Below you will find the transcript of a recent interview by Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Community Church. The interview is based on Bob’s most recent book, Finishing Well but the ground covered between this meeting of the minds is a tremendous read.
Willow Creek Community Church
Creating A Volunteer Revolution Conference
October 28 & 29, 2004
Willow Creek is known for hosting some of the best educational conferences in the world, Christian or secular, and this year’s Volunteer Revolution Conference was no different. The thousands of individuals in attendance heard many of the best communicators in the world tell how the church is being invigorated to prevail. In a special segment geared to calling and motivating volunteers Bill Hybels interviewed Bob Buford. Bob is the Chairman and Founder of the Buford Foundation and Leadership Network as well as the author of Finishing Well and Halftime.
Hybels:
It was probably mid-eighties when I started to get to know Bob. Bob was someone, when I first met him, that every time I spent time with him, he was the president of a cable television network, and working really hard, and racking up the score, this guy was one of the hungriest guys I had ever met when it came to relentlessly trying to discern the call of God on his life and what he was to do with his resources, with his skill, with his talent, his experience. We used to meet, I would come home from meeting with Bob and I would say to my wife Lynn, Bob’s one of the few dangerous Christian’s I’ve ever met. He’s dangerous because when God talks to him Bob will do whatever God asks him to do at great cost, even if no one agrees, if it’s contrary to the way the stream is going, if Bob feels God is in it he will do it. We’ve partnered together on a whole bunch of different ministry adventures over the years, and he’s been very helpful to Willow at its different growth points. I think Bob has set a whole new vocabulary into place in the Christian language. You can go almost anywhere in the United States, and increasingly almost anywhere in the world, and ask someone whether or not they’re dealing with halftime issues. They know immediately what you’re talking about. For someone to actually change the understanding of language with this whole idea of halftime is just a testimony to how God has used this guy. So anyway, because Bob has had enormous influence in the kingdom as a volunteer, he’s always been a volunteer, and set up his life so that he could retain the mantle of volunteer all the time, and make huge input’s into the kingdom, I just couldn’t think of anyone else I’d rather ask a few questions of on the subject matter of volunteerism. So having blown half the interview time by just stroking you here, the building isn’t paid for yet so, I’m just kidding, he doesn’t like buildings anyway. Bob, the unbelievable resonance with the whole halftime thing, that had to even surprise you. Talk to us about what happened when the book went out, and the responses you’ve gotten in return.
Buford:
First of all I want to say that I not only volunteer, I’ve paid to show up most of the time.
Hybels:
For which we’re all very grateful.
Buford:
Yes, and as to speaking, my wife says that my basic technique is to start slow and then ramble after that.
Hybels:
That’s why we’re doing an interview.
Buford:
Peter Drucker who’s Bill’s friend and mine, and I think one of the wisest men alive said the basic insight in halftime is that we have more than one life now. The midpoint in the boomer generation is age fifty, and there are just a lot of forty year old, fifty year old people who understand that you don’t die at fifty years old like you did early in the century, and that we’ve got a whole thirty year adult lifetime to live, and it’s our job to figure out what to do with it. We’re hugely over prepared to go out and make money, and do deals, and all that was in the first half of my life, and we’re dramatically under prepared to make the move from success to significance. I think where Willow Creek is, once again, not the first time in the history of this, is out on the cutting edge in just simply seeing that people need help thinking about issues of meaning and significance. There is no university for the second half of life, and I daresay if there is one that the church is the best one of the lot to be needing you. I’m fifty years old, I’ve got some options in my life, twenty percent of the fifty year olds can retire now, and everybody else can do what that lawyer in the back of the room is doing, which is spending a whole bunch of billable hours to volunteer for this conference at Willow. Everybody can do something.
Hybels:
Bob, I think, again, worldwide people are now thinking about the phrase “from success to significance”. Just give us a couple minutes in your mind, I think that captures something but again, what does that mean to you now that you’ve been using that phrase, and people have been responding to it?
Buford:
Let me try and define it first. Success to me is using your knowledge and experience to build up your own portfolio, whatever that is, whatever selfish thing you’re inclined to do, and I’m not pointing at anybody else. I did lots of that. Significance though is pretty similar to success in a way. It’s using your knowledge and experience to serve other’s, and I really believe the church is going to be the logical gateway if the leader’s in the church are willing to challenge people to do that at a certain point. People get to a point, and I think it’s happening a lot in the developed affluent world that we live in. I’m talking about not rich people, but people that have options in their life. Peter Drucker says, when we look back from a standpoint of two hundred years from now on the twentieth century and say what changed, it’s not going to be technology. It’s going to be that the century started where most people didn’t have options of what to do with their life. If you were born the son or daughter of a farmer, you were going to, fifty years later, end your life as a farmer. Well people have enormous option time right now, and they’ve come to a point in halftime, and say there’s got to be something more than this. I had this very morning two lawyers tell me that they’re volunteering to do work at this conference. I said why did you do that? And they said, each of them in their own way, I don’t get a buzz like what I’m doing here ginning up billable hours in a law firm. People just know inherently there is more to life than what the first half of life appropriately preoccupies us to do. They’ve now got a whole thirty year second adulthood if they’re fifty year’s old, to do that if someone will challenge them to do like you do.
Hybels:
I remember your story because you and I met when you were first feeling called to go from success to significance but it seemed to me, and I think you’ve written about this, what accelerated your desire to make that transition was the tragic loss of your only son. I’m not sure everyone knows that about Bob, but Bob’s son Ross was about the age that my son Todd is right now, and attempted to swim across the Rio Grande and never made it. I remember being at Ross’s funeral, and just agonizing with Bob about that whole thing. But it seemed to me Bob that episode in your life turned the burner’s up really hot, and it seems to me that happens with a lot of folks. They get some kind of pain, or wake up call, or some adversity, or something that makes them go, wait a minute, what am I doing, or what’s life all about. Would you agree?
Buford:
Yes, we were doing the Foundation conference about that time, and I remember walking through an airport on the way to a meeting with you in Atlanta, and just looking at everybody and saying what are all these people doing with their lives? Also, I was in the television business, but I was unable to watch television for six months just because it looked so relentlessly trivial to me. It just looked silly. There is so much silliness, and repetitiousness on television. I don’t know about everybody but a lot of people I know have to build THE house at some point in their life, it’s the sign of arrival or whatever. Linda and I had built a big house in Tyler because we’d done well in business, and Linda looked at me and said, you know it’s okay to sell the house. That was a big moment. I think what God wants from everybody is not so much our giftedness, though he certainly wants that and I think operates through it, but more than anything he just wants our availability. I think if we’re open handed with our lives God will find a way to show up and provide everything you need. But most people are so close fisted, and I think losing our only son just broke my fist open, and God showed up in a big way. Also, it teaches me, just do the math on eternity versus here, this is this little fragment in time that we live in, and the way I would think about Ross’s life, or I came to think about Ross’s life afterwards, he was twenty-four years old, and he was a golden boy. He would light up a room when he got in it, and I used to think that if eternity is some long number, and I said a million years just to quantify it, Ross lived twenty-four one millionth of his life, he and I together. If I live a proper actuarial distance, whatever it is now, I’ll live another thirty years or something, and then we’ll live the balance together. He lived twenty-four one millionth of his life in this form, and let’s say I live eighty, one millionth of my life in this form, you don’t change the fraction by working on the numerator.
Hybels:
I read Halftime, benefited greatly from it, and have talked to hundreds of people who have benefited from it, and yet it seemed to, it opened a door, but I think what had to happen in the culture is that enough people had to negotiate halftime to figure out how someone actually crosses from life 1 to life 2. You came out, I’m not sure when this came out, but I picked up this book called Finishing Well, and I’m probably asked five times a week by somebody what’s the top book you’ve read in the last twelve months? And my standard answer these days is this is the book, right here. This book creamed me, Finishing Well, because it actually tells the story of fifty or sixty people.
Buford:
Sixty-two people, Peter Drucker who is my mentor said to me two years ago, okay you’ve got this dust up in the air, and you’ve established the idea that people come to a mid life and they have more than one life, but people don’t have role models for doing this. The role model for our culture is you go to school, you get a job, you do the best you can, you retire, and then you just go to leisure land and do the long goodbye. I don’t think this is what this generation of people is going to do, I really don’t think people are, the big buzz in the media is what are the boomers’ going to do? Are they going to do like mom and dad, and go off to Florida, eat dinner at 5:30 in the evening, pull their pants up to here and play shuffleboard? Well, they’re not, and Peter said go out and find the people who are making the second half work, and I came to call them the code breakers. Peter told me, this is very important about Willow Creek and churches too, that the distance between the best and the average is constant. If you raise the best up the average goes up. For example, when Roger Bannister ran a four minute mile in the 1950’s nobody thought that was possible for a human being to do, and about a week after he ran a four minute mile every high school miler notched up their time five or ten seconds. Within a year after that thirty people had run a four-minute mile, and even two years after three hundred people had run a four-minute mile. So these people in this book that I set out to interview, he said go find those, and tell people about it in their words, and so they’re the code breakers. They’re the pioneer’s, they’re out ahead of the rest of us, and that’s whom you learn from.
Hybels:
What I just thought was absolutely fascinating was these sixty-two people, different walks of life, male and female, different economic bracket’s, they all came to the conclusion that life 1, that first half of their life, had run it’s course, and then they all took a little different approach to figure out what life 2 really meant, or how God wanted to configure life 2. Not only was this interesting to me because of my age and stuff like that but at Willow I’m operating with a theory these days that the greatest untapped resource in the next ten or fifteen years around this church is going to be all of the people who are finishing life 1, who don’t want to just go to dinner at 5:30 and shuffleboard. They love God, and they love our church, but we have to engage them at a whole different level than they could be engaged in life 1 when they were working sixty hours a week and commuting downtown. We have to tap in to the incredible potential of all the life 2, second half people who are ready to give time, energy, resource, experience, they’re ready to give it if we call them to it. If we don’t call them to it, the call to golf might win. We have to call them to it, and we have to engage them at a very high level. In other words, you have to call them to something that’s challenging, that brings the best out of what they spent the first half of their life gaining experience to be able to provide. So my sincere hope and desire, as all of you I hope, are trying to figure out how to do a volunteer revolution in your church, I hope that somebody from your church, if not all of you here, would pick this up if for no other reason than to understand what’s going to happen to a segment of your church whether you’re ready for it or not. People are moving from one phase to the other, and it’s an enormous opportunity for us as church leader’s to engage them. You would certainly agree with that?
Buford:
Yes, and if you squander it God’s going to hold you accountable, just to put it correctly.
Hybels:
Me, personally?
Buford:
All of us, and yes you too. Golf is going to win, golf is nifty. Pick up Town and Country magazine or one of these four color magazines. The pages are so thick they’re like a sandwich or something, and they’ve got all these professional four color ad’s, people tempting you to, how many watches can we buy, and stuff like that, and that’s going on all around. God’s still, small voice is spoken through you. You’re the carrier’s, the human carrier’s of God’s still, small voice. The last thing Bill said this morning is this is no burden to these people, you’re going to save their lives to do this because after a while the magic of doing another deal or buying another cable system as I was doing just wears off, and you begin to say been there, done that, now what? And if there isn’t someone to model now what, and there aren’t mechanism’s like the ones Jim Miotta was describing earlier where you have programs, first step, second step, third step, if there isn’t a biblical, ethical, and moral foundation and call by Christ himself to do this, it’s on every page of the New Testament to go do something, then people are going to veg out. It’s comfortable, I was in the television business, we put people to sleep six hours a day, and it’s America’s Sominex. There is more in people, the biblical parable of the Sower says, and I believe this is accurate, that every single human being is soil that could multiply thirty fold, sixty fold, a hundred fold. Now what’s on my T-shirt which is, Peter Drucker said you ought to be able to get your personal mission statement on a T-shirt, is a 100-X. I like a hundred of those, I liked it better in business, and I like it better in kingdom work. People have that capacity, if it’s but called it. The three challenges that emerge from the book are simply providing enough margins in your life to do kingdom work. If you’re just totally, if your dance card is full you can’t do that, finding out who you are, not who you are as a lawyer or a cable TV guy, but who you are as a human being, and Network and other programs give a lot of help in that, and then finding a context in which to serve, and getting challenged, it’s important, and critical. This conference is a dream come true for me because the mission Peter Drucker told me came from God was to work, spend the rest of my life working on transforming the latent energy in American Christianity into active energy, and that’s what this volunteer revolution will do. It is about accepting Christ, and it is about studying the bible, and it is about being in community with other believer’s but ultimately you’re going to be like the third seed in the parable, if you don’t go to work, if you don’t serve someone. Read the book of James, or read about every third paragraph of Jesus for that matter, and people are not going to grow spiritually, and the churches are not going to be credible to the broader public if it doesn’t change people’s lives. I just spent five hours two weeks ago with a New York Times reporter who is trying to figure out what’s going on, that there is some kind of spiritual renaissance going on in the United States, and she doesn’t quite understand it. It’s because it’s not the normal thing in churches, but you can make it the normal thing, and you can be credible in the New York Times, and to ABC, and other places like that because they’ll see that the go-to place for creating a volunteer revolution is called the C-H-U-R-C-H. That’s the body that God ordained, end of sermon.
Hybels:
Let’s thank Bob for joining us here, and I strongly, we have this book in the book store, and Bob is gracious enough after the session with Jean Apple, when that’s all concluded Bob’s going to be in the book store if you’d like to greet him, if you’d like him to sign a book or something, he’ll be hanging out there to interact with any of you on that subject matter. In a moment I’ll ask you to thank Bob one more time, but we’re going to see a video before Jean comes up, and it’s about some volunteer’s who are doing the real thing.
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