Barnabas File

The idea of how a church pursues missions has changed drastically in the last fifty years.    Although my perspective comes from being a Baptist in the South during that time, I believe that many of the changes have also impacted churches of all denominations across the United States in some way. The paradigm in which I was indoctrinated saw “missions” as something that was done somewhere else by people who were specifically called to leave their homes and do evangelistic and philanthropic work in strange and exotic places.  The denomination had overseas, domestic, and state mission boards who were responsible for this work.  The role of those of us in local congregations was to pray for the missionaries, learn about their work, provide the funds for them to pursue their ministries, and give them a platform to tell us about what they were doing.  There may have been a few local mission opportunities such as a “rescue mission” for the down and out, but we more often supported thi

I was sitting in a conference room with several other people a number of years ago.     We had gathered to create an organization that would raise funds for Baptist collegiate ministries in underserved areas of the United States and Canada.     A consultant who was volunteering his time led us through a planning process called SWOT--strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.    The process made sense at the time, gave us some direction in the formulation of our plan, and I even used it in a couple of other settings, but I began to be a bit uncomfortable at the negative connotations of parts of the process. In recent years, I have come to use an Appreciative Inquiry process in consulting--one that identifies and builds on the inherent strengths of an organization.  I was pleased, therefore, when I discovered that someone had taken the SWOT approach and transformed it into an Appreciative Inquiry process. In The Thin Book of SOAR: Building Strengths-Based Strategy , Ja

The United States has provided the environment for many titans of industry--such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and John D. Rockefeller--to flourish.     Although many of these individuals used extreme tactics to build their empires, they tended to become philanthropists in their later years and turned their attention to the good of humanity.     Most invested their income in benevolent causes, but few invested their knowledge.     Bill Gates is different. Bill Gates, former CEO of Microsoft and co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, at age 63 is now the second richest person in the world (behind Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon). In  Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates,   a new three-part  documentary   series on Netflix created and directed by  Davis Guggenheim , we are exposed to an in-depth look at the mind and motivations of Gates. Each episode introduces a challenge that Gates and his foundation has addressed and counterba