Vision for Resource Ministry: library, or MI-6 ?

Three stone layers were asked what they are doing. The first said: I am just laying bricks. The second: I am building a house. The third: I am building this beautiful cathedral to glorify God. This familiar anecdote reminds us that vision shapes our attitude, and inspires joy into our everyday lives.

In my other article on Personal Vision, I have talked about finding for our individual lives God's general and specific will, and the corresponding long term strategy and short term tactics for implementation, (AKA vision and mission statements). This article illustrates how that framework of thinking has applied to my own life, in the forming of the NHF Resource Ministry, and now, with its core values re-examined, refocused, and sharpen, the expansion and execution of new ministry directions.

For anyone who views the Resource Ministry as simply a fancy title for a small church library, this perspective would limit both their possible usage of the ministry (people would only think of boring books that they have no time to read), and their potential involvement in the ministry (who would want to handle such a boring task?)

For me, right from the beginning, this ministry holds the potential to a tremendous amount of innovation and service. It is poised to become the most spectacular arena for people to demonstrate their Christian living, to be trained in all areas of faith, and to help equip others for ministry.

Formation of the core values

At the core of the ministry is the spirit of sharing, caring, and innovation. Sharing engenders good will, builds bridges between souls, and establishes community. Caring forces us to consider the particular context and lives of those we interact with, not to be dogmatic and impose our opinions on others, but instead value their time as well as point of view, and guide all that we do for others with relevance. Innovation encompasses creativity, exploration, courage to tread a new path, and leadership to demonstrate new ways of weaving our faith into contemporary culture.

Caring and Sharing

My uncle Reverend Earnest Wu summarized the actions of Christianity to be Caring and Sharing, with the two words juxtaposed in the shape of a cross for illustration. (I am forever grateful to him for being the first to incite my serious investigation into Christianity.)

I had always loved to explore new ideas and resources. After becoming a Christian, my sense of awareness for other people’s interests and well being expanded. I am excited to share my discoveries with other like-minded individuals, to save them the trouble and effort in search for similar resources. In addition, I dislike wasted resources, and want my books, multimedia, or whatever useful items, to be maximally utilized by others when I am done with them.

Becoming more considerate, I learned not to force onto others what I myself find interesting, because not everyone has the same need, taste or opinion, nor at the same stage of their spiritual journey. Everyone needs different things at different stages. This is where caring comes in. When you care about someone, you think about what they need, rather than what you like them to have. (Analogous to the difference between a gift and a present, the former being something the recipient wants, and the latter something the giver wants the recipients to have). Being relevant is the fine art of balancing the two aspects.

Exploration and Innovation

My approach to learn any subject is to start with a top-down perspective of the entire landscape before getting into the details. I investigate the various viewpoints and methodologies, and how they all fit with or complement each other. This demands lots of surveys and constant exploration. In the context of the Resource Ministry, I get to be acquainted with available resources, popular opinions, and the insightful but less publicized gems.

Along the thoughts outlined in my other article on shaping one’s Personal Vision, I have come to learn that an essential aspect of myself is the drive for innovation. Perhaps this is simply a result of constant exploration: when I am exposed to many ideas and patterns of solving problems, it is much easier for creativity to germinate, in the form of an original association of disparate elements. Or perhaps the exploration is caused in the first place by the drive to improve and innovate with unconventional approaches in every aspect of life. But then what would be the primary motivation behind that drive?

Whatever the psychological explanation for the cause of my actions, I know that God has made me that way, and I have concluded that this will be an essential part of my ministry. Just as Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire says that God made him fast for a reason, and that when he runs he feels the smile of God, so too I feel fully alive when I exercise my best abilities and gifts.

In my past NHF newsletter articles, I have hinted to my journey for a sense of personal integration within the spiritual life. Most recently, the reflection into Personal Vision has offered me a sense of how every aspect of my life can fit together in God's grand design. The gist is that, along the themes of John Piper's Desiring God and John Eldredge's Journey of Desire, my becoming fully who I am (in the sense of embracing every aspect of myself and my background context) is an essential part of what Jesus calls "living life to the full". (Only through knowing Jesus have I been able to accept myself and circumstances that way.) Consequently, my ministry bears that integration.

Visions Renewed: MI-6

Is Google simply a good librarian that keeps the index to the Web? Is Amazon merely an online store? While they appear to be just that under traditional categories, these companies are at the core more about innovations and new ways of living.

Similarly, while the NHF Resource Ministry can be categorized traditionally as a ministry library or store, its dormant potentials can rival the most exciting missions or growing efforts within God's kingdom. As a result of reflection and re-focusing on our core values, we now present to you a renewed and broader vision, in the form of six specific directions of Ministry Innovations, so that, when you think of Resource Ministry, think “MI-6”.

MI-1: Innovation in presentation

The basic service of the Resource Ministry has been to encourage and enable growth and development of personal faith and discipleship, through the use of media resources of every format, such as books, sermon MP3, video DVD, audio books, praise music, bible study software, online resources, etc.

In addition to this general goal, we will purposely focused on the role to support and enhance the pulpit message and the directions from church leadership. To enhance the sermon experience, we will provide the infrastructure for sermon annotation, archival, and online discussion. (See DesiringGod.com for what can be done.) Currently, we have converted all 14 years of NHF sermons into MP3 format, available for distribution on 6 DVDs.

In addition, we actively present themes on books that elaborate on or supplement the sermons, and filter and review best available resources. Some themes that we have offered in the past year includes:

• Marriage books (books by Mike Mason and others around Valentine, and many more after the Marriage Seminar)

• Inspirational Christian biographies (sermons and films) on less known lives of extraordinary Christians

• Ordinary Christian women who changed the world (books on many great examples besides Mother Teresa)

In addition to themed resources, we aim to provide more frequent supply of review articles and recommendations, available through emails and weekly announcements.

MI2. Innovation in ministry tools

We promote good tools (hardware and software) and methodology that can help individuals achieve greater efficiency and productivity in their Christian growth. The main idea is to redeem wasted time. We encourage the use of scrap minutes in our week, such as during commute, waiting in lines, etc, so as to do all the spiritual activities that we thought to have no time for, such as to read, learn, reflect and meditate.

We facilitate this effort by providing tools and gadgets to individuals (whether church members or visiting missionaries), such as MP3 players pre-loaded with sermons or audio-books, portable text and audio note-takers to jot down our reflections, or signal converters to enable in-car listening during commute. Upcoming plans include the rental of cool gadgets, such as the Kindle eBook reader, to promote interest in collaborative reading and shared commentary.

In methodology, we have been practicing

• “Active Lending”, of recommending resources to church members before they know they need it;

• “Try before you buy”, where you can ask for and sample new books and resources without risking your hard-earned dollars

• “Read it and keep it”, where after you read an entire book, you have the option to keep it free of charge. (If a book makes such an impression on you, you can keep it for further reference.)

MI3. Innovation in online collaboration

Current Web2.0 technology allows many form of collaboration, from social network, user-contributed wikipedia, to user-voted filtering of quality content (e.g. social bookmarking, YouTube). Online tools are useful particularly among groups that cannot meet easily at the same time at the same place, as the case with the geographically dispersed and busy members of NHF.

Given the limited Christian presence within the user groups of these technologies, we will pursue and develop a number of these possibilities, such as Web2.0Christianity.com, OpenTestimony.com, etc. Through these tools and websites, we can enhance Christian online interaction for testimony and sharing, collaborative reflection, and insight generation.

MI4. Innovation in cross-church interactions

To practice being Ambassadors for Christ, we can show goodwill through gifts when connecting with other people. This includes offering of appropriate resources or concrete ideas to aid individuals and organizations, Christian or not. Having the connection, we can more easily pursue evangelism to the unreached or joint ventures with organizations.

We will develop a gifting ministry, to enhance bonding toward individuals, guest speakers, visiting missionaries, and other local churches and ministries. I will never forget the looks of excitement and gratitude from our Ukraine visitors when they were offered samples of our resources.

Furthermore, to equip ministry workers, we address the question: “what tools could we offer the current and next generation missionary, for them to have a highly productive ministry?” We seek novel and resourceful uses of existing tools, and develop new technology and methodology to support faith workers.

MI5. Innovation in cross-cultural experience

What is the role of NHF as we become a dynamic and innovative multi-cultural church? More important than our ability to attract people of multiple nationalities is our exposure and understanding of the cross-cultural experience, enabling us to be mediator in the current post-Modernism cross-culture and cross-religion discussions, and a contributor to global Christianity.

Firstly, we are in a unique position to introduce to the mainstream Church the cultural wisdom of non-Western Christians, and translate the writings of gifted Christian authors from other nations. As I look at the Christian bestsellers in the US, I find many books to be relatively shallow, their success driven mostly by marketing to the “Me”-generation. In comparison, I find among the writings of Christian authors in China a deep understanding of multiple religions, amazing spiritual experiences, and godly insights. Seeing that the translation ministry is always from English to various languages, it is time to help these resources cross the reverse language barrier and be offered to the church at large. For starters, we will provide introduction, reviews and summaries of ideas from these authors.

Secondly, we are the people most ready to engage, appreciate, support, and involve in cross-cultural ministries and efforts. If we want to experience God’s amazing work on Earth right now, we need to focus not just on “what would Jesus do” (easily diffused into the self-centeredness of bringing Jesus to where I am), but “walk where Jesus go” (joining efforts with missions to the poor and the needy, through which even our personal problems will dissolve as we see the grander pictures of how our lives can be used by God).

In practice, we will turn our attention and awareness toward the frontier of global missions and evangelism, and report on the emerging trends and needs of the Body of Christ on the global front. E.g. the impending needs of the large number of Christians in China for trained pastors, and ways to support their large scale missionary efforts toward the Islamic countries.

Unless we are co-working at the frontier of the Gospel, daily witnessing and depending on the power of the Holy Spirit, we can easily ignore the reality of a living resurrected Christ, and our faith would be no different than a stagnant one which treats faith as a philosophy, Jesus as a good moral teacher, the Word as merely a will left by God.

MI6. Innovation in challenging the Next Generation

The best investment we can make is to prepare our next generation. We will encourage our teens to try out daring faith projects, and prepare them as leaders in a new generation of Christian Social Entrepreneurs. This includes teaching, mentoring, and helping them to start their own non-profit organizations, to impact society and reflect a visible display of the glory of God.

Conclusion

Are we biting more than we can chew? Should we have interpreted “MI” to mean Mission Impossible? No vision is too big for God, and, in the words and spirit of Robert Morrison (the first Protestant missionary to China, landed 200 years ago in 1807), while I can't, God can and will.

Your mission, should you choose to accept, is to join me on a most exciting ride in our faith journey, equipped by a relentless love and uncompromising passion for God in Jesus Christ, to change the world one minute at a time.

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