Episode 058: An Interview with Jimmy Mellado

In this episode Pastor Brady sits down with Jimmy Mellado, the president of Compassion International, for a wide-ranging interview on his background, the sources of poverty, and the challenges of leadership.

 

 

My mom said to me, “When someone grows up in poverty, they never think it is going to be a benefit to their children… and yet I can see how my growing up in poverty impacted not only you in a positive way, but is using it to be central to your life’s calling [to serve the poor]…”

 

We [at Compassion] are a church-equipping ministry… we believe that the strategy that Jesus invented of discipleship through a local church is in fact the best strategy to release anyone in any circumstance from poverty…

 

When we talk to pastors [in central American countries], we’ve learned that they’ve earned the respect of gang leaders, because the gang leaders don’t want their kids doing what they’re doing… so they’ve declared Compassion sites “no violence” zones…

 

Life in leadership is hard; life in leadership alone is impossible… I have to do life in community… I used to do mentoring groups with pastors, and on average 70% of them would say they didn’t have one friend that they could be fully disclosing with…

 

In my experience, as you lead over the long haul, you’ll either end up with a cynical heart, a hard heart, or a soft heart, and how you design your life will take you down one of those three paths…

 

The most important contribution you will make to the kingdom of heaven is not anything you do, but who you are becoming… I can’t stress that enough… that doesn’t mean we don’t care about results… “doing” matters a lot… but it is not more important than “being” in Christ…

 

A spiritual discipline can be any activity that you have dedicated to the Lord to either stop the natural flow of sin in your life, or increase the flow of the fruit of the Spirit in your life… spiritual disciplines help you do what you cannot do by “trying” alone…

 

Life will give you a lot of pop quizzes, and if you try to make the right decision when you get a character pop quiz, you’ll probably fail… you need to try to pre-decide how you’re going to handle the character pop quizzes that come your way…

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