{"id":934,"date":"2010-10-14T05:00:24","date_gmt":"2010-10-14T11:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/?p=934"},"modified":"2010-10-14T05:00:24","modified_gmt":"2010-10-14T11:00:24","slug":"winning-friends-in-the-sbc-beyond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/?p=934","title":{"rendered":"Winning Friends In the SBC & Beyond"},"content":{"rendered":"

“If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.”\u00a0 <\/strong><\/span>Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s amazing what influence you can have with those around you, especially those whom you call “friends.”\u00a0 Even a brief, friendly encounter with\u00a0someone who you have never met before can have a significant\u00a0influence on your future actions.\u00a0 Arm twisting and cajoling, in addition to\u00a0feigned friendship,\u00a0simply cannot compete with the real thing when it comes to winning people to your cause.\u00a0 If you want to truly “win friends and influence people,” you must be personally involved with the people you are trying to influence.<\/p>\n

One of the most vivid examples of this principle occurred in my life in May of 2002.\u00a0 In January of that same year, my family and I moved to Grundy, a small town in Southwest Virginia, where I began serving as pastor of Grundy Baptist Church.\u00a0 Known for its coal mining (praise the Lord for the coal miners rescued in Chile), Grundy had recently seen the arrival of the Appalachian School of Law, Virginia’s newest law school.\u00a0 The Baptist church that I was called to pastor literally shared a parking lot with the law school.<\/p>\n

Five days before moving to Grundy, I received word that a disgruntled former student had\u00a0gone into the law school, where\u00a0he shot and killed\u00a0the\u00a0Dean, a\u00a0Professor, and a student and shot and injured three other students<\/a>.\u00a0 I hit the ground running as both the church and the community were trying to come to grips with the tragic events of that cold, January day.<\/p>\n

Because of my legal background, I was able to quickly establish relationships with the President of the Law School as well as faculty, staff and students.\u00a0 In May of 2002, only months after the law school shooting,\u00a0I was asked to deliver the Invocation and Benediction at the Law School’s Commencement Ceremonies.<\/p>\n

The Commencement speaker that day was Rick Boucher, the long-time Democratic Congressman from Virginia’s Ninth Congressional District.\u00a0 As a political and theological conservative, I have rarely voted for Democratic candidates, despite the fact that I grew up in a Democratic household.\u00a0\u00a0After voting for Bob Graham in the\u00a01986\u00a0Florida Senate race, I had no intention of ever voting for a Democrat again.\u00a0 That changed when I met Rick Boucher.<\/p>\n

During Commencement, all of the\u00a0law school faculty and administration left their seats to participate in handing out diplomas.\u00a0\u00a0That left only Congressman Boucher and myself, all alone\u00a0amongst rows of empty chairs.\u00a0 Before I knew what\u00a0was happening, Congressman Boucher got up from his seat in the row ahead of me and came back to where I was sitting.\u00a0 He\u00a0proceeded to sit down beside me and, for the next 20 minutes, carried on a conversation with me like I was his long-lost relative.\u00a0 And, when I say carried on, I mean that he mostly talked and I mostly listened.<\/p>\n

He did not have to give me the time of day, much less sit next to me and talk with me.\u00a0 But, in that brief period of time on that particular day, Congressman Boucher was as friendly as could be.\u00a0 And, little did he know, it made a huge impact on me.\u00a0 In November of that year, I did what I told myself I would never do again — I voted for a Democrat!\u00a0 I would vote for Congressman Boucher two more times before leaving Virginia and moving to New Mexico.\u00a0 Maybe you wouldn’t have been influenced by a similar personal and friendly act, but I was.\u00a0 And, just to be clear, a vote for the Republicans at the time, who were all weak candidates, would have been a completely wasted vote.\u00a0 This year, who knows.<\/p>\n

Even though I haven’t voted for a Democrat since 2006 and will not vote for a single Democrat in the election\u00a0of 2010, that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t be persuaded\u00a0to do so again.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For instance, there are several of my fraternity brothers from Phi Sigma Kappa (Lambda Chapter)\u00a0at George Washington University that I would\u00a0support in an election (or otherwise), even though they are liberal Democrats (you know who you are).\u00a0 If they were running for office and needed my help, I would not hesitate\u00a0to do all that I could to support them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What would persuade me to vote for and support\u00a0a person\u00a0who I might not agree with?\u00a0 Quite simply, a\u00a0personal relationship.\u00a0 For with personal relationships comes trust and mutual respect.\u00a0 That doesn’t mean that I\u00a0have to agree\u00a0with them on some, or even all, of the issues.\u00a0 What it does mean is that friendship matters.\u00a0 Sincere friendship (or fraternal bonds) go a long way in winning people to your cause.<\/p>\n

I have no doubt that some will misunderstand this post.\u00a0 There will be\u00a0some, especially in religious circles, that\u00a0will automatically conclude that I am a\u00a0“liberal” because I have voiced support for “liberals.”\u00a0 While my friends, including my liberal ones, know that this is not true, those who I don’t have a personal relationship with will perhaps jump to the wrong conclusions.\u00a0 And, they jump to these wrong conclusions because they have forgotten that the politics of persuasion often begins with friendship.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There are causes that we passionately believe in.\u00a0 There are changes that we want to see implemented.\u00a0 Sometimes these causes and changes require winning people to\u00a0our side.\u00a0\u00a0We can try\u00a0arm twisting and hardball politics, which is often the easier and preferred method of those already in power.\u00a0 Or,\u00a0we can try the method that one of this nation’s greatest leaders advocated.\u00a0 In the long run, friendship really does work much better than force.\u00a0 What a radical concept!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.”\u00a0 Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States It’s amazing what influence you can have with those around you, especially those whom you call “friends.”\u00a0 Even a brief, friendly encounter with\u00a0someone who you have never met before…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[32,37],"tags":[55,97,414,439,464,465,520,3391,3392,841,3393,1031],"class_list":["post-934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","category-southern-baptist-convention","tag-abraham-lincoln","tag-appalachian-school-of-law","tag-friends","tag-george-washington-university","tag-grundy","tag-grundy-baptist-church","tag-influencing","tag-politics","tag-religion","tag-rick-boucher","tag-southern-baptist-convention","tag-virginia"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1LP7G-f4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}