Serving Bread

My grandfather, Armen Kouyoumdjian, passed away last week. We affectionately called him Obaba. He was born July 21,1921 in Fallujah, Iraq, was the youngest son of Khosrof and Sara Kouyoumdjian. His family immigrated from Caesaria, Turkey in the 1800s and  settled in Falluja, Iraq where Armen spent his childhood and most of his adult life, along with his siblings Diran, Sonya and Makrouhi. After graduating from high school, he worked as a farmer in his family’s cotton plantations in Fallujah and then moved to Baghdad and started a contracting company. He married his childhood sweetheart, Aida Ekmekjian in 1944. Together they formed their family and reared their four daughters.

Armen and Aida lived in Baghdad until 1979, then moved to Beirut, Lebanon. In 1986, they moved to the United States where he lived with his wife until her death in 2008. Armen was an avid gardener, enjoyed walking 5 miles twice a day, and loved animals, especially birds. He was always loved and respected by his friends, and his house was always open to all. He enjoyed playing cards, discussing politics, playing tawle, and sneaking chocolate to grandchildren and great-grandchildren (to their parents’ chagrin).

He is survived by four daughters, nine grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

Last week, I attended Mike’s memorial service. Though I had known Mike for 9 years, I didn’t really know much about him. Mike was my mechanic and 6 weeks ago, he lost his battle against cancer. A man in his fifty’s who left behind a mourning wife, mother and five young girls (the youngest is 3). Though the extent of my relationship with Mike surrounded my cars, what I appreciated most about him was his value for relationships. His integrity and care for each of his customers spoke volumes to me about his character.

When I first met Mike, I was a bit intimated by his hard look and short/direct responses, but I quickly grew to respect him. He knew me by name and knew everything about my cars. He told me when I should pass on fixing something and when I should put in a little extra cash to do it right.

My last memory of Mike took place in January, when he worked on my car and its stubborn issues for two weeks. In fact, he rented me a car so that he could keep my car indefinitely and fix it.

And during those days spent at the shop, he shared how proud he is of his children. In the last five years, I know Mike drew closer to God and relied on his faith as a way to battle the cancer and correct his outlook on life. I will miss Mike and glad to have gotten to know him. Relationships matter. They matter more than financial gains. Mike, thank you for teaching me about the value of maintaining and advancing relationships. You taught me much about integrity, hard-work, and that people matter.

While I’m not a regular listener to John MacArthur’s sermons, I recently read and heard his series of sermons titled, “The Sufficiency of Scripture.” On the radio broadcast, MacArthur commented that this sermon captures the core of his values of his ministry. Though his sermon is titled “The Sufficiency of Scripture,” I found his introductory remarks to argue otherwise.

I’m convinced that John MacArthur has had a pronounced impact on the American Church. His teachings, theology and philosophy of ministry impact many corners of our country, and arguably, the world. And his reach concerns me. MacArthur may highly value the sufficiency of Scripture, yet his arguments are flawed and they compromise and  limit the power, breadth and depth of God.

In this sermon, he identifies several concerns that urge him to preach this sermon. And it is in these concerns where he exposes his mistrust of the power of the Word of God. First, he is concerned that among church leaders there is a “great preoccupation with what I would call ‘worldly management technique.’” I agree with MacArthur in that if modern corporate management philosophy has replaced a biblical-basis for leadership, then there should be a concern for the kind of church we are building. However, like most other things, it would be unfair to “throw the baby out with the bath-water.”

There is much to be gained and gleaned from corporate leadership development. In fact, I would go so far to say that as believers, we should be learners of our society, glean the best, and ultimately redeem those management theories for the Kingdom of God. Luke 16.8 lies a great condemnation on believers when Jesus explains that “he people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light.” We have much to learn from the world around us.

Second, MacArthur critiques the entertainment culture of the church to draw people. He is concerned that churches are spending a lot of money to “entertain people.” In this area, I mostly agree with him. Many churches seem to embrace an entertainment culture and have failed to illustrate that God is enough to satisfy as Isaiah 55 proclaims.

Third, MacArthur criticize the church’s infatuation with mysticism or the occult. Here, MacArthur’s offense to the church and millions of believers is that he refuses to attribute the things that are from God to God. MacArthur’s theology limits his openness to an active God that does active things in our world–like heal people. Because MacArthur has reduced the gospel to right belief followed by right behavior, he misses the full reach that the gospel can have. It baffles me that MacArthur can believe in the God that raises Jesus from the dead, but refuses to believe that God has given us power (like the disciples of Scripture) to heal people.

Fourth, MacArthur critiques the realm of Psychology. And there is much to critique psychology and psychotherapy–especially in a believer’s reliance that counseling can do more for the soul that God. However, the realm of psychology has also been helpful (like many other disciplines) to expose God’s craftsmanship in humanity and how far we have fallen from the things that God intends for us.

Fifth, MacArthur ties biblical sufficiency with the “matter of marriage and family” and his concerns of the growing role of women in the church. It is unfortunate that MacArthur continues to encourage and expound a teaching that demeans and undermines God’s creation of women. It seems to me that it’s not the secular world that is guilty of simplifying and judging the Bible as unsophisticated.

I agree with MacArthur that “we do not any longer seem to believe that the Bible is sufficient for the life and conduct of the church. That is a sin.” While MacArthur has a respectful and obedient posture toward Scripture, I’m concerned that he has a limited understanding of the power of God and the Gospel. The Scripture is far more sufficient than what MacArthur advocates.

In a recent Fast Company issue (April 2010), columnist Nancy Lublin raised the importance of followers that do much of the work to make the leader look good. In “Do Something: Let’s Hear it for the Little Guys,” she argues that it’s the people who are not on top that turn “the visionary stuff into tangible reality.” Lublin believes that as a society we are too obsessed with leadership and do not recognize the contribution of the followers.

She notes that our culture celebrates success and the role that a leader plays in that endeavor and doesn’t pay enough attention or credit the followers.

I think Lublin is right in her observations. We are a society obsessed with leadership and while most of that material is helpful and good, it does lack any focus on the importance of good followers. The fundamental character of a good follower is one that asks good questions and presses leaders to be better at what they do.

Most of us who are in any sort of leadership are also followers. We have supervisors and managers whom are tasked with great responsibilities to carry out a certain vision. Being a good leader is learning to be a good follower. It’s also about nurturing, developing, and praising our followers—people who trust us and our vision, and who will go anywhere with us.

This past year, I have been indebted by a community of students who have been great followers. I appreciate how they have trusted me with their time, their questions and their faith. While many have thanked me for the great leader I have been in their lives, I find myself that much more grateful to God for them—for the ways that they have made me a better person today than I was four years ago.

Jesus’ most gracious words to the people of his day were, “Follow me.” To the fishermen he said, “Follow me and I will make you fishers of people.” Throughout the gospels, we see Jesus developing, praising, rebuking and loving a group of followers who were being empowered to lead. Their faithfulness as followers influenced their credibility and developed faithfulness in them as leaders.

I’m not the biggest fan of commencement ceremonies. There is a whole lot of waiting around to hear one name uttered. And graduations are sort of bitter sweet rites for me. Every year, I see a crop of students from my ministry transition to new endeavors. It’s sad to see them go, yet it’s satisfying to reflect of the years I have known them and what God has done in them and through them.

This morning, I get to celebrate with one of my students from the past four years–Deon. I met her as a freshman as we relaunched our ministry on campus. Any student who got involved and “stuck” it out with us during the first year is a hero in my book because of how fragile our ministry was at the time. Deon stuck it out for four years. As a somewhat shy and timid student, Deon tells me that it took her three attempts before she attended any of our events (which was a fellowship gathering in our home).

She grew up in a town not too far from Los Angeles, and her life experiences were fairly limited in scope and diversity. Would she engage with the diversity of our community and campus? I wasn’t sure. Deon became one of our leaders but struggled to make space for her faith, for God and for community. About a year ago, neither she nor I were sure whether she should continue as a leader. But God reinvited Deon into community and leadership, and Deon chose to be faithful.

This past year, she fell in love with community and became convinced of the necessity of having a Christian community around us. She also fell in love with leadership. Deon and her co-leader developed and shepherded a fantastic small group this year. Every person but one will be a leader in the fall. Deon’s passions have grown for the purposes of God. She has grown in character and deepened in faith. In a couple of weeks, Deon will serve as a camp director for a Christian camp. Today, I celebrate what God has done in Deon. I love that I’ve had front-row seats into God’s work in Deon’s life.

A week of outreach events on the CSUN Campus

There is a genocide in Armenia. And unlike the one that took place 95 years ago, Armenians seem to have chosen to largely ignore the ongoing genocide in Armenia at the hands of Armenians.

I was saddened, shocked and ashamed to stumble upon the latest issue of The Economist that profiled ‘gendercide’, a growing and disturbing trend in many parts of the world. While the topic itself was enough to anger me that this injustice exists in our world, I was that much more distraught to learn that my people—Armenians—contribute more to this evil than any other peoples in the world (save Chinese society according to some statistics). Gendercide refers to the intentional and systematic elimination of baby girls to honor a family’s preference for boys.

According to the latest CIA World Factbook, Armenia ranks first in gender imbalance at birth. In Armenia, 114 boys are born for every 100 girls. If the world is at should, the ratio should be about 1 to 1—that roughly 50% of all births should be boys and the other 50% should be girls (While evolutionary biology may skew the natural ratio toward boys, the ratio would be closer to 1 than 1.14).  But in Armenia, the picture is skewed. I don’t pretend to know all the reasons for this imbalance. Technology allows us to know the sex of a child before birth and any ancient prejudices toward boys are most likely playing a significant factor in this ratio.

According to the Economist article, the sex ratios in the Caucuses rose dramatically after the fall of the Soviet Union (from normal levels to what we have today). So in the past 15 years, there has been a systematic elimination of little girls in the country of Armenia.

I’m ashamed that I only learned about this today. I’m ashamed to be a part of a people group that has engaged in a practice that has no other word but evil to describe it. To this day, Armenians continue to lobby governments around the world to recognize the genocide of 1915 where 1.5 million Armenians were systematically and killed at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Since World War I, Armenians have been relentless in our pursuit to make sure that the world does not forget this evil that has been committed against our people.

It is our arrogance and hypocrisy that has focused our attention to remember the past and overlook the present evil committed by our own hands and by our society. Today, I am ashamed to be an Armenian. As a people, we pride ourselves on our culture, our traditions, and our religiosity (we are the first Christian nation), yet we have perpetuated and allowed for this evil. It is those very things that are fundamentally broken and need to be transformed and changed. It is our very culture in which we take pride, that has perpetuated and allowed for this evil. God have mercy on us!

In the past couple of weeks, I have been working (what it feels like full-time) on a small condominium my wife and I own. We are turning it over from one tenant to another. And the condo needs quite a bit of work—not because of how the former tenants left it but because much of the condo has worn out its years of use. It needs a new paint job, new carpets, and a repair of the kitchen cabinets.

And all of this has to happen in a short amount of time to minimize my loss of income during the process. The cost of the updates are a bit more than we wanted to spend, yet we knew we had to invest the money in making it look nice for the new tenant.

Like all household projects, this one had its fair share of headaches, including a mis-communication between the painters and us regarding what we needed them to paint and what we needed them to not paint. I found myself on the eve of passing the keys to the tenant without the paint job that I had promised him. I had to make a quick decision—I hired a new set of painters on the spot without taking the time to find out how much I should pay to paint the small condo. I know I paid more than I would have, had I solicited bids for the job.

Time and patience does save money. Sometimes, we don’t have the luxury of time, but careful planning can give us more options when we have to make a decision on the spot. Rarely does urgency beget good decisions. Most good decisions that happen in urgent matters tend to point to the character of the decision-maker who has prepared for the time when the decision is of an urgent nature.

Had I spent the past two months planning for fix of our condo, I would have saved money and seen a better quality of work done on our condominium.

Leaders and followers alike know how important vision is to an organization or a team. Proverbs 29.18 is the most quoted proverb when it comes to visionary leadership: “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (King James). (Incidentally, that proverb is translated quite differently in more modern versions. The NRSV translates the passage as: “Where there is no prophecy, the people cast off restraint…”)

Vision is important to leadership. That much is usually understood. But what I find less recognized is that vision leaks. As a leader, I cannot expect that the vision for a particular outreach or ministry would remain strong in the heart of the people who are a part of the vision. Vision will leak. I notice this in myself all the time. I remember being a part of a visioning conference weekend where I was inspired and sold on the vision for this particular ministry. But within a week, I had lost all interest in the material that I learned and the vision that I was supposed to be a part of. Vision had leaked. In a vacuum of a weekend conference, I was sold on the vision. But when I returned to my responsibilities, vision had become something additive and no longer a motivating factor for me.

As a leader, I must expect and compensate for vision leaking–which is why we need to recast vision and find creative ways of keeping people accountable to the vision. When vision leaks, it threatens the health of the ministry and the call on people’s lives. Rather than be motivated to pursue a God-given vision for transformation, the vision will feel like a burden to uphold.

I’ve identified the following factors that encourage vision leaks:

1. Lack of Goals: When the vision does not lead to a plan with practical goals, it will leak. Refleting back on that visioning weekend, I realized that I left with inspiration but not with any practical steps on how to engage that vision when normal life resumes. Sustaining and advancing vision requires people who are opting to buy into that vision to set goals for themselves toward that vision.
2. Unrealistic Goals: Goals need to be somewhat attainable. Lofty and unrealistic goals can be inspiring for some butare usually overwhelming.
3. Lack of real ownership: Paying lip service to a vision paves the way for the leaks. If I don’t own a particular focus or vision, I need to do the harder work of engaging and wrestling with it and with God.
4. Addictions and Sin: I’ve noticed that even if I have ownership and goals toward a vision, sin will poke holes in the vision. My energy will not go into advancing that vision but toward sin and addictions.
5. Fear: Vision has power to catalyze and transform the status quo. Change can be scary and fear can cause me to pause. It can cause me to wonder whether I really want to move forward in a particular direction.

To prevent vision from leaking, we should:

1. Cast and recast vision: The leader needs to continue to hold the vision in front of the community. And as followers, we need to revisit the vision regularly to be reminded why we are engaged in that particular vision.
2. Set Goals: I think we need to set goals as close to the initial vision cast as possible. I need to set the goals and even implement them in my calendar to make sure that I am taking steps to implement the vision.
3. Invite Accountability: I need to invite accountability in my life to make sure that I am still engaged in the vision. Accountability can come in face to face meetings, phone calls or emails.

I’ve discovered that one of the best ways for me to understand leadership is to critique how my follower-ship. As I learn how I am being led and how I am following, i can be more proactive in my leadership and more sensitive to the needs of followers. So as I’ve observed vision leaks, it has helped me to be better at leading my followers in vision.

As I process with young students whether they should pursue leadership, I often run into two responses: one set of students will take leadership as an almost given. They have little hesitation to take on a more significant leadership role (many of these students are too quick to say yes without counting the costs of such a commitment). Another set of students feel like they are not prepared for leadership and they need more time to discern whether they are “called” to leadership.

What I appreciate about the second type of response is that these students recognize that leadership is an important and serious calling on someone’s life and should be considered with care. Students want to make sure that they are hearing God correctly and clearly before stepping into leadership. Part of that may have to do with the realization that a commitment to leadership is a commitment to serve and shepherd others toward the heart of God. Emerging leaders want to make sure that they are hearing God for this awesome responsibility.

Scripture captures very powerful pictures of calling to which we compare ourselves. And it’s easy to fall into the trap that unless our calling is as emotional and powerful as what we see in scripture, it may not be from God. We want the moment in the desert like Abraham who is called to leave everything and start walking, or we want a burning bush moment as in Moses’s case, or a lightning in the sky like Paul experienced.

But for most of us, calling comes in incremental steps as opposed to a momentous occasion. It comes in the form of experiences and sermons and studies that over time paint a trajectory of how God is leading us and calling us.

Leadership professor Bobby Clinton put it this way:

For with many emerging leaders there is no once-for-all leadership committal. There is a growing number of steps involved in the leadership committal. Submission to each opens the door for the others. Two things should be noted. One, there are repeated leadership committals. Two, with each call there is a progressively deeper and more specific call. Leaders who are concerned with leadership selection and development must be aware of both the repeated nature of calls and the progressively deeper committal involved. Recognition of these elements can vitally affect design of ministry application times. Leaders interested in the leadership selection will in fact design ministry times with these two notions in mind. From this case study we see that leadership committal is as much a process as it is an event.

Clinton has observed what I have experienced. Over the past 12 years of full-time ministry, I have found myself going deeper with God in my call. I have understood the different facets of God’s call on my life and have recognized more of the ways that God has been focusing my unique calling.

Saying yes to leadership does not have to invite a deep processing of calling. Instead, we can see leadership commitments as small steps along the journey of our calling. Every step we take leads us that much closer to understand God’s call on our lives. We may even make mistakes along the way, which (if addressed in faith) will give us even better insights into our call.