Moving Day!

This blog has moved to AMF’s new website, amfmission.org/burns. Please update your bookmarks. If you are already subscribed to the feed here, you should automatically continue to receive posts from the new feed. Check for the most recent post, “Gettysburg,” in your feed reader or inbox, and let us know if it has not arrived. New readers can subscribe to the current blog feed and to feeds for AMF news and missionaries’ ministry journals at the bottom-right corner of the new homepage (www.amfmission.org). Thanks for reading!

I hope you’ll take the time to become familiar with the new site. It features photos, ministry journals, missionary stories, missionary profiles, and opportunities to donate to the work God is doing through AMF all across the nation. You can also keep up to date with AMF by becoming a Facebook fan.

Fourth of July in Washington, D.C., Part 2

We had an interesting day in Washington, D.C. The Mall was filled with people with causes. There were people who wanted to protect the animals, who were fighting breast cancer, who were involved in political efforts. There were people representing the inhumane treatment of people in other countries. But there were also spiritual groups. Probably the most noticeable of these were the Hare Krishna groups. Their tents were colorful, and they were giving out free food. They had great music. They were dressed in their Krishna garb, monk-like outfits. Their place was packed. For some reason, they drew everyone in. There was curiosity, and they treated everyone like guests. They treated everyone with a warm, warm welcome.

There were also some Christian groups there, and they were passing out literature. I enjoyed taking the tracts just to read what they were passing out. One was filled with words we take for granted, words like “atonement” and “trinity,” but I wondered whether people walking the Mall, just enjoying the Fourth of July, could really understand what the message was.

Some of the Christian groups were in-grown. They were under a little tent, singing hymns, some of which had words that would make little sense to someone without the backdrop, the theology. It seemed so out of context; it seemed there was no sensitivity to where they were and to what message would be appropriate and relevant in the context in which they were delivering it. For some reason, the Krishna group seemed more attractive than the Christian group.

I realize these are brothers and sisters who love the Lord, who were doing what no doubt God had urged them to do, but it made me think about our mission and whether or not we are relevant to the culture that surrounds us. Is our message is filled with words that need definitions and context, or does the context allow us to share the Gospel in a way that people understand? It reminds me of Jesus talking about the mustard seed and the trees that were visible to the people – he used the context to give an illustration of what faith was about.

It’s my prayer that we at American Missionary Fellowship will not be blind to the cultural context so that the message is easy for people to understand and powerful for people to claim for their lives.

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

Fourth of July, Part I

Our whole family is at the Home Office for the next week or so. Our son, R.W., flew in from Chicago, where he lives and is going to grad school. Our daughter, Barrett, who will start at Westmont College this fall, is also here. They and RobAnne and I are all in our little apartment at the Home Office.

We decided, since we’re so close to Washington, D.C., to go this Fourth of July to the Mall. We knew we would have to fight the crowd and deal with the hassle, but we wanted to spend the Fourth of July in Washington, D.C. Let me give you the top ten things I loved about the day:

1. Being with family – There’s nothing better than just hanging out with your adult kids and having them tell stories of all the shenanigans they did when they were younger. I don’t know why Dad has to be the brunt of every joke, but it’s part of being a dad.
   
2. The party – Washington, D.C. was just a big party. There were bands, music, food, dancing, and free museums. I loved the party atmosphere.
   
3. Fireworks – This one is interesting because in southern California, fireworks are illegal, but in Pennsylvania, they’re not. We bought, for $15, a bunch of homespun fireworks, and we had a ball putting on our own fireworks display – just for us – on the back porch of the Home Office. But the fireworks with the backdrop of the Washington Monument were amazing. While ours were pretty good, we were surprised by how incredible and how beautiful it was to have fireworks in the context of the Capitol and the Washington Monument, of all the great buildings and monuments of Washington, D.C.
   
4. The crowds – I love a crowd. I love being part of a larger group. I really enjoyed all the different types of people – families, younger people, single adults – all kinds of races and ethnicities. It was just great to be part of a crowd.
   
5. Energy – You cannot go to the National Mall on the Fourth of July and not get amped up. It is just a lot of energy and a lot of fun.
   
6. Aretha Franklin – They had a concert. We sat on the Capitol lawn and listened to Aretha Franklin sing “Respect.” (R-E-S-P-E-C-T. . .) What a deal! She got that crowd so worked up. We were all standing and singing and dancing as she sang songs that reminded us of our growing-up years.
   
7. Fighter jets – It was very cool to look up in the sky and see what I believe were two F-15 fighters keeping watch over Washington, D.C. I just felt safe.
   
8. Picnics – We took our picnic lunch. We had sandwiches and candy and soda, and there we were – 200 yards from the U.S. Capitol, sitting on the lawn, just enjoying each other’s company, having a picnic. There’s something that’s very right about that.
   
9. Remembering those who paid the price – In the midst of all this partying, all this excitement, Aretha Franklin, and all the fun, I could not help but notice the veterans who were there. Some were in wheelchairs, and some obviously had had their lives severely affected by their service to our country. I couldn’t help but remember the cost of freedom.
   
10. Flip-Flops – One of the challenges I have, being from the West Coast and working on the East Coast, is how formally people dress. I miss wearing flip-flops to work. I was wearing them all day in Washington, D.C.

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

Camp Dynamite

Camp Dynamite is a camp run primarily for urban youth in Washington, D.C. by AMF missionaries Bob and Sharon Mathieu. I spent the day with Bob and Sharon recently. It was quite a day! I was presented with a Camp Dynamite t-shirt and was told about this two-week camp that’s run to help young people know who Jesus is. They learn Scripture; they hear messages; they sing together; they play together. They do everything that camp is, and in a very real way, this camp is the place where these kids – many of them for the first time in their lives – will feel accepted and loved by people who care for them.

Bob knows everyone in Washington, D.C. He’s been there a long time, and it was amazing to watch him interact with everyone we came in contact with, like the school principal. They love Bob. He’s part of the community. He didn’t set up a monastery or a private area where Christians could come. No, he’s out in the community, mixing with the people who struggle to make ends meet in the Anacostia area of the city. A little church meets in a building that the Mathieus own, and the church is a place of refuge, a place of sanctuary for the community. At the same time, the school has integrated Bob into its world. He’s provided free school supplies for teachers to be better teachers, working in partnership with World Vision.

What really impressed me was when we went to a wellness center where Bob has a Bible study for senior citizens. The wellness center has weight machines and massage and aerobics classes, things that help older people become healthier. We went to a small room where five or six older African-American women were waiting for Bob. They love him. They love the fact that he accepts them for who they are. I was more impressed with the fact that these women had asked, “Why should only children get to go to Camp Dynamite?” So for the last couple of years, Bob has invited senior citizens to Camp Dynamite. They come, and they play, and they worship, and they sing, and they meet Jesus.

Bob and Sharon Mathieu have a different style. They’re right with the people. They’re not administrators; they’re doers. They get their hands dirty. What I love about Bob and Sharon is that in a very true sense they are Jesus in that community. They talk about Him, but they don’t just talk about Him or preach about Him. They are Him – they take on characteristics of our Savior.

It was a marvelous day. I’m proud that people like Bob and Sharon Mathieu are part of our ministry at AMF.

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

Bill Pennington

Bill Pennington is the father of our controller, Dave Pennington. He (Bill) passed away a couple of weeks ago. Last Saturday I went to his memorial service at one of our key AMF churches. It was fairly typical of a memorial service, with singing, hymns, Scripture, and a message. All were done really well, but what was amazing was what happened with the grandkids.

You see, Bill Pennington had a Bible, and in the Bible he had underlined or circled or highlighted a series of verses, and they all had the common theme of contentment. He preached a sermon at his own memorial service through the reading of Scripture by his grandkids. David asked each of the grandkids, and I think there were fifteen of them, to read all or part of a passage their grandpa had circled in the Bible. There was something very powerful about this group of young people reading Scripture marked by their grandpa about where he is and the contentment that he had in the Lord Jesus Christ.

I think the Pennington family is onto something. I think they’ve learned the power of learning from each generation. Last Sunday night we went to church with the Penningtons, and I learned that for two weeks every year the entire extended family gets together in a big house on the New Jersey shore just to be together. They swim together, they eat together, they play games together, and they interact with each other for two weeks, and so the relationships among cousins and nephews and aunts and uncles and grandparents are cemented by spending time together.

Many of us have lost that. Many of us have lost the fact that we can pass on not only our family heritage but the values of our family and the teachings of our family as the generations interact with each other.

Bill Pennington preached probably the greatest sermon of his life as his grandkids spoke and read the Scriptures that were important to him. It was a good service, and Bill Pennington must have been a good man because his grandkids obviously have learned a great deal from him.

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

Change

It has been said that the one thing you can count on is that things will change. Nothing stays the same. Our bodies are regenerating cells every three seconds. The weather changes. Our culture is changing. Our country’s demographics are changing.

Sometimes we desire so much to stop the change because we like the safety and the security of the familiar. The unfortunate part is that in ministry we don’t have that option. We are about transformation; we are about change. That’s what Jesus does when he comes into a person’s life. He changes that person from a sinful human being to a redeemed individual. We are, at our core, agents of change within our culture. We are to be agents of righteousness and justice. We are to be people of love who are counter-cultural and therefore change our culture into something that God wants it to be.

I don’t know why we all resist it. I don’t know why we spend time protecting ourselves from change, except because the safe and the comfortable are our security.

As I read the Gospels, Jesus was all about creating problems for the status quo. He was all about creating change within individuals, within systems, within structures, within cities, and within the religious establishment. It is my prayer that we at American Missionary Fellowship will also be the same agents of change that our Lord was while He was ministering here on earth.


http://www.americanmissionary.org/

Time Alone

“You should never make a major decision in your life without sleeping on it overnight,” a good friend told me a few years ago. I’ve thought a lot about that. Sometimes things look different in the morning. I think time alone – time by myself – is critical to getting through the noise of our culture, the busyness of our schedules, and the decision-making process.

We spent the last couple of days here in Villanova, Pennsylvania, working on some critical issues for the mission, issues that will affect the future, affect people, and affect the way the mission runs for the next few years. They’re all related to the economic crisis and require us to be proactive in our thinking.

What is amazing to me is after we spend all day talking and strategizing, I go on a walk, or I sit on a porch and look at the trees, the squirrels, and the birds. I open my Bible, and somehow the quietness allows me to see things more clearly.

Ministry is a lot of work. Ministry is busy. Ministry is overwhelming. But ministry needs to include stillness and quietness. As God told us, “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). There’s marvelous victory in being alone.


http://www.americanmissionary.org/

Intentional Ministry

During our Orientation, I got to know John and Kathy Hoover. They and their young family live in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Lancaster is a safe community. They pray in school. It’s common to see families gathered around, holding hands and praying in restaurants. It’s a very safe Christian environment, but John and Kathy Hoover are very unusual people.

I’m guessing that John is in his thirties, and he feels called to working and presenting the Gospel to people in rest homes. He was so impressed with his grandmother and the despair that she felt in a rest home that he wants to leave a safe, secure job at a bank, to raise his own support, and move to be able to spend the rest of his life working in rest homes. And not just in any place. The Hoovers decided they wanted to move to a place that did not have very many churches, that in fact was a fairly unreached community, and they picked Nashua, New Hampshire.

So John and Kathy are leaving the safe environment of Lancaster. They’re leaving their parents, who are close by now, and moving eight hours north in order to be what God calls them to be in an area that desperately needs a light, someone who will shine for Jesus.

Hats off to you, John and Kathy! You’re an example of incarnational ministry. You’re an example of intentionally living your life. We have a lot to learn from you, and I pray God’s blessing on your forthcoming move to Nashua.

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

The Cross / Orientation

I’ve just spent the last week with our new class of missionaries, recruits who are just beginning to raise their support and focus their attention on the new mission field. These missionaries and missionary candidates have decided that they will serve the Lord in a very strategic and powerful way with American Missionary Fellowship. I was very, very impressed by the walk with God that these young families had. They seemed to want to be obedient; they seemed to really want to know what God had for them and be prepared for what lies ahead. I was amazed at how the group gelled together because they had a common interest in serving God.

The last night, we commissioned them. We had built a cross out of a tree on our property, and we had these young missionary recruits write all of their fears, all of their cares, all of their stresses, all of their anxieties, and all of their inadequacies on a card, and nail the cards to the cross. It was powerful to watch as they surrendered these things to the cross of Jesus Christ.

Those of us who were not candidates were board members or staff. We put on the cross another set of specially marked cards that had encouraging messages on them. They signified promises that our missionary candidates could claim that would counteract the cares they had put on the cross.

At the end of the night, I said to these candidates, “The challenge is being able to leave these things at the cross and not take them back with us, not to wallow in them each day instead of just leaving them where they need to be – in the hands of our Lord and Savior.”


What a night! What a night of turning to the cross! What a night of being able to leave behind those things that will keep us from being all that God wants us to be! What a great night of learning to give things to Jesus!

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

Worry

I’m not happy with it or proud of it, but I am a card-carrying, Class 1 Worrier. I bite my fingernails; I worry about things. I am married to RobAnne, who is not a worrier. She is an even-keeled, level-headed person who takes things in stride. We’re built differently; we’re wired differently.

I read in Scripture (I Peter 5:7) that I am to cast my cares on Him because he cares for me, and I see the distance, the disconnect in my life, between what the Bible says and what I should be doing. I’m very worried about the coming days. We have a huge summit next week with the members of the executive team to work out what we need to do to weather these economic times. With a shrinking endowment and expanding benefits expenses, I worry. I worry that I cannot be the leader that God has called me to be. I worry that I cannot make the appropriate and right decisions to protect the promises we’ve made to our retired missionaries and to our field staff, to have the kind of resources necessary that they can take care of their families, which will enable them to do ministry.

Then I remember, “Cast your cares on Him because He cares for you.” The word cast is a verb; it’s active. It’s what we are to do every day. We cast our cares. We project our cares on our God, and He does not back up. He embraces them and carries us through.

It’s a good lesson for me, and I pray that those who read this blog will also learn the power of casting.

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

The Good Shepherd

Our church is preaching through the Gospel of John. This Sunday we were in John 10, which is about the Good Shepherd and His sheep, and we learned about the sheep hearing His voice. In John 10:3-5, it says, “. . . He calls His own sheep by name and leads them out. When He has brought out all his own, He goes on ahead of them, and His sheep follow him because they know His voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger's voice" (NIV).

That’s an interesting concept, that Christ-followers know the voice of the Good Shepherd. It caused me to wonder when I last really heard His voice, and when I began to recognize the difference between His voice and other voices. It seems to be a core section of Scripture, a core value that we place on Christ-followers.

This Sunday was also Salsa Sunday at our church. After church we had a big Mexican fiesta. We had a mariachi band; we had a salsa contest. I was the emcee of that event. We have about 250-300 people who come to our church, so there was a lot of noise – a lot of people talking and having a good time, with mariachi music in the background. But it was interesting – above all of that, I recognized one voice. That was RobAnne’s. We’ve been married for thirty-five years, and I could hear her voice. I didn’t know she was around, but as I tuned my ears into the multiple conversations going on around me, I could distinctly understand RobAnne’s voice because I know her voice.

I must admit that what we learned in church and what I experienced with RobAnne’s voice made me more sensitive to opening my ears to the voice of God. That’s what I want for our mission: people who recognize and flee from the voice of the stranger and who understand and run to the voice of the Good Shepherd.

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

The Power of Transparency

Last week, our eight regional directors from all over the United States came to Villanova to discuss the future of the mission. The economic environment, the donation environment, has led us to where we need to make some hard decisions, as (like most organizations) we are having difficulty responding to reduced income.

What impressed me was that the more details we laid on the table, the more transparent we were, the more we said, “Here’s what we’re dealing with,” the more unity there was. There is a cancer in secrets and a freedom in transparency.

But that’s not even what impressed me the most. What impressed me the most was hearing each person’s life story. Each night one person shared, starting with his childhood and walking through to where he is now in ministry – not in three or four minutes, but sometimes a half-hour, forty-five minutes, even an hour. Every one of those testimonies involved tears, pain, and suffering. There was a transparency that took place as we shared our lives with one another, and the result of that was unity.

The result of simply being truthful and honest without pretext and without disguise was unity. I could feel it. I could sense it, even when we talked about difficult decisions we need to make.

I find it interesting that when Jesus entered a situation, people became transparent. When the disciples were unable to catch fish and they caught so many fish the boat was sinking, what did Peter do? He ran to the shore and fell at Jesus’ feet, saying, “Woe is me, a sinner!”

I would encourage our mission to quit whispering and telling secrets because there’s power in transparency. There’s something about when we’re in the light of the Spirit, the light of Jesus. When all our sinfulness, all our pretenses, and all our inability to be transparent suddenly become transparent, we find freedom and acceptance. It’s a great lesson for us all to learn.

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

The Future

Saturday night I was at a presentation for Youth Link, an AMF mission point in Paradise, Pennsylvania. Youth Link is an influential youth ministry in that area. I have written about its leaders, Sam and Tina Gordley, before. Sam is connected with the superintendent of schools, coaches, teachers, and churches. He’s the glue. He’s the one God seems to be using to reach that high school and junior high generation.

Sam is an amazing leader. He thinks about the future, not just the present. He thinks about building leadership skills and vision into his youth volunteers and his co-director, Ed Campagna. I wish you could have been there to hear Ed articulate the vision, purpose, and procedures of Youth Link. It was electrifying. That night I didn’t see Sam, the leader. I saw Sam, the delegator, the discipler, the mentor, speaking through Ed. Sam understands clearly what succession is about. He understands that he’s building the future.

At the pre-meeting for this presentation, which was made up of high school students, Sam asked for volunteers to mop up the floors, pick up the chairs, and take care of the tables. He actually had to choose which students to pick because so many of his people wanted to help.

Sam and Tina offer a tremendous amount to the students of that area. One of the things they offer is a model of what a great marriage is about. Tina stood up at the meeting and almost apologized for not being involved enough. She felt like she, as the mother of three rambunctious boys, needed to spend more time with them and get them to bed at a decent hour. But, she said, “I sneak away after they are in bed, and I get to interact with some of the students.”

The Gordleys model marriage. They model a marriage that these young people in high school and junior high will remember when they get married. They’ll think about Sam and Tina and say, “That’s what marriage is about. That’s what a Christ-centered marriage is about.”

I say hats off to Sam and Tina Gordley and hats off to Youth Link. They understand what it means to build into the future.

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

Royal Liverpool Golf Club at Hoylake

My father taught me how to play golf when I was five years old. Almost every Saturday of my growing-up years, he and I would do our chores in the morning and then go play golf at noon at Redford Golf Course in Detroit. I still love to play golf.

One of the benefits of being able to travel in different parts of the world is having the opportunity to play some really cool golf courses. Royal Liverpool is one of them. Tiger Woods won his last British Open at Royal Liverpool in 2006. I went simply to buy a sweater from the club, and to my surprise, I was able to play.

I started late in the afternoon. The sun does not go down until 10:30 or 11:00 at night in England, so there was plenty of time to play. The golf course was deserted; I was by myself. It was one of those golden moments with the blue sky and an incredible golf course and memories of the British Open. When I got to the eleventh tee, I found myself enormously emotional. In fact, I had to sit down. I cried. I couldn’t really understand why; I couldn’t figure out what it was that made me do that.

Then I realized – I wanted to call my dad. I wanted to call my dad and tell him where I was playing; I wanted to share this experience with him. I desperately wanted him to be part of my life. My dad died on December 30. I don’t have very many emotional moments, but every now and then one sneaks up on me, like that moment on the eleventh tee.

I began to think about that experience, and I wondered, Why is it that we don’t have that same desire to share powerful experiences with our Lord? I have decided to be more deliberate about living in an open relationship with our heavenly Father and cultivating a desire to share my life with Him in the way I want to share it with my earthly father.

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

The Power of Forgiveness

In our mission are people who have prodigal kids. As I’ve traveled around this spring, I’ve seen the heartache these parents experience over their families – sons who are on drugs, daughters who are leading dangerous lifestyles that are difficult to watch. To these parents, I offer the story of one of my close friends:

Ten years ago, my friend had a difficult conversation with his daughter and her husband that did not go well. The conversation became caustic and ended with ten years of silence. He did not receive an email, a text message, a phone call, a Christmas card, or anything for ten years. He was totally cut off from a relationship with his daughter and son-in-law.

My friend is a Christian leader. He loves God, and he understands the power of forgiveness. He did what he could to keep the lines of communication open – he wrote her letters and tried to get in touch with her through third parties – but to no avail. Despite the silence, he continued to pray and ask God to open up that door of communication some way, somehow.

Well, last Thursday he got his first email. His other daughter is getting married, and she wants her sister to come to the wedding. They decided to meet after the wedding to begin talking and working toward reconciliation.

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

Capernwray Hall

This week I am in the northwestern part of England, by the Lake District, lecturing in Capernwray Hall. Capernwray Hall is a manor house – or, as we would call it, a castle – that has housed a Bible school since the middle of the last century. It was purchased by Major Ian Thomas for the purpose of educating students about the supremacy of Jesus Christ. It has a rich history; many of the people I come in contact with were students here at Capernwray. It is a nine-month Bible school, and the administrators bring in lecturers from all over the world to teach these Bible students.

You might call these 150 students from all over the world “in-betweeners.” There are students who are between university and their careers. There are some who have tried a career for several years and decided that they wanted or needed more Bible knowledge, and so they are here. There are people who are between high school and college. They’re in between different life events, but the one common value of these 150 students from all over the world is that if God calls them to do something, they’re ready, willing, and able to do it. They’re not encumbered by mortgages, car payments, debt, and all sorts of things. They’re ready, and they’re willing, and they’re able.

I’m here for two reasons. One is to teach them about life skills. My thirteen lectures are on life management, using the gifts that God has given to us. But I’m also here because these are the students that we need on our mission – young students who have passion and enthusiasm for Christ. They do things differently; they express things differently from what we’re used to. They desire to talk about their relationship with Jesus in terms that we’re not very familiar with.

When I’m here, I sense the incredible gift that God has given these students to do anything that He calls them to do, any time, at any place. That’s not a bad lesson for us all.

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

Seven Things I Know about American Missionary Fellowship

I’ve just completed two months of visiting as many area fellowships (small group gatherings for our mission) as possible – sometimes two a weekend. I’ve seen a lot of people, talked to them, heard their stories, and heard about their ministries. I’ve spent some time listening to their hurts and their dreams and also their frustrations. After meeting these people, there are seven things I know about our mission:

One: There is no doubt about it – our people love God. They want to serve Him, and they want to see revival come in America. They want to know that they are part of what God is doing to restore the spiritual vitality of the people in our nation.

Two: They are faithful. I have spent time with missionaries who have been in ministry with AMF for over forty years. They have seen good times and bad times, strong financial times and weak financial times, and they clearly say to me, “God is faithful. He will take care of us, as He’s always taken care of the mission. What we need is strong spiritual leadership to help us understand what God wants us to do.”

Three: We as a mission need to provide more value to our missionaries. It’s been clear to me that over the past years, the value that an individual missionary receives from the Home Office has been eroded. I’m not just talking benefit packages or increased resources that are required; I’m talking about spiritual leadership – fellowship, a sense of common purpose. We need to provide more value.

Four: Everyone in our mission wants our mission to grow. We understand that our mission is older with a lot of mature Christians, but everyone I come in contact with desperately wants us to reach the next generation. That’s high on our agenda.

Five: We are stuck. We’re stuck not because of our lack of ability or our desire to grow, but something has mired us in the mud. It might be not knowing what our common purpose is, or struggling with territorialism, or not staying up with the current ministry trends. We need to get unstuck and begin to move forward again.

Six: Our strength is our diversity, and our weakness is also our diversity. Because we are a unique collection of individuals strongly committed to doing what God has called us to do, we embrace – in fact, we enjoy – our diversity. Rural and urban ministry, ministry to the rich and ministry to the very poor, ministry to children and ministry to older people, ministry to the incarcerated and ministry to the free – we have strength in our diversity. That diversity is also our weakness because our reason for being is a little out of focus.

Seven: We are committed to change. We are committed to the idea that we need to think through why and how God has called us to do ministry. I know of no one in our mission who is resistant to change. How we do that is going to be the real challenge.

It’s been a great few months. I’ve met a lot of great people. I look forward to what God’s going to do in the future.

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

The National Day of Prayer

I’ve always struggled as the leader of an organization with what to do with the Day of Prayer: Do we hold a corporate meeting? Do we encourage people to attend meetings at their own churches or other meetings that are in their area? But I felt impressed this year with the idea that all the missionaries, staff, and those who are concerned with the mission of American Missionary Fellowship should gather together at the same time and pray about the same things.

So I wrote a prayer guide, and at 10:00 EST on the Day of Prayer, May 7, all who were able joined together – alone – and worked through this three-page document, confessing our souls, declaring our dependence, and seeking God’s guidance. The most amazing thing that happened as I was praying was to understand that we were doing this together, that all across the country there were people who were coming to the Lord with their needs, with their hopes, with their sins, and with their inadequacies.

The last four minutes of the hour we spent together, I asked people to do nothing but sit and listen. What was God saying to us? What was God speaking into our lives? And then I asked them to email me responses as to what God was saying, to see if there was a pattern or trend, if we might get a corporate answer to what God wants for us.

I was not prepared for the fifty-nine responses. Some were too personal to share, as God really convicted some people, and some had felt that God was instructing us as a mission along certain areas that needed to be changed. But the overwhelming sense was that God was drawing all of us more toward Him. He wanted us to turn our eyes toward Him; He wanted us to embrace Who He is instead of working at what we do. It was a sense of peace, shalom, so to speak, that our God was speaking into our hearts.

It was powerful to read those. Probably in my twenty-five years of running nonprofits, this Day of Prayer was the most significant, and what was amazing was that we did it alone together. I hope to have another one very soon.

The Collins Group

It all started out as a fun deal: six couples plus RobAnne and I decided to get together one May and pray for the upcoming summer. We were all involved in camping ministries, and we were so busy doing the work, we thought we needed time just to rest our souls and be together with people who understood the issues and the challenges of running a camp.

We called ourselves the Collins Group because we met at the Collins Lodge, a bed and breakfast at Forest Home. There was an immediate bond between these seven couples, despite different ages, different sized ministries, and different perspectives on what a camp should be. We’ve met for nine years now, and we no longer talk about camp. We spend two nights and three days together, and we just talk about our souls – we talk about our kids, our fears, our insecurities. We’re able to cry together and be together in a powerful way.

I know I’ve heard other people talk about groups like this, but I have one. And it’s so refreshing not to have to pretend to be something we’re not – not to have to lead, not to have to be perfect or have all the answers. It’s a group where we can listen, and we can question, and we can pray together. Usually we meet as couples, but on the morning of the second day, we split up guys and girls. It’s powerful just to be with brothers who want to listen – not condemn, not give answers, but just listen.

If I could give a gift to the missionaries on our field, I would give the gift of a group like Collins – a group of good people trying to serve a living Lord.

http://www.americanmissionary.org/

Wisconsin Area Fellowship

I spent this past Saturday in Wisconsin at an area fellowship with Brett and Cindy Belleque and some of their people in Region One. What a ball! What a fun group of people to be around!

I was particularly drawn by two people. One of the first couples to connect with me was Bob and Gale Romig. Bob has been around the mission for a while – twenty years or so – and had a lot of good insight. I enjoyed listening to him. But what intrigued me was his ministry. He’s a clown! And he uses the clown and the activities of this clown to present the Gospel in a creative and powerful way to children.

If that wasn’t wild enough and crazy enough, Gale looks like a soccer mom! She looks like anything but a clown. And then I found out that the two of them clown around together. And then I began to think about how creative and wild it is that God can use any talent we have to accomplish His good and perfect will – even clowning. It was great.

I was even more impressed with Cindy Belleque. She played the piano, and she cooked, but she’s a great mom. I was watching her with her children. I watched how she interacted with them, the balance between being a mom and being a help to her husband. The Belleques have a special-needs child, and I was blown away by how well they care for their son. They’re good people.

I then began to think about all of the spouses in our mission who serve the Lord without a lot of flash and without a lot of public exposure. There are a lot of Cindys around. They may be the backbone of our mission. They keep the ministry going because of their organizational skills and their service.

Hats off to clowns and spouses who serve in the background!

http://www.americanmissionary.org/