CHANGE??? CHANGE!!! — Part 1
Practice what you preach. That is one of the toughest things that any preacher has to deal with. Sometimes it’s easy to talk it, but it’s more difficult to walk it.
I learned a great lesson about this. It involves the John Ed Mathison Leadership Ministry which provides you with the opportunity of reading this blog.
My denomination had mandatory retirement from ministry at age seventy. I retired in 2008. A group of people encouraged me to start a leadership ministry training pastors and lay people. A board of trustees established this ministry.
The first ten or eleven years I spent traveling to India five times, to Europe, South America, and different places in the U.S. to train pastors. I was able to train over 12,000 pastors.
That was a lot of travel for a person past seventy. I also made a commitment to write a book each year in retirement, and I had written a book titled CHANGE??? CHANGE!!!. The premise was that we live in a world of change and whether you are a business or a sports team or a church—if you don’t change, you don’t stay in business. The important thing is to know what to change and what not to change. The book has great appeal to churches and businesses. We have copies available here at our ministry office for $10.
About a year later, my wife Lynn asked me an interesting question. She said, “John Ed, have you read your book on Change?” I began to think of how I had written a book from concrete experiences I had had in other places, but somehow had not made the application to this leadership ministry. I began to pray about it and ask questions and discovered that there are a lot of things that did not need to change, but there were some things that needed to change.
I learned about digital platforms. Lynn encouraged me to make a one-minute video to see if it might meet a need. She insisted that it be done professionally, which we did. Would you believe that we had over 21,000 people watch that video? We recently had 33,000 watch a video! Wow! It opened my eyes to the vast reach that ministry can have without all of the travel. We called it Got a Minute. They are one minute long because I knew that Methodists have an extremely short attention span!
I was introduced to a marvelous group of people who were a part of three different companies who combined under the name of MindVolt. After discussion with them and the vision they had for this ministry, our board voted to sign a contract with them. It was expensive, but they knew where, how and when to put up different things on digital platforms. Their employees are located in several different states. It was one of the best moves I have made in ministry in going to MindVolt!! I love working with them!
We continued the Got a Minute video. I was doing a 58-second radio program daily on several secular radio stations. I was also writing a blog each week. We started taking subscriptions to enable us to email them each morning to a person’s phone or computer. MindVolt started putting it on digital platforms and our numbers began to escalate. I’ll have more information next week about our growth in Change??? Change!!! – Part 2.
Are you receiving my daily, weekly, and monthly digital opportunities?
