Are you saying we need to throw out the idea of learning from these kinds of leadership principles and practices?
No, we’ve got to learn from them. We’ve had such wonderful training with corporate principles and sales and marketing and customer service, and I love to learn from that. But you just don’t want to abandon your identity for it and take on a new thing. Jesus didn’t come just to make people better; He came to raise spiritually dead people to life. Sometimes we think God is good enough to just make my business better, to make my marriage and finances and earning power better. If we do that, however, and that’s all there is, we’re leading people down the wrong path. We’ve got to remember that the church is designed to win people from death, from hell. And they’re still going to have problems in their finances. Jesus really didn’t come to remove our struggles. He came to give people eternal life and purpose. That’s what I’m trying to get us back to.
Can you offer some specific examples of what you see happening?
I’ll give you an illustration, though it’s not really politically acceptable and popular. A lot of the younger generation is involved in justice efforts—digging wells, helping the poor. All of that is wonderful, wonderful. But if you give everybody clean water and shoes and they don’t come to Christ, in the end they still go to hell. So we can put all of our eggs in that one basket, and we’ll miss the depth of the assignment for which Christ died.
If you think about it, Jesus didn’t die for humanitarian reasons. If He had, then He would have upset the Roman occupation and restored Israel. That’s what the Israelites wanted Him to do. Throughout His whole life, He hardly addressed the Roman occupation. His focus was the soul: “What about your soul, what about your eternal life, what about your relationship with the Father?” And then He left that assignment to the church.
Many justice movement leaders say that they pray and believe the end outcome of their efforts will be that people who serve and are served meet Christ.
And that’s great. If they say that’s their goal, I say “hallelujah” and I applaud them; I shake pom-poms. But in the end, they need a metric to say, “Here’s the result.” This many people have received Christ, and there are 18 churches now. This is what has happened in the wake of what we’ve done with these wells.
If you’re planting the right seeds, you should have a harvest. What farmer plants seed and doesn’t look for harvest? And I say it this way: The harvest will not self-reap, but it will self-destruct if not reaped. Jesus prayed for more laborers in the harvest. And that is my heartbeat—to get us back to our assignment, our identity, as laborers in the harvest. We have to connect everything we do to a soul.
