Leadership Beyond

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Transforming Business for the Kingdom

Suzy Schultz and Mako Fujimura are talented artists. Their Christian worldview informs and inspires their work, and both are critically acclaimed by Christians and non-Christians alike. Novelists Marilynne Robinson and Bret Lott are believers who sculpt words into beautiful stories that enrich millions of lives. Musicians from Bach to U2 have, in response to God’s call, created the world’s best music.

Christian artists add beauty and complexity to God’s creation, transforming the raw materials of paint, language, and sound into finished products that proclaim God’s glory.

Where are their business counterparts — the entrepreneurs and corporate executives who, with the same passion, reshape the world through business? And who, intentionally and for the sake of God’s glory, manage the power of free markets to make the world more productive? Where are the Christians who are propelling the world’s best corporations?

God’s people can, as agents of His redemptive plan, transform business, stripping it of selfish ambition and pursuing instead what’s best for their neighbors. Through business, God’s people can harness mankind’s creativity, and with it nurture His creation, developing products that make the world more satisfying. Through the economic power of commerce, Christians can make the world safer and healthier. The members of Christ’s Church, distributed in offices around the world, can transform greed into good stewardship, showing the world that business has a biblical responsibility to create new wealth and provide a fair return to investors (Matthew 25:14-28). But, with an eye toward the consummation of Christ’s kingdom, we also create wealth in order to create new and satisfying jobs, which offer the hope (and perhaps a glimpse) of a coming world where there is no poverty.

God has placed His people in business so that they can — in humility, and making full use of the talents and resources He’s given — serve customers, employees, suppliers, and the world at large, looking out for the interests of others and providing for their needs.

On their deathbeds, many Christians will regret that they didn’t love their neighbors, care for the poor, or advance Christ’s kingdom as they should have. They might therefore, with their final breath, gasp: “I wish I’d spent more time at the office.”

Ed Stetzer asks:

All this provokes me to ask, "Why are so many missional Christians uninvolved in God's global mission?" As the missional conversation continues and deepens, what has occurred that has led to our blindness to the lost world around us?

Then offers five reasons:

1) In rediscovering God's mission, many have only discovered its personal dimensions.

2) In responding to God's mission, many have wanted to be more mission-shaped and have therefore made everything "mission."

3) In relating God's mission, the message increasingly includes the hurting but less frequently includes the global lost.

4) In refocusing on God's mission, many are focusing on being good news rather than telling good news.

5) In reiterating God's mission, many lose the context of the church's global mission and needed global presence.

Above is just an outline of Stetzer's insightful post. Please visit his site to learn more...

Submitted by Mike Brown & TC Robinson, for Leadership Beyond.

The note below comes from Norival Trindade, one of the international staff guys with ILI.  He is reporting a remarkably suspicious chain disruptions in the International Leadersip Institute (ILI) in Africa. 

It has all the markings of spiritual warfare.  The evil one must be getting nervous.

In Malawi, the venue contracted for the National Conference next week cancelled their reservation four days ago forcing our team to find a suitable place in less than one week. Last month in Zambia, the retreat center director announced that our History Makers participants had to vacate the premises one day before the contracted date and conclude the conference somewhere else. One week ago in Kenya, the vehicle that transported the ILI team was vandalized during the Mombasa National Conference. Almost every conference has one or more last minute cancellations due to unforseen circumstances. We could go on and on describing incidents that threaten to derail ILI conferences everywhere in the world.

Most people call this Murphy's Law. If something can go wrong, it will. For us the reality of Spiritual opposition is stronger than the random troubles we all face. ILI is in the cutting edge of accelerating the spread of the Gospel and our leaders are on the front lines of the battle for the souls of the lost all over the planet. As such, we should expect the enemy to oppose us with everything he has.

This is why we need your prayers. We need partners who will commit to fasting and praying on behalf of the four History Makers alumni who are currently in prison for their faith in an undisclosed nation. We need intercessors who will pray daily for Yaqub Masih, who is preparing to lead a National Conference in Pakistan, where religious intolerance and the threat of suicide bombings is a daily matter. We need to bring before God the many leaders who will travel the treacherous roads of Pakistan to attend this conference, for safety during the event, and for Rev. Mike Goodyear, Orangevale, CA, who is traveling to Pakistan to support Yaqub.

Oftentimes, obastacles come from our poor preparation, lack of forsight, of just plain circumstances.  (Yes, "circumstances" are sometimes just circumstances.)  Other times it is demonic.  In all of it, our primary response is prayer.  Pray for the work as Norival requests.  The Lord is on the move.

Kyle Phillips

Came across an excellent article by Gordon MacDonald here,  entitled, DNF, Many in ministry Did Not Finish. What can we do about that?  I'm giving the "Finishing Well" talk at the ILI Regional Conference in Santa Clarita, Feb. 19-21, 2010, so it caught my attention.

What money is to the financial folks, and power is to political people, and knowledge is to intellectuals, intimacy—deep connections with people—is to those of us who are in the people-care business....

When we gets this "up-close-and-personal" with people, we come within sight of behaviors that cross the boundary into the inappropriate. The so-called temptations of the flesh become prominent under such circumstances and among people who operate in a world of intimacies.

A preponderant percentage of those of us drawn to [Chrisitan] leadership have a higher-than-normal urge to engage with other people. We love to get below the surface of people's exterior lives: to understand their dreams and their burdens, to urge them on to higher possibilities, to sympathize with their feelings and fears, to show them grace and mercy when they fail. The word close is operational here.

No kidding.  Wouldn't it be great if we had the Robinson family robot from Lost in Space blinking his lights and making noise, "Danger Will Robinson!" following us around and watching our backs. Later in the article, he writes,

I find it hard to put into clinical words what I intuit. Simply put, I am not confident that many young men and women entering public ministry with all of its privilege and demands are emotionally (and spiritually?) ready to face the subtleties of human relationships on their darker side.

I am not sure that many midlife men and women appreciate all the pressures bearing down on them that make it easy to seek illicit ways to anesthetize the growing discomfort within. Saying good-bye to children, adjusting to a now childless marriage, caring for aging parents, facing the inexorable aging process with its health issues: pressure, pressure, pressure! For the less vigilant, escape into something simpler, more exciting, seemingly more fun can be exceedingly attractive.

In ending, MacDonald gives the obvious "how to's," accountability groups, inquisitive mentors, et. al.  Read the article, it's good.  I really love his finish:

In our contemporary Christian culture, let's frankly admit the fact that we are—most of us—starved for healthy intimacy at every level and, when we do not experience it, are likely to turn toward the sexual to find it. We need to surface this, find ways to identify the drives and desire and then talk about how to prevent it.

DNF: did not finish. Among the saddest of all epitaphs for a leader. Moral failure: among the most serious and tragic of the reasons. You'd think we'd talk more about this and what can be done to prevent it.

Our radically individualisitc culture tied to a "superman" picture of leadership is a set-up for failure.  What are some good practices to keep us from "being stupid?"

Kyle Phillips

What follows are my reflections upon the gang rape of a 15 year-old girl in Richmond, Califormia.  As reported by the News Hour here http://video.pbs.org/video/1320768285, the rape was witnessed by twenty or more souls who did nothing.  A friend asked for my perspective.  I share my thoughts here as well.

1. Loss of moral foundation in a Christless culture.

The problem here is that people recognize what should happen (ie. rape shouldn't), but are powerless to ground that morality in anything other that "you ought to." Richmond is a gross picture of the kind of decay that takes place in human community without the moral structure provided in community by Christ.

2. Passivity

Our culture cultivates passivity in the face of need rather than action. It's part of the entitlement mentalitry thatgrips us. "Someone else should do something." In the world, not exclusively in impoverished Richmond, people feel powerless. They hide their powerlessness in addictive behaviours and false bravado. When evil comes, we are unable to discern it and act because of our spiritual poverty. What is dramatic in Richmond happens every day in America in less intense forms. We do no act when it is subtle, we will not act when it is overt. Nazi Germany is the obvious historical example: a Christian nation led into great evil, one step at a time.

3. Loss of community

In contemporary America, people grow up with a deep sense of disconnection from one another. Identity is profoundly individualistic. Only in hindsight is Richmond seeking to act of out a sense of community. Community solidarity is not present in young people because the culture does not value it as a primary value. What comes first is my personal sense of satisfaction; second comes community value. One of the hardest things to coach in discipleship is the corporate value of the body of Christ from 1 Corinthians 12. The default response in everybody is "me" not "us."

4. Symptom management, not cure.

Rhonda and other leaders in Richmond articulate well an awareness of the symptoms of the pathology. Rhonda's right,rape is about power and violence, not sexuality. The attempted solution, strong men talking to teen-age boys, better modeling is classic "treat the symptom" behavior. The cure is the radical call from Christ to abandon the power game of the world and embrace the grace-based reality of the Kingdom of God. The world cannot see the solution bacause they are out of touch with the deeper, profound systemic problem in the fallen world.

5. It's going to get worse before it gets better.

These issues are pervasive. They are everywhere, including the church practices of conventional Christianity. The only solution I see is deep mourning, profound repentence, and dramatic lifestyle change. I fear we are not yet hurting enough as a culture to get eyeball to eyeball with Jesus. Lord help us.

Kyle Phillips