ILI: History Makers Leadership Podcast
Explore the transformative journey that is leadership. In each episode, we will dive deep into strategies, stories, insights, and the core values that shape and inspire effective Christian leaders who make an impact - all around the globe. Get ready to unlock your leadership potential.
When leaders are equipped, kingdom impact multiplies. Equipping leaders and spreading the Gospel. Let’s change history together!
This podcast is brought to you by the International Leadership Institute.
ILI: History Makers Leadership Podcast
Ep. 51 | The Harvest Is Plentiful: Mobilizing Effective Missions
This week's episode features a pastor's journey to renewed purpose. From spiritual dryness to leading a vibrant missions movement, Pastor Lee Stevenson offers a masterclass in authentic leadership.
At Macland Community Church, a fascinating transformation is underway. What makes their approach distinctive is how deeply missions is woven into every aspect of church life. Small groups must partner with outreach organizations. Their "Macland Moment" replaces traditional children's messages with mission testimonies and opportunities. Every day at 9:37 AM and PM, alarms ring throughout their congregation—a daily reminder to pray for harvest workers based on Matthew 9:37. This simple practice keeps evangelism at the forefront of members' minds and has sparked remarkable generosity.
Lee's church recently experienced their "Faith Promise" missions fund initiative exploded from an anticipated number to over five times more than expected in just their second year, demonstrating how spiritual hunger translates into tangible resources. Most innovatively, they've established funding specifically to keep their pastors engaged in frontline mission work, ensuring church leadership stays spiritually fresh through hands-on service.
For leaders currently navigating dry seasons, Pastor Lee offers liberating advice forged through experience: "Just find somewhere and go do it." His testimony proves that personal transformation often precedes organizational change. When we step out individually, regardless of institutional support, we create the stories and experiences that will eventually inspire others.
From dry seasons to kingdom harvests, Lee's refreshing candor about struggling through seasons where he "stopped having his own stories to tell from the pulpit" resonates with anyone who's experienced ministry burnout.
When you begin ILI training, you will discover how the Eight Core Values will lead to the Seven Outcomes in your life and the lives of those you lead. Join a community of leaders who are ready to change history and make an impact in this world. Discover more at ILITeam.org/connect.
Welcome to the History Makers Leadership Podcast, where we explore the transformative journey that is leadership. Each episode, we will dive deep into strategies, stories, insights and the core values that shape and inspire effective Christian leaders who make an impact all around the globe. This podcast is brought to you by the International Leadership Institute. Get ready to unlock your leadership potential and let's change history together.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to ILI's History Makers podcast. Today we are joined with Lee Stevenson. He is a pastor and in our last episode we had a great conversation with his wife, judy, and together they co-pastor a church here in the Georgia area. So, lee, it is nice to have you Welcome, Thank you, shannon.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2:So Judy shared a little bit about your calling and how you guys landed at Macklin Community Church, but I'd love to hear your perspective and what that was like for you.
Speaker 3:You know, it was just awesome seeing God provide a way for us and have a calling for us to come to Georgia. I'm sitting in the town where my mother went to college and both my parents are from Georgia, so it's kind of like I'm back on the town where my mother went to college. Wow, and both my parents are from Georgia, so it's kind of like I'm back on the family land.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:Raised in Tennessee and now I'm in Georgia. Judy and I both felt it was time for us to leave the denomination that we're in. She shared about how we'd had an interview process and that call from the older pastor here, from the Holy Spirit, and then within five weeks we're in Georgia, having sold a house, and the guy who lived across the street from us in Tennessee owned a moving company and we developed a really good relationship and I told him that we were moving and he said I'll move you and all you have to do is pay for the trucks. Wow, so that that's just a sampling of that and finding a rental house really quick. Uh, just amazing how God provided for us to come. Come to Powder Springs, georgia.
Speaker 2:Yeah that's great. Uh, sometimes my stories get too long because I feel like all those little details matter. And next thing, I know I've been talking for too long and like wrap it up here. Oh, but there was so much that God did.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:That's encouraging. So together the two of you have really been stewarding an outpouring in your church where people have been mobilized by God, and your wife was sharing how she's just really identifying what God's already doing and kind of you guys are giving some language around that, and so I know with you we kind of discussed earlier that you have a strong passion for the harvest and for evangelism, and so how have you seen those qualities within your community, in your church?
Speaker 3:community in your church. Yeah, you know, being a new church in a new denomination, who, it's my heart that we would recover some of the systems and the calling and the passion that we Methodists had from the beginning. And Methodism in the beginning was about seeing the lost saved and sharing personal testimonies of how God is moving. And what happened over the years is that we established some boards and committees and agencies to do that for us and the passion for seeing people saved was not in the pews any longer. We relied on other people to do that for us. So, in this movement of a new congregation and a new denomination who we're seeking to have to fulfill Jesus' mission in the church again in a Wesleyan flavor, it's just awesome to be in a place where people are hungry and receptive for that.
Speaker 3:The passion for the harvest piece. We, as Mackinac Community Church, we have an alarm set for 937, and at 937 our alarms go off. That's am or pm, and at 937 our alarms go off.
Speaker 3:That's am or pm, and it's a reminder for us to pay pray for uh, for work, for we are beseeching the lord of the harvest to send workers right um, and so it's a reminder that while we are working in the fields of the harvest, we are asking the lord to send more workers. Two thousand years ago, jesus j Jesus said the harvest is plentiful. And for 2,000 years, the harvest is plentiful, and it still is plentiful. Yes, it is.
Speaker 3:So we are asking the Lord to send more workers while we ourselves are working in the harvest and somebody prayed for you. I think a lot of people prayed for me, particularly those that knew me as an elementary and middle school kid. A lot of people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and your church has done something really interesting to rally around the two of you as pastors when it comes to making sure that you're still out there being able to minister, whether it's locally in the States or overseas. And what is it that they did that has really benefited for you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we operate our missions budget as part of our send and engage system, of our discipleship system. We have a missions budget that's separate from our operating budget and each year we do what's called a faith promise, and so for a month we are praying Holy Spirit, give us a number that we will commit to give. As you're giving it to us, we'll commit to give that to fund our missions. And so our church is now we're about 15 months old, so last year was our first faith promise and we thought we might get in $30,000. And we ended up getting around $60,000. And then, while we were gone on a mission trip, we had that same, that faith promise mission celebration Sunday, and the number that came in was $158,000 that our folks have committed by faith promise.
Speaker 3:That's different than committing to the general budget, but it's a Lord, you have given us individuals, family, couples this number that you want to provide for us. So you know. The question is how does God provide that? So when Judy and I do a funeral or a wedding or when we receive money for a birthday, that's the money that we use to go to the faith promise. So I was able to take the birthday check that my mama gave me and give that faith promise.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's beautiful, that's incredible. And give that faith promise. Wow, that's beautiful, that's incredible. And I love to see that your church is actually passionate about it, because if you went, I mean you've over more than doubled in one year that faith promise amount, not that the dollars don't necessarily show growth, but at the same time it kind of does, you know, showing that passion. And so how have you been able to keep missions in the forefront of your church? Because I'll confess the job I have here at ILI, I work with a lot of missions pastors and I will say one of the things missions pastors desires that their senior pastors would be as hungry for missions as they are, and it wouldn't just be their job but it would be something they can co-labor with. And so you guys are the senior pastors of your church, and so what is co-laboring with your mission director and keeping it in front of the congregation? What does that look like for you guys?
Speaker 3:I think it has to go back to Jesus' original calling to the church for us to go. Or some folks say the Greek says as you are going, make disciples. And so it's a little bit of lifestyle evangelism for every member as well as a team who plans and mobilizes people to go. Right.
Speaker 3:So a little bit of it is kind of a both-and, so it's neither, or it has to be in the DNA of the church. Right, we inherited. We're a new church plant, but we're not new Christians, right, and so we're a church plant-ish kind of people. And so the folks who planted our church had mission and DNA in them, and so we were able to come alongside that and it's just partnering with them, with Jesus, to make this happen. I think about, you know, part of making disciples I'll just go back to Passion for the Harvest and sharing your story and so part of the history makers and the core values is sharing your story, and so we've done that at different times with different curriculums, and sharing that and it's catching on and it's catching on it. It so just this week at our leadership council meeting, we took about 45 minutes and every person on the leadership council shared their testimony in about three minutes.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 3:And, and, and, even though we might be shy individuals, if we practice that in the church, then it becomes more natural as we go. And we talk about as we're going. So what does that mean? That's at work, that's at school, that's with family, that's being a grandparent. That's while you're in the store.
Speaker 3:That's while you're at work it's while you're at work, it's it's why you're at your kids ball field, and so it's that the gospel and and sharing the gospel is at the center of your life, and you do that in the midst of everything. Versus, versus. Oh, there's an evangelism committee in our church that does that for us yes we can't have a do that for us.
Speaker 3:It has to be us that do that right, and so it flows from there as an expectation for our membership that if you're going to be a member of Macklin Community Church, you support the church with your prayers, presence, gifts, service and witness.
Speaker 3:And so we've just built in and asked every small group to have a mission partner. We have mission partners through our missions team and we want people to be on hands-on as much as they can, and so that's neighbors and nations. So we have a ministry partner that is in Marietta, georgia, and their mission is to help people get out of poverty. And we have folks who go hands-on serve dinner at their meetings, and just this week, on Tuesday night, they had their graduation in our facility, and so that was another chance for our people to be in the parking lot to welcome, to guide, to direct, to serve the food, to celebrate with them in their graduation. So it's moving your missions team from sending checks, which that financial part's important, but let's take it to the next level Where's the relationship, and be in relationship. And so it becomes a movement within the neighborhood and in the nations, with I think it's nine mission trips that we are either leading through our church or we've partnered with another organization who's doing ministry that we've offered that mission trip to our people.
Speaker 2:That's incredible. I love what you said about the building relationships between the small groups and your people and the missions committees and the ministries that you support. One of the things here at the office at ILI is they're always encouraging us to have transformational relationships, not transactional ones. The transformational ones are lasting and you're not just getting something and not just giving something, but it's a two-way street there where we're able to serve and people serve us, however, so I really appreciate that perspective from you. That's really good.
Speaker 3:We see that in benevolent funds in churches that I've served. You have a benevolent fund to help folks who need to pay a bill or a medical bill and those are so easy to be transactional and even the people that you're trying to help, they don't want the relationship, even if the church wants that relationship. But figuring out a way that you can do ministry that is not buffet style running people through a buffet style, but you're sitting down at the table and eating with them.
Speaker 3:So there's thousands of analogies. You can use that relationship piece, particularly with people that aren't like you, is important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it really is. So when we had lunch today, you shared a little bit of something that your church has done, um out of just a prayer, um between you and your wife and your missions committee, about keeping you guys in the mission field and keeping your fire fresh, and I think I don't know if I've ever heard of a church doing it so deliberately. So I'd love for you to share. Maybe, uh, people watching will take this idea and also incorporate it into doing it so deliberately. So I'd love for you to share. Maybe people watching will take this idea and also incorporate it into their churches, so I'd love for you to share about that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we had all those mission trips that we were planning and the people who were leading those trips were connected to that ministry. We were like we want Pastor Lee and Pastor Judy to go with us, and so all of a sudden we're filling up our calendar. And Pastor Judy to go with us, and so all of a sudden we're filling up our calendar and then you think how do you pay for that?
Speaker 3:So we went to our missions team and our leadership council and said if you want us to go on these mission trips, then we need some funding for that. And so the missions team, out of that faith, promise send us with the teams on mission. Now we're not doing all of them, but we're doing a select handful. And I think, shannon, that I went through a big dry spell of not being on mission and as a senior pastor, and my last two churches were downtown, high steeple, formal churches and you get into the administrative 501c3 work, so much leading, managing staff, just just all the stuff you get into as a pastor and and you and you and you start you for me in. Anyway, I stopped having my own stories to tell from the pulpit and I started seeing myself telling other people's stories more than I'm telling my own stories.
Speaker 3:And so for pastors, I think it's important for us to have fresh, new experiences that we're able to live into and share. And for me, I'm not growing in my relationship with Jesus unless I'm serving. And yes, I can serve in those administrative ways. But get outside the walls of the church and meet some folks who are in need and serve folks that aren't like us, and see new parts of the world and meet brothers and sisters who are just living totally different lives than us. It impacts you and it helps you grow in your relationship to Christ.
Speaker 2:Right. I really appreciate them coming alongside and giving you guys that avenue, especially because, like you said, you can get in those dry spells and you need something to pull you out and remind you of the why. Sometimes you know and I think pastors sometimes are afraid to say I've lost the why, because what does that mean? And so I think it's great that you guys have that avenue and I'm sure you've heard this before, I'm sure people watching have heard this before. But if you want your church to be about something, you've got to be about it, and so it's encouraging to see you guys being about something and seeing the fruit from that. What are some practical things that you've seen work in your church as you're getting them more mission-minded and focusing on discipleship?
Speaker 3:What are some things that you think you've implemented that kind of help? Stir that along. I think one of the things we've done, or a couple things we've done, is we have a yearly missions celebration and so we bring in our mission partners and when I say mission partners, this is local and global, and some of those are organizations, some are missionaries, and we have it's kind of like a mission fair as well as some preaching about missions, and that's where we do our faith, promise, ask and call for that, and so at least once a year there's a big missions moment in the life of the church. The other thing that we've done many churches that have been around for a while. They have children in the worship service, they have a children's message, and so instead of having children's message every Sunday, we have what we call Macklin Moment, and Macklin Moment can be children's message, and often it is, but then often it is someone sharing about the mission they're involved in.
Speaker 3:And also maybe even an in-house, on-campus service opportunity, like our trustees at Macklin. At our church, our people are the custodians and the lawn care, and so there's always we're getting ready to cut grass again, and so there's an ask to join one of these teams during the missions moment, because to fulfill your membership, vows, prayers, presents, gifts, service and witness.
Speaker 3:And so you can serve on campus, you can serve off campus.
Speaker 3:So those two things are pretty important.
Speaker 3:And then, through our spiritual formation team, we do leadership training for our small groups, and one of the requirements for our small groups to be considered a small group is that you have a mission partner, and we have some of those small groups who will go and serve together. We have others that are providing for organizations to do what they do. We have a mission partner that ministers to women who are staying in hotels. Some of them are being trafficked, some of them are being trafficked, some of them are prostitutes, and this ministry provides a safe place for them to have a meal, and not a buffet meal but a sit-down meal with someone who will talk to them and their kids go to school and then their kids come back off the school bus and we have small groups who are packing supper bags for this organization to hand out to these kids, and so part of it you know you want folks to do that hands-on, because that's where the transformation happens, but there's also organizations who have needs. Some of that's provision, some of that is the sack lunch.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, that's awesome. I really find great encouragement in that. I can see how God will keep groups together, even as they see God using them and using their gifts. You know, that's one of the things I think sometimes in churches there's no place for people to use the gifts they have. I even remember when I was younger in my faith being like where can I go serve, where I just really enjoy filling up people's tea and serving them and loving on them, making them laugh, like where's a place for a person like that at church? You know, but there is a place, you know, and what you're saying is you're opening many avenues for people to find their place in the kingdom and to use their gifts.
Speaker 3:So many times I've seen, particularly youth. You can take youth who don't know each other well, put them in a couple of vans 15 passenger vans, take them on a mission trip. And this really happened a few churches ago. We took our youth to Chicago and they served as Salvation Army in the south side of Chicago, served the teenagers there, south side of Chicago, served the teenagers there, and so that eight-hour ride the week together hearing the stories of the youth who were growing up in south side Chicago with my brother got killed, drive-by shootings, all those kind of things.
Speaker 3:putting them back in and having those powerful moments, worship moments, driving them back to Tennessee. You have a brand new youth group that is at a level in relationship with the Lord and with each other, and I remember we got back and those youth didn't want to leave each other and they themselves planned a pool party. Wow.
Speaker 3:And how does that happen? It happens because you're serving Jesus together. Now I remember what Jesus says in Matthew 25. You serve them, you serve me, and so when we together serve Jesus and the people we're serving, there's a bonding that happens that is far deeper and transformational than just being in a classroom together for an hour.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's great. I know we have a little bit of time left and this may put you on the spot. If it does, I'm sorry, but I was just thinking. You're so passionate about it, like your passion is just coming through as you're sharing, and so what would you say to encourage someone that maybe they are in a dry space, maybe they're a missions pastor or maybe a senior pastor in the church they're pastoring or shepherding, just they're not for missions at all. And you're in a different season Now. You went through the dry season but now you're seeing the blessings, and so I don't know, maybe if you had some encouragement, maybe to offer a pastor or a leader even what they can do, to kind of take that next step.
Speaker 3:I know the dry season and I know the church that doesn't want to do anything. And I know the church that when you start doing something they wonder why, even when it's successful. I know the church that when it becomes successful they're not really happy that it became successful. You know it's. Are we building our castle or are we building the kingdom mindset? So real story had a church that we started a food pantry in it. We're kind of a rural church, started a food pantry and it was going really good and I had a leader say how do we know these people need this food? And I said they ask for it. But in that church I was in that dry spell, no movement, missionally church I was in that dry spell, no movement, missionally. And so I went to the county seat town and I found a place to serve myself and so in that organization it went from. I was in the shelving room where the food is to. I became an intake interviewer. See how we can help the person. The best.
Speaker 3:And so I just found a place to serve, because if that calling of discipleship number one, it's on you as a pastor, as a missions pastor, and if your church isn't moving in, that just go do it. Just find somewhere and go do it and know that you're doing your job, going and doing it, and then you doing it, and then there's the stories, and then you can come and tell, and then you can say come and join me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you remind me of. I know you go to Exponential Conference and I didn't go this year, but the prior year I was able to attend and I think the moment that stuck with me the most of that entire conference was when one of the speakers came up. I think it was in one of the first five minutes of his talk and he said if you want to know why your church isn't evangelizing, look in the mirror. If you're not evangelizing, your church isn't going to evangelize. And I was like, wow, I mean, even for me, it's just I'm not a pastor, but if I want my kids to evangelize, I should be doing it. I love that. Just go and do it. That's incredible. What good advice that that is.
Speaker 2:So if there's anything else you'd like to say, go for it. Otherwise, it's been nice having you. Thank you for sharing your birthday with us. It's been just wonderful. And, yeah, so I guess we'll see it, hopefully in a couple of years. Like I told Judy at the end, seeing all the things that God's done, the ministries that are going to be birthed out of you guys, the youth's lives are going to be changed. We definitely see God's favor on your church and how he's pouring it out, and so thank you for not being afraid to share that beginning parts with us.
Speaker 2:We really appreciate it. So, to those of you guys that are joining us, thank you for joining us, letting us know. Let us know in the comments, maybe, where you're at on your journey. If you found this encouraging, let us know out on your journey. If you found this encouraging, let us know. We hope that, wherever you are, whether you're seeing God's outpouring, whether you find yourself maybe in a dry spell, you'll take Lee's advice and just get out there and do it, whether you've got people with you or not. You know it reminds me of that song though none go with me, still I will follow. And so if you're in a dry season and you just don't know where to go, just get out and serve somebody and God will show up, and then, next thing you know, you'll be leading a new movement. So thank you guys for tuning in. We've really appreciated you listening to this conversation.