Consequential Leadership E-Book

Mac Pier

• Herausgeber: IVP
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 301

Beschreibung

Are we living in challenging times? Yes. But people can and do make a difference. Here are the stories of fifteen entrepreneurial leaders doing just that. Drawn from church, business, government and non-profit sectors, these world-class visionaries and activists offer examples that motivate and principles to imitate. Their stories show that mature networks of leaders and organizations can offer opportunities to a new generation of young people, change communities ravaged by HIV/AIDS, reach new groups of people with the message of hope--and more. If you see a need and want to contribute your own consequential leadership, this book is for you.

Leseprobe

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Consequential Leadership

15 Leaders Fighting for Our Cities, Our Poor, Our Youth and Our Culture

Mac Pier Foreword by Bob Buford Afterword by Kevin Palau

www.IVPress.com/books

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InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web: www.ivpress.com E-mail: [email protected]

© 2012 by Mac Pier

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at www.intervarsity.org.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

While all stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders for additional material used in this book. The authors will be pleased to rectify any omissions in future editions if notified by copyright holders.

Design: Cindy Kiple Images: City skyline: © Shane Obrien/iStockphoto

Manhattan cityscape: © bravobravo/iStockphoto

Interior design: Beth Hagenberg

ISBN 978-0-8308-6332-7

Contents

Foreword

In Appreciation

1. Introduction: Consequential Times

2. Tim Keller: Grace

3. Luis Palau: Festival!

4. A. R. Bernard: Culture

5. Glen Smith: Shalom

6. Richard Stearns: Rescue

7. Ajith Fernando: Suffering

8. Frances Hesselbein: Sacrifice

9. W. Wilson Good Sr.: Equality

10. George Gallup Jr.: Belonging

11. Brenda Salter McNeil: Reconciliation

12. Alan and Katherine Barnhart: Obedience

13. Bob Doll: Strategy

14. Jim Mellado and Steve Bell: Team

15. Conclusion: Consequential Leadership

Afterword by Kevin Palau

Notes

Image Credits

About the Author

Endorsements

Foreword

The spirit of enterprise is America’s greatest asset and its greatest export. This is as true for America’s growing churches, nonprofit organizations and government as it is for business. Right now, however, this spirit is deeply imperiled. We are in the worst fix since the Depression and the two World Wars. And it is not a problem of short duration or easy solution.

In the opinion of the late Peter Drucker, “What we have in the developed world is not so much an economic problem as it is a moral problem.” The authors of a recent book on Drucker’s life pick up on this as well: while others stressed technique and skills, “the human component was most important to Peter Drucker,” they write. “This was in large part because of the strong Judeo-Christian underpinnings to Drucker’s overall concept of management as a way to achieve a moral society comprised of institutions. For Drucker, management was a moral force, not merely a tool at the service of the amoral market.”[1]

New York Times columnist David Brooks also stressed the moral aspect in his op-ed titled “The Spirit of Enterprise”:

Why are nations like Germany and the U.S. rich? It’s not primarily because they possess natural resources—many nations have those. It’s primarily because of habits, values and social capital.

It’s because many people in these countries, as Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, believe in a simple moral formula: effort should lead to reward as often as possible.

This crisis of legitimacy is unlikely to be solved by business or politics-as-usual. It is not a problem that is amenable to money or power. What we need is a moral renaissance rooted in the intersection of faith and action—action that grows out of character, commitment and values.

There is hope, but not of the sort that dominates the headlines that thrive on conflict and controversy. Rather, there’s hope from organizations like Halftime, which is helping a generation of heroic, highly skilled activists devote the second half of their lives to encore careers of meaning and significance—meaning and significance that come only from following God’s call to selfless service.

There’s hope from people like Rich Stearns (see chapter six), who left the commercial world as CEO of Lennox China to serve the poor. Through Stearns’s superb leadership skills, he took World Vision from $350 million dollars to $1.2 billion in annual revenue.

Wilson Goode, the first African American mayor of Philadelphia, is also spreading hope (see chapter nine). As former mayor of Philadelphia he had thirty thousand employees and a budget of two billion dollars. He himself went from church to church to church recruiting mentors for the children of men in prison. I still carry a business card Wilson gave me when I interviewed him for my book Finishing Well. One side of the card states the mission of his organization, Amachi: “people of faith mentoring children of promise.” On the reverse side of the card, in Wilson’s own handwriting, is one of the clearest business plans I have ever seen (see figure 0.1).

Amachi has already served at least three hundred thousand children.

Figure 0.1.

Hope is also springing from Frances Hesselbein, former president of Girl Scouts of America (see chapter eight). She and I have been what Frances calls “partners for life” since we cofounded, with Richard Schubert, the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, now the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute, thirty years ago. Frances says, “I have a very strong belief that we are called to do what we do, and when we are called we are given the energy.”

Jim Mellado (see chapter fourteen) is yet another example of hope, and one of the stars of the work of the Leadership Network, an organization for which I serve as chairman, whose focus is applying Peter Drucker’s principles to the exponential growth of evangelical churches in the United States. As both an athlete who qualified for the Olympics and a graduate of Harvard Business School, he is one of the smartest people I know and clearly could have made millions. Instead, Jim chose to build the Willow Creek Association, which has provided leadership training for thousands of churches across the globe that have experienced significant growth. In the United States alone, churches with one thousand attendees in a normal weekend have grown in number from one hundred when Willow Creek and the Leadership Network were just beginning to over seven thousand today. Tim Keller, of Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City, has a similar story (see chapter two). Keller left the academic world to begin Redeemer and is now planting churches in cosmopolitan cities across the globe. And, as Peter Drucker was quoted in Forbes as saying, “The pastoral megachurches that have been growing so very fast in the U.S. since 1980 . . . are surely the most important social phenomenon in American society in the last 30 years.”[2]

In Consequential Leadership, Mac Pier has done us a great service by bringing forth the stories of great entrepreneurs who have crossed over from politics, business and other fields to form a vanguard that may yet bring us back from what the ever-wise David Brooks calls “a crisis of legitimacy.” These tales are a call to action for all of us.

Bob Buford

Founding Chairman, Leadership Network/Halftime

Author, Halftime and Finishing Well

In Appreciation

I want to thank my family for being on the journey together—Marya, Anna, Jordan and Kirsten, who have given me the freedom for thirty years to travel, experiment and write about big ideas.

I want to thank my team—Lauren, Tom, Beverly, Gary, Carlos, Dee Ann, Sharon, Stephanie, Ken, Pam, Ebony, Ramona, Caren, Annette and Natisha—for their shared sacrifice for the vision of a changed New York City.

I want to thank Julie Ackerman Link for her brilliant work in editing this book. She has become a great friend and colleague.

I want to thank Andy Le Peau and the team at InterVarsity Press for believing in this simple effort to describe what is possible through ordinary lives possessed by extraordinary passion.

Special thanks to Beverly Cook for her efforts to finalize the manuscript.

I want to thank all of the leaders in this book who generously gave their time to transparently share their journeys with me and with the world.

Dedication

I dedicate this book to a growing community of colleagues fighting for the welfare of their communities and cities—often in anonymity and decades of effort. Thanks for being on the journey together.

Atlanta—Chip Sweney

Boston—Doug and Judy Hall, Jeff Bass, Bobby Bose

Chicago—Phil Miglioratti, Scott Chapman

Corvallis—Tom White

Dallas—Rebecca Walls, Mario Zandstra, Jim Runyan, Jeff Warren, Brian Considine, Ed Pearce, Raymond Harris, Marydel Harris and Doug Kramp

Denver—Dave Runyon

Houston—Jim Herrington and Steve Capper

Jackson—Jarvis Ward

Minneapolis—Glenn Barth

New York—Mark Reynolds, Scott Kauffmann, Chris Troy, Paul Coty, Jeremy Del Rio, Matt Bennett

Phoenix—Gary Kinnaman, Billy Thrall

Portland—Kevin Palau, Ben Sands

San Diego—Mike Carlisle, Sam Williams

1 Introduction

Consequential Times

The most exalted idea applied to God is not infinite wisdom, infinite power, but infinite concern.

Abraham Heschel, The Prophets

On September 11, 2001, I was sitting on the fifteenth floor of the Empire State Building preparing for the annual board meeting of Concerts of Prayer Greater New York when board member Tom Mahairas stuck his head in the door at 8:50 a.m. He had just gotten a phone call from his daughter, who said that a plane had crashed into a tower of the World Trade Center and that people were jumping out the windows of the one hundredth floor. We assumed that the pilot of a small plane had accidentally flown into the building. Thirty minutes later we got news of the second attack. Within minutes we were sitting in the tallest building in New York City. We scrambled down to Fifth Avenue, two miles north of the World Trade Center. Smoke and dust billowed across the avenue. Thousands of dazed and disoriented New Yorkers wandered the streets.

My children had gone to school that morning with one parent in Manhattan and another in Washington, D.C., where my wife, Marya, was attending a cardiology conference with Dr. William Tenet, the twin brother of CIA director George Tenet. Phone service was unavailable for several hours, so none of us knew whether or not other family members were alive. For a time, Marya thought she might be spending the night at George’s home. I was able to get home that night because I had driven into Manhattan (which was unusual for me to do). But even there, in the weeks ahead, the schools my two older children attended received bomb threats. Terrorism hit very close to home.

September 11 became a defining moment in U.S. history. No other single day saw as much death on U.S. soil—three thousand lives were lost. Some were eviscerated by the explosion. Some leapt to their deaths to escape the flames. Claudia Roux, a colleague with Alpha, and her coworkers couldn’t return to their downtown offices for weeks due to bio dust from human remains. Weeks later, cars parked below ground level in the World Trade Center were still smoldering at one thousand degrees.

The paradox of September 11 is the number of Americans who were spared. The courageous work of the New York City Fire Department, the New York City Police Department and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority saved thousands of lives. Men and women ran into burning, collapsing buildings to rescue as many people as possible. One woman being escorted out of a building asked a fireman why he was going inside. The fireman responded simply, “This is what I do.” Courage made the difference.

In addition, for many weeks emergency workers and volunteers scoured the remains of buildings at Ground Zero hoping to find one more lost loved one. Nonprofit leaders and agencies sprang into action providing food, relief and resources to victims. On September 13, I was sitting in the parking lot of a Connecticut diner when I received a phone call from World Vision asking if Concerts of Prayer Greater New York would cocreate a relief fund for the victims. Together we started the American Families Assistance Fund; by the end of 2011, we had raised six million dollars, which was distributed to victims of 9/11 largely through the efforts of New York City churches.

Churches were actively involved from the day of the attacks. One Chinatown church, Oversea Chinese Mission, for example, fed five hundred people every day for months. Primitive Christian Church, under the leadership of pastor Marc Rivera, provided round-the-clock assistance to people who needed rest, food and counseling. Pastor Rivera said, “If the Twin Towers had tipped rather than imploded straight down, they would have reached all the way to the doorstep of my church.” The follow-up initiatives in the church community after September 11 awakened a desire to revive New York City. Leaders came to plant churches, start careers and give themselves to serve a city that was broken.

On a personal level, September 11 left me with three life-changing impressions. First was the immediacy of eternity. Three thousand people went to work that day with no idea that they would not return home. In the time it takes a heart to beat, they went from an ordinary day in the office to the door of eternity. Cantor Fitzgerald, whose offices were on floors 101 to 105 of the World Trade Center, lost more than six hundred employees. When CEO Howard Lutnick participated in a memorial service one month later at the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, he spoke about the devastation of the attack and confessed that he had no idea how to rebuild his life or his company.

Second, I was struck by the power of agreement. Nineteen terrorists changed the world by agreeing with their superiors to commandeer airplanes and fly them into the greatest symbols of American democracy and capitalism. Now, no one travels by plane or takes a ride into Manhattan without thinking about September 11. Rebuilding the economy is taking years, and it is likely that our sense of national security will never be restored.

Third, I saw the importance of global cities. New York City wasn’t a random choice. It was chosen specifically because an attack on the media and financial center of the world was a way of attacking the entire Western world.

MY STORY

Consequential Times, Catalytic Events, Christlike Mentors

Standing in the bleachers at the Urbana Student Missions Conference on December 30, 1979, with my beloved Marya, whom I would marry one year later, was an unforgettable experience. For three days we had been listening to John Stott’s heart-gripping exposition of Romans. Now Billy Graham was challenging us to go anywhere in the world God called us. Marya and I stood to say yes to God.

Since that night God has used various mentors and catalytic events to guide us to New York City:

David Bryant’s writing and speaking provided for me a global worldview and a deepening understanding of the supremacy of Christ.

Ray Bakke’s teaching on the centrality of cities in fifteen years of urban consultations and doctoral courses involved showing, not just telling. During a fifteen-year period he took me on trips to Johannesburg, Manila and Vancouver and on many excursions in New York City.

John Clause from World Vision opened my eyes to the world of the HIV pandemic. As a result I have taken ten trips to East Africa.

Bill Hybels and his Willow Creek Association team introduced me to the centrality of leadership in effecting measurable change in difficult contexts from a biblical perspective, and the idea that “leaders do what leadership requires.” That concept was the seed of the New York City Leadership Center. I founded the New York City Leadership Center along with my staff team and board in 2007. After twenty years of journeying with New York City pastors and mission leaders, we saw the urgent need to provide training resources and collaborative opportunities to transform our city.

The pastoral community of New York City (Bob Johansson, Roderick Caesar, Ron Bailey, Luciano Padilla) and scores of other leaders immersed me in the beauty and challenges of local church life in the inner city.

A 1983 trip to India taught me the power of extended, united, corporate prayer as I gathered with other believers every Friday for three to nine hours of prayer.

Selling our possessions to move to New York City in 1984 was the most radical faith step we have taken, but God transcended our risk with his provision.

Three spheres—campus, city and church—form the crucible in which I have attempted to become more Christlike. I served for seventeen years with InterVarsity on campus as a student leader and staff member. I was shaped by the godly supervision of Clayton Lindgren, Janet Luhrs Balajthy and Bobby Gross. I was deeply impacted by the Bible teaching of Barbara Boyd and the Urbana Student Missions Conferences. The promise of Psalm 23:3 has proven true: God has guided me into paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

In his book Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, Ralph Winter suggests that every four hundred years a global event radically changes the trajectory of the church. Beginning with the crucifixion (a.d. 33), followed by the invasion of the Barbarians of Rome (a.d. 410), the invasion of the Vikings and the capture of Dublin (a.d. 834), the Crusades (a.d. 1095-1291), the missionary work of William Carey to the Indian coast (a.d. 1793) and Hudson Taylor to inland China (a.d. 1853), each four-hundred-year epoch represents the geographic progression of the gospel. Winter surmises that God grew the church during each period, dark as some of them were.[1]

Is it possible that September 11 marked the beginning of one of those four-hundred-year periods? Only history will tell. But a cosmic conflict between Western culture and an ideology of terror rooted in religious extremism does not seem coincidental.

This book is about leading consequentially. A consequential leader fully enters with their spiritual community into the concerns of God and the suffering of Christ for the world. Consequential leaders act to address the greatest spiritual, social and humanitarian concerns on the heart of God. This book is about those kinds of leaders and helping us to aspire toward being more consequential in our leadership.

Consequential Realities

There are three demographics today that represent a majority, or near majority, of the world’s population: people living in metropolitan areas (urban), people under twenty-five years of age (young) and people living on less than two dollars a day (poor). Consequential times require leaders who can address these major demographic groups.

Global cities. In 2002, Ray Bakke, retired chancellor of Bakke Graduate University, wrote:

The astonishing new fact of our time is that the majority of the world’s six billion people now live and work in sizeable cities. Moreover, we live at the time of the greatest migration in human history. The southern hemisphere is moving north, East is coming West, and everyone is coming to New York! I remember well the day several years ago when, sitting in Manhattan, I read a New York Times report that 133 nations had been found living together in one Queens zip code.[2]

Bakke describes the trend in American cities, in particular: “In the first hundred years after colonization people moved west to farms. In the second hundred years people moved north to cities. Now in the third century we are seeing the internationalization of American cities with people from all over the globe.”[3] The U.S. now has the largest Jewish population, with more Jews than Tel Aviv. It also has more Spanish speakers than Spain, the largest Irish population and one of the largest Scandinavian populations in the world. These immigrant communities are concentrated in many U.S. cities and New York City in particular. In one decade, more than one million immigrants moved into New York City. New York City is the largest Jewish city outside Israel and one of the largest Muslim cities outside the Islamic world.

However, though the U.S. has a high concentration of immigrants, other countries have many more highly populated cities than it does. Of the five hundred cities with a population of more than one million people, the majority are in Asia, Africa and Latin America. China, for example, is experiencing an annual influx of more than sixteen million people—roughly the population of Canada—into its cities from rural areas. It is not a coincidence, then, that the rapid growth of Christianity corresponds to the rapid growth of cities on those three continents. The rapid growth of Christianity is happening right now. Between 1900 and 2050, the percentage of Christians globally from Africa, Asia and Latin America is forecast to grow from 22 percent to 71 percent, according to Bob Doll in his Lausanne 2010 seminar at Cape Town, South Africa. China has the fastest-growing church in the world, according to Ray Bakke in a 2008 lecture at Faith Bible College in Flushing, New York.

The posture of the United States toward the world has changed. With the opening of Ellis Island in 1891 the United States faced east to Europe, allowing in people of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish faith. Today the country faces west toward Asia, as 60 percent of the world lives in the Pacific Rim. Together, India and China contain 40 percent of the world’s population. In his same seminar at Cape Town, Bob Doll noted that China has the fastest-growing economy. Tom Friedman has stated that India has the fastest-growing middle class in the world. No longer are neighbors in U.S. cities from only the faith traditions of Abraham (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). Eastern religions, including Buddhism and Hinduism (also New Age), along with aggressive secularism and atheism, are competing for attention.[4]

This great global reality represents an unprecedented opportunity for communities long separated from the truth of God in Christ to encounter the gospel. After moving to New York City in 1984, I met a jewelry dealer on an airplane whose daughter was the same age as my youngest daughter. The jewelry dealer was a Sikh from the Punjab of India and was married to a Hindu. We became friends and visited each other’s homes. When my friend’s mother became ill and slipped into a coma we prayed for her and she was miraculously healed. This provided the opportunity to talk about the God to whom we pray. God was setting up this opportunity to reveal himself to a family who had no significant contact with the gospel. God is choreographing global neighbors into our urban U.S. neighborhoods to fulfill his purposes; we need to seize the opportunities all around us.

The young. In the spring of 2011 the world witnessed the outrage of young people across the Arab world, with the unrest spreading through the Middle East at the speed of social networking. The “Arab Spring” demonstrated what happens when oppressive governments make young people feel so hopeless that they are willing to risk their lives for a taste of freedom.

Many young people in urban centers are profoundly challenged. In the United States, crime has exploded. Twenty-five percent of the global prison population is in our country; on any given day more than seven million people are in the penal system in America.[5] We have become a capital of incarceration. The state of New York alone has more than eighty-five thousand inmates[6]; of those, Ray Bakke estimates that 80 percent come from six zip codes.

Gary Frost, president of Concerts of Prayer Greater New York, was the highest-ranking minority leader with the North American Missions Board prior to his move to New York City. As part of his ministry now, he regularly visits young African American and Hispanic men in prison. Prison visitation is disheartening, he admits, but having to conduct funerals is even worse. “I have conducted too many funerals over the lives of young African American men killed senselessly,” Frost says. “To hear the sobbing and the wrenching of mothers who have lost their children is unbearable.” He recounts a specific experience he had: “I was walking one day with my son Timothy through the cemetery of Youngstown, Ohio, and my son counted forty tombstones of his friends. He could not take it anymore so he just stopped counting.”[7] Frost and his wife, Lynette, have worked to alleviate the crisis by serving as foster parents to forty children.

Young people in large cities are also vulnerable academically. In a January 2009 interview by Bob Costas, Tony Dungy, former head coach of the Indianapolis Colts, was asked by Costas whether he would return to coaching. Dungy responded, “I will probably not return to coach. The most significant reason for not returning is to address the needs of young people. In Indianapolis we only have a 19 percent graduation rate.”[8] Other estimates indicate that the graduation rate in Indianapolis may be as high as 30 percent, but it is still the second lowest in the nation; only Detroit is lower.[9]

The reality is that in many of our urban centers across the country, a near majority of young people are not graduating from high school. This is creating a social time bomb. Frances Hesselbein, CEO of the Girl Scouts for thirteen years, says that unless something dramatic is done, this trend will undermine democracy. Young people without hope will protest.

Another form of hopelessness that grips young people is secularism. In 1998 David Sue, staff member with Concerts of Prayer Greater New York, surveyed the diverse religious community of Flushing, New York, speaking with Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians. He found one common thread—everyone was losing faith in the religious tradition of their ancestors. Secularism was drawing young people away from their ancestral beliefs. The percentage of young people who discontinue their involvement in church upon graduation from college is as high as 90 percent.[10]

Pastor Anthony Trufant of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Brooklyn is working to address this. He has a successful three-part strategy for reaching young people in his church, helping them become multilingual, crosscultural and technologically literate. Trufant implemented programs along these lines when he started the church, which has grown to several hundred members.

The doors are wide open for churches to make an incredible, relevant difference in the lives of young people. Intersecting with young people where they have expressed interests is urgently important.

The poor. Ron Sider’s 1978 book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger and Rich Stearns’s 2009 book The Hole in Our Gospel have become bookends on the subject of poverty. Troubled by the stark contrast between wealth in America (U.S. citizens living in the middle class enjoy being in the ninety-ninth percentile of global wealth) and poverty across the globe, these two men have challenged American Christians to recognize their responsibility to the poor.

Much of the population in east and southern Africa, devastated for thirty years by HIV and AIDS, lives on less than one dollar a day. In the developing world, most people live on less than two dollars a day; Haitians—in our own hemisphere—also live on less than two dollars a day. When I traveled to Port-au-Prince in March 2010, ten weeks after the earthquake of January 12, the landscape looked many times worse than New York City after the September 11 attacks. The entire city—not just two skyscrapers—had crumbled into rubble. Clean water and sanitation were nearly impossible to find. More than one million Haitians lived in makeshift tents. According to one estimate, it will take three hundred years to clear all of the debris at the current rate of rubble removal.

Thankfully, as in the aftermath of September 11, Christians are responding. A coalition of agencies has agreed to a goal of creating one hundred thousand new jobs in Haiti by the tenth anniversary of the earthquake. According to Doug Seebeck, president of Partners Worldwide, that many new jobs would double the economy in the country.[11]

There is a need for a huge army of marketplace leaders to provide skill training for ever-emerging talent in the Two-Thirds World.

A Need for Heroes

As I interviewed leaders for this book, two patterns emerged. Nearly all of them were influenced by (1) extraordinary mentors and (2) catalytic events. I consistently heard about the influence of Billy Graham, John Stott, Ray Bakke and John Perkins. I also heard consistently about events like Lausanne and Urbana. Moreover, it became clear that the richest source of vision for this leadership community has been Scripture. On page after page of the Bible we meet leaders who rose to the challenge of consequential times, leading a nation out of slavery, fending off starvation or intervening to prevent genocide.

One of the most consequential times in the Old Testament happened in the fifth century b.c. during the reign of Xerxes, king of Persia. At that time Persia was divided into 127 provinces extending from Ethiopia to India. Chronicling events that took place in what is now Iran, the Old Testament books of Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther form a “Persian Trilogy” and create a paradigm on how to lead consequentially. Ezra led God’s people to renewal by pointing them back to the Scriptures. Nehemiah mobilized the laity to rebuild Jerusalem. Esther used her position as queen to change the law and save her people.

Esther was raised by her cousin Mordecai after she became an orphan. When King Xerxes was looking for a new queen after deposing the previous one, Esther won his favor and was selected to fill the role. The orphan became a queen. While she was queen, the highest-ranking noble in the king’s inner circle hatched a plot to destroy Mordecai and all the Jews.

When Mordecai learned of the plot, he tore his clothes and went into the city wailing loudly and bitterly. He understood the consequential times in which he was living and could not accept the incongruity between the promises of God for the Jewish people and the law authorizing their annihilation. Mordecai therefore appealed to his cousin Esther to intervene on behalf of the Jewish people. His response serves as a model for us of the appropriate reaction to a horrific reality—a reality that many in the world face today: he entered the reality of their danger. We must do the same.

The response of those of us in the West, however, is often like Esther’s initial response. She denied the seriousness of the situation and sent Mordecai a set of new clothes, urging him to change out of his mourning attire. Like her, we simply give to meet superficial needs. Doing so helps us compensate for our own sense of meaninglessness, but it does nothing to bring meaning to those in danger of losing their lives. Esther also responded in fear, stating that her life would be in jeopardy if she approached the king without being invited. We do the same when we fail to take risks because we are more concerned about the longevity of our lives than about the needs of people or the purposes of God.

Mordecai demonstrated leadership by defining reality and making Esther’s choice clear to her. She could stand up for her people, recognizing that God had placed her in a unique position at a unique moment to make a dynamic difference, or she could cower in a corner and watch God use someone else. Esther decided to become consequential, agreeing to approach the king on behalf of her people even though it could cost her her life.

What happened? The crucial element in Esther’s story is her appeal to other Jews. She invited them to fast with her for three days, taking no water or food. By standing with her in spiritual agreement, her Jewish community gave her the strength to risk everything, to be consequential. Indeed, in the past two thousand years of church history, the common thread of the great spiritual movements beginning in the early church—the German Moravians who prayed for twenty-four hours a day and sent out missionaries, the British Clapham Sect who prayed three hours a day and worked to get legislation passed that freed slaves from the British Empire, and the Franciscans who changed Europe—is this: they all practiced corporate spiritual disciplines. A spiritual community is crucial for consequential leadership.

Given the enormity of need in the world today, there has never been a more important time to live consequentially. The story of Esther, Mordecai and the Jewish community demonstrates the starting point. Be a mentor and find a mentor. Be part of a community that exercises both personal and corporate spiritual disciplines. Pay attention to your life and listen to God so you can understand his call to you in your context. And let the leaders in this book be “authorial mentors” for your own consequential leadership. They are our “great cloud of witnesses” and have contributed to changing the spiritual, social and humanitarian landscape of the planet.

It seemed fitting for September 11, 2011, to fall on a Sunday, since God and his people provide the appropriate context for finding the meaning of salvation, world history and our unique participation in the great eternal drama. My prayer for us is that we hear the whispers of God and become increasingly like his Son, who became flesh and dwelt among us, providing for us the most consequential possibility of all—eternal life that starts now in sacrifice with and for others.

This is my prayer for us.

Jesus,

We thank you that you lived your life consequentially. We thank you that you came in the fullness of time as a first-century Jew in the Roman Empire. In your birth, you identified with all of humanity as an Asian-born baby who became an African refugee. In your work, you identified with the common laborer as a carpenter’s son. In your social life, you identified with all of the single people by remaining unmarried. In your death, you identified with the abused and slaughtered. In your burial, you identified with the homeless by being placed in a borrowed tomb. And in your triumphant resurrection, the most consequential moment of all history, you rescue all of us by proving your power over death and guaranteeing our eternal life. Help us to understand the uniqueness of being made in the image of God, and to understand our unique assignment to represent you in our communities. May our lives and our leadership draw us into greater conformity to you—and may we live consequentially.

2 Tim Keller

Grace

The Story of a New York City Church-Planting Movement

Learn: Do with your life what will have the most impact. Founding a grace-centered, gospel-centric church-planting move-ment in New York City was a world-changing choice.

Succeed: Understand the compelling message of God’s grace and how it can attract anyone, even in the hardest places.

Tim Keller is a rare gift—to me, to New York City and to city movements around the globe.

For the past twenty-five years he has been both a personal mentor and a partner in ministry. He and I both believe that New York City is on the precipice of a faith-filled century not seen for several generations.

In 1987, Keller was spending time in New York City, and I was on staff with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in the city. He called me to find out about existing ministry networks. Soon after that initial phone call we had our first meeting.