There were many lessons I learnt in my time at Regent College (1981–1985). One key one was the importance of a compelling vision/mission. At that time Regent was housed in two small buildings on the University of British Columbia campus, buildings that had previously housed student fraternities. (We used to joke that there were days when you could still smell dried beer in the premises.) Even then the school had key evangelical scholars on her faculty, folks like Bruce Waltke and J I Packer. The faculty offices were tiny. I am sure most, if not all, of the faculty had come from schools that had much better facilities for their faculty and surely bigger faculty offices. Yet here they all were, in these tiny huts in their tiny offices in a then relatively unknown school in Vancouver. Why were they there? Why had they made obvious sacrifices to teach at Regent? Because they believed in her mission. Here was an evangelical school that focused not on training clergy for the church, but on training all of God’s people for their roles in the world and in the church. These top scholars had made sacrifices to teach at Regent because they believed in the mission of the school.
This principle of the need for a compelling vision/mission is well documented in leadership literature. What is the compelling vision of Graceworks? This afternoon the Graceworks team had lunch with a friend. He is an expert in product management and he had volunteered to give us some time to brainstorm how Graceworks could do what it was called to do, better. He started by asking us the most basic question: What were we about? What had we been called to do? What is the compelling vision that drives Graceworks? What is our mission?
As we talked further, we recognised that our mission was the mission that first prompted the birth of Graceworks. It is summarised in our slogan: The promotion of spiritual friendship in church and society. Graceworks is a training and publishing consultancy. We have two main activities. We promote spiritual friendship through training, teaching and speaking, and by modelling it. And we publish books. I have sometimes wondered how the two main activities relate to each other. I received greater clarity through our lunchtime chat. We promote spiritual friendship through the teaching we do and through the books we publish. But our core calling remains the same — promoting spiritual friendship.
The context for our ministry is the loneliness of modern society, especially in large urban centres like Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Here is one report from the UK:
Recently I have come to see loneliness as one of the greatest problems of the modern age. After writing my advice column in the Mail for just nine months I’ve realised how many of the problems which arrive in my postbag — from bad marriages to a sense of life’s pointlessness — have sheer loneliness at their root.
The irony is that in this world of frenetic communication, more and more people feel there is nobody who wants to communicate with them at a meaningful level. You see all this communication on the street, in buses and trains, standing outside noisy pubs — so many people talking into their mobile phones, endlessly, until you can imagine the combined worldwide noise of all that yakking could rise up to the heavens and deafen the silent stars.
Then think of the electronic ether, zinging with messages and junk mail, billions upon billions of words and symbols, keeping people in touch as well as peddling everything from shoes to sex.
What does it add up to? What use are the multi-layers of “communication” when so many people have no feeling of belonging? We are deceived by communication. Mistaking it for community, we pay the price each day in a downward spiral of mental health. (Bell Mooney, “All the lonely people: Society CAN do something about the epidemic of loneliness,” Columnists,MailOnline, 29 March 2008, https://dailym.ai/1oU53yw)
It seems that a ministry that promotes friendship in today’s lonely world is a no-brainer. And it should also be a no-brainer that people need help connecting, both in society and in the church. But Graceworks is not just about friendship. It’s about spiritual friendship, the recognition that we need human friendship but we also need divine friendship. We need the life-giving friendship of the Jesus who said:
I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. (John 15:15 NIV)
So what is the mission of Graceworks? To help people build the friendships they need. To help people become friends of Jesus. To help people follow Jesus in the company of friends. To this end, we publish books. To this end, we provide teaching and training. We believe in this mission. We have given our lives to it. But we can’t do this alone. We need our friends. We need the help of all who share this same passion, like the friend who joined us for lunch this afternoon. Will you partner with us?