TRANSCRIPT

NATHAN JONES

Our guest today, Rob Martin, shares some incredible insight into the opportunity we have for the future of mission in the world if we focus on unleashing local stewardship. This, if done faithfully over time, will lead to the sustainable interdependence that will affect gospel transformation globally.

My name is Nathan Jones and I'll be serving as your host on this episode of the Inspiring Stewards podcast.

Rob, thank you so much for the time this morning. I am just thrilled to jump into this interview. So, let's just kick it off. Give us a little bit of background, kind of where you're from, where you grew up. Who is Rob Martin?

ROB MARTIN

Well, it's actually an interesting question to me from the standpoint that I am the grandson of Armenian orphans that were slaughtered. My great grandparents were killed in 1896 in a small dust up in Urfa, Armenia, and it was very similar to the Syrian situation that you see now. The Christians were caught between competitive forces and were trying to find their own space. They were put on a long march. It was beginning of the genocide of the Armenians that actually went on for 20 more years, and millions were killed.

My great grandparents on my mother's side – my grandmother was five years old when she saw her parents slaughtered in front of her, raped, slaughtered, and killed. She was rescued by Presbyterians in Aleppo, Syria, and was renamed Son of the Martyrs: Martyrosian. Then later in life, for a number of reasons, I was given the name Martin as a tribute to my great grandparents’ martyrdom.

And so there's a survival instinct that I inherited through my maternal life that has gotten me through a lot. Then, I was one third through my life or more, and I found Christ at the age of 33, after a difficult time of not looking for Him and looking for happiness everywhere but. Soon after I became a Christian in 1976, I was called into this work. So I got started within a few weeks.

NATHAN

What drew you to Christ?

ROB

I was desperate. My life had fallen apart. I'll just say I was desperate, and the one thing I hadn't tried was church. My younger step brothers had all come to faith in the Jesus People movement. And I was desperate.

There was an “I Found It” campaign going on in the mid ‘70s, a Campus Crusade program that people were making fun of. I was on a road trip interviewing for a newspaper job. Everything was stolen. I'm sitting in the motel room dead broke. Everything gone. And I see this TV show commercial: it's a guy talking about Christ and saying, “I found it!” He jumps up and kicks his heels. Campus Crusade, some people made fun of them for the program. The Jewish community had a bumper sticker made that said, “We never lost it.”

NATHAN

Oh, wow.

ROB

In any case, it put into the back of my mind, “Hey, that's the one thing you haven't tried.” That day, I had actually considered what it would be like to not be alive and that scared me into wanting to seek life. And I found it in Christ.

NATHAN

So the compass bearing changes. You come to know the Lord. And what impact did that begin to have on your life?

ROB

It was a wholesale transformation almost immediately because I needed it. It was like a blood transfusion or really more of a soul transfusion. I went from lost, literally, to found and just started finding a new life, a new viewpoint. But also a sense of love, security, and hope that I hadn't had before. And, it was a security based on the love of God.

That was the preaching I was drawn to and hearing. All of the things that were holding me back were suddenly being chipped away. I could just feel the new man being built. So it was very real to me.

Plus, I got involved early with a little street mission that was serving the homeless and began to see God work miraculously. Because when you're down with the least, the last, and the lost in doing anything for them, anything for them, God is alongside of you and pushing that energy that you're giving and just multiplying it in ways that are unfathomable unless you believe in Him and understand that what's happening isn't coincidence or luck.

NATHAN

The follow up campaign could be “He Found Me.”

ROB

“He Found Me.” Yeah.

NATHAN

That's beautiful. Well, I want to kind of hear what life has been like since then, kind of how the Lord has you involved in his Kingdom. But there was a pivotal conversation that you had in those early days at the rescue mission that really set a course then for your journey of stewardship. Give us a… kind of retell that now.

ROB

This is actually the most surprising part of the story. And if I were to tell you that for this part of the story of my life first would be He uses the foolish things to this world to confound the wise, you’d understand.

The mission was struggling. We were being pushed out of our location by the city. There were lawsuits. It was a tumultuous time because the homeless situation in the United States had just exploded in the 1970s at the end of the Vietnam War. A lot of those veterans, in fact, one in ten ended up in the streets for at least a month. It was back in those days.

In addition, they closed down the mental institutions for most mental illness because of the advent of psychotherapeutic drugs and therapy was getting people better. And so they closed down the hospitals. The long term care facilities that they had the mentally ill in, and quite a few of them ended up in the streets, and that was the beginning here in the United States of the bag lady phenomenon. All of that happened at the same time and the cities wanted the rescue missions out.

So we were struggling in that environment. Putting a nickel together here, a dime together there. It is literally very small and my board chair, who was an accountant – and I'm the exact opposite of accountants – called me into his office early one morning in the middle of the week and said, “You got to come over.” He was a very thoughtful Christian, very full of life and the Lord. He said, “Last night, God woke me up and kept me up all night saying that you and I were going to handle millions of dollars for Him in His name.” And then he drags me down to the floor of his office and says, “Let's pray.”

And I'm laughing. I'm literally laughing because we had $5,000 in the bank maybe. Monthly revenues of $10,000, $15,000 and we were feeding hundreds in housing. I was just cracking up. I had no idea how to fundraise. No idea how to lead. No idea how to organize. I was just sort of showing up and trying to make things happen.

A couple of years later after I built the mission, and it was time for someone to come in to run the place instead of turn it around and build one of those kind of activists managers rather than an activist builder, which is what I turned out to be at that time. And I went to work for one of the wealthiest people in the world out of the blue. He had been a supporter of the rescue mission and he asked me to come and help him give away his money.

And that's where it started: 1983 at Fieldstead and Company. He had a deep interest in India. We immediately did a trip to India. We worked with a number of missions. I worked there for six years. I won't disclose how much money we distributed but it was into the multiple millions.

NATHAN

Your accountant friend was right.

ROB

It was exactly right. He went on to become the controller of WYAM, one of the largest missions in the world. He literally was managing multiple millions of dollars for the YWAM-Mercy Ministries and other things like that.

I had one of the first jobs in Christian philanthropy. There wasn't really a field in this before. Obviously, wealthy people have always given their money to the church and have always given their money to mission. It's just there wasn't this sense of organized, deep philanthropy where people were actively looking for, philanthropies were actively looking at missions.

There are a lot of major donors, of course. But organized philanthropy, that is two-decision philanthropy where you're dealing, one, with a program officer that invites you to bring a proposal to their board, but the board makes the decision. I have never made a decision on this giving until I actually served on the board of a foundation that also gave millions of dollars to the guy that baked the buns for McDonald's hamburgers oversees.

NATHAN

Wow. [Laughs]

ROB

This was financed. The first guy I worked for was finance. This last foundation I'm with now – I retire in four months – I've been with them 31 years. The funds came from building out homes, so a very large national home builder.

So, I've seen millions of dollars go into mission. It's not been my money. It's always been somebody else's money and I've just been an employed steward. But they were the stewards, and I was serving their stewardship by finding opportunities for them to put money to work. It's a very unusual job. But from that day of being told I was going to be handling millions of dollars for God to this time, it's happened.

NATHAN

We're talking about stewardship in this podcast and Inspiring Stewards is the name. You have seen and experienced stewardship from a very unique seat. For those that are listening that maybe have a question around the definition of stewardship, what would you offer by way of some thoughts or even a phrase definition if you've got one on what is stewardship?

ROB

We all have responsibility for the things in our life, but not ownership. The ownership is from God. And if you don't recognize that, then the burden for your life is on you to look at everything. I've seen God work in the most desperate situations on earth. I've traveled over 70 countries. That money that I was just working with these givers was dedicated to the poorest people in the world. And I had access to them because we had the funds for me to go on the road and go and see how stewardship worked. What I realized is the strongest stewards in the world are some of the poorest people I've ever been around.

I would direct your listeners to a film they can find on YouTube called “The Handful of Rice.”

NATHAN

“The Handful of Rice.” Okay.

ROB

Seven minutes long, “Handful of Rice.” I taught the woman that is featured in that video. It's one of the most powerful videos on stewardship you can see because it talks about how the people of Mizoram in the northeast of India evangelized their entire population to – 95% are churchgoers over the last 100 years – going from being, in some cases, headhunters to this level.

They're still very poor, but they send their own missionaries out to the tune of millions of dollars through the raising of a handful of rice. That is, the homemaker takes a handful of rice, makes the family's pot rice for dinner, and then puts a similar amount into a bag, takes it to church on the weekend, and it's sold back to the parishioners and out to the community. And that's how they raised their money for missions.

NATHAN

Wow.

ROB

All of it just on the simplest generosity. But that handful of rice, it would be like one of us in the United States taking our entire food budget and a portion of our rent budget and saying, “We're going to double this and whatever we spend on food and rent, we're going to give to mission.”

NATHAN

Wow.

ROB

That's what it's like. That's stewardship.

NATHAN

So stewardship is not only for the rich.

ROB

Ooh. They need it more. A lot of rich people are rich by being hoarders.

NATHAN

Yeah. So, we were talking a few minutes ago…

ROB

I've had the privilege of working for the ones that recognize it's God's money and that they are a steward. So the thing about stewardship is ownership. You're not the owner. You are the manager.

The thing that really works for me in this work is the parable of the stewards. Of the three, one is given five and he doubles it. Ten and he doubles it. And one's given one and he buries it because he's afraid.

The other 2 may have been wise investors, which is a skill, but they were also entrepreneurial. Stewardship is entrepreneurial, in that sense, is that when you have something, what do you do with it? How do you make it grow? That was the purpose of that is whatever you're given, to that measure, grow it. That's like being given a garden plot, some seeds, a pail of water, and told, “Grow something so that you can eat it.” It's no different. We are stewards of this. And when we realize that, we start becoming genuine disciples.

For me, discipleship started the day I gave my first gift, and I was very reluctant. I was broke. I'd been robbed of everything. I'm sleeping on my mother's couch. It couldn't be where a 33 year old man sleeping on his mother's couch. And I picked up a small job and I got a paycheck, which for me at that time and is still a lot of money. It was $600. I hadn't heard any teaching on stewardship, generosity, on giving, on tithing, on responsibility to do that. I just had this strong urge that I was supposed to give some of this money away and that ushered in a slithering, selfish mood.

I did not want to give a penny of it away. I hadn't spent any of my money in the past. I don't think I donated anything since I was a kid and put a dime in the old March of Dimes polio campaign thing, which is way before your time. And I'm sitting there thinking, “Wait a second.” That set up a big crisis in my heart, in my soul.

I took a long walk on the streets that day trying to figure out what was the challenge and I came down to this simple idea. I was struggling with my belief in God. Was He real or was He not real? If He wasn't real, if it was just an illusion, if this was just a Sunday morning club that I was going to with a bunch of fun people that like to sing and do strange things, then why would I get that money? Maybe to pay the bills. Just charge me a little mission charge. $5? What's the cost to turn the lights on? That's how my thinking was going, and I realized: no, what I'm really struggling with is my belief in God. Is He real? And if He is, then what does that mean to who I am? And so I realized on that walk that He was the deepest reality of my life. As such, anything I had was His, given from Him to me to steward.

I don't remember where I gave that day, but I remember that I did. What I really remember is when I gave the gift, I felt that I had exchanged something precious, which was very precious to me at the time. I needed the money to live on and get off the couch. But I've given the money that was precious to me for something much more precious.

Stewardship: the sense of well done, my good and faithful servant. Not that I was earning anything by giving, I was just responding to what I was given by making it possible for others to hear the message that I had heard. And so I joyfully gave that money. Here's the key thing. It was that day that I felt I actually became a disciple of Christ. Not just a watcher, not just a participant, but an actual disciple. Sold out, and I've never looked back since then.

Stewardship is exciting. Generosity is exciting. And, it should be a joyful experience for you. It is when you recognize you're just a steward, not an owner. The harder you grip, you're going to lose it. It's like gripping a bar of soap in a shower too hard. It's good to go somewhere else.

NATHAN

It’s going slip out. So considering that reality, that stewardship is very closely related to our discipleship, considering how God is at work in the world around us and in the days to come, what are some words of observation that you would offer by way of how you're seeing God at work?

ROB

Well, to our listeners here at home in the United States – home for me – it can seem kind of hopeless. The church is wrent with political and civic and racial and emotional and cultural differences to the point where we look like medieval Europe fighting between Catholics and Protestants. It's a terrible witness.

However, there are still a lot of very generous people in the West. The critical thing for Western givers, so I'm speaking to Western givers with these thoughts, is to encourage local giving with your giving. The point there is we're aiming for something here with Global Trust Partners and others called “sustained interdependence.” And what that means is changing the paradigm from the money comes from the West and goes to the South and then is utilized in the South for evangelization. Instead, the money goes from the West now or from wherever. It's mission from everywhere to everywhere.

So what you need to be able to do if you're going to be a successful mission, that is cover your expenses and actually make a difference with your loving actions, is that if you can develop local stewardship in your churches by fundraising from them, by fundraising from the local folks, they will give you an accountability that will help you establish the ability to sustain your work, whether you have large grants or not.

Now, let's say that you have big projects. This happened in the north of India when the southern missionaries started going up to the north – transmissionary prayer bands and all – they were on personal support raising. And they were able to sustain that for at least two or three decades: this massive push of evangelization that has led to millions coming to Christ in the north. That is not an exaggeration. We can talk literally into perhaps 100 million Christians now live in India, maybe more. Those numbers are from a few years ago. They just sustained the work for the longest time just on personal support.

And then they started getting into social action: building hospitals, building schools, just exactly what Christians have done for 2,000 years. They built hospitals. They built schools. They started taking care of the dead and dying on the streets. They started feeding the homeless. Suddenly, you need kitchens and buildings and x-ray machines. That takes big pots of money.

So, sustained interdependence means we all need somebody else to help us accomplish our work when we're working in the Kingdom. And so we create these partnerships, but we create them in a way that we're equal with our partner, no matter what the relative wealth of both are in the setting.

We actually call that a “communion of giving and receiving.” It occurs where we're equals at the cross. And when that happens, we can come to this place of sustained interdependence. It is where the local mission is accountable to its local church and its local believers, everyone that knows them. That gives confidence to all other donors, givers, including international, if they need them.

So let's say you're a humble missionary. You're building a school and you need $20,000 for a classroom. Well, if you can raise $1,000 or $2,000 in your community, that's a big deal. That's equal to somebody's entire yearly wages or more. Then, you can meet as equals with someone that can give you the $20,000 or aggregate that kind of money for you in order to build the classroom, in order to expand the Kingdom. That's how the Kingdom has expanded over all the years.

So what we're looking at is awakening the stewardship in the congregations that are used to the West doing the missionary work. All over the world, all throughout Latin America, Nigeria, Kenya, all over Asia, you have autochthonous missions funding themselves to expand the Kingdom. What we're talking about is taking a huge movement and exploding it bigger with just more stewardship. Not doing for people what they can do in their own settings and recognizing that the smallest gift from the most sacrificial gift giver is as important to your mission or more important than any large gift, because God looks at the heart of the giver, not the money in the hand of the giver. He looks at the heart.

There'll be a judgment day in which those that had an open hand – just read Matthew 25 and look at the stewardship there and what He counted stewardship, taking a glass of water to a prisoner, and you're taking it to Him. That meant at that moment, Christ identified with the most hideous people in our society, the people we've put away because they're dangerous to be around us.

And He said, “No, I'm one of them. When you give a cold cup of water to one of these dangerous people, you're giving it to me.” That stewardship at a critical level because you gave a cold water to an ungrateful person.

NATHAN

Right. This conversation has really unpacked the interconnectedness between stewardship and discipleship. We recognize that stewardship doesn't then allow discipleship to happen as a result but as stewardship happens, discipleship is happening in the life of the stewards. So powerful.

ROB

Because you're saying, “Hey, it's all yours. Teach me how to live with opening, releasing. How do I live with my hands open instead of touching everything?” It's a mind blowing change. But boy, is it fun when you get it right! And if you're in with a group of believers to get it right, you can put up with anything. You can fight any war, any battle. And we've seen them do it for 2,000 years, even with their own lives: the ultimate stewardship.

NATHAN

Rob, this has been rich. We could keep going, but give us a final thought as we wrap up.

ROB

[Laughs] Good luck.

NATHAN

[Laughs] Good luck. Good word.

ROB

No. Look. Get in the swim. Just give it a try. Start looking around. If you're a missional entrepreneur in the developing world, look local. Look around your neighborhood. Look at your friends. Look at your people that are in church with you. Look at the partners that are helping you do your mission. And see what God sees, not what you see.

NATHAN

Amen. Rob, thank you for your time. This has been tremendous.

ROB

You bet. It’s been fun.