Helping People

There are plenty of people who are looking to become famous. They want to be an “influencer” on social media. Some people have a knack for it. They are a natural. Others stumble upon a platform by accident. Still others try and try but never succeed.

Dr. Lyon makes it clear that, when we are following God’s lead, it is never about us achieving a platform. It is about obeying God, pursuing the visions he has given us, and helping others. Dr. Lyon never had the ambition to meet an American president or a British prime minister. These things happened because she was trying to help dying people. That was the vision.

The mission is God’s mission. We are only along for the ride. Missional thinking does not say, “How can we get people to come to our church?” Missional thinking says, “How can we get people into God’s church, whether they worship with us or worship somewhere else?” 

To fight for something that isn’t God’s goal or isn’t in God’s timing is futile. How many individuals have witnessed to a sense that it was only when they gave up on a goal for which they had been striving so hard that it actually came to them? The battle is ultimately the Lord’s, not ours (1 Sam. 17:47).

When faced with the results of the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, Dr. Lyon had two secret weapons. The one was naivete. Surely one person in a small, newly formed start-up cannot stand against the Goliath of rebellion and havoc, where they amputated children’s arms just because. But one person’s naivete can be God’s faith. 

The other secret weapon was the conviction that only God could really begin to heal the land. “Only God can do something” was Dr. Lyon’s realization once she got there. At one point she shares that it is hard to get a real picture of the need through a television. You need to be there. And God opened the door for the story to be on the cover of The Washington Post, and soon the story was in front of presidents and prime ministers.

Then they found someone who made prosthetics. These would become a powerful gift to all of those who had seen their limbs chopped off by the rebels. Soon World Hope was doing a major ministry throughout the country of Sierra Leone. 

And there was no sense that you had to come to Jesus before you could get an arm. Such conversions at the end of a sword are not likely to be true conversions. Rather, giving the arm opened to door to conversations about Jesus.

The church does not have a mission in the world. God’s mission has a mission in the world. We need to find out what God is doing and get on board.