• Our hope-filled future is bound up in sharing the story of Jesus, in discipling others, in bringing those disciples together into communities of believers, and in developing and releasing those believers to create other communities... till Jesus the King comes again!

Dig deeper

Posted on July 8, 2016 by wtdavid

A couple of months ago, in a conversation with a leader coach, we discussed several ways to understand how different members on a team function. This coach shared with me the following diagram.

Decision process

The diagram captures how people on a team can process and make decisions. For example, there are people who are rapid in processing the elements of the decision, but are slow to ultimately make the decision. It’s not that one column or way of processing and deciding is better than all the others.  The ultimate purpose of the grid is to help a person on a team learn from others and know how best to manage or navigate the  decision making process with others.

This is where the insight came for me. Rapid processors and rapid decision makers can digdeeperlearn a lot from ‘digging deeper’ into an issue through the help of those who process more slowly and take more time to make decisions.  However slow processors and slow decision makers can learn a lot from being ‘moved along’ in the journey towards a decision by those who process more rapidly so that a ‘divine opportunity’ is not missed because the team took too long to come to a decision.

Obviously, there is a lot of give and take needed in such a discussion. If we add in the other cultural elements in play from various members of a multicultural team, then the discussion can look extremely complex. However, that should not keep us from moving towards each other to learn from one another. A lot of times it begins by simply asking good questions to learn how others are processing a decision, and then seeing how that could impact our journey in the decision makingi process.

Filed under: Community, Decision making, Teams | 8 Comments »

What’s in a name?

Posted on July 6, 2016 by wtdavid

I’ve been reading through 1 Chronicles the past few days. Beginning with the first chapter, the author leads us through a seemingly unending series of names. It’s the kind of text that you often ‘speed read’ or skim through. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of importance to these lists of names.

Lists and lists of names, what we call ‘genealogical research’, can be interesting G-best-genealogy-siteswhen we want to know more about the family history. However, our Western cultures can blind us to the deeper significance of genealogies for the people of Israel (and others). For the people of God, genealogies served the function of defining who individuals were in the larger community, and recognized the people who had a part in building that identity.

Looking back, we could say is a way of giving direction, purpose, and identity for moving forward.

Not only do we, as Christians in the 21st century, have an identity which has been built on the sacrificial work and grace of Jesus on our behalf, but our identity has been and is being built by the impact of other brothers and sisters on our lives each day.  Many of us can give testimony as to how God used the influence of another to point us in the direction of missions.  Many of us can give testimony as to how God used the words and counsel of another to strengthen our ‘weak knees’ in the midst of difficulty or doubt.

What’s in a name? A whole host of history that gives meaning to where God has placed us at this moment.  What’s in a name?  The reminder of the special love that God has placed upon us.  What’s in a name?  The assurance that He has placed us on His path and will use others to build into our lives.

“The sons of Issachar: Tola, Puah, Jashub, and Shimron, four. The sons of Tola: Uzzi, Rephaiah, Jeriel, Jahmai, Ibsam, and Shemuel, heads of their fathers’ houses, namely of Tola, mighty warriors of their generations, their number in the days of David being 22,600.”  (1 Chronicles 7.1-2)

Filed under: Community, Identity | Leave a comment »

Why three good players are better than one star player

Posted on July 5, 2016 by wtdavid

Those of us located in this part of the world have been taken up with the various matches of the Euro 2016 football championship over the past few weeks. European ‘football’ is what we call ‘soccer’ in some other parts of the world.  From the various groups or ‘pools’, sixteen teams emerge to play single elimination games leading to the final this coming Sunday.

People have been surprised by the rise of several lesser known teams who have gone ‘deep’ into the tournament. One of those lesser known teams actually played one powerhouse of the European football world to a tie, and beat another one to advance to the next round.

At that point, everyone began asking: “How could this team beat such a highly favored one?”  In part, the Dimitri-Payet-answer lay in team-work.  A solid group of good players, with no star, drew on the resources of everyone on the team to be able to defeat a powerhouse whose lineup contained a number of star players.

One of the reasons for including ‘teams’ as one of our guiding principles (see the World Team Ministry Framework) is to emphasize how God calls us to work and minister. When God calls us to Himself, He calls us into a body or community of believers. God does not look at us as individual ‘stars’, but as members and workers of a larger community that acknowledge their need for one another.  As a community, we pool our gifts together to create a greater dynamic than we could accomplish by ourselves as individuals.  All for the glory of God’s kingdom.

The apostle Paul put it is this way: “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.”  (1 Corinthians 12)

How might you demonstrate this week the team principle that ‘three are better than one’? What can you ‘bring’ to your next team meeting that will empower and strengthen the other members of your team?

Filed under: Community, Teams | Leave a comment »

And then there were three

Posted on June 10, 2016 by wtdavid

three people prayingYesterday, I offered for anyone from the team here to come and pray with me for the World Team Day of Prayer. It was kind of last minute, but I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who called and said they would have come if they had known sooner.

In the end, we were three. Three may not seem like a lot, but we prayed. We prayed along with many of you around the world, lifting up the needs of World Team and rejoicing in what God has done over the past number of months in our midst.

We prayed. It’s such a simple statement, but it has a lot to say about what is important to us as a mission, as an organization.  I won’t say it wasn’t hard to keep praying when there were only three of us, but the value we hold to ‘pushed us on’ in prayer and at the end, I can say, we were glad we spent that time together.

In October 2016, I’m hoping our ‘small group’ will multiply and there will be six or more people joining for prayer here at the WT Global office. I should probably start thinking about picking up a few more chairs for that day.

Filed under: Guiding Principles, Prayer | Leave a comment »

“Get in a prayer meeting”

Posted on June 9, 2016 by wtdavid

I’m reading a book with colleagues entitled: Nothing is Impossible with God: Reflections on Weakness, Faith, and Power.  Today, I stumbled on this quote: “Be people of love. Be people of faith.  Be people of prayer.  Do you long to be changed?  To see people change?  To be part of God’s reclaiming the world for himself?  Get in a prayer meeting.  Go to the throne of grace andprayer-meeting-n bring others with you.”  I could have thought of a lot of other answers to those questions than prayer.  If you had asked me: “Do you want to be part of God’s reclaiming the world for himself?” I might have answered: “Then join World Team!”  The better answer is prayer!

Prayer not only places us in the centre of what God is doing in this world, but prayer reveals our moment by moment helplessness to do anything apart from God’s work in us and through us. It is why we need to pray for others and ask others to pray for us.

Meeting with others in prayer; praying with others when we are together for various reasons offers us regular opportunities to tie our weakness to His power.

O.Hallesby wrote: “The work of praying is prerequisite to all other work in the kingdom of God, for the simple reason that it is by prayer that we couple the powers of heaven to our helplessness, the powers which can turn water into wine and remove mountains in our own life and the lives of others, the powers which can awaken those who sleep in sin and raise up the dead, the powers which capture strongholds and make the impossible possible.”

Today and tomorrow are times we have set aside to pray with one another as a World Team global community. May today and tomorrow be a start to regularly pray with and for another another, and for the needs of this lost world in need of Christ.

Filed under: Prayer, Weakness | 2 Comments »

Influencing one another

Posted on June 7, 2016 by wtdavid

I really do like the World Team Ministry Framework. It captures the essentials of who we are and what we do.  However, at times, I can look at the World Team Ministry Framework as a collection of individual elements or pieces to which I need to give attention.  I do not always look at it as an ‘interactive highway’ of fundamentals that are constantly influencing each other.interactive highway

For example, how does the Gospel influence our call to ‘reach’ and ‘invest’ in people each day? Or how does our growth in collaboration influence our call to act more ‘holistically’ in our ministries?  Or how do facilitation and our work in teams impact releasing others into ministry?

There are obviously a host of combinations to consider, but all that to say that we have so much more to learn from each other about how the World Team Ministry Framework works itself out in our lives and ministries.

So, this is my invitation to you to explore together how some of these ‘combinations’ work themselves out and influence our lives and ministries.

Let’s ‘talk’ about the first combination I suggested: How does the Gospel influence our call to ‘reach’ and ‘invest’ in people each day? 

Post your comments to this post and I’ll try to summarize what we ‘discover’ together in a future post.

Filed under: Collaboration, Gospel, Uncategorized, WT Ministry Framework | 3 Comments »

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