Membership Cards

We recently mailed CBN-USA membership cards to the addresses listed on the website. If you did not receive yours, please send an email to Dave Cooper at The Ink Well at inkwell124@juno.com. Use your card to identify yourself at member businesses that may offer discounts and specials to CBN-USA members. As our organization grows and we continue to add more value to your CBN-USA membership through partnerships with other organizations, your card will become an increasingly useful tool!

Window Stickers

We have produced and are distributing a new batch of CBN-USA static cling window stickers. They can be placed on your car, place of business, or anywhere you would like to display your membership in CBN-USA. Please see your chapter or regional leaders for yours!

Website Member Records

Since the launch of our new website we have been very busy continuing to refine the site and increase its effectiveness. The site is being used to create email lists for various people in leadership to communicate with our membership. This is something it was designed to do. If a member's information is not correct, they will not receive important emails or the occasional snail mail communication that is sent out. We encourage everyone to check the accuracy of your listing on the website. If a correction(s) needs to be made, you can make the change yourself using the Username and Password that were emailed to you in June when we went live with the new site. If you do not recall your Username and/or Password, or you are not listed on the site, please email John Kocher at john.kocher@cbn-usa.org. Please use “CBN-USA Username & Password Request” as the Subject of the email.

CBN-USA Members - Hurricane Relief Efforts

Vineyard Church of Columbus is working with the City of Columbus to bring hurricane victims to Ohio. CBN-USA has volunteered to assist, as needed, with job placements once folks get settled.

The Troy Church of the Nazarene in Troy, Ohio had a 10-member crew of men and women provide assistance in Mississippi. They assisted with tarping roofs of salvageable homes, cutting down fallen trees, and general clean up of the wind blown areas. Working in conjunction with the local Home Builders Association of Miami County, they were able to fill a semi truck with food, water and supplies and a second truck with clothes.

An Army National Guard unit from Piqua, Ohio was mobilized on September 2 to Poplarville, Mississippi to guard business buildings and distribute supplies. The local people have welcomed them with open arms. They rescued a small, injured puppy that is now the unit mascot. They named him “Broken Buckeye”.
Westerville Christian Church in Westerville, Ohio, and the Westerville community united together and donated supplies to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. On Sunday, September 4, a 26 foot truck filled with water, food and baby supplies left WCC and traveled over 18 hours to a church in Gautier, Mississippi, just outside of Biloxi. It took nine men 1 ½ hours to unload the truck filled with supplies, but when it was empty the hearts of the victims, their families, and the Crossroads Church of the Nazarene were full. Tears of gratitude were shed and the empty truck made it back home on Tuesday, Sept. 6. Thank you Westerville Christian Church for committing yourself to Love God and Love People.

Executive Ramblings By Jerry King

The Blessings of Variety

Aren’t you happy that all of the members aren’t clones of me? Even those of you who have never met me can be happy about that. Too much of the same personality, approaches, solutions, my lingering Chicago accent and other characteristics would be too much for anyone. Fortunately, we don’t suffer with any duplication in CBN-USA; we are a very diverse group! That diversity in itself is a great blessing. The Lord has drawn us together for specific reasons and one of those reasons is to discover new colleagues that are fellow warriors in the spiritual battlefield that we call the business marketplace.

You have the priviledge of establishing many relationships with other Christian business people that you would never meet otherwise and enjoying the fruits of their lives and careers in a unique setting. What an opportunity to broaden your horizons, give and get some business, hear testimonies of the Lord using His mighty hand in the marketplace and be challenged to serve in the most effective manner possible.

So… are you taking advantage of this opportunity or are you hanging with the same crowd at every meeting? Do you attend the same meeting every month, or do you try to get to other locations and really experience the broader fellowship that CBN-USA offers? Are you reaching out actively to your brothers and sisters (and to our visitors)?

There is another aspect of variety that is on my heart. Without having the exact numbers, but based on lots of interactions with our members, I hope that you will encourage more women and minorities to come as visitors and to join the ranks. I cringe when people ask me about the “Christian Businessmen’s” group that I lead. We need to be very open and inclusive to all the Christians in the marketplace. Please keep this element of diversity in mind and in prayer.

Finally, I want to encourage all members to consider their role as potential servant/leaders within CBN-USA. We have a variety of opportunities at chapter, regional and national levels, in which you can serve, grow, nurture and set an example for your fellow members. Some of these are very visible positions and others operate behind the scenes. Each position will allow a member to extend blessings and open themselves up to the blessings of serving. Again, we are striving to bring all types of minority members into appropriate servant/leader roles. Each role presents a unique opportunity to model Christ…and that is what it’s really all about. I encourage you to serve. We’ll see who steps up to the plate before I write again!

Be blessed in the name of Jesus Christ and take your blessings to the marketplace to share!

Strategy & Alignment Day by Jerry King

CBN-USA was blessed on August 27 when 18 leaders attended a Strategy & Alignment workshop in Jeffersonville, Ohio. We had members of the Executive Committee and leaders from the Central Ohio, Cincinnati, and Dayton Regional Leadership Teams in place for an eight hour session. CBN-USA member Craig Hohnberger and Annette, his wife and business partner, donated eight hours that day and many hours in advance working to put this Action International program in place for us.

The overall team benefited in many ways; some were as simple as putting names, faces and voices together for leaders that had not met in person previously. After eight hours, most everyone was quite a way down the path to better knowledge of the co-leaders.

Under the Hohnbergers’ guidance, we explored various personal traits that impact team effectiveness (listening, cognitive styles and communication patterns being among them), took a self-scoring Personal Insight Profile and divided into two teams to conclude our session that focused on two key areas of concern for the organization as a whole—the challenges and opportunities facing our leaders and finding, caring for and retaining members.

There were many best-practice discussions about a variety of topics. The chapter meeting should be richer as the techniques and approaches are propagated from chapter to chapter. One great result is the likelihood that the regional leadership teams will meet to focus on the specific challenges they face and build a stronger network among the three (and more!) regions in the near future.

We will be discussing our conclusions at this month’s Executive Committee meeting and sharing new methods and ideas at chapter meetings. Thanks to all who supported this effort in prayer and many, many thanks for a job well done by Annette and Craig. Their experience as coaches for Action International will benefit us for a long time.

Networking Tip of the Month

The Origin of Networking by John Kocher

Last month we talked about why we network. This month let’s talk about the origin of networking. Despite its 21st century name, networking is a phenomenon that has been around since the dawn of man. Networking is an aspect of community and it has been called, “The good ole boy network”, “word of mouth advertising” and it is even encapsulated in the phrase, “its not what you know, but who you know”. One of the first scientists to investigate networking was Stanley Milgrim. In 1967, he conducted an experiment in an attempt to pose an answer to the "small world” problem. The small world problem starts with any two people in the world and asks what the probability is that they will know one another directly or through a chain of mutual acquaintances. So, Milgram's hope was to be able to assign a numerical value to the average distance between any two people on earth, measured by the length of the chain of intermediate acquaintances that connected them. To test his hypothesis that any two people could be connected in such a way, and furthermore that the number of intermediate links required would in fact be quite small, Milgram conducted two studies in which a sample of people were asked to move a message toward a target person. Each person in the sample was instructed to pass the message forward to one person they knew on a first name basis that they thought would be more likely to know the target person. If the participant with the message in hand knew the target person, he forwarded it and the chain was completed. In the Kansas study, the wife of a Divinity School student living in Cambridge was the target person. In the Nebraska study, a stockbroker who worked in Boston and lived in Sharon, Massachusetts was the target person. When Milgram analyzed the data produced by the successfully completed message-passing chains, he concluded that the average number of intermediate acquaintances was 5.5, or put in what are now familiar terms, the small world phenomenon says that there are only six degrees of separation between us all.

Reference
Stanley Milgram, "The Small World Problem", Psychology Today, May 1967. pp 60 - 67.

Featured Member – Loren Minnick by Bill Gaffney

Many in CBN-USA outside of Dayton will not know this name, but he truly was a father in one way or another to most of us. Loren Minnick passed away early in the morning of August 14. He had been a member of CBN-USA Dayton since the beginning, but that is only a small part of the story.

Loren was 88 when he was promoted to the corporate office. Loren exemplifies Matthew 25:21. He never met a service organization he didn’t like. Loren was a past member of Optimists and a current member of the downtown Dayton Rotary and Kiwanis clubs. He had administered both clubs over the last 20 plus years, as well as serving in almost every capacity imaginable in the Kiwanis. He was a 52-year member (never a missed meeting in that time) of Kiwanis and was responsible for bringing in over 150 new members. It would be next to impossible to count the number of United Way campaigns he served in.

Loren was a former city councilman in Kettering. He was also a recipient of the coveted Silver Beaver award by the Boy Scouts of America for meritorious adult volunteer service. He was an active supporter of Boy Scouts until his death. Loren was a member and active in his church, Westminster Presbyterian, for over 50 years.

Loren was involved in Christian businessmen’s ministry while many of us were still too young to know what it was. He was a lifetime member of Full Gospel Businessmen and a president of the Dayton chapter in the mid 80’s. While president, and with the help of many others, Dayton grew to be one of the largest and most active chapters in the country. They averaged 300-400 at dinners and even had a television show. Loren was also a founding member of IFCB (International Fellowship of Christian Businessmen). The image accompanying this article was taken at his IFCB 87th birthday party picture. Loren is the third back on the right side of the table. There are five CBN-USA members in this picture and the rest are IFCB and Full Gospel brothers.

Loren’s greatest accomplishment may well be his 65-year marriage to his wife Alice. They were more devoted to one another and in love at the end than they were at the beginning. You could see that by just being with them.

Many of us in CBN-USA Dayton regard him as our mentor. He had no peer at volunteering and getting others to do likewise. When you saw him coming with his hand out and that twinkle in his eye you knew you were in trouble. Every year Kiwanis would sell roses for Mother’s Day and, of course, Loren sold more than anyone else! His line to get you to buy was always, “You do love your wife, don’t you?”

Loren was working and serving God until the very end. I went to visit him the Friday before he passed away. Alice told me he had been trying to tell her something about booths that morning, but she didn’t know what he was talking about. I told her he had to be talking about the Dayton Rotary FitFest that was going on that weekend. It was Loren’s baby.

Acts 13:36 says, “David served God’s purposes in his generation”. Loren served God’s purposes in three generations. He would have hated this memorial as he truly served God with great humility, never seeking recognition. I will end by saying that wherever there is a Christian Business group meeting going on, especially in Dayton, he has a chair at the table. He truly was one of the pioneers. You will be greatly missed, my friend.