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About Us
Who …… or, What …… are we?
That’s a good question …… and it deserves a good answer. I hope I can provide you with one. It’s hard to know just where to jump in with this.
I’ll have to jump back to about 1984. I was struggling to direct a small non-profit, that seemed to go more into debt every time I turned around. I knew how to deliver on what we did. I did not know how to raise the funds, though, that would allow us to do that work. I have never felt comfortable asking people for money, and still don’t. Period.
This small non-profit held a board meeting in the upper North West in the spring of 1984. These men asked me one, simple question: “Where do you think this ministry should go?” I thought that was simple enough, so I told them: “Right now, I am fielding requests from all over Latin America and Southern Africa … nearly 25 in all.”
The chairman looked at me and said, “Just stop. Every Christian ministry goes to these places. As a board, we have agreed unanimously on the following. That is, we should be going where most ministries are not. These ministries have been around for quite some time; they have build their base after years of work. Another ministry is not needed where they are, even if our’s is different. We want you to continue to work in those areas where you already have requests, but we also want you to begin to break new ground, and that would be to take this ministry where most other missions are not. We want this ministry to break ground in the Middle East and in Communist countries such as the Soviet Union and Cuba.”
Have you ever felt stunned? I mean really stunned!! I not only had no immediate interest in any of these places, had never been to any of these places, and did not speak any of their languages. I was reminded by the commercial where the guy says, in response to his boss telling him to do something and he said, “I can do that, I can do that. How am I gonna to do that?
God always has a plan…… By summer, I was offered a full scholarship to an MBA program with a degree in Third World Economic Development, with an emphasis in — you guessed it — Communist countries, or those countries where Liberation Theology was involved (which kept the door open to Latin America). It seemed that this program was tailor-made for the ministry I was in. By studying full-time and going to school with back-to-back semesters which included the summer, the degree was completed in 1986. God always has a plan…… Following that, another scholarship was offered in a Ph.D. program at Oxford. This degree was in Islamic Studies, which covered a lot of territory, and completed in 1988. This almost made me believe my board had a direct line of communications with God.
Now, that I seemingly had the tools, all that was left was for me to go …… God always has a plan…… In August,1989 I received a phone call from someone I did not know, but was referred by another friend who had passed my name on to him. This man was putting a group together that would go to Russia (this was before the wall came down) and speak on Christianity and business. There were about ten of us. This was to take place in October, just a couple of months away. He wanted to know if I was interested — and if so, had to pay my own way. Why not? I already had debt.
In late October, I got on a plane and headed to Frankfurt, where we were all supposed to meet. Trust me, you need to understand all this in order to know, “About Us.”
Once the conference began, we were all given a time slot to speak. What really gripped me though, was standing on the stage in this auditorium, with two eight-foot pictures on the wall behind us. I began by talking about some of God’s principles and their application to business, while everybody was staring at me. It was then that I realized they were not staring at me, but rather at the pictures behind me, which loomed quite large. One picture was that of Joseph Lenin, the Soviet father of Communism, while the second picture was that of Karl Marx … and I’m talking about JESUS CHRIST and CAPITALISM. God always has a plan……
On the way home, I changed planes in Frankfurt, Germany. Just by accident, I turned a corner and literally walked into a man I had not seen in fifteen years. He was working with Operation Mobilisation (OM) in north Africa. After we talked a bit, he said I really needed to go with him to Morocco. Not tomorrow, not next week or next month, but right now, today. After doing what needed to be done with the airlines and all, we had tickets to Gibraltar, where we caught a ferry across the Mediterranean to North Africa, and then caught the train down to Casablanca.
