Hello, again. After a lengthy hiatus, I plan to start writing again. We’ll talk about the hiatus later, but today, let’s just jump into the deep water!
It’s Friday—the day before the Saturday board meeting—the BIG Saturday board meeting! Ten board members will begin arriving tonight, though most will just drive to the meeting in the morning. Even though it is not yet noon on the day before, I’m confident that all of these men and women have already been thinking—and, I suspect, praying—about this Saturday’s board meeting.
Tomorrow, the Let’s Start Talking Board of Directors is interviewing the two finalist candidates to take Sherrylee’s and my places as the new Executive Director. We—Mark and Sherrylee—began this ministry in our home 36 years ago—a lifetime ago. Sherrylee was the first paid staff member. Our three kids were born into it and raised in the backseat of our many rental cars that we drove around Europe each summer of their lives, organizing and supervising those early LST teams.
This short-term missions ministry which we started with a very small, limited vision for working in Germany (actually, still West Germany in 1980) has now sent Christian volunteers into over 60 countries—including some countries that were not even countries in 1980. Literally thousands of Christians have shared their faith with more thousands of people who asked those Christians to tell them why they were so happy and what made them believe the Story of Jesus. God has truly done greater things than we could have ever imagined.
Three years ago, Sherrylee and I told our board that it was time for us to give the leadership of the ministry to the next generation. We were not pressured to give notice, not by board politics, not by financial crisis, not by scandal, nor for health reasons. No, many years ago, when we were young missionaries in Germany, we watched the painful struggles between older missionaries who had planted churches in Europe after WWII and those same churches who needed to break away from their “parent” in order to mature. My memory is that at least one church changed the locks on their building because their founding father refused to give up his key, aka “control”, of his church.
His church? Really? Watching those missionary giants rejected by their spiritual children is how we learned not to believe that we possessed, that we owned a ministry just because God used us to start something that He wanted done. Not owning LST made it easier to start the process three years ago of giving up the keys to the building! It isn’t our building; they aren’t our keys! They never were!
Tomorrow, we believe we will begin the final step of stepping down. And that’s just the beginning!
What has brought me back to writing again is the opportunity to share with you this transition. I want to share with you what happened when we gave notice three years, what didn’t happen, and what probably should have happened! I’d like to talk about processes, choices, and feelings. And I wish to share this information, not as a history, but perhaps as a case study for those of you who are in non-profits, ministries, or small organizations that will face this same kind of transition sooner or later.
