There is great synergy that is building within Forums and CBMC especially around our Mission Statement, and I have never been more excited than I am right now. Our mission statement is:

“To present Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord to business and professional men and to develop Christian business and professional men to carry out the Great Commission.” (Matthew 28: 18-20).

This has been our mission since our founding in 1930. I also like this photo of our founders and the banner that they hung behind the platform at one of their conferences: “Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable Gift” (2 Corinthians 9:15). These men knew they were presenting Jesus as the unspeakable gift.

We have come to think of our two-fold mission as evangelism and discipleship. For the first 50 years, we were mostly about evangelism as presented in event-type settings. For the past 28 years—thanks to God giving us Operation Timothy through Joe Coggeshall and a number of other CBMC pioneers—we have built a reputation of solid discipleship among business and professional men. OT has been a wonderful means to an even more wonderful end, that being learning to live in relationship with God through Jesus Christ. So the historical method has been to introduce men to Jesus (evangelism) and then educate and train them to hear His voice and follow Him (discipleship). What CBMC has been so effective at is helping disciples of Jesus become disciple-makers.

CBMC Forums got its start back in 1985 at a Business by the Book seminar. Forum founders were struck that God had so much to say about business, and they learned in the six months following the seminar that it was even harder to do what they had learned. Here is the great marriage of Forums and CBMC. Forums invites men to join the journey with Jesus, continuing their discipling relationship with Him, and to leverage what CBMC has learned about evangelism in their workplaces.

Jesus says in His Great Commission: “Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age’” (Matthew 28:18-20).

You don’t have to be around CBMC very long before you begin to sense an urgency to “go and make disciples.” It runs deep in our culture; it is part of our DNA. For CBMC Forums, it is no different. We are presenting to our Forums members an awareness that Jesus is here in the present time. He is, in fact, the unspeakable gift of God, again the present of God. And we want to present Him to one another and to people who are far from God.

Ken Boa shared at a Family Conference a wonderful statement:

“Jesus came to give His life for us,
So He could give His life to us,
So that He could live his life through us.”

This unspeakable gift is Jesus and the abundant life found in Him. It is His Life in ours and our life in His that Forums is talking about in its Focus statement and movements:

Forums is presenting the Christ-Life to one another, our hearts are being radically transformed to His. We are living in mission with Him, contextualizing His Gospel, His LIFE; in our lives at home, our lives in our businesses, and our lives in the workplace at large.

Another “bolt of grace:” Do you remember that business man from New Jersey in an earlier article? At an earlier Forums meeting, he shared about a business deal where he hired a competitor to help with a project that was too large for his company to handle. The job was over in March and he discovered a billing error, he had been under-charged by approximately $60,000 by his competitor. Each month his controller asked what to do with the difference and he just said, “nothing yet.” December came and the controller came and asked again. As this Forum member shared his dilemma, his Forum team encouraged him to do the right thing. They helped him see the Kingdom opportunity, not only with his competitor, but also with his employees who were watching. They noted his opportunity to trust Jesus and grow in his relationship with God. He did the right thing, called his competitor, and worked out a solution.

This is “teaching them to obey everything I commanded you.” In Forums our discipleship is real-time and real-life, kind of the way that Jesus did it with His twelve. In Forums we believe He is with us always, still making disciples today.

There is a great line in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The Beaver says of Aslan, the Lion, the Christ figure: “Aslan is on the move.” In Forums, Jesus is on the move: among us, within us, and He is leading us on His mission into the world.