Greatness

I work with celebrities. Some are minor celebrities who have a degree of fame within a local community. Some are national celebrities, the kind that have fan sites dedicated to them and their own stalkers. Some are just celebrities in the Christian community. In general the celebrities I work with are really wonderful people. Most are wealthy, but really humble. Very rarely do I find them egotistical or demanding. Even though I like them and sometimes I get caught up in name dropping to pump up my own ego, overall, they don't awe me. They are world class entertainers and it's wonderful to experience their music or hear their stories but they don't awe me. Let me tell you about what awes me ... . . . Two pastors working together: complete strangers: one the senior pastor of a charismatic almost mega-church and the other a solo pastor of a small Southern Baptist congregation. They humbly serve each other and work late into the evening to make sure that every person who make a decision for Christ at an evangelistic festival gets followed up on. In another city it's an Episcopal priest and fringe pentecostal pastor working together. In another it's a Church of God pastor and a Lutheran Brethren pastor. . . . Two laymen, one a bank president and another a contractor, one Roman Catholic and the other from an Evangelical Free Church, working together in unity with nearly every denomination in their town offering all of their personal and professional resources for the Kingdom. . . . A bank president, who calls the festival leadership and says, "I can't make the meeting tonight but I'll be on the Finance Team or do anything you need. Just let me know what I signed up for." (paraphrase) . . . A man who is a borderline billionaire who could pay for everything to be done for him, not only gives his money to a festival but shows up every day to run errands, clean up the grounds, set-up & tear down all the staging and equipment in the rain and other menial tasks as needed. . . . A man who has owned or started over 20 businesses in the last 20 years, is a millionaire, but because of his passion for evangelism and love for Jesus decides to take a vice-president position with a non-profit, something well beneath his stature, for the sake of the kingdom. . . . A pastor of a small pentecostal church, who is semi-retired, spends several hours a week for months organizing a team that trains several hundred people to share their faith. . . . A senior pastor of a multi-staff church of several hundred shows up daily at an evangelistic festival, with his associate pastor in tow, to do "whatever is needed." . . . An engineer that takes a few vacation days and parks his camper on the site of a festival to lead over a hundred volunteers to oversee the entire festival campus, bringing his own equipment for the job. I do meet a number of celebrities in the course of my work organzing evangelistic festivals. They don't impress me. It's the all of the pastors, lay people and community leaders who selflessly volunteer hour upon hour, sometimes to do tasks well beneath their community stature, that impress me the most. It is a phenomenal sight to see several hundred clergy and lay people in a community, from every conceivable denominational background, from very different ethnic, age, theological and socioeconomic backgrounds, all laying aside important, dearly held differences, all working and praying in unity for the common goal of the growth of the Kingdom of God. Now that is impressive . . . very, very impressive.