COPING WITH THE UNKNOWN: business is ministry and ministry is business:

African is more exposed to diverse ways of choosing from concerning how to do things, than the average American or European.  African people are not all just poor ignorant people. By the time a missionary arrives in an area, the local people are smart enough to know how they will respond to him or her in order to get the most out the missionary.  We know that when it comes to spiritual abilities, African ministers are NOT underprivileged.  They are at par with all GOD’s ministers worldwide, and more advanced in some areas than many ministers in the Western developed countries, given the above scenario.  What is needed much more than otherwise is leadership training to filter through, collect relevant good information and align it to GOD’s way and redirect it to do GOD’s business genuinely.  Most integrity and leadership failures in ministry and business establishments in Africa and other places can be easily eliminated by solid biblically informed Leadership Training.  For us in East Africa, this can be achieved without traveling aboard to get knowledge.  There are available resources that can be obtained through the Infotainment Superhighway and the Internet at our Long Distance Learning Center.  We need to complete building our Multi-Purpose Learning Center, to give us this leading age Mission.

Mr. Glenn Henderson is CEO and founder of AFC Worldwide Express, is an experienced Christian businessman and minister/teacher, who believes, and understands rightly so, that business is ministry and ministry is business.  We affirm that notion because the two share the same spiritual and physical aspirations.  They are both missions to profit for the Master-in-Charge!  They both need faith beyond speculative presumptions to succeed.  Both step out and utilize Faith talk.  And both can crumble from false promises but more so from false emotional excitement, which comes from certain unrealistic expectations overshadow reason that works are necessary to succeed.  Needless to say, for both pulpit and none-pulpit businesses can be misunderstood and misappropriated by many.  For OTIC Inc., we have had to learn and remove ourselves from false emotional excitement that we were to make a lot of money for the ministry from 10,000 chickens within a year:  we determined to leave just faith talk alone and do the works phase of faith James 2:26 admonishes.  Leadership requires that we speak responsibly with financial intelligence, based in financial literacy that best demonstrate biblical faith talk pleasing to GOD.  Grace is GOD’s Otherness.  Therefore, Grace is salvific only when Faith speaks and acts out towards GOD, who is also the WORD.  Faith is more than a thought.  It is a tangible encounter with things hoped for and not seen but present in the immediate physical vicinity and left to manifest when spoken about, spoken to and reached out to, to receive them.

Here is a testimony.  When OTIC, Inc., set out to establish the Ten Thousand Chicken Project most of us on the staff, especially in Africa, “did not know what we did not know”, as Glenn Henderson, put it, recalling his business entrepreneurial start.  It was after the purchase of up to 1,500 chickens that we began to realize, beyond imaginations and faith talk, how naïve GOD’s people can be when it comes to any business start up, as well as starting a local church congregation.  We realized that able leadership personnel are primary in all to bring any mission to measure up to the vision by speaking responsibly with financial intelligence, based in financial literacy. 

Speaking responsibly with financial intelligence, based in financial literacy requires sitting down to write down real figures relating to the real world of business and in our case, chicken farming.  We bought our first chickens without a solid plan with informed tested accounting from reliable sources written down.  We did not have a proper check list, and did not count the cost before going to war!  That was a very expensive hard knock but GOD helped us not to despair when we found out what we did not know.  He led us to correct what we didn’t know.

This is how GOD taught us concerning Leadership Training:  Consideration of biblical counsel seriously and listening to informed teaching by men like Glenn Henderson is a good foundation to start with.  Being ready to go and do what is heard about the LORD’s business comes from  continuous listening with a teachable spirit to what the spirit of GOD brings our way, to  enlightens the research, training, and physical involvement, moving us from confessions into victorious and prosperous real lived-life experiences.  Knowledge of how to intelligently plan, carry out, resolve conflicting surprises, and achieve our goals via the strategy of our mission to fulfill our vision.  Listening to Glenn Henderson’s teaching CDs, “Business, Beyond Belief”, helped us to recognize what Henderson termed as the “Key Performance Areas (KPA)”, and recognize the “Key Performance Indicators (KPI)”.  The KPA and KPI help to project realistic operation results based in a clear checklist!  Hence, the KPA and KPI helped us understand that Ministry is Mission, Vision, and Strategy working together as an undivided whole.  Vision measures or maps out scope of “who we are” (our being), including what GOD has given us.  Mission the scope of what we are and why we are() with (our character and our purpose), and how we are (our personality in) conducting ourselves in our world as Witnesses of the Kingdom of GOD, amid those Mr. Henderson terms as our customers.  For OTIC, Inc., customers include the kids for Child Discipling, the Christians who partake in this ministry and also buy the eggs as well as the sinners who will buy our eggs, together with the Christians.

Strategy is what it takes includes our organization in America and Africa, the structural premises for education, chicken coups building, chickens farming and egg sales.  From time to time, we remind ourselves that vision is directly connected to its mission and both are constant but that strategychange from time to time unlike vision and mission, to fit the context or the environment and culture!  Paul was changing Strategy and not vision and mission when he attested that to the Jews,   he became like   to win some to Christ.  He was not changing the vision and the mission based in Christ-likeness that is always constant to all humanity:  By constant we mean, not able to change to live like the worldly because we imitate Jesus the Son of the Living Jehovah Covenant GOD: “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8); and “I am the LORD change not” (Malachi 3:6).  Christ left the true example of leadership training by example and the here is the cutest thing.  The new generation of leaders GOD is raising is emerging knowing that no one in ministry owns anyone, especially the rich and particularly the money of the rich!  GOD is the LORD and He owns the earth and fullness thereof.   He makes the rich without the minister’s approval and or input, Amen

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