5 Years in Concordia with LBT

00:00
Mike Rodewald
I got more gray hairs in that few months than I had previously gotten in a couple years. But we made it work. Now we can look back on it and we’re actually laughing about it. 

00:22
Rich Rudowske
Welcome to the Essentially Translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible Translators. My name is Rich Rudowske. I’m the Chief Operating Officer here at LBT. Five years ago, on October 25, 2015, Lutheran Bible Translators dedicated a new headquarters location in Concordia, Missouri, USA. LBT CEO Dr. Mike Rodewald and I sat down to talk about our memories at the time leading up to the move itself, how it has shaped and repositioned us for more effective ministry, and where we think the next five years might take Lutheran Bible Translators, join us on a little trip down memory lane. 

01:02
Rich Rudowske
We are here with Dr. Mike Rodewald, the first repeat guest on the podcast now, and this time not in the midst of a COVID lockdown. So we actually get to be in the same room together and talk about some stuff. So welcome back. 

01:15
Mike Rodewald
Thanks, Rich. Nice to be here again and look forward to it. 

01:18
Rich Rudowske
Today we are going to talk about LBT’s move to Concordia. We have been here for five years now and we just thought we’d kind of recap where we’ve been, how we got here, and where we’re going from here. We’ll just kind of jump right into it. So this move starts before five years ago. If we go back to the time that you were appointed by LBT’s Board as Executive Director in January 2014, you were coming on in June. What were some of the concerns of the Board for the direction of the organization at that time? 

01:49
Mike Rodewald
That’s a great question. During that time, 2014, thinking back on that, the Board doesn’t actually direct…the type of governance that we have in Lutheran Bible Translators is called policy governance. And so the Board directs through policy, not through directives from Board members. I did talk to some Board members privately and they had some suggestions of what they thought were some of the problems or the directions that Lutheran Bible Translators go. But the Board, by policy, has set a number of objectives. One of those is to create operational reserves that we would have reserves to cover in times such as Covid. As that we have had operational reserves. And what about the future? What were we going to do into the future? How was Lutheran Bible Translators going to survive and thrive as the future unwound? 

02:39
Mike Rodewald
And those were the main concerns of the board. I do want to compliment our previous Executive Director, who did a great job of shepherding Lutheran Bible Translators through many years and Chicago. We were there from 1984 to 2014. It was a wonderful place to be. We had outgrown that facility in some ways. Maybe I’ll talk about that in the future. But those were some of the concerns that what were we going to do into the future? 

03:07
Rich Rudowske
Okay, so you’re coming on the job, and there are those kinds of concerns. How did relocating the headquarters of the organization become a priority? What other things were at play there, and what were factors involved in doing that? 

03:20
Mike Rodewald
Well, the largest consideration was mainly financial. If moving was not a board mandate, the board did not say, you must move or do any specific thing that had to do with moving, but we should consider moving. So primarily it was a financial consideration. And I just have to say, personally, if you’ve ever moved an organization, it’s a huge job. I will do that one time. I will never do that one again. Because you were in that move, you understand what that was, all the dynamics that had to go with that. Part of the question was, the headquarters that we had, did we need a building? We had a 15,000 square foot building that needed about $500,000 of deferred maintenance at the time. The question was, do we look for funding to raise that five, to take that $500,000, fix the building up? 

04:08
Mike Rodewald
Then we had 15,000. We weren’t using a lot of that. The mission paradigm has changed so much since many years ago, 1984, when Lutheran Bible Translators moved to Chicago. At that time, we needed many staff. Missionaries needed much support on the logistics, support on the field. That’s changed now. Many of even the remote places we live, you can get things in those nations that we are serving. So we no longer needed the 15,000… made us to think, we can do this for a less price. Let’s sell the building and take care of things in a different kind of way. 

04:46
Rich Rudowske
Sure. 

04:47
Mike Rodewald
Financially, the turnaround that we found was the first year that we came here to Concordia. The turnaround was about $400,000, and we did not have to maintain the building, run the utilities for that building, and it gave us some breathing space. That $400,000 was enough to look in new directions. 

05:05
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. So once it was decided, this is strategic to look for a way to move out of this building and move to a different location. How did LBT leadership go about determining the location, what were looking for in a new facility, in a new location? What were the factors involved in that? 

05:23
Mike Rodewald
Yeah, good question. I do have to say the major reason for the moving was, again, financial. And the second major reason would be the ability to maintain our Lutheran Christian identity. We were open to any invitation which would maintain those two and then look at all the other dynamics that were in a particular location. We did receive nine invites and each one was a great location. With different ways of that we’d be able to operate positives and negatives, different groups of positives, different groups of negatives. They were all really partnerships. In the end, we chose Concordia and this partnership with St. Paul Lutheran High School as the most suitable. It’s affordable, it comes in a strong Christian community. And I just have to say, in Chicago there was a feeling of a waning Christian presence. 

06:18
Mike Rodewald
The community was no longer conducive to the Christian environment. I’m talking about the public domain government, and they seem to be moving in a different direction. In Concordia, we are very much welcomed or it’s very nice to be here with strong community. This used to be a two-year Lutheran college here in Concordia, and so there was space. When this became a high school, there was still space on the campus and a lot of this empty space, it’s given us the ability to use that space for our purposes, too. Great partnership we have with St. Paul Lutheran High School. 

06:54
Rich Rudowske
So we landed on Concordia, but what were some of the other options were looking at? Where were we thinking about going and how did we end up landing here? 

07:01
Mike Rodewald
Yeah, we had some great opportunities and invitations. All the other Bible translation organizations, I’m called the evangelical non-denominational Bible translation organizations said they could create space for us. I’m talking Wycliffe Bible Translators, SIl, and we made visits, site visits to those places. Concordia Seminary St. Louis issued us an invitation and offered us space also. Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne also offered us space to be able to serve. In the end, Concordia here in, kind of, the rural area was the cheapest option. And the advantage of some shared space that we had, that we chose this one as being the most suitable for us at this particular time. 

07:45
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, we’ll get into some of those benefits of this particular space in a little bit. 

07:50
Mike Rodewald
Yeah. 

07:50
Rich Rudowske
And I remember visiting some folks in Phoenix and we heard from folks in Ann Arbor and Concordia publishing house had some space. So, yeah, there was a lot of different opportunities. Kind of, speaks to mission and ministry paradigm that folks do need to look at their building space and are looking for ways to use that wisely. And so to be a ministry looking to use shared space instead of owning a building was strategic for us. 

08:17
Mike Rodewald
Very much so. 

08:18
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. Now we’re thinking back closing down the operations in Aurora. You’ve talked about that whole process as like, driving a car while trying to fix it at the same time or driving a car while eating a hamburger. Tell us a little bit about the challenges. 

08:32
Mike Rodewald
It’s pretty messy. You’d like to say that things are going to go just a specific way, but if you’ve ever had a big, juicy hamburger driving the car, you’re going to drop some on your lap. And I do have to thank all the staff that we had that was helping us to do this down. By leaving a location, we lost a number of our staff who could no longer come with us. And that was really part of the challenge of moving from one place to another. There was 30 years of being in one location. All the things that one gathers, one went into some of the storage rooms that had become storage rooms, packed on things, on top of things. You look at it and you say, what do we do with all of this? And you don’t wish to throw it all away. 

09:14
Mike Rodewald
You wish to find out what’s valuable within that stack of documents or archives. We ended up digitalizing quite a bit of data that we had sifting through and saying, this is no longer useful for the future, bringing some stuff with us, and it’s still in storage. We did find some boxes that had been brought from the previous location in Orange, California, that were stored from that time and looked like nobody had touched them at that time. So it was a good chance to review all the data that we had available and to say, what historical is helpful for the future, what is no longer helpful, and archive the rest through digital means. 

09:53
Rich Rudowske
That’s right. I forgot about those boxes from Orange. It was something special that you found in there, remember? 

09:58
Mike Rodewald
Yes. Many years ago, before one went overseas, went to something called Jungle Camp. And it was a time where we learned how to do things in a way that you would do in a very remote location where you didn’t have all the things, like stores. So I had some great pictures from that, and someone at the office in Orange, California, asked me to, “Could we look at that?” I’ve made an album out of these pictures, and I gave them this album, and I said, send it to me when you’re done. And then I went back overseas and always thinking, I wonder if they have sent that to my American location. When I got back, they hadn’t, but they had moved to Chicago, and somebody apologized and said, “We don’t know. We must have lost that in the move. We don’t know where that is.” 

10:42
Mike Rodewald
Well, when were getting ready to move to Concordia. My wife was down in, looking through some of the boxes that had come from Orange and she came running up and she said, look what I found. And that book had been sitting there for many years in that box, but I’m relieved to have access to those particular pictures again. But they had not been archived or anything else since that particular time. So we did look through everything else. I have my album back. Very grateful to have that. 

11:08
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, I got a good vintage LBT polo shirt out of that whole deal as well. 

11:12
Mike Rodewald
Yes. That’s a lot of things that we had stored away. 

11:16
Rich Rudowske
That’s right. There was lots of space to store, that’s for sure. So, yeah, there was a transitional time then in Aurora, and one thing I found fascinating was that we were also really more intentionally at that time, starting to work on our social media presence and experiment and say, well, what do people like or what are people really interested in here? And every time we posted something about LBT’s move, it by far was the thing that got most interaction. So there was a lot of interest in that, for whatever reason. The interesting thing for. I’ll just even throw a little bit of my story in. I came to the US and began work as director of program ministries. In September, I signed a lease to squeeze my whole family into this little townhouse, knowing that this is probably not permanent. 

12:00
Rich Rudowske
And then the owners of that townhouse sold it and the new owners said this lease needs to end at the end of May. And so already in March, we still hadn’t decided. We knew that the organization was moving but not where. And so anyways, then we had a board meeting in May and finalized this is going to be the location. And about within days, my wife had me in a car down here looking for a place to live. So we were the first to come down here in May of 2015, school got out here at the high school and they were going to begin work on renovation. Why, I should say collectively we were going to begin work on renovation. And the first step was to unload these rooms. 

12:41
Mike Rodewald
Yeah, that was a time, I do have to say, again, I do want to acknowledge the hard work of the staff. Unloading rooms, putting everything into boxes, bringing it in a moving van, bringing everything down. The whole goal was that still missionaries had to be supported during that particular time. Still people were supporting Lutheran Bible Translators through checks and gifts, and those things could not stop at the same time. And so the goal was, how do we maintain those things without anybody, the field staff and our partners feeling the move while at the same time making sure everything is getting in its proper places. And it was really awesome. The people that God put on those tasks, that were able to fulfill those tasks in a way that many people were not even aware that were moving. 

13:32
Mike Rodewald
Now, for the people that were moving, I got more gray hairs in that few months than I had previously gotten in a couple of years. And I know it was stressful for many of the staff, but we made it work, and now we can look back on it and we’re actually laughing about it and wringing our hands of how this is going to happen. 

13:51
Rich Rudowske
It was an interesting time. So we started a small kind of parallel office. While the operations were still happening in Aurora, we had a small office in built hall on this campus that my wife and I staffed, she worked in gift records for an interim period. So she was learning remotely how to do that. And I worked from there, and they began renovating this space over the summer. So again, every time we showed pictures about the place, that was the stuff that people loved. And there was a great blog series that we’ll have to see. Maybe on a throwback Thursday, we’ll have to throw that on social media. There was a great blog series on thoughts on the move. That, again, just really got a lot of traction. So that first day that the office opened here was in September of 2015. 

14:36
Rich Rudowske
I planned accordingly and was out of the country at the time. 

14:41
Mike Rodewald
Did well. 

14:43
Rich Rudowske
So when the trucks arrived from Aurora, others helped to move that stuff in. And there was quite a bit. We had taken staff down, I think, when the doors opened here. Well, when the doors opened in this building, first day before the stuff arrived, I was here. And that first day, the room we’re sitting in right now, which is my office, was the only room that was finished out. And so we had a card table in here, and my wife and Emily Wilson, who was our office manager at the time, because again, that was a position we made just for the move to figure know. So there was no, there’s a backbone to the office. She and my wife and I sitting at a card table with our laptops and a phone. That was LBT for about a week. 

15:23
Rich Rudowske
So it is stuff you don’t forget. 

15:26
Mike Rodewald
Yeah, I wanted to just jump in to tell our listeners the space that we’re in kind of has an interesting history. And St. Paul High School being…having the history of St. Paul Lutheran College, a two-year college. This area is a fine arts building. And back in the day, it used to be a music piano practice rooms and organ rooms, because back in the day, if you wanted to be a Lutheran school teacher, you had to learn to play the piano. And so they had practice rooms soundproofed with pianos in them. In this whole space, they took away that requirement for Lutheran school teachers. And when they took away the requirement, then nobody played these pianos. And so they had turned into storage. 

16:05
Mike Rodewald
And when things turn into storage over ten years, 20 years, they end up with old books from the library, just boxes of unused stuff. So as we renovated, the job was to take all of that out, to take small practice rooms, piano rooms and organ practice rooms and turn them into offices that we could use as space. And that was the renovation task. It’s very conducive and functional at this particular time. Works out really well, but we’re busting at the seams. We thought at the time, we’ll never use all this space, but the Lord has blessed us and we continue to add staff and missionary support and project support and we’re filling up these offices very quick. 

16:48
Rich Rudowske
So we had a dedication in October 25. So just shortly after the release date of this podcast is five years since that dedication. Tell us a little bit about what you remember. 

16:59
Mike Rodewald
The dedication that day is a blur for me, Rich. I do remember there were crowds, flags flying. Kennedy G from Liberia was our guest preacher as part of the story of Bible translation in Liberia many years ago. I remember the LBT director from Canada came down, was with us, activities well planned. For me, as the Executive Director at the time, it was a blur. And we had dinner at the end with many people that came and very thankful for everyone who came to support and see what Lutheran Bible Translators was doing in the new location. 

17:34
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. Pastors visited. President Hagen was here. 

17:37
Mike Rodewald
Yes. Okay. That’s right. 

17:39
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. So it was a wonderful day. It was some of the best weather we’ve had in Concordia. Some of the folks who may listen to the podcast there are our remote staff and they get to come. We have this series of meetings in January, which is. That is one of the least pleasant times to be here. And then we have this conference in July, which is the other extreme of that. But for those folks, I can tell you there are very nice seasons of weather around here. We just keep them all to ourselves, I guess. Yeah. So that dedication is five years ago. Let’s talk a little bit about what the move to Concordia has meant as a leader in this organization. 

18:12
Rich Rudowske
That’s a question I get asked quite a bit by folks who remember before we moved or caught up with our story as were moving. What has this move to Concordia meant. And was it a good move? Was it positive and why? 

18:25
Mike Rodewald
Yeah, I’m not sure if I mentioned, but our financial director at the time told us that the first move we gained not only the selling of the building that we had in Aurora, but we also gained about $400,000 in expenses that we did not have to spend on a building or utilities. That was a pivotal moment in that we were able to take that $400,000 and apply it in other ways than we had previously done before. That gave us some space, gave us space to create reserves, gave us space to spend more money on some of the projects that we’re doing. And really I have to credit to having that space through the years. 

19:03
Mike Rodewald
To be able to do that now has helped us to survive Covid and even thrive in many ways in a time of uncertainty where we had made plans and we can continue those plans with certainty knowing that we’re going to be able to accomplish those, even if Covid gives us a hit to some of the financial planning that we had done. Some of the other advantages that’s been really nice being here at St. Paul Lutheran High School is we have a lot of shared space. These are things we do not have to keep up. We do not have to keep them going, but we have access with them through our lease with St. Paul Lutheran High School, there’s conference rooms that are available. We use those once a year we come together in Concordia Mission Institute, is what it’s called. 

19:45
Mike Rodewald
Together with Mission of Christ network brings about 120 missionaries from all over the world. We’re together. We have families, we have ways of talking together, making sure that everyone is okay. It’s a time to learn new skills and just understand what it’s like to serve in God’s mission and that’s very possible here. There are rooms here on campus that people can stay in. And even when missionaries come to visit our central offices, our international offices here, they have space to just relax. It’s 100 yards away from our offices. No one has to drive in, no one has to fight traffic. We’re in a rural location. It’s very relaxed compared to some of the things I’ve experienced before being in an urban area. There’s advantages for each. 

20:31
Mike Rodewald
I think we have a great labor pool from which we’ve been able to draw dedicated and really passionate staff. Very happy to be serving in God’s mission through Lutheran Bible Translators in this location. 

20:42
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, I think that people are surprised sometimes at the rural location. I think there’s an expectation that an organization’s headquarters is going to be in a more suburban or urban location for various reasons. And the questions that will be asked is, “Well, do you have adequate access to talent to work in your organization if you’re not in an urban or suburban setting?” But just, it speaks to some of the unique aspects of who we are in our ministry context. Certainly we have some folks in urban context, but largely rural context, and so there’s just a good match that way, too. It’s just in a way, part of our ethos that we’re in these out-of-the-way locations. So even here where our headquarters is. And that has translated well into staff and missionary engagement. 

21:29
Rich Rudowske
When they come onto this campus, if they wonder, why did we choose all these choices, why did we choose to go to Concordia, Missouri? And they had that question until they set foot on this campus and saw. And then it just makes a big difference. The green space, the access to housing, everything in one space, and the kind of slower pace of life here all really helps with organization dynamics, which is critical, really, when you’re in 2020, when you’re running an organization, you’re lean and not a lot of fat and fluff financially. And that positive organization dynamics is really what gives you the edge in ministry, I think so. 

22:05
Mike Rodewald
True. And I wish I could say we as executive team had planned, all right, we actually didn’t. The Lord led us here, and then we have gotten the benefits of being in a, kind of, a rural location. My thought is the day of the big building is for a nonprofit, for such as us who are working primarily overseas, that we don’t need the big building. There are digital ways of doing what we did in the past, and so we’ve been able to capitalize on that by being in a more efficient space, if you want to say, than what we had before. 

22:37
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, like you’ve said many times with the move, lack of knowledge makes planning easy. And so we thought, oh, this is how hard is this? But we really were blessed by God with a lot of the situation we have. I think if we had to say, what’s the advice we would give anybody who’s moving? I mean, I only have one, which is, well, don’t do it very often, but practically speaking, don’t close your post office box for some time. That would be one of the things that we learned along the way. But, yeah, we’ve really been blessed. And I won’t say we fell into it all, but certainly nobody can say we had this all in mind. And it turned out just how we thought. It would. So five years here. What do you see as strategic in the next five years for LBT? 

23:18
Rich Rudowske
We’ve sort of established ourself. You’ve mentioned that the staff has grown now. We were down to bare bones for a year or two there, and then have been able to carefully and strategically build back staff to support, to tell the story of God’s mission and Bible translation. Where are we going from here? 

23:35
Mike Rodewald
In executive staff, we’re really using, it’s been explained to me, as a three-box solution. As we look at how do we understand what we’re doing now, how do we understand what we’ve done in the past and where we’re going into the future? So the three-box solution is looking at today’s work. What are you doing right now at this particular moment? Might call it operations. How do we do this and do it better? Efficiency, do it better and faster all the time. And so we are constantly working on that. And I really appreciate your work, Rich, as the COO, making sure that all our systems are working to the best that we can to have them work. And then there’s another box, which you look inside is kind of the historical box. 

24:16
Mike Rodewald
Look inside of it, see what you have from historicity that is no longer helpful for you into the future and selectively get rid of what is no longer helpful. Sometimes through emotion, we hang on to things. The building that we had in Aurora would be a historical way of doing things. And we look at the building and say, is this still helpful for the future, or is it not helpful for the future? And then make a decision based upon that. And then the third is creating the future. What are you going to do in the future? What’s going to happen? Of course, we can’t tell what the future is going to be, but if we don’t plan for the future, then we run the risk of running ourselves into oblivion. 

24:58
Mike Rodewald
And think of organizations like JCPenney or Sears that were the big organizations of the past, and they were not able to adjust so well for the future, and so they move into oblivion. I think that the future, creating the future, is all about partnership. No longer can we go alone. In the past, many agencies, and nonprofits, have kind of gone alone, done their thing. But today’s US context no longer supports going alone to do specific things, and so we have to work through partnership. Lutheran Bible Translators has a number of partnerships throughout the world. The Lutheran context in the U.S. is dwindling. It’s just a hard fact. And I even read something the other day that the Baptist church dropped 4% in their baptisms for last year. And so we can see the whole Christian context in the United States. It’s not like it was. 

25:54
Mike Rodewald
And how is it going to be into the future? If we see the trends, we say that it’s going to be dwindling. It’s going to be harder to operate as a Christian nonprofit in the States if we continue to expect things are like in the past. So how do we change? Where do we go? For us, the future of Bible translation is really in other places where the churches are growing and expanding and where their capacity is high, even as they may not have resources to be able to carry the vision forward on their own. And that’s why partnership is so important. So we’re putting resources into places where mission will be carried forth in a self-sustainable way. 

26:33
Mike Rodewald
And that’s the key, is how will our partners carry things forward when we are not around, or if we are not around to take care of them? If the Lord blesses us and we continue to be around in 100 years, we will continue to be faithful to the resources that he gives us. If our context is more like Europe, where they have no longer have resources to support the missions that they did 70, 80 years ago, then we need to prepare for that particular time. So we’re putting resources into places where mission will be carried forth in a self-sustainable way. And in a way, we’re becoming a trailing partner in places where originally were the leading partner. It’s just a mission paradigm changing. The future change is going to be different than what the past has been. 

27:18
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. So as a trailing partner, or you speak of that, you imply some sort of reciprocity, a reciprocal relationship, or more peer-to-peer type of operating, which is easy to say, and a lot of people will say, of course, that’s how it should be around the world. There’s a lot of capacity and so forth, but it’s a lot harder to do. It’s hard to not fall into old routines and ways of doing things, and certainly there’s a desire by the folks we partner with to properly honor the partnership and the relationship. And so that’s one of our greatest challenges, is authentic partnership, more than lip service and working in ways that really say, we’re here to serve, we’re here to fill in gaps. But you’re the lead. 

28:05
Rich Rudowske
The mission is your vision, and reaching out is your church’s objective as much as it is anybody else’s. And so that’s been pretty rewarding to be part of. 

28:16
Mike Rodewald
And it’s so true, because partnership is a matter of negotiation as you’re working together, as you’re deciding on objectives and goals. And the rules of negotiation are different from culture to culture. And so we have to be sensitive to what is happening in that culture and with that system, that accountability system and what is happening in our accountability system and make sure the two merge together and both partners are happy with the results and how we get there. 

28:41
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, for sure. I think that’s what we hear a lot of our folks talk about is both the joys but the tension of having a foot in two different worlds. And I think in a way that’s how missionary service has always been. But it’s even more so now that a lot of our interaction is right there in the middle, and in the middle you can get torn, you can get twisted, and it’s a very unique place to be. But when we know that it’s God’s mission and see how God is at work and recognize that God is always at work in mission, and there’s no set method that God says that’s got to be the one. There’s no set people or place or whatever. 

29:21
Rich Rudowske
God’s mission is a question of involvement and seeing where God’s at work and trying to line up with that, rather than making that our mission. What advice, as we kind of close out here, if there are nonprofit leaders listening, what advice do you have? If they’re wrestling with tough questions like you were when you started as our executive director? 

29:43
Mike Rodewald
Well, I guess the one piece I would really think about is putting resources into the future for the future. If we don’t think about the future and where we are looking at the data and say what trends are we looking at, then we really fail as nonprofit leaders. There is no certainty of what is going to happen into the future. But if we pretend like it’s not going to be there, if it’s always going to be just like the past is, then ultimately we’ll be closing the doors of our nonprofit sooner or later. For us, how we accomplish proclaiming the Word through Bible translation, the future, it will be a different way than how we accomplished it in the past. 

30:21
Mike Rodewald
So the end result is always going to be the same, that people hear the word and come to know Jesus as their lord and savior. But the who and the how, that continually transitions on a, I’m not going to say daily basis, but pretty close to it. 

30:34
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, that’s true. It’s an interesting time to be in. I mean, to honor what’s been done in the past and there have been so many people recently I was looking through some of our historical documents and just at the list of the names of folks that many of whom I’ve never met but who have been involved or connected with Lutheran Bible Translators at some point and did things a certain way, which was the way that was the right way to do things. 

30:57
Rich Rudowske
If you can say the right or wrong, but there’s the way to do things and now to both honor that service and that time and then say, we have to look to where things are going now and be in that space to intentionally make part of the plan, even part of the budget, to say we have to invest in whatever is coming next and not just be in the whirlwind of doing what we do now. And then all of a sudden you look up and everything’s gone over here and you’re still over. 

31:23
Mike Rodewald
And it’s a good picture that you’ve put forward. 

31:26
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. And I think our move to Concordia really allowed us to do that in some ways. As you mentioned, the building up of a reserve. So you have the ability to be strategic instead of reactive and to just be more nimble when you’re not tied down to trying to figure out how to make everything work with your building and your physical plant for your headquarters. I’m sure that works for a lot of ministries. For us, it was advantageous to become more nimble. You remember the time that Tilahun came the first time expecting to see a big headquarters? Tilahun’s one of our development officers, and he was surprised to just find a bunch of folks tucked away in this tiny little building making stuff go and, yeah, it’s a hidden gem, I think. 

32:07
Mike Rodewald
In fact, I was with Tilahun just recently and he was bringing forth that particular story again of just how humble he felt that Lutheran Bible Translators can be because we’re not trying to project a mighty front here in the United States, but all of our work is done overseas. And that’s where someone else told me not too long ago, he says, never seen an organization which raises money for other people to do mission instead of for yourself. I’m not going to say proud. We try not to be proud about that, but that’s a great observation is that the less money we can spend on ourselves in our office space and everything else, the more we have to put into God’s Word going forth into the world. 

32:49
Rich Rudowske
Very true. And that’s been one of the blessings. So five years here in Concordia, just like that, it’s gone. So it’s a pleasure to serve together. Looking forward to where God’s taking us next. And thank you for being on the podcast today and spending some time talking with us. 

33:03
Mike Rodewald
Well, it’s awesome. Just rich, this is God’s story of salvation that we’re serving in, and I just am ecstatic to be a part of that. God calls each of us into his story, and he uses each of us that others might know of this story, too. That’s why I really like serving in the story of Bible translation through Lutheran Bible Translators. It’s the story of God’s salvation going to the most remote parts of the earth through our own languages. I just want to say thank you to all who serve through prayer gifts, staff, missionaries, and partners. God is using all of us that his word goes forth. The word stands no matter what happens all around us, and it’s a great story to be in. 

33:47
Rich Rudowske
Thanks for joining Dr. Mike and myself. We hope you enjoyed our reminiscing as much as we did in producing this episode. It’s a privilege to work together with you in God’s mission that his word may go forth to the ends of the earth in the language people best understand. It’s been an amazing last five years, and we look forward to what God has in store. 

Thank you for listening to the Essentially Translatable Podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible Translators. Look for past episodes of the podcast lbt.org/podcast or find us and leave us a good rating on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, iHeartRadio, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow Lutheran Bible Translator’s social media channels on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. 

34:27
Rich Rudowske
Or go to lbt.org to find out how you can get involved in the Bible translation movement and put God’s Word in their hands. The Essentially Translatable podcast is edited and produced by Andrew Olson and distributed by Sarah Lyons. Executive Producer is Amy Gertz. Podcast artwork designed by Caleb Rodewald. Music written and performed by Rob Veith. I’m Rich Rudowske. So long for now.