Jim Rhodes, Copyright 2021
For 45 years Jim Rhodes served on staff with CRU, an international Christian parachurch organization dedicated to the fulfillment of the Great Commission. Jim has been one of CRU’s national directors and has served around the world, starting ministries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Japan, and sharing the Gospel behind the Iron Curtain when it was dangerous, life-threatening work. Jim is a great friend of ServingLeaders, and we asked him to discuss some of the core values that have contributed to the heart and longevity of his ministry over the last 45 years.
For most of us, the adventure of knowing and following Jesus begins at a crisis point. We are in turmoil, and our focus tends to be on what Jesus can do for us. However, as we start to know Christ, trust Him, and become His disciple, we quickly learn—or we must learn if we are going to follow Jesus for a lifetime—that it's not about me.
From this foundation of ministry as stewardship, my CRU team and I learned core truths that we incorporated into the heart of our work. My hope is that these values encourage and challenge you wherever you are on your journey with Christ.
Core Value 1: Believe God for the impossible.
The Jesus we follow is incredible.
In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul wrote that God is able to do far more than we can ever think to ask of Him. When I look back over the past 45 years, if I could do it again, I would have believed God for more sooner.
In the summer of 1979, I was directing a mission in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire with a group of students learning to do evangelism. We had just shared Christ with over 800 people at an outreach on the beach, and I was ready to consider it a significant success. However, when I met with the student leadership team back in our apartment, they were really discouraged. They had been praying and asking God to minister that day to 4,000.
The group was trying to figure out what happened, why it wasn't what they thought. One young man, after a period of silence, spoke up and said, “I think I know what it was. We didn’t believe God for enough.”
Everybody said, “Wait a minute, do the math here. We were asking for 4,000, and we got 800.”
“That's exactly the point,” replied the student. “If we'd have ministered to 4,000 today, how would we be sitting here feeling?”
“Pretty satisfied, pretty proud of ourselves.”
“Exactly,” he said. “God, didn't send us here to reach 4,000 people. He sent us here to reach everyone.”
And with that, shock spread through the room. Wait a minute, we just tried to reach 4,000. How are we ever going to reach everyone? The young man replied, “I don't know. I guess we’d better ask.” And they did.
A week after the students began to pray, I received a phone call from The Wall Street Journal. A reporter had been doing a story about evangelism in New England, and she asked whether I actually see people turn to Christ and follow Him right there on Hampton Beach. I said yes, and she arranged to come and see.
On July 3rd, 1999, her story led on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, starting a media firestorm with reporters and cameras from across the country. At the end of the summer, media experts estimated that we had shared Christ with three to four million people. This was all because the students began praying for the opportunity to share Christ with everyone.
Jesus said, Greater things will you do than I have done because I go to my Father. In my years of ministry, the catalyst to these “greater things” has always been earnest prayer.
I do not want to leave the impression, however, that believing God for the impossible will always yield huge ministries or outward success. We must rightly acknowledge that “the impossible” is any transformed life, and there are many pastors laboring hard in smaller churches for a harvest just as rich.
Core Value 2: It's impossible for someone to come to Christ apart from the Holy Spirit.
In the early 1990s, the national leadership of CRU was seeking the Lord for a strategy that would allow us to share Christ with hundreds of thousands of students across the nation. We had no idea how God would do it, but we had learned to pray and believe God for the impossible. The answer was another scenario we could never have imagined—the testimony of Steve Sawyer, a freshman student dying of AIDS.
Steve suffered from hemophilia, and just before joining us for the summer at the Hampton Beach project, he contracted HIV from his regular blood transfusions. Despite his prognosis, he continued to show up, spending the weekends with us doing outreach and then going back to Boston throughout the week to get treatment. The Lord spared this young man's life for four years. He began traveling to universities all over the country doing a program called “If I Should Die.” We estimate that over those four years, he shared the gospel with over a quarter million students and saw tens of thousands come to Christ.
Without the power of the Holy Spirit working in the life of Steve Sawyer, such a story would be unfathomable. When we believe God for the impossible in the power of the Holy Spirit, He's able to make the impossible happen.
Core Value 3: Invest in building leaders.
Oftentimes pastors are so busy leading, preaching, and doing many other things that they do not believe they have the luxury of developing leaders. However, if we have missed leadership development, we’ve missed everything.
I had the incredible privilege of being mentored by Dr. Bill Bright, the founder and president of CRU. In the 1970s when I was right out of high school, I met Dr. Bright who challenged and encouraged me to get my degree and come on staff, which I did. Up until he went to be with the Lord in 2003, he very quietly kept track of me and invested in me. It was nothing organized, but he would call and ask about me and my family, and we would talk about ministry together. Above all, I knew he believed in me even when I didn't believe in myself.
As mentors and disciplers, we must be looking for young people who, perhaps, have not had a lot of experience, but who have great potential. This may sound counterintuitive, but as we coach them, believe in them, and help them believe in themselves, we must be willing to let them fail.
In a very practical sense, failure is how we learn. Our greatest coaching moments will often be in the wake of disappointment as we come alongside young leaders and help them learn and progress through their mistakes. Allowing failure can be especially difficult when a young person’s inexperience has the potential to reflect poorly on us and our ministries. However, we must remember that we are merely stewards of Christ’s ministry as we model our leadership after His.
A classic example in Jesus’ life is His restoration of Peter after he denied Jesus three times. When Jesus needed someone to preach at Pentecost, He didn’t turn to John who stood by Him at the cross. He turned to Peter, a man who failed royally. Jesus allowed Peter to make a comeback, and we serve a God who is the God of comebacks.
Another phenomena can take place when the young person we are coaching begins to surpass us in gifting and ability. This can be painful, but we must return to where we started—that the ministry belongs to Jesus. If we are following the lead of Christ, and this person can serve better, then it’s okay for us to step back. And from an eternal perspective, this is good and right. On the first day of a new position, I would immediately begin building into two or three people with the hope that somewhere along the line I would find that person who could do it better.
Core Value 4: We’re better together.
The fourth key we discovered along the way is that we’re better when we serve together. It's easy in ministry leadership to begin to see ourselves as indispensable. However, we were never meant to go at it alone. We are part of a community and—in an even greater sense—part of the Church, which is the ultimate biblical community.
For my teams at CRU, a critical part of serving together was learning one another’s gifts, the unique ways in which Jesus lives out His life through the varied Body of Christ. Such intentional knowledge allows for a shift in organizational structure from role-based ministry to gift-based ministry.
This means we choose to forgo the conventional top-down, command-and-control model in favor of a more biblical approach where we 1) inspire the people on our team to follow Christ, and 2) allow the Holy Spirit to lead through the unique gifts of each member. When we know how Jesus often chooses to express Himself through a colleague, and he or she starts speaking out in a meeting in his or her area of gifting, we listen very carefully, acknowledging that Jesus could be leading through this person in this moment. Leaders, when we orient our organizations around the expression of Christ through one another, the growth within our teams, our ministries, and our own hearts will be exponential.
In closing, we cannot have a wholehearted discussion about biblical community without addressing conflict and other threats to unity. In Part II, I will begin by discussing our responsibility as leaders to seek out difficult feedback and embrace conflict for the ultimate good of our teams.
To hear more from Jim, please listen to our corresponding ServingLeaders Podcast episodes and view “Leading Courageously and Transitioning Well” on our Video Resources page.