From IHOP to Chengdu

Recently, I visited with Jeff McNair, an old friend from Redlands, CA.  For over ten years, Jeff and I participated in a group of four guys who met every other Tuesday morning at IHOP to eat a short stack of pancakes and encourage each other in our personal and professional growth.

During those years, we watched Jeff’s commitment for the disabled grow from a teaching job at Cal State San Bernardino into a passion for promoting a Christian view of disability on a worldwide scale. Today, Jeff is a tenured professor at California Baptist University in Riverside, CA and one of the world’s leading voices of hope for thousands around the world who have been ostracized from society due to being physically or mentally handicapped.

It began 20 years ago when he and his wife, Kathi, started the Power & Light Sunday School class at our church to reach out to the needs of the disabled in our community.  That class grew into having a weekly attendance of sixty to eighty. Next, Jeff launched a website focused on helping other churches understand their role in serving the disabled. That, in turn, led him to writing books and articles on the subject leading to extensive speaking engagements at conferences and national events.

Now, I’ve learned that Jeff is significantly involved as an advisor with Joni and Friends, the ministry to handicapped people developed by Joni Eareckson Tada. Together with several other renowned authors, including Chuck Colson and John MacArthur, Jeff helped create an outstanding study course called Beyond Suffering, A Christian View of Disability Ministry and is one of the master trainers teaching the course throughout the US and around the world. Whether in Seattle or Serbia, Jeff is finding church leaders absolutely stunned by all that the Bible has to say about a theology of suffering and disability.

When we met a few weeks ago for a delicious chicken dinner at the home of another one of our famous Tuesday morning pancake guys, Jeff informed me that Joni and Friends had been approached by top officials in the Chinese religious bureau, asking if training on disability ministry could be extended to the church in China. So, for the past several weeks, Jeff has been part of a delegation hosted by national leaders of the Chinese Three Self Church, conducting training workshops on the subject all across that country.

What a thrill it is to see how God has taken a guy who is fond of blueberry pancake syrup and thrust him into a worldwide ministry of such significant challenge and encouragement for His people.

Here are links to Jeff’s personal website: http://jeffmcnair.com/ and the Beyond Suffering course:

http://www.joniandfriends.org/store/product/beyond-suffering-christian-view-disability-ministry-study-guide/.

Doing Something Right

In his famous little book, The One Minute Manager, Ken Blanchard encourages leaders to “catch people doing something right.”  I think the same principle should apply to the mission world--which is just what this blog post is about.

Orphan children from the Seeds Children's Home in
Kitale, Kenya (courtesy of The Gathering, CO)

Recently, I was asked to provide some consulting advice to an elder from a Colorado church that has had an emerging relationship with a national ministry in Kenya.  Richard Makani and his wife, Hellen, both native Kenyans, were so moved by the plight of the poor in the slums of their city that they dropped everything to start Seeds, a group of outreach ministries responding to the needs of those slum dwellers. As I listened to my new friend describe both the local Kenyan ministry and the subsequent response from a group of caring US supporters, I was impressed by how much seemed to be right about what I was hearing.  Here are some examples:

• The vision for responding to this need came from a local, national couple, not one imposed by an outside foreign mission.
• Seeds has developed a balanced ministry approach of preaching/teaching/healing—just what Jesus modeled for us in Matthew 9:35.
• The US donors have been very careful to develop a relationship with Seeds that would not lead to an indefinite dependence on foreign funds.
• My friend has already read the book, When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, one of the best publications available on how not to ruin national ministries by overwhelming them with too many “good intentions” from the West.
• The US donors are ready and willing to create a unified advisory group so as to provide more consistent and helpful input to Seeds as well as streamline and simplify Richard’s need to provide project reports.

So what more advice could I offer someone who is already doing so much right?  Here’s what I shared:

• Encouraged to create a partnership agreement with Seeds that is based on the new Lausanne Standards recently created to help set accountability guidelines for missions (www.lausannestandards.org)
• Explained how to build a cross-cultural relationship based on Servant Partnership as opposed to the typical business model of partnership based on mutual benefit. (See my chapter on Servant Partnership in Shared Strength, Exploring Cross-cultural Christian Partnerships, Birmingham and Todd, p.55)
• Suggested that the US stakeholders help Seeds develop stronger organizational capacity using something like my Organizational Capacity Assessment Matrix tool to determine where and how they should improve different ministry areas, especially their board governance function.
• Recommended checking out the website on Cultural Intelligence (http://culturalq.com/) and learning more about the differences between American and Kenyan cultural values.
• Advised developing an agreed-upon annual partnership strategy based on the model that Partners International uses with their PDPs—Partnership Development Plans.

What a pleasure to be able to “catch” so many things going right in a single mission relationship.  Now, if more cross-cultural ministry endeavors could follow suit, I believe we would see significant acceleration in the advancement of God’s Kingdom around the world.