Dan Williams "Bill, understand, one of the major difficulties of ministry is, people."
That statement by Dan Williams early on in the process of planning and implementing Open Doors for the Open came back to my mind several times as relational challenges kept cropping up.
One major instance of this became very evident on Father's Day 2013, just two months into the process.
Following the initial April meeting of the planning committee for Open Doors, Dan Williams, who I had met for the first time during our initial Skype meeting, sent me an email and attached the complete business plan for the More Than Gold (MTG) Outreach during the 2012 Olympics in London. I will expand on this incredible plan in a later post. I was astonished that someone I just met on the telephone was gracious enough to send me a business plan of that magnitude and importance. Another reason it was so graciously evident to me was that I had spent the last two years working as a Business Specialist for the Tennessee Small Business Development Center (TSBDC). This experience at the TSBDC awakened me to the magnitude of importance a business plan is to any venture as, potentially, this effort was. So, this emailing of this business plan from a man I had just met and, by the way, this wasn't just a business plan, it was a ministerial plan. With this understanding, I began to realize how extremely important this endeavor was that the Lord had allowed us to participate in.
I was so impressed with the business plan that I almost read the entire thing in one sitting. I saw the great importance of what was contained in the plan. In fact, I was so excited that the next weekend I sat for 7 hours and expanded on the outline that I had made in my mind and waded through different areas of the business plan and wrote out a plan for what we would later call Open Doors for the Open. The plan, certainly, was not complete but I felt it covered enough of the direction necessary for us to move forward. I immediately copied everyone that was at a meeting on the plan and distributed it throughout.
This is where the challenges of ministry and people begins to show itself, especially when working together from extreme distances.
Keep reading .....
That statement by Dan Williams early on in the process of planning and implementing Open Doors for the Open came back to my mind several times as relational challenges kept cropping up.
One major instance of this became very evident on Father's Day 2013, just two months into the process.
Following the initial April meeting of the planning committee for Open Doors, Dan Williams, who I had met for the first time during our initial Skype meeting, sent me an email and attached the complete business plan for the More Than Gold (MTG) Outreach during the 2012 Olympics in London. I will expand on this incredible plan in a later post. I was astonished that someone I just met on the telephone was gracious enough to send me a business plan of that magnitude and importance. Another reason it was so graciously evident to me was that I had spent the last two years working as a Business Specialist for the Tennessee Small Business Development Center (TSBDC). This experience at the TSBDC awakened me to the magnitude of importance a business plan is to any venture as, potentially, this effort was. So, this emailing of this business plan from a man I had just met and, by the way, this wasn't just a business plan, it was a ministerial plan. With this understanding, I began to realize how extremely important this endeavor was that the Lord had allowed us to participate in.
I was so impressed with the business plan that I almost read the entire thing in one sitting. I saw the great importance of what was contained in the plan. In fact, I was so excited that the next weekend I sat for 7 hours and expanded on the outline that I had made in my mind and waded through different areas of the business plan and wrote out a plan for what we would later call Open Doors for the Open. The plan, certainly, was not complete but I felt it covered enough of the direction necessary for us to move forward. I immediately copied everyone that was at a meeting on the plan and distributed it throughout.
This is where the challenges of ministry and people begins to show itself, especially when working together from extreme distances.
Keep reading .....
RSS Feed
