Worldview Matters

The Mission Exchange is the largest evangelical association of missions organizations. And so I was especially pleased they featured my book, The Longview: Lasting Strategies for Rising Leaders

In their monthly “Leaders Edge Book Summary,” they did a nice job pulling out some of the major ideas.  You can read the review HERE

They also did a 35 minute interview about the book, and that can be heard HERE

Or if you’d like to see my 3 minute video summary of the book it is HERE

With nearly 400 full time faculty and staff, now spread out over 6 physical campuses, plus our online campus, there is only one time each year when we all get together.

I only have  one time each year to share with all our focus for the year, and emphasize the core of our God-honoring mission that drives us together.

I just posted online my 16th message from these “Kick-Off” events, which we now call our Service of Dedication.  (And during the service received a clock to commemorate completing 15 years as president.)

Each of these messages are based on a verse of the year – a text that is especially applicable as I see where the Lord is leading the school in the year ahead.

From my perspective, during these 16 years, there have been three of these messages that have been most important (although last years would be a close 4th in my ranking):

1996 – My first message to the campus set the tone for our future together.

2003 – I introduced a new planning model to the campus based on the metaphor of becoming sailboats to catch the wind of God, rather than powerboats who go where we assume God wants us to go, but operate ignoring the wind.

2010 – I’ve outlined our mission in a fresh way, as the Lord has developed us as a University of 3,500 students.

If you’d like to listen, read, or download the message, you can find it HERE.

But here is the core ideas in summary:

What distinguishes Belhaven University from all the other 4,168 schools in America is our commitment to: “purposeful stewardship.”

It comes down to this idea – we have a drive and culture ingrained in Belhaven that seeks to get the best out of everything that God has given to us. We are purposefully good stewards of whatever the Lord entrusts to us.

1.  We have a calling to the stewardship of teaching an unchanging biblical worldview.

We are unwavering in the major issues of our Christian faith, and couple that solid biblical commitment with grace to be accepting of a variety of perspectives the minor issues of faith. We together all of God’s people across the evangelical spectrum of the Church.

• The uniqueness of Christ as the only way to the Father
• The justification by faith alone
• The authority and inerrancy of scripture
• The transforming power of the Holy Spirit
• The reality of eternal life to come.

Like the pillars that symbolize Belhaven near our fountain, these timeless pillars of what it means to be a follower of Jesus are unmovable at the center of our campus.

2.  We have a calling to the stewardship of valuing every student.

We take every student – just where they are – and we invest in them to help get the most out of them.  We don’t just try to push students through a pre-designed program that makes it easy for us. Instead, we try to work with each one as a unique person whom God designed with special gifts, drive, and purpose.

We are convinced that every student at Belhaven University came here because God hand-picked them to come here.  And because they are a gift to us from God, we must be purposeful stewards of every single one of them.

3.  We have a calling to the stewardship of honoring God-given opportunities.

Our planning is built around waiting for God’s wind to blow, rather than traditional destination planning that attempts to predict where God wants us to go in the future.  Yes, we plan, but we do it locally, as close to every academic department, office, team, and function as possible – in order to be purposeful stewards of what God has already given us.

We do stewardship planning, instead of predicting a future in destination planning that wastefully consumes most schools, attempting to predict future outcomes that are often far beyond their control.

Last week I had the opportunity to talk about my book before an audience of 5 million listeners on the Moody Broadcasting Networks popular evening drive time show, Prime Time America.

If you’d like to hear this 8 minute interview click here:  Roger Parrott Interview- Prime Time America, Moody Radio.

I was thrilled that the gracious host, Greg Wheatley,  invited me to begin by sharing about Belhaven, and I was able to give a brief message about the College to that nationwide audience.

I’m pleased to have had opportunities to talk about Belhaven during every radio interview I’ve done about the book.

I’ll have the opportunity to talk about my book this afternoon on the national radio show, Prime Time America, on the Moody Broadcasting Network. The show is hosted by Greg Wheatley and reaches 5 million listeners.  The 10 minute interview will be at 4:30 this afternoon.

Tomorrow morning from 8:00 to 8:30 I’ll be a guest on the Gallo Show on Supertalk Mississippi. It is heard on a number of AM and FM stations around the state.

It has been a joy to share about the book on regional radio stations over the past two weeks.  And I always get opportunities (especially in the 30 minute interviews) to talk about Belhaven.

The website for the book is www.thelongview.info

For sometime I’ve been encouraged to take the time to write and share some of the leadership principles that have been important to me through 21 years in the college presidency. As our faculty, and others of you who write know, it takes discipline and it’s sometimes hard to stay in the chair long enough to get ideas onto paper.

But with the encouragement of our Board of Trustees (they even put it in my annual evaluation to make this a priority) this three year project is now in print and was released last week.  One of my great joys about the book is the opportunity to share the stories of how God has worked so marvelously at Belhaven through these years.

David C. Cook is the publisher.  They are working with B&B Media to help get out the word about the book, and I discovered last week that the daughter of the VP for B&B, Diane Morrow, is studying dance here at Belhaven – Amy Morrow.

With their guidance I started a round of radio interviews last week, and there are more on the schedule – Detroit, Charlotte, Des Moines, Cleveland, etc. – I’ll be sharing on the American Family Radio broadcast to several hundred stations tomorrow with Matt Friedman.

On Wednesday the 28^th at 4:30 central time, I’ll have the honor to talk about the ideas of the book on the national broadcast of Prime Time America, on Moody Radio .

I put in the campus mail today a signed copy of the book to each faculty and staff member because they make leadership easy for me at Belhaven. Thanks!!

But if you’re not on the team here at Belhaven and would like a copy, it is on all the major book websites now, and will be featured in Family Christian Stores and in LifeWay Christian Stores during the month of November.

Here is the quick link to Amazon where you can order, or share your reviews if you like (of course, if you don’t like it, just tell me instead of the whole world on Amazon!!)

Had some nice endorsements for the book including Ken Blanchard, Joni Erickson-Tada, Michael Lindsay, Ed Young, Steve Douglass, Duane Litfin, and Doug Birdsall.

There is a website for the book as well:  www.thelongview.info

Since you know me, you won’t be surprised that some concepts run against the norm of traditional leadership thinking, such as the chapter:  Planning Will Drain the Life from Your Ministry. This has been one of the hallmarks of distinction for Belhaven, and while our long-term faculty and staff lived through this dramatic shift, those who are newer may be interested to know the philosophy behind our not having a traditional long-range plan.

The core focus of the book is on pages 11 and 12, calling us to break free from the immediate results driven culture that has taken over business – and permeated the church as well.

Our theology and our ministry passion draw us to talk about longview outcomes as our heart’s desire, but we have been duped into fostering a generation of leaders, board members, employees, and constituencies who value short-term gain over longview significance. Ministry leaders believe it and act accordingly—hiring and rewarding people who can promote Band-Aid fixes as monumental solutions, creating plans that promise the moon and always come up short, raising funds from unrealistically compressed donor relationships, and touting to boards and constituencies those results that can most easily be measured and applauded.

Because this short-view corporate culture has so permeated the church today, we in ministry have loosened our grip on the biblical model for leadership. . . . The time is right for rising leaders to break free from the short-term leadership patterns of the past and set their sites on the horizon to ensure a life of leadership that will be honoring to God and bring us back to principles that will allow the church to make a transformational difference in the world.

We need to be leading for significance rather than giving into the pressure for short-term results.  This book not only calls us to this priority, but deals with the practical implications of leading for the longview.

I’d welcome your feedback and insights.  You can leave them here, or on www.thelongview.info blog.

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This was such a busy summer, I didn’t get a chance to get out of town the entire time.  So a week ago, I did break away for four days of fishing in Yellowstone National Park.

It is one of my favorite places in the world, and although the fish didn’t cooperate all that much, I had a marvelous time being in the wilderness.

Ken Burn’s series on the National Parks is on PBS right now, and is not to be missed.  These park are truly the unspoiled artistry of God, as the Lord designed the world to be.

Below is a picture from my trip.  I was fishing where a large herd of buffalo came up behind me (no, those are not cows).  Since so many people stopped to take picture of the buffalo, I had them get one for me too.  This was on the Firehole River, where the water is  warm from the geysers all along the river’s edge.  It is a great river for fishing late in the day because the water is 20 degrees warmer than the other rivers.

While there is lots of doom and gloom about the economy, there are some bright spots that bring good opportunities beyond simply the price of gasoline dropping.

Mortgage rates have never been lower – it is a great time to buy a house, refinance if the cost savings would make it worth the effort, or consider turning a 30 year mortgage into a 15 year mortgage to save thousands of dollars over the life of the loan.  CNN reports, “The 30 year fixed rate fell to 5.01%, its lowest level since Freddie Mac started conducting its survey in 1971.”

Mortgage rates dip to new all-time low

NEW YORK  (CNNMoney.com) — Mortgage rates fell to another all-time low, declining for the tenth consecutive week.

Government sponsored mortgage lender Freddie Mac said Thursday that fixed rates on 30-year mortgages averaged 5.01% for the week ending Jan. 8th. That’s down from 5.10% last week and well below 5.87%, which is where the rate stood at this time last year.

The 30-year fixed rate mortgage has not been lower since Freddie Mac started conducting the survey in 1971.

Mortgage rates continue to respond to the Federal Reserve’s decision to purchase mortgage backed securities from Fannie Mae (FNM, Fortune 500), Freddie Mac (FRE, Fortune 500) and Ginnie Mae, according to Frank Nothaft, Freddie Mac vice president and chief economist.

“On November 25, 2008, the Federal Reserve announced that it planned to purchase up to $500 billion of these securities by the end of June this year. For the sake of comparison, there were roughly $4.7 trillion of such securities backed by home mortgages available as of September 30, 2008,” Nothaft said in a release Thursday.

The 15-year fixed rate mortgage this week averaged 4.62%, which is down from 4.83% last week. A year ago at this time, that rate averaged 5.43%.

The 15-year rate has not been this low since June 13, 2003, when it averaged 4.6%.

Five-year Treasury-indexed hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) averaged 5.49% this week, down from last week when they averaged 5.57%. At this time a year ago, the 5-year ARM averaged 5.63%.

And the one-year Treasury-indexed ARM averaged 4.95% this week, up from 4.85% last week. Last year, the 1-year ARM averaged 5.37%.

“Since the end of October 2008, these rates have declined by almost 1 1/2 percentage points,” said Nothaft. “[That's a] payment savings of about $184 a month for a $200,000 loan – an additional $11 from last week.”

The first thing I do every morning, after opening a diet coke, is to open Marshall Ramsey’s latest editorial cartoon on the Jackson Clarion-Ledger web site. While my eyes are still blurry, it’s about all I can read, and it always starts my day out with a laugh. Marshall has a great way of linking together two current events into a thought provoking humorous concept. Here is the one from today:

I’m honored to be a third generation college president, following my grandfather – I work at the big partner’s desk my grandfather had specially made back in the 1930s when he was president of Olivet Nazarene University – and then my dad who was president of two different schools for a total of 25 years.

Around our house, my wife and I are convinced that if there is to be a fourth generation College president in our family, it will have to be our daughter.  She is the one who God has gifted for College leadership because she has never seen a problem that doesn’t have a solution, and she knows how to hold to a budget with an iron fist.

But our son is the philosopher about higher education.  And I keep framed by my desk the essay he did when asked to define leadership in first grade:

“If I were President of the College, I would expect nice artwork.  Better education.  Having more students know more about God.  Everybody will be working and studying.  And I’d want to make the college better.  And after the 4^th year, I’d expect that when the students leave, they would be smart and they would obey the Lord.”

Being a dad is lots more important to me than being a college president . . . but if I can help Belhaven hold to those goals laid out in my son’s first grade essay, I’ll feel like I did the right things in the president’s office too.

Last week John McCain issued a challenge to Barack Obama to participate in a series of debates.  The McCain camp hand delivered the letter to the Obama camp, who received it and asked, “why didn’t you just email it?”

Clearly the world of communication has shifted with a generation — not just how we communicate, but how we even think about communication.  We communicate across time zones and languages with the expectation of accessing information instantly and receiving immediate responses.

Today I had emails from Singapore, Buenos Aires, Taipei, and New York City – and that was before lunch.

I love it – because when we communicate globally and instantly, we think differently about the world and God’s work in the world.

Starting this blog, I’ll never know who reads it, from our campus in Mississippi to those who care about Christian Higher Education all around the globe.  But I pray this new way of connecting will honor God and enrich our lives together.

Write me with your comments:  President@Belhaven.edu