Mike Henry Senior-Making an impact on the work place. Follower of One. Make your work life count! Chief Instigator of Follower of One - He helps marketplace Christians integrate their faith & daily life.
Coming soon, a new small group study titled the Marketplace Mission Trip: A Six-Week Mission Trip to Your Workplace. check out his website. https://followerofone.org

Transcript:
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (00:00.407)
Welcome in to Echoes Through Eternity. I am your host, Dr. Jeffrey D. Skinner. I am joined in the studio today by Mr. Mike Henry, Sr. He and I connected on LinkedIn and I saw his ministry follower of one. It's just, I love the story he has there which is essentially that you are a missionary and I'll let him talk all about that and tell you all about that. But welcome in, Mike. It's good to have you here today.
Mike Henry Sr. (00:29.198)
Thank you for having me, this is a blast.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (00:31.763)
Yeah. So, so tell us a little bit about Father of One and what that does, what your ministry is there.
Mike Henry Sr. (00:38.402)
So the ministry basically is an online community designed to help marketplace Christians integrate their faith into what they do every day. And it kind of came out of this idea that several ideas that have happened in my career, but I became a Christian when I was already in the workforce and it seemed like almost everything the church wanted me to do was something that made me leave work.
or I had to get away from work to do it. And I just, I felt like it seemed strange to save me and then put me in a position where I can't do anything. And so I started asking God for ideas about what I could do and realize that there are so many things that we can be doing, but we think if we're not doing the church things, then we're not doing the right things. And all that kind of led into a 30 year journey that resulted in follower of one.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (01:36.687)
That's great. That's great. And you're right. I mean, we argue, I've got a, I told you before we started out of a church planting background. And so this podcast kind of serves kind of three purposes. I want to primarily echo the voices of people like yourself and, and you'll reverberate those and it's called Echoes Through Eternity in that. Marcus Aurelius was famous for saying, you know, what you do today will echo through eternity. And, and
Mike Henry Sr. (01:44.614)
Mm-hmm. Yes.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (02:06.875)
so often the message that we clergy give to the parishioner, to the laity, which by the way, is not a separation between professional clergy and the people. It just literally means the work of the people is what it's talking about there. And so, I hope that clergy are people. I hope I'm a person. Everybody is people. And so, when we're talking about laity, it wasn't designed to say, okay,
Mike Henry Sr. (02:17.413)
He's drawing. Yeah. No.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (02:34.615)
Here's the people and your job is basically sit in a pew and receive. And then if there's anything to do, they want you to come to the church, and we want you to do it at the church or within the church. And so this idea of the church becoming the center of all ministry was not even what Jesus did. Jesus did not begin his work in the temple. In fact, very little of his ministry took place in the temple. It was the temple that rejected Jesus' work.
Mike Henry Sr. (02:38.791)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Exactly. Mm-hmm.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (03:02.299)
And Jesus' message, you know, the temple essentially that crucified Jesus, if you want to say it that way, not the people, you know. Now they had a little crowd there in the end that they'd whipped up into a frenzy and they could say it was the work of the people, so to speak. But you and I know, you know, how that goes, right? So I love, but that's why I invited you on. I love your message at Follower of One. It's not about you. You're not the hero of that story.
Mike Henry Sr. (03:10.253)
Yes. Yeah. Exactly.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (03:30.191)
It's individuals. It's all about them finding their purpose and connecting that with God. And we spend more than 40 hours a week, at the very least, at work. And so, if everything centers around the church, it's going to be very little time for ministry for you. It's going to happen on a Saturday. You're probably already exhausted from, and we say 40 hours. If you're working in a job, we all know it's probably more than 40 hours.
Mike Henry Sr. (03:41.273)
Yes.
Mike Henry Sr. (03:57.658)
yeah that's right well so I almost felt like I was adversarial with many of my pastors
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (03:58.023)
I have a wife as a school teacher. She works a lot more than 40 hours a week. Uh, so anyway, I just, I love your message. I love what you're talking, what you're doing there. And so you're right. So tell us how you say it was born out of that conversation with God. How long after you were saved before, how long did it take you to kind of discern that call in your life?
Mike Henry Sr. (04:26.678)
during my 40-year career. It's been over 40 years since I exited college. But I didn't become a Christian until I was 30. And all of my early challenges were when I would ask my pastors about different ideas that I had or what I wanted to learn. The answer was, sure, come back out to the church, come back out to the suburbs.
I traveled quite a distance to work. I worked in industrial businesses early in my career, and then in big office buildings later in my career. And nothing was ever close to where I lived. And I felt like, because I couldn't get back out to the suburbs, that my best case scenario was to just stay out of trouble until Sunday. And I would even.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (05:06.541)
Yeah.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (05:19.493)
Hahaha
Mike Henry Sr. (05:22.606)
because this dates me, but going back, often people would use the term called into full-time ministry. And it just basically told me that I was a part-timer, that Jesus saved me, but I was just supposed to stay on the bench until the coach put me in on some key player. If somebody walked into my office and grabbed me on the shirt and wanted to know about salvation, I could help them, but there wasn't anything else for me to do.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (05:30.019)
Right.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (05:35.125)
Yeah.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (05:40.06)
Mmm.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (05:52.416)
Yeah, let's...
Mike Henry Sr. (05:52.71)
And I discovered that there are plenty of things to do, but you have to kind of disassemble some of the baggage and the meanings that we put on words. Mm-hmm.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (06:02.375)
Yeah, you're right. We do. I'll use the term, mercenary missionaries. And so we have essentially, and I don't think we did it on purpose, but just accidentally, we communicated to the parishioner, your job is essentially to fund the ministry. And so you pay us or pay others
to do the ministry for you. So it's a, you know, kind of a mercenary force, mercenary missionary force there. And if we're to do ministry, we're going to take a vacation. We're going to go somewhere overseas. You're going to go to Haiti or we're going to go to Dominican Republic or we're going to go to some other, you know, place that we perceive that needs Jesus, so to speak. And I'm telling you that there's a lot of folks here in America that need Jesus. And that's not to necessarily say mission trips are bad.
Mike Henry Sr. (06:42.598)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (07:00.683)
Um, you know, mission trips can be a very formative experience. The difficulty with that is that when we do that as with our children and our teens and we just, and even adults to a certain extent, as they begin to be the, the mentors and the chaperones for these trips is we accidentally communicate that missions happens somewhere else. Missions that's not happening here at home.
Mike Henry Sr. (07:25.685)
Yeah.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (07:26.279)
A huge mission field, as you point out, is our workplace. So talk a little bit about what does that look like? I know you have it on your website and you also have a podcast. And we'll get to that in a few minutes. But it says you are a missionary. See how easy it is to follow Jesus at your place of work. So how does that work?
Mike Henry Sr. (07:44.973)
Well, and so we actually practice what we call five daily habits. And really there are six, I've since decided there are six. But the five that we talk about that we do every day are pray, appreciate others, know what we believe, serve others, and speak for ourselves.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (08:03.935)
Yeah, that's good. And wow, what a powerful message there, because I think too often, at least today, in this divisive culture that we live in, it's almost like we are demanding that somehow people bow the knee to Jesus before they ever accept Jesus as their Savior, so to speak, you know? And then we've reduced that to saying a prayer.
Mike Henry Sr. (08:25.948)
Yeah.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (08:30.787)
And so people say that prayer, Jesus come into my heart, whatever it looks like for them, pray the sinner's prayer, and or the ABC, accept, believe, and what was it, confess, accept, believe, confess. And so, we reduced salvation to that. So now I've got my get out of hell free card, and I'm a Christian, but there's nothing that connects us with that. So I love that, it starts with prayer.
Mike Henry Sr. (08:49.681)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Dr. Jeffery D. Skinner (09:00.179)
I love the idea of serving and, uh, you know, appreciating our neighbor. Loo