iRetire4Him Show 141: A Mission Trip You Can Take From Home
Jim: You've tuned into iRetire4Him, a podcast dedicated to Christ followers all over the country, seeking purpose in the retirement years. Your retirement years, they may be 30 years of purpose driven, fully funded ministry, years of making impact in ways and places you never imagined.
And we're your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg. Check us out online, iRetire4Him.com. It's, I retire the number 4 him. Dot com. So what does it look like to be a fully funded missionary in your retirement years? Does it mean you have to go overseas or to an impoverished part of our country, or is it just a paradigm, mindset shift that involves looking at our neighborhood and time and seeing what God really wants to do with it all?
Could it still involve golf, tennis, pickleball, seashell hunting, camping, vacations, et cetera? Sure it could, as long as you're working with God and serving at the pleasure of the king. Retirement could be some of the most fulfilling years of our life, and with the proper mindset every day can have meaning and impact. But how do you get started with this paradigm shift? Our friend Mike Henry, with Follower of One, is here today to tell us about his plan to build purpose and meaning into every day.
Mike Henry, welcome to iRetire4Him. All right, Mike, you're in your sixties now. Shouldn't you be retiring?
Mike Henry: I probably should be retiring, but I can't not do things. I just don't wanna play golf. I actually spoke to a couple of friends recently. One of 'em was playing golf all the time. The other one's hunting all the time. I'm sorry, I can't do that. So I started asking God what he wanted me to do and got into a bunch of other things.
Jim: So you were facing retirement - I remember, like when you finally get social security and you're like, but the Lord said now you're not done. And that's about when we first met, which was nine years ago already. God laid Follower of One on your heart. What is Follower of One all about?
Mike Henry: So Follower of One is an online community for people that want their faith to matter every day. And so we just connect people, online mostly because it is easier oftentimes, for me anyway, to find people that want to do something with their faith. I can find them online easier than I can find them at most churches.
Most of us at church, I get the impression that we're somewhat content, or we believe that we can't do much more than what we're doing. And so even before I was retirement age, I was getting late in my career and questioning how I could do more with my faith in the workplace. And that's what prompted me to start Follower of One, was just I wanted to be in a community with people that wanted to do something else with their faith.
Martha: So talk about that community. What does that really mean to be in the Follower of One community?
Mike Henry: We have a private, kind of an app that we use, that we pay for, and people create a profile in this app. It's like a private Facebook. But it's not on Facebook. It's at FollowerofOne.org. And if you click on community, it will tell you a little bit more about it, but you can join in that community and in there we have conversations and we do different activities designed to help believers live out their faith right where they are.
One of those activities is an idea that we created called the Marketplace Mission Trip, where we challenge people to go to their own job like they're going on an overseas mission trip. And we just, we encourage people who are retired, people who are still employed, even people who're working on a student version of the Marketplace Mission Trip to help people realize that if we get up every morning looking for who Jesus would have us interact with, we're on a mission trip.
And he puts us to work and he give us - in whatever I'm doing today, I get opportunities to interact with people and try and help them live out their faith.
Jim: Well, and that's really why I wanted to bring on iRetire4Him 'cause I think we need to do that for our retired friends because there's an intentionality that needs to be interwoven in our retirement years that is just as significant as that intentionality at work or even in school. I wanna get back to that in just a second because if we're truly followers of one, of the one and only, then it's important that we examine all areas of our lives and make decisions that honor him as well.
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Alright, you spent the last several years guiding workplace believers to a paradigm shift in their minds. You just mentioned students to a paradigm shift in their minds. Talk about the paradigm shift you're looking for because I wanna talk about this paradigm shift to retired folks.
Mike Henry: So retirement is just choosing what we do. For the first 40 years of my career, I pretty much agreed to do things. Many of them weren't even wise decisions on my part. Some times I got laid off. I got asked to leave a couple of times. A couple of times I couldn't wait to leave because I was bad at choosing what I did, but I still did them. I did the work that was given to me. Now I'm choosing a different work and I get to choose to use those gifts and abilities that I enjoy more and they give me energy.
And so I started Follower of One as a side hustle while I was still employed full-time as vice president of a technology company. And right after we got approved with our 5 0 1 C3, the music stopped and there was no chair for me at my former employer. And so I started doing contract work with some friends and working on Follower of One because that was my choice.
And I'd get up every morning now and work on Follower of One and I get to do that. And so I just feel blessed in that regard. But now I'm using all my experience to make a difference in the lives of other people that want that. We create content that we share on social media. We've created reading plans for the YouVersion Bible app, and we've created this marketplace mission trip and several other things that we're doing to try and help believers realize that they can enjoy their faith in the middle of a regular paying job.
You don't have to wait until you get to church to do something with your faith. You can start doing something with your faith right where you are.
Martha: Okay, so I'm gonna say a couple of housekeeping things just so that the listeners know. I'm gonna put in the show notes some links so they know how to find Follower of One, find this community you're talking about.
And I love your perspective, Mike, on this idea that retirement is really just a season where you really get to make some choices that you haven't gotten to make for quite a while. And I don't know if you're like me, but like when we wake up on Saturdays, sometimes we wake up earlier than a workday because we are getting to make a choice of how we're gonna spend the day and we're eager about it.
And so as I think about our listeners of the iRetire4Him Crowd, this is an opportunity for you to really find a community where you can invest in others. The platform is such a great place to be able to encourage other people and to challenge them to respond, and I see such an opportunity for people to spend time there, choosing to spend time there and speaking to others that may still be in the workforce earning a paycheck.
That you as a retiree have wisdom and good counsel and wise words that you can share to other people that really wanna hear it. You knoq, there's nothing worse than trying to share wisdom where it's not wanting to be heard. But this is a format where people are looking for people to speak into their lives. And so I just, I feel like that's really important for the listeners to hear, that this is a place where you are welcome and needed.
Jim: Online at FollowerofOne.org.
Martha: That's right.
Jim: Sorry, Mike.
Mike Henry: Yes. Thank you. And I agree, I think that we're called to walk in the joy that we have following Jesus so that other people are interested in that. They won't hear us preaching to them about, if you did this, you would experience more joy. What we need to do instead is go live that joy so that other people are curious and they want to see that. Many of the people, many of the younger people that I attend church with believe that they can't experience this kind of joy in their regular daily job, but they can.
Once we punch in with Jesus, I talk about how "here I am, send me" is like clocking in. And if I punch in and go to work today and I ask Jesus to direct me, he will give me more joy and I will see him working in the lives of the people that I interact with, even in difficult situations. And I wish I'd have had that more of that joy when I was younger in the workplace.
So now that's what I want to communicate. And in retirement, if you will, is to help other people realize that you don't have to wait until you're old to do this.
Jim: You know what I love? Martha and I've been on multiple marketplace mission trips and those times where we gather together, we prepare for a week on really shifting our mindset to being intentional, with living out our faith in specific ways that you lay out for each of the trips, then you have a whole week of putting those things into practice and then sharing them at night with other people that are on the quote unquote missions trip.
Now, you're not going anywhere except back to work but what you say, Mike, it's just hilarious, is that a lot of people spend a whole year getting ready to go on a one week long short-term missions trip. Most of us spend zero time preparing to go on a lifelong missions trip to our workplace, and so the idea is preparing.
Now what Martha and I've loved is the community, the people that we've gotten to know on those trips. I think we've done three each, and I know on some of those trips there were some retired people that joined us. You've had people that are no longer working join the trips, haven't you, Mike?
Mike Henry: Yes.
Jim: Why? Why would they do that? It's not a marketplace mission trip then.
Mike Henry: In, even people tell me I'm retired, I don't work. And I say, what? When you go to breakfast, you're at somebody else's workplace. Or when you go to lunch, you're at somebody else's workplace.
It's just paying attention to the people around us. And so well, I think I, I get this opportunity and this joy of paying attention to the people that I interact with. And to me, those retired people, they enjoy it as well. We're free to be available, to be interrupted by somebody and to be helpful to someone.
And so it's just exciting to me. To live out what Jesus has for me. When you, once we realize that the person we might be in line behind at the coffee shop is somebody that Jesus might have us interact with today it becomes this adventure we get to live. It's not boring. We're not dying to get through it.
I'm excited about what happens next. Yeah, and I, we practice, we call 'em the five Daily Habits, but it's just being intentional with the people that we interact with, praying, appreciating them, being prepared to answer and then doing whatever God calls us to do. And to me, that's just, it's the way I should have been living my whole life.
I didn't become a Christian until I was 30, so I had a lot of bad habits to unscrew, but. We get this, we're called to be here to make a difference in the lives of people, not to just get through it with a lot of stuff. And so that's my job is to try and figure out how to do that. And as a retire, people have this, we have this extra advantage of the experience that we've lived through.
To be able to put that to work for other people and to me. This is a great opportunity because I have the freedom to do it. I just feel blessed in that regard.
Martha: It reminds me of a book that as parents we went through that was called Age of Opportunity, and Paul David Tripp talks about, using opportunities to teach your children gospel lessons, right?
The same thing is true in all of life. When we talk about the retirement years, you have different opportunities than you've never had before. It could be. That you have a little bit more time when you are out to lunch with a friend to ask the waitress how they're doing, or to ask them what you could pray for them about, because you don't have to necessarily be outta there and back to work at the end of lunch.
I know we keep talking about food and going out to. Eat a lot, but apparently you're hungry. Apparently we think that's what all retirees are doing, I just, I think that using the opportunities that are around you and being intentional is really the bottom line of what we talk about on iRetire4Him is using all of the life experience and all the wisdom that God has given you for a bigger.
Purpose. So today we're talking with a retirement crowd and one of the things that I know Jim and I have experienced with our own parents is how easy it is to click on the click bait on the computer. And within just a couple of minutes, you can be so compromised by the things that are put in front of you.
So mom.
Jim: We're talking about you.
Martha: I wasn't gonna, be that specific Jim, but
Jim: we can't pick on your dad anymore. He iss with Jesus. But
Martha: that's true. But we've experienced Ted, we were
Jim: also thinking about you. Okay. We
Martha: experienced a lot of that danger that comes from clicking on things where there's an ad that can take information from you or whatever.
But Safer net.com is an amazing safety net. For all of your computers and devices, it's simple to install whether you do it yourself or have your grandkids help you, or SafeNet can walk you through it and it's really at a price that makes it an easy decision. So check out safenet.com today and tell them that I work for him, sent you and we will put those links in the show notes as well for you to find it easily.
Jim: Mike I want you to talk to the, iRetire4Him Crowd today 'cause there's a couple of ways you can get involved with follower. One. One is go on a trip and learn to start developing that mind shift set. And really, we talk a lot about that in the book iRetire4Him. How do because a lot of people don't have a lot of money and can't afford to go on trips.
In order to get a ministry mindset, but a lot of us live in neighborhoods. Oh yeah. We all live in neighborhoods of some sort. How do we learn to turn on that mission mindset in our neighborhood to be loving our neighbor like Jesus talked about? But that's just one way they could go on a trip with you guys, and we recommend everybody listening.
Go on a Marketplace Mission Trip with Follower of One do org. But Mike, there's other ways people can get involved. What would some of those ways be?
Mike Henry: Just praying for our ministry or being involved in the community. There are other ways we're inviting. One of the things that we do is we do the marketplace mission trip. We do them now customized for churches. And so we're inviting more and more churches to consider adding a marketplace mission trip to their standard annual missions calendar. And so you might go to whatever countries your church goes to. But also adding a marketplace mission trip and inviting the rest of your congregation to also take a mission trip every year without going anywhere.
And so we do that as well. I really believe the next great move in the church are people who are living their faith every day, inviting other people into that mode. That we need to help make it very attainable. I've always felt like that the standard answer was that I was just supposed to stay out of trouble until I could get back to the church and do whatever the church was doing. But when we start ministering to the people that we interact with every day, we're always in ministry. And we don't have to just stay out of trouble. We can cause trouble.
Jim: I don't have to stay outta trouble anymore? Wow. (laughter)
Martha: That's so great. So for our retirees that are listening, this is what Mike is really saying, is like you can think about even leading a marketplace mission trip within your church and they make it incredibly easy. Everything is set up and you don't have to understand all the technology. They'll help you with that. But what an amazing way to have a purpose, something to look forward to that you know is intentional, that is gonna help a lot of people, not just prepare for one week, but prepare them for the rest of their lives and to not live in regret saying, man, I wish I'd have been more intentional.
Mike, you were saying earlier, I felt like I had to make up for lost time and I should've been living like this. And those are the kinds of things that we wanna give an opportunity to say, from here forward, let's be more intentional. Let's do things for the kingdom and the marketplace mission trip is one of those things that experiencing it will really help you to understand it for yourself. So, maybe the best next step would be for anybody listening to go to the website, FollowerofOne.org and join an upcoming mission trip so you don't have to know anybody on it.
Join that trip. Experience it for yourself, and then tell your friends at church about it and maybe get a group of people from your church to go on mission together and experience it even deeper. It's very doable. It's very worthwhile, and you don't have to raise money for a year in order to do it.
Jim: I got a question for you, Mike, but I wanna say something first. Everybody listening that's a retiree, pre-retirees, 50 and older, we have so much wisdom we've gathered from our screw ups and from the successes that we've had. The Marketplace Mission Trip is a phenomenal platform for sharing that wisdom in a community of people that are truly seeking to be a better Jesus follower, a follower of the one.
It's Follower of One, but you just eliminate the the, because we know who the one is. And if you've been looking for a place, maybe you're 75, maybe you're 80, and you're like, I just wanna be able to pour my life into others. I don't know what platform to do that in. Everybody under 90 - even 91, my mom uses Zoom - knows how to use Zoom because of COVID. That's all we do is you use Zoom and you connect with people and you can pour your life into somebody and they may be all over the world. That's why Follower of One is so important. It is a place for you to use what God has given you and poured into others.
Mike, what do you think about that?
Mike Henry: I agree. In fact, a couple of other things too, I'm wholeheartedly behind what you're saying. There are all kinds of ways to get involved. We've also created a six week small group kind of discussion guide version of this. If you want to do this like a small group, just get a few copies of our workbook and do them together just like you would do anything else at your local coffee shop.
We're also totally donor supported. Maybe somebody wants to invest in a ministry or helping do that. Everything that we bring in goes towards mobilizing Christians, and that's our goal is to help every Christian realize that we're a minister to the people that we interact with. And I'm not, my church might get a little irritated with me, but I'm not trying to drag people to my church to hear about Jesus.
I wanna live in such a way to where if they want to know more about him, they're asking me. And that I believe is what we're challenging believers to do, and so people who are interested in being a part of that, check it out.
Jim: Mike Henry with FollowerofOne.org. Thanks for being on iRetire4Him today. Appreciate it, Mike.
Mike Henry: Thanks for having me.
Jim: Check 'em out online, FollowerofOne.org. Thanks for tuning in to iRetire4Him. Martha and I are super excited, we wanna see you live out your retirement to its fullest, so when you get to the end of your work, you can say iRetire4Him.