Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit--Rev.Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil

Courageous Leadership for Catalytic Times -- getting ready to hear from the next speaker at the Global Leadership Summit and hoping for some more inspiration for our Operation Christmas Child team.

time out for announcement--

Howard Schultz from Starbucks was scheduled to speak but a petition was started to boycott Starbucks if he spoke because the feeling was that Willow Creek is anti-gay. Howard decided to cancel his speaking engagement. Bill Hybels asserts that Willow is not anti-gay and is not anti-anybody. He explains that all people matter to God and anyone is welcome at Willow Creek. They let Howard out of his contract with no penalty. Write to starbucks.com and with genuine Christian love communicate to them that our churches are open to anyone and we'd love to have him back at the summit someday. Bill also recommends we read Howard's book, "Onward." Also pray for a possible meeting with the people who started the boycott petition to see if reconciliation is possible.

Courageous Leadership for Catalytic Times--

God has called us together to prophetically speak to us.

Brenda and her husband were invited by the Anglican Church to speak in Birmingham, England about the black church in America. A Jamaican woman there screamed at them and said, "Where have you been? Why didn't you come sooner?" God used that experience to humble her and to expand her world view. She started to become a global Christian.

(video of a catalytic event--Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier)

The difference between Chuck Yeager and others before him who'd only attempted it was that Chuck resisted the temptation to pull back when the shaking of the plane started and he pressed on to completion.

Young people are global by default because of Internet connections. How have you responded to that as a leader?

Acts 1:8--the initial catalytic verse that birthed the church. This clearly sets out our mission. The mandate is to take the gospel to the whole earth. Jesus seems to suggest that there's a movement outward.

First we begin in Jerusalem (our home turf--our comfort zone). This is where we have to face our bigotry. It's where we challenge the jokes being told or take the risk to start talking about the policies that are restrictive.

Judea--people look alike but have political or denominational differences. The divide that comes between the young and the old or the able-bodied and the differently-abled.

Samaria--people who are hostile to us, foreign to us, totally other. The neighborhood where you drive through and lock your doors. This is the place of sex trafficking, child labor, corporate greed, environmental injustice. This means moving outward and experiencing the outer borders. It takes a catalytic, spirit-filled leader to go to Samaria. You need the Holy Spirit to move you beyond your natural affinities.

A Catholic priest on the south side of Chicago was disturbed by products being advertised on billboards near the schools. This priest painted over the billboards.

It takes a catalytic event to move us. Without a catalyst we stay in our own homogenous communities. Acts 2 brings the catalyst. Their souls 'caught on fire' and they began speaking with such credibility in other languages and sounded so authentically inclusive. A multinational, multilingual CHURCH was being born. From the beginning the church was intended to be a global movement.

When fear comes in the church should stand up and say maybe God is using the economic crisis to bring us together. Maybe God is moving.

Are you ready to break through your 'sound barrier'. If so--

--Pray for a divine mandate--pray "God, break our hearts for what breaks Your heart"

--Name your catalytic events--stop and ask God how His spirit is moving in our community or our country

--Mobilize people to go!--so much cultural cross-pollenization available near us. Not looking for people who will go and 'help' but people who will go and learn.

Where's your Samaria? That's where Jesus is calling you. God is trying to move us out to the ends of the earth so how about we get started now.

I believe God wants to interrupt our previously scheduled programs. There's a catalytic event breaking forth right now. Holy Spirit send us forth ready to be a global community.

Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit--Mayor Cory Booker

We're getting ready to hear from Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, NJ and looking for help in leadership for our Operation Christmas Child team.

He tells his father's story of being in school where the teacher asked anyone who thinks they're stupid to stand up. Finally, Booker's father stood up and said, "shucks, ma'am I don't think I'm stupid but I didn't want you to be the only one standing." The point is--you will face adversaries and bad things will happen but you must be willing to stand.

Before you can stand you need to understand that you are born as the result of a grand conspiracy of love. People stormed the beaches of Normandy for you. People scrubbed toilets and prayed for you. You eat lavishly from banquet tables prepared by your ancestors. Will you take your blessings and use them to move forward?

His parents introduced him to all the people who worked behind the scenes to give equality to all people and bring new freedoms.

Abraham Lincoln "each person is born an original but sadly most die copies." Don't let the world tell you who you are. Booker admits he still struggles with this.

We are the result of people who did not see the world the way others saw it. In the midst of slavery they saw freedom. In the midst of sweat shops they saw workers' rights. They had the courage to stand up and do something.

Cory walked up to the 5th floor of one of the projects in Newark as a law school student, knocked on the door, and told the woman he was there to help her. She took him into the middle of street and asked Cory, "tell me what you see around you," and he kept describing the problems of the neighborhood. The woman kept shaking her head and said, "You can't help me. You need to understand that the world outside will always be a reflection of what's inside you. If you can see hope and the face of God, then you can be someone who will help me."

Quote from Gandhi, "Be the change you want to see in the world." We have to live out what we want to see happen. The only way to make change in this world is to start with oneself. "If it is to be, it's up to me." Stand up with faith in God, in our nation's ideals.

Before you preach or teach show me in how you live and give who you are. So many things distract us from the 'right here' and the 'right now' such as materialism and 'televisionism'. Example of a man in a blighted neighborhood who used his stimulus check to buy a lawnmower and weed whacker and used them to mow and manicure an empty overgrown lawn where drug deals had been taking place. The drug dealers left and he became a hero in his community.

We are stars. If we don't live life brilliantly and dim our being we won't live luminously. We as people can bring light to the darkness and turn barriers to blessings and obstacles to opportunities.

Booker went to the funeral of a youth who was murdered who he had met and had a chance to impact. He wept afterwards and said "where were we, not for his death but for his life?" Are we evidencing our truth?

Having problems in his political life with not being able to make changes happen and he read the verses that said, "If you have the faith of a mustard seed you can move mountains" and read the verses beneath that said you need to fast and pray. So he set up a tent as a place to fast and pray and he called a press conference to let people know what he was doing. Others came around and soon there were crowds. On the 10th day his political adversary, the mayor at that time, came out and Cory felt love for him and the mayor promised change. Because people stood together in humility and respect for those who preceded them, change happened.

There was strength as they stood together. The African saying "sticks in a bundle cannot be broken". "Wherever 2 or 3 are gathered together I am in the midst."

"Let us now stand up and tell our truth to a world that is yearning for it." In this world we don't always get what we pay for but we pay for what we get.

"Liberty and justice for all" must be a passion every day. If we stand like this, then we'll find a way to 'get to the roof'.

Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit--Len Schlesinger

Getting ready for the second session at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit. Hoping to learn something that will help our team mobilize more persons to pack shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child.

Len Schlesinger president of Babson College where they use the case study of Willow Creek Church in their studies of business.

Len's formula for business success

Find out who your customers are

Find out what they want

Give it to them

(We know children around the world want to know God loves them and so we're doing all we can to give them shoeboxes so they'll know that)

Getting from 'Here' to 'There'--

The problem of leading people somewhere else when they're comfortable where they are.

Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech is used as an example but no one talks about the 3-4 years it took for him to get people energized to receive the message of that speech.

You need to get people to understand the unacceptability of 'here' before they will move to 'there'.

A 'here' where people live in povery is unacceptable

A 'here' with an inadequate education system is unacceptable

A 'here' where we have too much food and can't get it to those in need is unacceptable

A 'here' where the young people can't look forward to a better future than their parents is unacceptable

(and a few more I couldn't get recorded)

What are we going to do about it?

Entrepreneurship can go a long way to providing for the future we aspire to achieve.

Successful entrepreneurs get 'writers' to write a book for them and tell their story in a more dramatic and disenfranchising way. So we get a skewed view of what entrepreneurs really are like. Most of those views are complete nonsense

Research about successful entrepreneurs shows

--low appetite for risk

--start without a sharply defined goal or vision

--distrust research that purports to predict the future

--don't usually come up with totally creative businesses

--not unusually self-confident

--are decisive but so are others

--sometimes and sometimes not egotistical

Family enterprises--the first generation creates, the second enjoys, and the third destroys

Large organizations who are unwilling to embrace entrepreneurship tend to disintegrate.

You cannot ride one business model through your life and career. You have to reinvent yourself 3-5 times in your career

We need to develop mechanisms who we can deal with challenges simultaneously instead of sequentially.

Peter Drucker says entrepreneurship is not magic; it can be learned.

Successful entrepreneurship requires you to forget everything you learned in school. History doesn't always predict the future.

1921 (someone) talked about the juxtaposition of risk and certainty. When you can't predict the future, you create it and that's what entrepreneurs do.

Think about being Indiana Jones--you fall in a hole, it's dark and you can't see. How do you get out? What do you do? What do you think about? First, look for what resources you have, take one careful step and assess, etc. Those are the rules for entrepreneurial action. In the face of unknowability what would rational action dictate?

--take small steps with what you have at hand

--limit the risk for each step

--build on what you find from taking that step

--build a team to help you

(the above steps are what it takes to pack a lot of shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child!)

affordable loss--pay only what you can afford to and want to--how badly do you want to do something? You can 'enroll' people then to come alongside you.

What keeps people from doing this? Don't worry about what you're going to do--just think about what you want to do NEXT. Focus on where you are before you take the next step.

We're afraid of taking action because of fear of failure. Only over the last 100 years have we intermingled organizational failure with personal failure. Failure rate of venture capital endeavors is 61%. Failure doesn't mean 'game over' it means try again with experience.

Instead of failure, call it an exercise in learning what no one else knows.

To be an entrepreneur--

--Know what you want

--Start with the means you have

--Be alert to what you are getting

--Take steps based on your means and what you want to pay

--It's not what you're going to do but what you're going to do next.

--Bring other people with you and remain flexible in what you do and how you do it.

This will take us from 'Here' to 'There'

Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit--Bill Hybels

Blogging my notes today from the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit. I'm attending via satellite at Grace Church in Erie, PA and I'm here to try to learn how to better lead the Operation Christmas Child Northwestern Pa Area Team. The first talk was given by Bill Hybels--


Bill Hybels—5 important leadership questions for today

1) What is your current challenge level at work? appropriate (enough to do but not too much); underchallenged (not enough to keep busy); dangerously overchallenged (can’t keep up with all you have to do)

Where do you think you do your best work as a leader” (according to above scale) --research shows you do your best when a little above appropriately challenged. This is similar to the physical challenge of building muscles.
Application: For senior leaders—try to demand more of yourself if underchallenged and reduce demands if overchallenged. It’s important to replenish your leadership bucket regularly. Stress causes your performance to increase at first but then performance will fall dramatically and you can crash. At the same time you don’t perform well if underchallenged.
For colleagues—Have people identify where they are on this scale so you are informed. Underchallenged people leave their jobs. Overchallenged people can break down.
It is possible for our entire organization to fall into one of these dangerous categories of being overchallenged or underchallenged.

2) What is your plan for dealing with challenging people in your organization?
The line exercise—if we had a 50% revenue drop and we had to eliminate employees, who would you eliminate first.? List by order of those you’d eliminate from first to last. Those you’d eliminate first—investigate the reasons for that. This brings clarity to leadership questions.
Leading difficult people—
Fantastic Fred—spreading a bad attitude. How much time are you going to give him to get an attitude adjustment? (varying answers. One pastor in Ireland said “your first bad day would be your last day.” A pastor in France said, “If I didn’t tolerate people with bad attitudes I wouldn’t have anyone working for me.”_
--should investigate bad attitudes immediately to find reasons; how can we help?; needs to be resolved in 30 days (Bill Hybels’ view—find your own view)
Underperformers—“laborer not worthy of his hire”—how long do you let this go on? Talk with them as soon as identified and resolve within 3 months. Put on a performance improvement pain.
Leader no longer qualified because the organization demands more talent elasticity—can’t fulfill new duties so allow 6-12 months to resolve this.

a) If you don’t deal with the above, you demoralize all the others in your organization.
b) Challenging people are not really happy people and will often be happier when they move on.

3) Are you naming, facing, and resolving the problems that exist in your organization?—by not naming the problems you never address them or resolve them. Acts 2-4 the problem of food inequities arose. In Acts 6 the leaders addressed the problem, formed a team to solve the problem and thus built trust and experienced more church growth.

New programs accelerate and then can peak and begin decelerating. These areas need to be addressed and new ideas, programs or initiatives developed to invigorate them.

4) When is the last time you reexamined the core of what your organization is all about?— What business are we in? Can we describe our mission on a T-shirt? (The church is in the life transformation business. Only the power of the Gospel can do this. An exercise—draw a circle and in it write 5 words (no God words) that explain the central message of Chrisitanity. Willow Creek still in the process of trying to define this but Bill Hybels uses these words: love, evil, rescue, choice, restoration and he used them to present the message of the gospel.

5) Have you had your leadership bell rung recently:--Has any book or crisis rocked your leadership world? Story of a leader in Thailand who stood up in front of a group of Christian leaders and challenged them with a plan to win one million to Christ in their country in the next 5 years. We need to renew our boldness in leadership. “If you are sick enough of being stuck you would do whatever it would take to get unstuck.” Don’t make excuses instead of doing the bold work of solutions. Your job as a leader is to move an organization from ‘here’ to ‘there’ and if you don’t believe that anymore, step aside. Bill told a story of the founders of the Global Leadership Summit who got together and made a pact that their next 5 years of leadership would be their best. We can decide if we want to give God our absolute best for the next 60 months. How you finish is how you will be remembered so finish well.

A call to decision and prayer.

A Faithful Church

Back in 1993 when Operation Christmas Child was just getting its start in the United States, Fellowship Baptist Church was built here in Erie County, PA. The church previously met for more than a dozen years in the local YMCA and they were thrilled when God blessed them with this beautiful building on 14 acres of wooded property.

In 1994 Fellowship Baptist was one of only two churches in Erie County to participate in OCC and they’ve continued over these years to faithfully pack gift-filled shoeboxes to minister to children around the world as one of our two longest-standing church partners.

Over the years they experienced, as many churches do, some divisions that reduced their membership greatly. Still, because of their faithfulness and sacrificial giving this small core were able to pay off the mortgage and make repairs to their building. They kept the church cleaned and maintained on their own.

And they continued their faithful service to OCC and other mission endeavors. They ran a large youth group with 40 or more students—a number often greater than their total Sunday morning attendance. In 2010 these faithful few packed 228 shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child—a total larger than most churches ten times their size.

On Easter Sunday of 2011 a church of their denomination on the other side of the county called Grace McKean formed a satellite church named Grace Harborcreek and began holding services in the high school just a few miles away from Fellowship Baptist.

Because they were worshiping in a school, Grace Harborcreek struggled to find a space to begin youth ministry. So a faithful group of youth from Grace McKean began fervently praying for God to provide a space for their counterparts in Harborcreek.

During this time the folks from Fellowship Baptist were also praying for the new church in their community and the Lord began to lead members of Fellowship to donate their building and land to Grace Harborcreek.

Could this be God’s calling? That the beautiful land God gave to them and the church they sacrificed to build and maintain should now be given away?

After continued prayer for confirmation, Fellowship Baptist affirmed what they’d held to all these years—their faithfulness was to God alone. The building and land they’d stewarded so well belonged to Him and since they believed He called them to pass it on to a new church, they would be obedient. Their investment in His Kingdom would continue.

The agreement to give and receive this property with a value of $900,000 has been accepted by both churches but the transaction has not been finalized yet. The small group of Fellowship Baptist members still meets for worship on Sundays and they continue to gather items for their Operation Christmas Child packing party this fall. They’re planning to pack more than 200 boxes again this year.

In a society that values ‘bigger and better’ it’s important to remember that there’s not a special place in heaven for pastors or members of mega churches. There are, however, rewards for the faithful.

No matter the size of our church or the number of shoeboxes we pack, obedience and faithfulness are what bring joy to the Father.

Though the faithful at Fellowship Baptist have regifted the land God provided for them in 1993, He’s preparing new land for them. “I will look with favor on the faithful in the land, that they may dwell with me;” Psalm 101:6a (ESV)

Meeting Faithful Amaya

God blessed me in a special way today because I got to meet my sweet OCC friend Amaya and her family. Last fall my friend Sarah told me about a blog she'd read about six-year-old Amaya's desire to pack lots of shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child. Amaya's mom (also named Sarah) could have easily squashed Amaya's vision by telling her that the family would pack boxes together or that they didn't have time for an extra project or that she should wait until she was older or....(you get the idea).

But Sarah and Chris Latello want to raise their children to pursue big dreams and help them to know that we have a big God. So they encouraged Amaya to make some homemade Christmas ornaments and launched a blog and Facebook campaign for Amaya to sell them to finance her shoeboxes.

In the end, Amaya packed 37 boxes and totally financed the $7.00 per box suggested shipping for them. Her story was told in a blog on the Samaritan's Purse website (click here to see that) and was also mentioned in the Operation Christmas Child special report that is sent to donors at the end of the season.

Today the Latellos are on their way to their vacation in Massachusetts and blessed me by stopping to meet me at the Erie Chick-fil-A where I got to hug Amaya (now age 7) and meet her parents and her sister Paige (age 6) and her brother Jaxson (age 5). I got to hear stories of God's faithfulness in their lives and how He's blessed their one-year-old auto repair business which I KNOW is really a ministry. Sarah and Chris are dedicated to helping provide financial help to families who are adopting children and are determined to use every avenue God gives them to support the ministries He brings into their lives. They have modeled faith in God by pursuing His dreams in their lives and it's reaping big rewards in the lives of their children. You can click here to read Sarah's blog "Are We There Yet?"



I've been inspired by Amaya to remember that God is bigger than we can imagine and that all He wants is our faithfulness. Our faithfulness may mean packing one shoebox to bless a child in Jesus' name or it may mean stepping out in faith to see God multiply our efforts and pack hundreds of boxes or thousands of boxes.

When we are faithful to the call of our faithful God the possibilities are endless.

Who's Counting?

My work packing Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes involves a lot of counting. Today is an exciting day because I met my crayon count. Since Toys R Us had an ad this week with Crayola crayons on sale at 4/$1.00 I was able to get WalMart to price match their ad. By God's grace WalMart had lots of crayons on the shelves so I only had to go to 2 stores to get the 1400 I wanted this week. This is a great answer to prayers prayed by my team and now we should have enough to put a bag of 8 crayons in each box we pack at our packing party on September 24th. Any extras we have donated will be used in case we pack more boxes than we anticipate and, guess what--this ALWAYS happens.

Last week I ordered 24,000 pens and they arrived at Grace Church on Thursday--the one day I was out of town. The staff at the church was great about unloading them from the truck and I'm excited because the quality of the pens is great. Now I only need about 5,000 more pens (yes, I AM counting).

The 1,000 pencils I got at Staples last week for a total of only $1.25 by using my teacher's card gets us half-way to the goal. I think we just need 15,000 more.

And God is filling up the Ark week by week. Last week's total was 550 and Hill Memorial United Methodist Church in Bradford, PA has a bunch that they collected at their VBS last week also. I'd say we only need about 3000 or 3500 more.

In the middle of all this counting, a friend whose daughter had brain surgery this week reminded me that God counts our tears. How amazing! My tears usually run like rivers, don't yours? Only the God of the universe could see and count each one. Every tear I cry alone is known to Him.

Every tear cried by a child in the world who is hungry or abandoned or lacking even what we consider basic necessities of life is seen and counted by our loving God. And because He loves us so much He gives us the opportunity to join Him in bringing hope and joy and turning many of the tears of those children into smiles. That's something that really makes life count.

Who's counthing? God is!