The Broken Dreams of Russia

"He hath sent me to bind up the broken hearted"
With our longstanding dream of returning to Russia coming onto focus, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and theologizing about the concept of dreams. I’m not talking about those dreams we have in the night, but the dreams we have – when we admit it – during the day. Is it OK to dream? The answer I’m coming to is a resounding YES. How did God build us? He built us with gifts, a calling, personality, a place to be born and raised in, and a time to live our lives with purpose and passion. All of these things come in a unique combination that makes us who we are.
As my ministry colleague Michael Johnson puts it:
"To be truly effective in [reaching] people it’s important to understand that the Holy Spirit has been speaking, wooing, calling, and inspiring people from their earliest childhood. To tap into someone’s heart, and help them recognize and understand God’s voice, is to midwife true identity and purpose. This can and should be the natural work of Christ-followers who in concert with the Spirit are well-equipped to ‘coax out’ God-given dreams, encouraging the stories, that move The Story on."
Michael and I have been working this notion of dreams into everything we are doing to encourage congregational involvement in citywide transformation through our ministry, The Community of Dreams Alliance. We see dreams as the path that God uses to transform us into His image. That is, He has a dream for our lives, and as we follow those dreams back to the Dream Giver, as Bruce Wilkinson puts it, we find ultimate purpose, meaning, and true relationship with Christ.

Redeeming God's Dreams for the Children of Russia
How does this relate to our future in St. Petersburg? Our dreams for the needs of the lost children of St. Petersburg are only growing. Moreover, our desire to connect with people who’s hearts are drawn to Russians is also growing, because we know most people can’t do what we are doing, but so many want to be a part of God’s plan for Russia. We want to build bridges! Rescuing children is good, but it doesn’t dignify them with what God has dreamed for them. Our dream is to empower the children to follow their God-given dreams and become leaders and agents of change themselves!
This is why I am now completing my certification as a “life synthesis” coach, which is a core component of my calling and how I envision being used in the transformation of St. Petersburg, complementing my ministry of counseling, networking, and citywide visioning. The essence of coaching is that of coaxing out God’s dreams for individuals, families, churches, and communities and helping them walk out that path of obedience to that call.

Acting On Dreams
I’ve been talking with our daughter Lydia about her dreams and asking her to reflect on her gifts and what gives her delight and fulfillment. One of her dreams is to minister to the poor. A few months ago, Lydia and I were in downtown Richmond, and we came upon a man who was begging. We got into a conversation with him, and I asked him his dream. His touching answer was this: “My mother owns a home that is too run down for her to live in, and my dream is to get a job so that I can fix it up so she can move back in.” He loved Jesus, and we stood there together, holding hands as we prayed for his dream. Lydia was on an incredible high for the rest of the evening, seeing God’s hand in empowering her dreams to bless another man’s dreams. This becomes not only a paradigm for how I want to raise my kids, but offers a glimpse into how we want to function in Russia.

Mr. Ephesians

I have been working on a special project for a couple of years now, but more intensely over the last several months – the completion of a 30 day “engagement” as I call it for husbands (kind of a cross between a devotional and a mini-course) with the passage in Ephesians 5:25-33 about how to be a godly husband. A lot of it has come out of my private counseling I do. I had a group of about 20 guys beta testing it through the month of September, and initial feedback has been very encouraging. Here is the introduction to the study:

I almost lost my wife early in our marriage, and I’m ready to take credit for it. What I don’t get credit for is the way our relationship turned around over several years to the point where it is today. This book is not about me, but about what God has taught me about being a husband, some of which continues to unfold before me. Just delve into His Word and take it seriously, and it will get to the heart of a matter quicker than any other approach to self-improvement you can find.
Even before I had learned a lot of what you will find in this book, God gave me the awesome role almost ten years ago of helping marriages find their footing. So I’ve been learning through practice, reflection, prayer (“crying out to God” when things were really tough), and teaching this material for some time. I say I don’t get credit for what I have learned because I constantly see men who don’t pick up on the same clues that God and my wife gave me. “Why don’t they see what is happening?” I find myself asking. So I began to consider that God was giving me something to say to help these men find their way.
All of us Christian men know the famous passage from Ephesians 5 that addresses marriage. The easy part to remember is about wives submitting to their husbands. And the husband’s role? “Love your wives as Christ loved the Church...” is about as much as we can confidently remember, and then it begins to get fuzzy. We hear a message on it once in a blue moon and we remember a few vague ideas: lay down your life, servant leadership, consider her needs, one flesh. That’s about what we get out of it. We may have even read a book on marriage. It got more in depth, but, boy, was it a lot of stuff, and I can’t do all that now, and I’ve got most of that down anyway. Besides, it's mostly my wife’s fault anyway.
So here is what God has given me as a fresh approach: one month to internalize and reform everything you can about being a godly husband. Why is that unique?
Instead of trying to cover everything under the sun on marriage, we are going to cover one thing well – the 8 verses that Paul addresses to husbands (25-33) of Ephesians 5.

• You will memorize this passage to get it “engrafted” on your heart.
• You will journal and do homework to interact with the passage.
• You will have assignments for processing the material with your wife.
• You will go through it with another man, both as an accountability aid, but also to help you with blind spots.

The easiest one to forego is the last item above, but this one may be the most critical. Just yesterday I was counseling a woman from my congregation who was frustrated with the inability of her husband to “get it.” I told her that, as bad as divorce is, the way to divorce-proof the Body of Christ is not to keep preaching against it, but to create a culture of what I can the three “mutuals”: mutual edification, mutual accountability, and mutual submission. No man can expect to be able to save his marriage alone, even if he says he is doing it “with God’s help.” Until we are in each other’s business, as it were, we don’t have a prayer. Do I exaggerate? Probably, but I think I’m in pretty safe territory doing so.
So over the last many years I have been mentored by several godly men, counseled by a few spirit-led counselors, taken my fair share of biblical classes and inspired conferences. What I want to do is distill it all down into small, bite-sized portions, packaged in a way that you can chew on it, alone, with God, with your wife, and with a buddy. You won’t retain everything in here either, but the test of whether this process has done what I have set out to do is whether something (if only one thing) important lodges in your heart and your wife sees a permanent change in you and sees you begin a process of permanent change.
A tall order? Sure, but we serve a God who takes on only big challenges.

“For God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Phil. 2:13

If there are any small groups out there interested in doing this study, let me know.

Now I have to decide what form to publish it in. Some guys think I need to do a video of me explaining it to a small group of guys. Yet another project...

What now with CMU?

Two obvious questions that many will have: what will become of my ministry here through CMU, and what will become of Diana’s ministry through The Potter’s School?

As to CMU specifically, I don’t have all the answers. I have been praying for God to provide a means of continuing what I began her back in 1998. Many great ministries and ministry leaders have emerged over that time to take some of the roles that I saw as necessary for the transformation of Richmond, for which I rejoice. God has made it clear to me that CMU is a viable ministry that this city needs, but what form that next evolution of the ministry takes, and what leadership will emerge, I don’t fully see yet, though some possibilities have emerged. Two other ministries are interested in taking over where I am leaving off. Please pray that God work all this out for the sake of the city.

On the other hand, God has provided a wonderful transitional ministry for me to invest myself in that builds on CMU, but it has a national scope with the likelihood of going international. I have written on this ministry before, and I will devote an entire letter to it soon (meanwhile, see www.withreach.com). It is a ministry that I can take with us abroad, and I am hopeful that it will have applicability where we are in Russia.

How we got to this point

Ever since we were engaged, Diana and I have had Russia on our hearts. We knew somehow, sometime, God would call us back. We even have had for the last several years a large map of Russia and its satellite countries on our den wall. Three years ago Diana was invited to speak at some missions conferences in Athens and Madrid, an experience which gave her a renewed passion for moving abroad and serving God's Kingdom internationally. I knew she was on the mark because we knew it had to be coming at some point, but I was too committed to the ministry God so clearly called me to here in Richmond, Christian Ministries United.

We talked and prayed and talked and prayed over the next couple of years. About two years ago we decided it was time to get serious, but we had not clue how to move forward. We serve a God, however, who promises, "I will lead the blind in the way they do not know.” That’s what we needed, and God provided in a wonderful way, though we sure didn't see the way most of the time. I've detailed this story in my last several letters, so I’ll fill in some of the gaps I've missed before.

This August was the culmination of that journey to find a path back to Russia. After 5 months of interviews, applications, gathering references, psychological batteries, and prayer, Diana and I flew out to Anaheim for a final 8-hour interview – yes, it was a doozy! We loved ministry, the staff, their values, their direction, and they reciprocated. We are now officially on staff with Church Resource Ministries (CRM – http://www.crmleaders.org/), headed within the next year or so to St. Petersburg, Russia. Of course it is only the beginning of a long road to getting ready to go, raising our support being the largest part of our preparatory work over the next year, but we are thrilled to have a new place to call “home.”