Mark Williamson's Blog, page 9

Billy Graham: Modesto Manifesto

Billy Graham is an evangelist with legendary status within the Christian church. For over 60 years he faithfully adhered to his calling of preaching the gospel to people around the world. As a result he has preached the message of Jesus to an estimated 2 billion people, more people than any other preacher in history. And his ministry has led to millions putting their faith in Christ.

One of the most frequent descriptions of Graham is as a “man of integrity.” For over 60 years, where many other evangelists and ministries became discredited, he managed to maintain a reputation as being a trustworthy man of God.

Part of the reason for this goes back to a moment in 1949, very early in his ministry. He and his team were growing in popularity, and whilst staying at a hotel in Modesto, California, Graham challenged his senior team to each come up with a list of issues that caused evangelistic ministries to implode. The team each spent an hour in their hotel rooms, and came back with remarkably similar lists that featured four issues; money, sex, lying and pride.

Out of this they wrote a series of commitments they agreed to adhere to throughout their ministry, which became known as the Modesto Manifesto:

The Modesto Manifesto

We will never criticize, condemn or speak negatively about others.
We will be accountable, particularly in handling finances, with integrity according to the highest business standards.
We will tell the truth and be thoroughly honest, especially in reporting statistics.
We will be exemplary in morals – clear, clean, and careful to avoid the very appearance of any impropriety.

The Modesto Manifesto laid out a plan for how they would navigate the temptations of money, sex, lying and pride. And by finding ways to live these commitments out, or testing all their actions to check they remained in line with the manifesto, they were able to serve the world for 60 years with integrity.

What do you need to learn from Billy Graham about integrity from the Modesto Manifesto? How do you ensure integrity is a foundational part of your life and ministry?

Mark Williamson works as a director of One Rock. He’s an experienced leadership trainer, author of biographies on John Wesley and William Wilberforce, and is also passionate about praying for London. He enjoys good films, good food, and going for long walks with his wife Joanna. You can follow him on Twitter @markonerock.

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The Magnificent Five

Recently I’ve been reading through the works of Dallas Willard. In fact, rather than reading them a better term is that I’ve been devouring them.

It’s the excitement that comes from having thought for years about the spirituality concepts he writes about, and then finding an expert has gone before you, putting a lifetime of thought into the areas you were just beginning to explore. It’s like having done my time at the shallow end, I’ve now been catapulted into the deep end of the swimming pool!

One phrase he uses, and which I now find myself taking up, is the Magnificent Five. Willard uses this term to describe what he sees as the five core Christian virtues that we should all be growing in as we become more Christ-like; faith, hope, love, joy and peace.

These come from a combination of the faith, hope and love described by Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, and the first qualities of the fruit of the Spirit listed in Galatians chapter 5. For Willard, these five qualities are the Magnificent Five that are each related to each other, and that together describe Christian maturity.

Faith: The building block of all Christian spirituality and maturity is faith in Christ.

Hope: And faith leads us to hope, since we trust that God will do all He has promised.

Love: The goal for Paul and Peter of Christian maturity is love. “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself in love” (Galatians 5:6), “make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love” (1 Peter 1:5-6).

Joy: Living out faith in God and love for all people should lead to a life filled with joy.

Peace: FF Bruce famously said “peace is joy resting, and joy is peace dancing.”

How are you growing in the Magnificent Five? What practices can you incorporate into your life that will help you to mature in each of them?

Mark Williamson works as a director of One Rock. He’s an experienced leadership trainer, author of biographies on John Wesley and William Wilberforce, and is also passionate about praying for London. He enjoys good films, good food, and going for long walks with his wife Joanna. You can follow him on Twitter @markonerock.

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7 Ways to Self-Learn Leadership

Here are seven ways to learn leadership skills, either for free or at a bargain cheap rate.

The cost of education is spiralling out of control, making formal courses of study further and further out of reach for many people. So what can you do if you want to grow your leadership skills, but can’t afford to do an MBA from your university of choice? Try some of these seven ways to self-learn leadership.

Buy a Notebook: Here’s a very simple place to begin. Always carry a notebook and pen around with you. And whenever you read, hear, learn or discern something about leadership, write it down. This helps because 1) what you write you are far more likely to remember, and 2) you will start to build up your own personal database of leadership truths you can then go back over to revise each month.

Create a Reading List: A few years ago my wife started an MA in theology. Naturally she was given a huge reading list of books to go through as part of the course. And I found myself feeling a little jealous that she was able to study whilst I couldn’t afford to. But then I realised, even if I couldn’t afford to do an MA in leadership, I could at least create my own reading list of all the classics in the field. So I compiled a list, and worked my way through them over the next six months. I bought all the titles second hand from Amazon so they were cheap (I still source my growing library either from Amazon or from charity shops). For a list of the leadership books I recommend, see the previous post Top Seven Books on Leadership. And as well as reading leadership theory, I also recommend constantly studying biographies of great men and women from history, and discerning your own leadership lessons from them. Politicians, business people, sports team managers, military officials and even film directors can all teach you a huge amount about communicating vision, building teams, creating strategy and coaching others.

Meet with a Mentor: Think about the top three leaders whom you personally know (or have access to), and would like to learn from. Contact them and ask if you can take them out to lunch or for coffee, so you can interview them about leadership. Before each meeting think of the three most important questions you will ask to learn most from their experience. Remember to take your notebook so you can record the pearls of wisdom they share with you.

Learn from your Experiences: Make a list of all the previous leadership roles you’ve been in; all the teams you’ve led, all the projects you’ve worked on, even all the jobs you’ve had. Then for each one distil one leadership lesson you learned during your time there. You can also do a similar exercise by listing all of your previous bosses, team leaders or people you’ve followed in some capacity. Again, for each write down one leadership lesson you’ve picked up from them.

Take the Old Mentor Test: This is great for when either you’re facing a difficulty or you’re struggling to make an important decision. Think back to the person you have most looked up to in life. Or think of a famous person you would like to have available as a mentor. Now imagine they are facing this difficulty or this decision. What would they do? Plan it out as detailed as you can. So can you take that imagined course of action yourself?

Write Problems as Case Studies: This can be another great way of thinking through a difficulty or a decision; dispassionately turn it into a case study. Imagine it’s a scenario in an exam question. What would you recommend as the course of action? Again, I’ve written more on this in a previous post, How To Overcome Problem Situations.

Weekly Reflection: By now you should have a fair amount of material in your leadership journal. But you need to keep yourself fresh by adding to it. Choose a regular 15 minute time each week to think through 1) what you’ve experienced over the previous seven days, 2) what you’ve learned from those experiences, and 3) what changes or actions you will take as a result.

That’s seven simple, low cost things you can do to learn leadership. Keep doing them regularly, and you’ll become an expert on the subject over time.

Mark Williamson works as a director of One Rock. He’s an experienced leadership trainer, author of biographies on John Wesley and William Wilberforce, and is also passionate about praying for London. He enjoys good films, good food, and going for long walks with his wife Joanna. You can follow him on Twitter @markonerock.

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William Wilberforce: Fighting for Justice

William Wilberforce’s fight for the abolition of the slave trade can teach us many lessons on fighting for justice.

I had previously assumed that his fight against the slave trade was a simple matter of Wilberforce the great, moral, Christian politician standing up for African rights against the nasty, evil, morally bankrupt members of parliament who were opposing him. But I’ve learned that it wasn’t that simple.

Wilberforce was not opposed by parliament per se, but by the MPs who represented constituencies like Bristol, Liverpool, London and Glasgow – port cities that had grown rich through the slave trade. Whilst many of the MPs could see that the trade was immoral, they feared that those British cities, and all the British interests in the Caribbean, would lose money as soon as the trade was outlawed, and that Britain could even go bankrupt as a result.

So Wilberforce’s fight was not especially against parliament. Rather, parliament was the battle ground where the great fight took place. The real fight was against the business community – against the commercial interests that were allied against him, against the people who were making money from the trade. Here we see the truth of Jesus’ words, “You cannot serve both God and money.”

For us today, where there are injustice issues we want to fight against, like human trafficking, or the arms industry, our battle is not so much against politicians, but against the people who are making money from these practices.

And so how did Wilberforce overcome this section of the business community? He fought a prolonged, 18 year campaign in parliament. But he also mobilised a popular movement in the country to support him. He used the media and the arts to create a campaign that would grab the public imagination, force the business community to back down, and so bring about the change he wanted. Societies distributed pamphlets and newsletters across the nation, and Josiah Wedgewood designed a logo for the campaign that became stamped on mugs, books, letters and anything else that could draw attention to the plight of the slaves.

Here to me is an incredible lesson on how the different spheres within society relate to each other, and also how we can use them to lobby for change. Wilberforce wanted a change in the Law regarding the slave trade. Politics was the battle ground, where he had to fight against the interests of Business. To overcome, he harnessed the power of the Media, the Arts and the Church, creating a mass movement that changed the mood in the country, and enabled parliament to finally push through the change he wanted.

So with this in mind, in what cause are you fighting for justice? And what campaign lessons can you learn from Wilberforce to push the campaign forward?

Click for more information on the One Rock biography William Wilberforce: Achieving the Impossible, available from Amazon, and other book sellers.

Mark Williamson works as a director of One Rock. He’s an experienced leadership trainer, author of biographies on John Wesley and William Wilberforce, and is also passionate about praying for London. He enjoys good films, good food, and going for long walks with his wife Joanna. You can follow him on Twitter @markonerock.

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How Do I Start?

‘How do I start?’ is a typical question to ask when God first lays something on your heart. How do I transfer it from just being a dream into something that actually exists?

My twofold advice is to start small and grow slow. You may have a vision in your heart of the project when it’s grown to be something huge and successful, but most visions don’t start that way. They start as something small, and over time they grow into something significant.

I know a couple in India who run an orphanage that provides food, accommodation and education for over 60 children. It’s an amazing place to visit, to see so many children have a home and a loving background, who would otherwise be living on the streets. It’s an incredible vision that is being lived out, but it didn’t begin on that scale.

It began when the couple sent their children to the local school, and the children said many of their school friends didn’t eat lunch each day because their parents were too poor to send them with either money or food. So this couple started to send extra packed lunches to school every day; three for their own children, and three additional lunches, so each child could feed a friend. From that initial act of kindness their involvement grew, to a point where they now look after an entire orphanage. They started something small, and it grew into something significant over time.

Whenever we visit a large church it’s easy to assume it must have always been that way. But every large church started out initially as a small church. Start small and grow slow is often the best mantra.

When John Wesley died in 1791 he was overseeing over 500 Methodist societies, with a combined membership of 72,000 – a huge and significant undertaking by any measure. But it didn’t start out like that. Wesley began in 1738 with a handful of people meeting together in London. Later on he also inherited a congregation from George Whitefield in Bristol. He then spent three years shuttling between these two cities, overseeing these two societies. He started small, and the movement grew slowly at first. But grow it certainly did, and became something incredibly significant.

So if you’re asking yourself ‘How can I start?’, I encourage you to think small first of all. What are the small steps you could take towards beginning the vision? Take a few of these, and see what doors God then opens up. Don’t expect everything to be handed to you on a plate to begin with. But if you start small and grow slow, who knows how significant it could become a few years down the line…

Mark Williamson works as a director of One Rock. He’s an experienced leadership trainer, author of biographies on John Wesley and William Wilberforce, and is also passionate about praying for London. He enjoys good films, good food, and going for long walks with his wife Joanna. You can follow him on Twitter @markonerock.

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God’s Presence is the Answer

God’s presence is the answer to so many of our deepest questions.

I still get frustrated sometimes reading the book of Job. It starts off in a straight forward enough manner – there’s the confrontation between God and Satan that sets up the situation with Job. Then all the calamities happen to Job, and he questions why so many terrible things have happened to him, a good person. After that there’s the long middle section, with Job’s three so-called friends turning up to argue with him and tell him off in the middle of his suffering (some comfort that is – please don’t be that friend when people need love and comfort, and you give them a rebuke).

But then there’s the ending. Job wants an answer to his question of why so many terrible things have happened. God finally answers him from heaven. But there’s no real answer to the question. What happens is that Job has an overwhelming experience of the presence of God… and that’s enough for him. That actually satisfies him more than any intellectual answer. God’s presence is the answer.

“My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.”

And then there’s the prayers of Habakkuk. He asks God why there is so much injustice in the world. He asks why his nation is going to be overrun by the Babylonians, one of the cruellest nations from Old Testament times. And he doesn’t really get a satisfying intellectual answer to the question. But he receives a fresh revelation of God, and that’s the thing that satisfies. God’s presence is enough.

Whatever your questions are at the moment, God’s presence is the answer. That’s not to diminish your questions. And I truly believe that there are answers to all of them, and one day we will fully understand them all. But at the moment, more of his presence is often the answer. That’s the answer that he most wants to give you more of. And that’s the answer that you most need at the moment.

Mark Williamson works as a director of One Rock. He’s an experienced leadership trainer, author of biographies on John Wesley and William Wilberforce, and is also passionate about praying for London. He enjoys good films, good food, and going for long walks with his wife Joanna. You can follow him on Twitter @markonerock.

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