J. N. N. Ng’ang’a – Meditations for 2nd-8th Jan 2012 … What will help you be an effective Christian professional and not just a professional?….why do we need to be involved in Christian professional fellowships
Day 1
Happy new year! .. commit yourself to serve the lord through your profession in this new year
2 Corinthians 5:11
11 Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade others. What we are is plain to God, and I hope it is also plain to your conscience..
In other words, for you to do what God has called you to do, it must begin by you first of all finding out what it is to fear the Lord. He is talking to a church, they already knew about the fear of the Lord, but the way they dealt with God clearly showed they did’t understand the depth of what it is to fear the Lord. If you fear the lord , your whole life ,24-7-365, will be lived in praise to him. Every aspect of your life will honor him.
Fearing the lord means never wanting to displease Him, both due to the likely consequences but also due to the high respect and love your have for Him
Let’s pray that in God’s own good way He will show us that in our professional life there is a role of becoming ambassadors of heaven. That he wants us to be His representatives in whichever area he has called us, in such a way that, that community, that particular area, that client ,will see a ministry of Holy Spirit because of the way we do our jobs. Could we see that the direction our nation goes is our responsibility and God expects us to live differently so that we influence our nation to go the right way..God’s way.
Day 2
Proverbs27:17
As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another
What will help you be an effective Christian professional and not just a professional?
First for you to have impact in the hostile market place, you must stay in fellowship with other Christian professionals if you can find them. When you go to Christian professional meetings ,it is a way of retreating in order to sharpen yourself so that you are going to be more tuned and ready to fight the battle for Christ in your market place. As a professional, I need it more than anybody else. I need the meeting more than the meeting needs me. It doesn’t matter how many years you have worked , you always need fellowship with other professionals.
The bible tells us that iron sharpens iron .So when you withdraw from fellowship of like minded people , you are taking a big risk of continuing to hit the market place with an’ axe’ that is no longer sharp. Your impact in the market place will be hampered. When you go to fellowships, you are giving your axe an opportunity to be sharpened. Some CEOs and other senior professionals do not go for such fellowships. But if you have been longer in the profession, does it not mean that your axe has worked harder for longer. You need sharpening ven more than others
When you go to a professional fellowships and are the CEO of a big company , what happens? The higher you go, unfortunately the less genuine friends you have. When you are the CEO, there are so many friends, everybody wants to be your friend but the truth is, they are not after you, they are after your post or your money or your influence. When you are just a new graduate, anybody who will be friends with you must really be interested in you. When you are the MD, you are not sure, and I have discovered that over time. I used to be in charge of aviation in Shell and at that point Shell had a hundred percent market share of local airlines operating in Kenya. The Department Of Defense , the air force were my accounts, as was Kenya airways .After those two accounts, you are left only small airlines most of which operate at Wilson Airport,Naiorbi. Shell was the only one having an oil depot in Wilson Airport. So all the Wilson Airport based small companies were my customers. So anybody who ever had an aircraft in Kenya had to know my name. Their aircraft fly from Kenya to everywhere in the world . I used to give them a credit card to use when out of Kenya. So somebody is in Rome and stranded because his credit card is rejected and has to ring me even at night. My wife might take the phone and is told, ‘it is captain so and so, a great friend of your husband’. Of course they have to be ‘friends’ to be waking me up at night.Over Christmas we struggled rejecting their gifts. However the day I left aviation department, not a single aircraft owner has ever rang me . Are you getting the point? My wife keeps saying, where are your old friends? We were friendly in as long as I had the power to determine whether he can get credit in London or not.
Day 3
Isaiah45:4
For the sake of Jacob my servant, of Israel my chosen, I summon you by name and bestow on you a title of honor, though you do not acknowledge me.
So when you get promoted in your place of work, you will get many friends but not necessarily true ones. The Christian professional fellowship may be the only place you are likely to get true friends who are not bothered in whether you get a senior or not. Thus it is when you become senior, you need the fellowship even more. Earlier you had no difficulty, anybody could be your friend genuinely. As you become the MD, it is difficult to know true friends. As mentioned elsewhere, I used to be an area manager in Kisumu for Shell. I was looking after both the depot, and the market, and so everybody who worked for Shell in that region reported to me. I discovered you can never know who your friends are because all over sudden you realize, all are trying to be friendly. In the head office before I went to Kisumu,I used to be just one of the small guys but in Kisumu , I was the one calling the shots. So even when you see any staff very interested in you, you are not quite sure whether it is you or your position.
When you come to a professional fellowship, we do not know who you are, it doesn’t even matter to us, all we know is you are a brother in the Lord. A few brothers when they rise up remove the middle ‘ r’in the wordbrother and become bothers. No wonder they cannot fit in the fellowship. I am the founding chairman of a group we call Christian Business Professional Fellowship and we organize dinners, etc to facilitate professionals meeting together. There is a time we asked a Christian politician to come to talk in one such meeting of professionals . In fact the title we gave was , how can I sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? However this gave politician an opportunity to tell us off . The person said that when he or she entered politics, Christians just dropped him or her . They no longer cared. He or she had no fellowship. We waited until the politician to finish the talk and allow questions . I asked , ‘so and so, are you aware that you are blaming the wrong group? We were in fellowship before you went to politics and where we used to meet we are still there. You left. What is the problem now ? You never came back. So you are the problem is not us. The problem is you allowed your big tile to take you from fellowship’.
You find that most senior people have no fellowship at all and their basic claim is, ‘Christians left me’. They did not leave you. You left them. When I started the shell fellowship I was junior. It was easy to be there. By the time I reached top management, people thought that I would no longer go to our lunch hour fellowship. None of the other managers used to come for fellowship. I would sometimes tell them, today you must remember it is our lunch hour fellowship. And even if you don’t want to go, I intend to go so we need to finish the management on time so that we don’t miss the fellowship. That way I am trying to remind them that if they used to be Christians when they were junior they can come back to the lord. Of course until I was in top management myself I did not have an opportunity to tell them about Christ but now I could tell them. Promotion had given me a new parish.
Day 4
1 Samuel 3
11 And the LORD said to Samuel: “See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make the ears of everyone who hears of it tingle. 12 At that time I will carry out against Eli everything I spoke against his family—from beginning to end. 13 For I told him that I would judge his family forever because of the sin he knew about; his sons made themselves contemptible,[b] and he failed to restrain them. 14 Therefore, I swore to the house of Eli, ‘The guilt of Eli’s house will never be atoned for by sacrifice or offering
I myself was running to the lunch hour fellowship to meet my spiritual need .When I go to the fellowship I am not going there as a manager, I am just a brother, one of the many brothers, to be ministered to. Unless it happens to be my day to share, I will just sit there and one of the messengers will be the preacher. And he doesn’t preach as a messenger of the company, he preaches as the messenger of heaven. I discovered even if it is a very junior person preaching, my heart is warmed. One of the reasons why I am able to fit in our lunch hour fellowship was because way back in Alliance High school ,when I was in form six, and those days form six used to feel very senior before form ones, God used a form one to talk to me.
We used to have a school Christian union Wednesday fellowship. One day a form one talked and as he was talking, the Lord used the form one to point out something I was not doing right in my life. The Holy Spirit just caught me. I felt like crying. I was about to cry in that fellowship until I remembered it is a form one talking. How do you cry when it is only a form one talking and remember you are in form six? Now, that’s when I learnt, it was not a form one talking, it was the Holy Spirit. A form one could not know anything about me. He was not talking about me, he was telling everybody. It is only that the Holy Spirit took it to really slash me. So my problem was not with the boy, my problem was the Holy Spirit whom I had angered. I discovered, it does not require a form six for the Holy Spirit to talk to me, He can use a form one.
Day 5
2Samuel12:1
[ Nathan Rebukes David ] The LORD sent Nathan to David. When he came to him, he said, “There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor
Although fellowship with professionals going through a similar challenges would be helpful, as you go up you career ladder, if you want to keep spiritually hot, please be aware you do not determine which of the people in fellowship God is going to use to help you keep spiritually hot. Go to the fellowship even if there is no other CEO. Do not ask :who is going to be present? May be nobody who is even a manager will be present, only clerks in various small organizations . You need to understand that when we come to fellowship we don’t come with our job titles, we come with one title, brothers or sisters. And as long as the brothers have not removed the middle r to become bothers or the sisters the final letters to be come sinners, it will be a group that is going to encourage you. When I got saved in the sixties, when we went home from high schools ,the people who were in fellowship in the village, none of them would have gone to standard eight leave alone high school. I as a university student, when I went to their fellowship I discovered old mamas who don’t know how to read the bible but when I hear their testimony it blesses my heart and encourage me in my struggles with sin. I discovered God does not require one with a degree to talk to me. I can get as many degrees as I want but God does not require them to communicate through me. He can use your mother who only knows the mother tongue to actually spiritually deal with you.
Day 6
1cor 14
26 What then shall we say, brothers? When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church
I hope I have given you enough reasons as to why when you become senior in your place of work, you still need fellowship. One , it encourages you in fighting with sin. Two it is a good retreat from hostile market to a group of like minded people.
The third reason why you need to fellowship with others despite your seniority in life, is because it is going to give you opportunity for ministry. After retirement I was involved in starting a Business Leaders Forum which is generally a CEOs meeting, every third Wednesday of the month, in Nairobi. This is for CEOs to come together and encourage each other weekly and then once a year we have a retreat in one of the big hotels. You know the junior professionals will find it more expensive but because we are aiming at CEOs we put it in a five star hotel which we believe they can afford.
But how can you get the busy CEO’s to come to retreat ? These are people who get to a level when you don’t expect any other promotion, after all you are a CEO. You can only leave the company to be a CEO of a bigger one. When you reach that level, chances are you could be tempted not to come to professional meeting because you don’t think you have a need. However the minute you tell that person that he is coming to minister, he becomes willing to come. The thing that excites them is not money at the CEO level, what excites them is opportunity for ministry. So when he hears, come to Naivasha, we would like you to share your testimony how you are walking with the Lord, a guy who was very busy, all of a sudden is available. At that level, that’s what motivates you. So when you come to a professional meeting like this, you don’t just come because you have a need, you come here also because you meet people who for example have worked for only two years and need you as mentor. When you share with them, what happens? They draw out of you something that will not cost you anything ,yet it is going to help them a lot.
Day 7
Acts20:35
In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.
As noted above, I happen to be the founding chairman of Kenya’s Christian Business Professionals Fellowship, CBPF , which is a group of Christian professionals that in addition to the professional meetings mentioned above , runs career days for universities all over Kenya. These career days prepare students to work as Christian professionals when they graduate.
When the university year finishes we normally have what we call a welcome tea at a Nairobi hotel for anybody who graduated in the given year . Our intention is having at least a hundred new graduate meets with a hundred old professionals for a one on one mentoring. We want the young Christian graduates to know there are people in industry, some quite senior ,who practice their faith at work. So it is mainly not a talk but a one on one mentoring time. We give them a cup of tea and they talk one on one hoping that, that way, the new graduates can get somebody who can help them know how to integrate their faith with their work by demonstrating how they deal with various challenges in their work . The evening is concluded by one of the born gain CEO’s giving their life story to the whole group.
The last number of years ,we have had good turn up of even senior professionals like CEOs and judges. I am realizing that busy professionals are willing to turn up when you tell them they are not coming just to listen but to also minster.
One senior executive told me,’ Last time when I came to the new graduates welcome tea I actually got an employee for my company out of that meeting’. I am sure young people want to hear that! Although we are not intending to make the meeting a job creation enterprise, opportunities to hear of vacancies also arise. However our aim is simply to help young people to know they can be Christians in their professions. But there are people getting jobs in the process and employers are getting employees.
The more senior you are, the more you can share with others in any professionals meeting .That is why you should not miss it. The people you see as juniors today , one day will also be CEO. And the struggles you have had, they don’t have to struggle in a similar way if you share with them how you dealt with the challenges.. Can you see then, there is no level you will grow into when you will not need to be in a fellowship.
When I was still in Shell, the management went for a management retreat in Naromoru River Lodge. We had a lot of time to team build. One of the managers asked me, ‘Ng’ang’a you never change!’ I said, ‘what do you mean?’.His reply was ,’ In our days in the university in the seventies you were behaving in the same way you behave in Shell’. I in turn I said, ‘did I give an impression while in campus I was going to change?’. Now he gave his defense, ‘No, no, no don’t misunderstand me. But most people who used to talk like you in campus no longer talk like that. Once they became senior, you never hear that kind of talk’. It was now my turn to defend myself but I realized I couldn’t defend myself. Why? I suspected he was right. When we left campus in the seventies we were a reasonably sized group involved in Christian work but it has grown less with time. Why do Christian professionals become less involved in any ministry as they get senior in their professions? It is not just being busy. It is that they may feel uncomfortable in Christian meetings other than a Sunday service.
Why is integrating faith and professionals life so difficult? This is the question this book is seeking to deal with.
After campus in the 1970s,a number of us used to meet in Ufungamano House in Nairobi for bible study and fellowship. Now how involved are they now? Many of them are not even active in their own churches. But why? I think that’s what we should ask ourselves as Christian professionals. How can you retain the spiritual fire not just for two years but for all the years of your life?. And of course the other question is who is really a Christian professional? What distinguishes a Christian professional from other professionals? How can they pursue excellence in their profession ? What are the avenues of reaching the level to be called an excellent professional?. What challenges do Christian professionals actually encounter in the market place as they try to go up the ladder and how do they overcome these challenges and make a lasting impact wherever they work?.