Herb: Vince, how did you get involved in ministry in general and men’s ministry in particular?
Vince: I spent about thirty years in the business world. I grew up under the teaching of Peter Drucker and Steven Covey live when they were teaching at UCLA back in the 70’s. I was inspired by them and by the whole idea of going out and speaking.
So I kind of cut my teeth on public speaking in the business world. I got into a lot of areas like how to evolve effective corporate culture, how to work with boards, how to deal with problem employees – a lot of business type stuff. So I was comfortable speaking in front of people and putting together messages. But it was all pride. It was all platform. It was all about me. I wasn’t thinking about teaching anybody anything, I was thinking about getting the “atta-boys.”
So when I left the business world, I went to work for a ministry called Everyone for Christ headed by Dick Eastman. It was a missions ministry. They brought me in to really lead it. We had offices in about 100 countries and we distributed literature door to door in countries all over the world. And so for five years I did that. I helped them re-envision the ministry. And then eventually moved that ministry from Southern California to Colorado Springs at exactly the same time Focus on the Family moved. So we were part of that wave of ministries that moved in there.
And then in ’94, as a result of seeking the Lord and doing a lot of fasting and praying, I wrote a book called Wired to Work. We?ve been wired to work in a certain way for God. But we’re also wired as workers. The book is available on all the electronic media including Kindle. The subtitle is “Answering the Two Most Important Questions in Life: How Am I Wired Uniquely and Why Am I Here.” It all has to do with vision. If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.
Everything in our ministry has to do with helping people discover God’s vision for their lives. So the transition for me out of the ministry position that I had for Everyone for Christ and out of the business world was the realization that God had been equipping me for going out and speaking this truth on how to find God’s vision for my life.
There was a formula I came up with along the way. It’s a very simple formula, but I’d been violating it for most of my life. The formula says, ?Intimacy with God equals strength of vision. If I am not willing to die to myself and be intimate with God, I will never discover God’s purpose for my life. I might have a vision, but it will be a vision more shaped by the world around me and my circumstances than it will be by God.
It’s very tough for us as men to get outside of ourselves and discover what God has for us. And to discover God’s vision doesn’t necessarily mean that you change jobs. It just means that God wired you a certain way. When you discover what that is, there are ways that you can live that out, even where you’re at. You don’t necessarily move to do it.
So everything we do is an attempt to help people find their way. I’m reminded of an illustration about Michael Angelo. he was asked how he was able to carve these magnificent masterpieces. And he said that he could see the vision of the statue in the rock while it was still in the quarry. “Once I catch the vision, the rest is simple. I just chip away what doesn’t belong.”
Today we are throwing drugs and psychobabble at people, trying to change behavior or trying to get people to go in a different direction when the secret is to just help them find that vision for their life. The porn’s not the problem. It’s a symptom. Anger is not the problem. Drugs are not the problem. They’re symptoms. You’ll never chip those away just because some shrink says you should. You’ll chip those away when you discover something bigger in your vision.
In the business world I was involved with mergers and acquisitions for a while. And what most people don’t realize is that most mergers fail. We put a lot of smoke and mirrors around them to make them look good. The reason [mergers] don’t work is not because they can’t. It’s because of management’s unwillingness or inability to surface a new and bigger vision that eclipses the individual vision for the company.
So whether we’re talking about merging churches or merging people, as in a man and a woman in a marriage, their failure to see God’s new and greater purpose for them being united is often times the reason for their marital failure. You need a vision bigger than your problem.
So the centerpiece of everything we do at On Target has to do with helping people find their vision. My life verse is Philippians 3:13-14, “I haven’t arrived, but one thing I do, forgetting what is behind, I press on toward the goal for which God has called me.”
Herb: So you do seminars. Tell us about how you do them.
Vince: The main seminar we do has been around for over twenty years now. Back in the great Promise Keepers days, the Man on Target seminar was one of the premier seminars in North America. We were doing them all over North America and Canada.
It’s about the five keys to unlock a man’s true potential: Release, Resistance, Relationship, Revelation and Response.
Release has to do with letting go of the past. Resistance has to do with learning to live a disciplined, obedient life so I don’t accumulate more negative baggage to have to let go of because men don’t understand that repentance is not a 360, it’s a 180.
Relationship has to do with the question of how do I now have an intimate relationship with God so that I have now His power to do these things.
Revelation has to do with how I discover His purpose for my life and how I’m wired uniquely as a man. We actually have them take a gift test, which is available online on our website: otm.co (not .com). There’s a free gift test there that they can take. It even gives them a report.
And then the last term is Response. How do I respond to a world that has gone mad? We are failing to affect our culture because we don’t know how to do it.
So that’s one seminar. And then my wife and I do one that’s similar for couples called Couples on Target. And then most recently I’ve been doing the six structural elements for churches for senior pastors.
And then we have the On Target Institute, a one year extrapolation of the seminar, which is a curriculum. It’s a small group experience that trains up discussion leaders and processes a strategy.
I’ve realized in my many years of ministry that we’re not having much of an effect on life change. In fact, on my website there’s a quote that I’ve never changed: “It takes a relational environment in order for truth to become transformational.” We’re giving truth out left and right, but lives are not being changed because we’re awkward in doing life together in a relational context.
So the On Target Institute is geared toward creating process driven strategies instead of event driven strategies. We in our culture for many years now have been eventing people to death. We call it the men’s ministry movement. And I tell my men’s ministry friends that only in America do we call something a movement that does not move. Men are worse off today then they were when we began. We’ve got our head in the sand. Whether you’re talking about the youth movement, the men’s movement, the women’s movement?they’ve all failed. By any objective criteria or discernable measurable standards, if you take, as a business would do, and read the results, how do you call that success?
The church is called to transform culture. How do you think we’re doing? How is it working for us? It’s not! But we’re continuing to do the same old stuff. So what I’m saying is that I’m beginning to look back with a certain degree of reality and I’m recognizing that we’ve got to change the way we’re doing stuff here if we’re ever going to make a difference. So the process driven approach, built around a relational environment, is the key to bringing about transformation.
Herb: You do speaking engagements around the country.
Vince: Last year I took a position at a 15,000 member church in Southern California and I thought I could be the executive pastor for a big church and still be able to do men’s ministry and that did not work. I could not keep the ministry going. That job was all absorbing and I’m so glad that I did it because now I have a platform from which I can speak. I’ve been there. I’ve done that. I’ve seen what church life looks like. I am a pastor. I’m ordained. But I’ve never been a senior pastor.
So this year we’re re-launching On Target Ministries again. Our twenty year anniversary is this coming June 4th. We’re going to have a big banquet and golf tournament in Colorado Springs. So now we’re actively opening up for speaking assignments again. I’ve got a lot of room still on my calendar for this coming year.
We’re also going to be developing more curriculum. We’re starting our On Target Institute in Colorado Springs. I had about two hundred and fifty men that we met with there every Thursday morning when it was in its heyday. And we’ll fire that back up again.
We’re going to start filming some teaching nuggets. We’re doing TV and media type stuff that we’re going to make available online, some of it free, some of it for subscription. We’ll reduce the teaching nuggets down to twenty minutes instead of the traditional forty, which really doesn’t work with today’s generation.
So we’re doing a lot of different things and we’re actively looking for places to go. I do a lot of pulpit fills for pastors who are interested in having us come out and speak. Those are very effective, especially if you’re doing it before doing an event, because people get to see you before you come back to the event. Couples’ events, men’s, pastors’ and leaders’ events, as well as pastors associations in different communities.
Herb: Vince, I want to just say how much I appreciate you as a leader and as a role model for me in men’s ministry. What a blessing it has been to see you and to know you.
Learn more about On Target Ministries here.