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Monday, September 23, 2013

Starting Starling Initiatives With the Right Team


I set out a few months ago to recruit the very best leaders I could find to join me in a new enterprise called Starling Initiatives. These people are not necessarily the most famous thinkers and speakers of the missional church (though some truly are that); they are all practitioners that have done the work in challenging environments and in remarkable ways. Honestly, they are all thriving leaders who have busy lives with their own work to attend to–so I fully expected them all to decline politely. To my shock almost all have responded affirmatively believing that God is saying the same thing to them at this time. Wow, what confirmation. Perhaps we are already seeing the murmuration of starlings!
 
Each one is not just experienced, but their experience was fruitful at empowering others to reproduce. Each member is mature enough that they now find their sense of importance in the fruitfulness of others. They are more concerned with others success than their own. In a sense, our fruit grows on other people’s trees now. This is important when you want to ignite movements in other cultures and languages and do not want to create unhealthy dependence upon expert leaders with US models and dollars.

None of us are out to prove ourselves, in a sense we’ve already done that (and bought the t-shirt). We want to help others to become change agents in their own environment and release kingdom movement into all the spheres of society…and to every nation. To play off what the famous coach once said: there is no "i" in Starling Initiatives. Uh, oops, well, you know what I mean.

We never plan to become a large corporation. We have no plans for a large offices and an expensive staff to administer it. Our movement will be decentralized and our resources and power will be distributed rather than held onto and protected by a board of directors or corporate headquarters.

3 comments:

Timothy Buck said...

I certainly hope you are going to take the time to tell us exactly what Starling Initiatives will do differently from other missions.

Frank Doiron said...

I love what you are doing and support it totally. One of the questions I have is in relation to your saying that we do not want these people groups to be dependant on "our money". In many countries there are still many orphans with no place to go, many children going through garbage heaps to find food, many people who only have one meal per day,many children who are caught in the labor of sex trade.....and so on. I wonder if you could speak to this issue as it relates to using our money.
I agree about the vast amounts of money needed to send one missionary couple out to one of these countries. One family of four (who recently went to Uganda) needed close to a half a million dollars for six years. Thats more than they needed here. It doesn't make sense....
You hit the nail on the head when you say;
"There are many nations where the majority is now "Christian" but the society is still plagued with AIDS, warfare, human trafficking and even genocide. That is not successful at all."

Robert Larkin said...

hello, you may not remember me, but I helped with worship years ago at your long beach cell group. I worked at living spring christian fellowship as (among many other things) cell group administrator. I remember your unstoppable zeal for spreading the gospel to a modern people. I have some ideas that I would love to bounce off of you that just may help you in your new initiative. I live in North Carolina now and am coming to LA area early nov. My main disciplining tool is reading a book of the bible 22 times consecutively. sounds crazy but it has fantastic results. If you want to know more, email me marvenmartian@gmail.com