Month: February 2017

The Bigger Our God, the Bigger Our Legacy

Posted on February 28, 2017 by - Articles, Calling, Leading Yourself, Relationship with God

A legacy is that which a person leaves behind to be remembered by. It is more than just the memory of a person’s profession, successes or failures; it is the memory of the themes that governed that person’s life.

The reality is that every single one of us will leave behind some sort of legacy when we are gone, whether it’s the end of a season or our life as whole.

I believe the quality of the legacy we leave for the next generation is directly determined by how big we really believe God is.

If we choose to live a life that extends beyond just ourselves and beyond today, then we are showing a generation there is Someone big and grand Who is worth living and giving our lives for. In other words, the bigger God is to us, the bigger our legacy!

How big do you believe God is?

“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:9)

Horst Schulze Inspires a Business Leader to Use Customer Service to Share Jesus’ Love

Posted on February 27, 2017 by - Business, Europe, Stories, Western Europe

In October 2015, Nick Osterland, a leader passionate about customer service, was invited to attend the GLS in Finland for the first time. Little did Nick know how God would use this event to stir up the calling He placed on his heart a long time ago.

Listening to the Summit was so inspirational. I could hardly sit in my seat!

The people from my church were looking at me, because they knew how passionate I am about customer service. I felt God was speaking to me during Horst Schulze’s talk—not with words, but with conviction deep in my heart.

I was nine years old when I served my first customer and that passion to serve people well has always been there in one way or another, for as long as I can remember.

That passion is what became my vision for the future.

I knew I had to start this journey of a company to give back to the community by bringing forward this message of serving others.

During the GLS, it all took shape. Nick understood that the gifts and knowledge he had gained over the years were there for a purpose. And he realized it was about time he gave back to the community by sharing his knowledge and experience.

Because of the GLS in Finland, Experience 360, a customer service training company, was born. The program was developed for retail businesses, hospitality, healthcare, entertainment, transportation, tourism, customer complaint departments and recruiting.

At Experience 360, we teach people how to treat people, and how to see people in a godly way within a business environment—true customer service. We call it Experience 360, because we teach people customer service from A to Z—implementing above-and-beyond service into everything a customer experiences. It’s important for the customer to be surrounded and embraced in excellent customer service from all sides.

Our core values are based on the Bible.

  1. Treat people as you want to be treated.
  2. Conduct yourself with love and respect.

The examples from the Bible are endless. We try to implement those moral principles, those principles that God himself, through the example of Jesus, brought to us.

We don’t scream “Jesus” to our customers, but by implementing those moral principles, we bring Jesus to the table. People can feel it and begin to understand it.

It’s hard to share faith in the business world without being silly, pushy or strange, but I have to say, I dare to share that faith. It is who I am. I’ve been saved by Jesus and saved by grace, and my customers deserve to know. So far, in all my speaking engagements, it’s been welcomed. Because it brings moral ground to the table, people are happy to listen.

Through the GLS and the teaching of Horst Schulze, God stirred a passion in Nick’s heart to show Jesus to the world through customer service. As a result, hundreds of people are experiencing Jesus’ love in the business world in Finland.

What Will Be Said of Our Generation?

Posted on February 27, 2017 by - Articles, Calling, Church & Faith-Based, Leading Organizations

Most people who have left an impact on the world were not focused on leaving a legacy but, instead, were focused on doing the right thing.

  • When Winston Churchill implored the British not to give up when the bombs of Hitler’s Third Reich were shell shocking London, he was not thinking about his legacy. Rather he was thinking about how a leader’s words matter in influencing people to persevere and continue fighting.
  • When Nelson Mandela said, “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy,” he was not thinking about his legacy. He was thinking about how to bring together a divided, racially angry country.
  • When Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus, she was not thinking about her legacy. She was thinking about the fact that there are no second class citizens.

I was a business major in college when I started working with students in a church youth group. I was struggling with the impotency of the church—and the lack of credibility we were having in our community.

And then I read Isaiah 58. A chapter about defending the defenseless. A chapter that talks about a community of believers focused on serving the poor. And it changed everything.

I took 30 teenagers to Mexico City and we saw some of the worst poverty in the world in the city’s massive garbage dumps.

The unfairness of it all drove me to do something I said I would never do. I brought a new vision to a dying church as senior pastor: to become a church with a burning, relentless desire to care for the poor. I pastored the church for 24 years, and we radically redefined the meaning of church and fought for the homeless, fed the hungry, cared for the elderly and defended the orphan, both locally and globally.

Along the way, I learned that serving the poor is messy, hard and not for the faint of heart. Yet, this is where we have seen the blessings come.

A legacy is being written about this generation of church leaders.

Some say that the church has lost its credibility. I pray that we will regain it by doing the right thing. I pray that we will leave a legacy of hope, healing and love for “the least of these.”

As I reflected on the possible legacy of our generation, I have been struck by four questions.

1. WHAT WILL BE SAID OF OUR GENERATION?

  • A generation that is more globally aware than any other, yet is obsessed with celebrity reality shows and stock market results.
  • A generation that believes in sheltering the homeless, as long as they’re not near their own over-bloated homes.
  • A generation that is technologically brilliant, yet socially stunted.
  • A generation where there is enough food for everyone, where most diseases are preventable, where the lack of education is fixable, yet we lack the determination to act selflessly.
  • A generation that prayed for the poor while building bigger barns.

2. BUT WHAT COULD BE SAID OF OUR GENERATION?

  • We gave—creating a mass of wealth that stunned the world and ended extreme poverty.
  • We adopted the orphan, ending the foster system as we know it.
  • We supported heroic organizations, declaring that the end of slavery would happen on our watch.
  • We sponsored children around the world, ensuring for them an education, antiviral HIV drugs and an introduction to faith.

3. WHAT SHOULD BE SAID OF OUR GENERATION?

  • We decided that poverty would not prevail and good would win.
  • We decided that the most important part of a church service is what happens once we leave the parking lot.
  • We decided that it doesn’t profit us to gain the world, but lose our soul.
  • We decided that God is close to broken hearts and crushed spirits.

4. WHAT DO I HOPE WILL BE SAID OF OUR GENERATION?

  • We shunned consumerism and found joy in minimalism.
  • We ignored the American dream and pursued God’s pleasure.
  • We simplified our lives so that others could simply live.
  • We preached always and occasionally used words.

We all get to choose our legacy. It is my hope that this generation will choose wisely.

Legacy: What Posterity Has Done for Us

Posted on February 23, 2017 by - Articles, Calling, Change Management, Leading Organizations

Sir Boyle Roche famously said, “Why should we put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity, for what has posterity ever done for us?”

Quite a lot, actually.

We were born into a culture that took generations to create. The people who came before us built a civil society, invented a language and created a surplus, enabling us to grow up without contributing much at all for the first 15 years of our life. Posterity, as created by the folks who came before, solved countless problems so we could work on the problems that lie ahead.

Posterity gave us jazz, the scientific method and medicine. It gave us a stable platform to connect, to invent and to produce.

We are someone else’s posterity. Each of us is here, and is able to do what we do, because others did something for posterity.

In many ways, our contributions to each other and our culture are a tiny repayment of our huge debt to people we’ll never get to meet. People who sacrificed and stood up for posterity. Otherwise known as us.

I’ve never met anyone who honestly felt they would have been better off living at the beginning of any century other than this one.

And our job is to build the foundations necessary for our great grandchildren to feel the same way about the world they’re born in.

It’s only fair, isn’t it?