giving it all away to the world.  One of the best examples is, youversion.com.

Instead of brokering deals for books and worship cd’s, the deals they are brokering is to get the Word of God distributed for free, digitally, via every iphone, blackberry and cell phone.  We’re talking the potential of a bible in every hand in every nation in every conceivable language – for free – all via the web.  Their not selling our giving away printed Bibles, their giving them away accross the globe for a very minimal financial investment.

Mega-churches spend 100’s of thousands of bucks on videos and lighting and sound and stuff that is necessary and useful.  Lifechurch.tv places a higher value on spending their time and staff on projects that serve the lost much more than they serve their own members.

Thank you lifechurch.tv for investing in the Kingdom, perhaps even at the expense of your own kingdom!