40 Years Of Faith And Freedom

Daily News-Record May 27, 2014

• CALEB M. SOPTELEAN

HARRISONBURG - If "the miracle in Romania" wasn't the highlight of Steve Wingfield's 40-year ministerial career - one filled with more than a few memorable moments - it comes close.

The Rev. Ed Scearce told those gathered at a dinner Sunday night honoring Wingfield's 40 years in ministry about how he and Wingfield witnessed the aftermath of the fall of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989. The two men, who Scearce joked were "two country bumpkins from Virginia," arrived in Bucharest on Dec. 28 of that year, three days after Ceausescu's execution.

The dictator's regime had killed hundreds of Romanian Christians in Timisoara, Scearce said. The bloodbath had sparked a nationwide march that resulted in some Romanian Army soldiers refusing to fire on Romanian citizens, Scearce said, and ultimately brought the end of Ceausescu, one of several Eastern European communist leaders to fall that year.

Scearce and Wingfield ministered in Romania for three weeks following Ceausescu's execution.

"The Book of Acts [of the Apostles] was wide open," Scearce said as he described those harrowing days. The men heard residual mortar fire during a National Day of Mourning event on Jan. 12, 1990, he said.

Prior to Wingfield's sermon, the crowd shouted, "Liberty, liberty; Ceausescu down, Ceausescu down," Scearce said.

"There were 10 to 15 minutes when we didn't know what was going to happen," Wingfield said Monday.

"God gave us the privilege of seeing something phenomenal," Scearce said. "Then the storm came!"

A storm that was headed toward them from nearby mountains returned to the mountains. That happened three times, enough time for Wingfield to invite thousands of Romanians to commit their lives to Jesus Christ.

"They say I'm an American with a Romanian heart," Wingfield said in an interview on Monday.

Wingfield lobbied for aid for the fledgling Romanian democracy when he returned to the U.S., Scearce said. By his own admission, Wingfield has made at least 28 trips to the southeastern European nation.

1974 A Good Year

Sunday's dinner at Harrisonburg's First Church of the Nazarene and hosted by the Steve Wingfield Evangelistic Association, honored Wingfield, 66, and his wife, Barbara, 62. The event, which drew close to 200 well-wishers, also served as a celebration of the Mount Crawford couple's 40-year wedding anniversary. They were married June 8, 1974, at Conestoga Mennonite Church in Morgantown, Pa. The couple's six grandchildren feted "Pops and Grandma" in recorded videos.

Wingfield grew up in the Lynchburg area and was the son of a United Methodist pastor, he said.

After getting married, Wingfield pastored a Wesleyan church in Roanoke for eight years before attending Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago for two years before returning to the Harrisonburg area in 1985, when he began his long career as an evangelist.

A Little Humor

The Wingfields' son, David, 34, shared a somewhat humorous memory of his parents from one winter day.

"They're both cheap," he said. "They wouldn't pay for the chimney to be cleaned," which led to occasional chimney fires. "Dad would take a bucket up on the roof and dump water down the chimney" to extinguish the fire, David said. One time, however, his father slipped on the icy roof and grabbed the gutter. His feet hit the ladder, knocking it over and into wife Barbara. She fell into the snow just as the water came raining down on her - as Steve landed safely on top of the doghouse.

When Steve asked Barbara if she was OK, she replied, "I'm not dead... ," David remembered. "Things were sometimes kind of crazy, but things always worked out," he said.

`Freedom ... To Preach The Gospel'

Romanian ex-patriate Petru Lulusa saluted Wingfield on Sunday, adding that he, "thank[s] God for the freedom Romania has to preach the gospel."

Lulusa, who escaped the former Communist nation in 1969, said nine members of his family came to know Jesus Christ in one of Wingfield's Romanian crusades.

Through four crusades Wingfield gave in 1990, some 11,000 Romanians came to know their Messiah, said Lulusa, who escaped his native country by riding more than nine hours beneath a train.

Lulusa was located beneath the train's toilet, which left him covered in excrement, Wingfield said Monday. That was his salvation because the smell helped him avoid detection by dogs, Wingfield said. Lulusa, who made it through Yugoslavia and on to Italy, where he stayed in a refugee camp for eight months, eventually made it to the U.S.

Lulusa prayed that if God would get him to the U.S., he would serve Him. He went on to become an opera singer and sings with the Steve Wingfield Evangelistic Association across the world.

NASCAR Next

In 2012, Wingfield began fulfilling what Scearce called "a lifelong dream" of evangelizing at NASCAR races through Victory Weekend events. This year has seen Wingfield at Daytona Speed Week in February and Bristol Motor Speedway in March, where he shared his faith in Jesus Christ at a somewhat unlikely venue. NASCAR crowds are known for their raucous behavior, but Wingfield has seen hundreds make the decision to follow Christ.

And the wheels keep on turnin' for Wingfield.

He plans to go to Dover, Del., this weekend, followed by Michigan in June and August, Dover again in September and Charlotte in October.

Anglican church branches out from Harrisonburg to Elkton

Valley Banner/Daily News-Record

ELKTON - A church that mixes the old with the new has sprouted in Elkton.

Church of the Lamb, an Anglican congregation that began meeting in December, has already doubled in size.

Although Church of the Lamb now averages 50 or more on Sundays, the goal of the congregation is not to be big.

The ministry grew out of Church of the Incarnation in Harrisonburg, which began in October 2010.

The Rev. Aubrey Spears started Church of the Incarnation with help from the Anglican Diocese of Rwanda. The church, which started as 27 people meeting in Spears' home, now holds services in a building at 292 N. Liberty St., Harrisonburg, and averages over 200 attendees.

The Elkton group is the Harrisonburg congregation's first church plant.

Although the Harrisonburg and Elkton congregations still maintain a connection with the African diocese, they are now in partnership with the Anglican Church in North America.

ACNA was founded in June 2009 by former members of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. They were dissatisfied with the increasingly liberal doctrinal teachings in their former churches, which they considered contradictory to traditional Anglican belief.

"Our goal is to become a small, healthy church deeply rooted in our neighborhood," Spears said. The churches also want to plant other small, healthy churches.

"Our strengths are hospitality and strong teaching," he said.

Home Groups Are Key

Even though its first service was as recent as Dec. 7, Church of the Lamb already has three home groups that meet in congregants' houses on Wednesday and Thursday evenings. The home groups are seemingly one of the keys to church growth.

The home groups' meetings usually consist of a meal, prayer, fellowship, a Bible or book study or video.

"If you want to know and be known, that's going to happen in a small group," said The Rev. Kevin Whitfield, a pastoral resident who travels from the Harrisonburg congregation to minister three times a month.

Spears, who ministers at Church of the Lamb once a month, said that a group of folks in the Elkton area had wanted for years to worship in their community instead of traveling to Harrisonburg. Church of the Lamb fills that void, he said.

Worship includes formal Anglican liturgy with contemporary music.

Spears, who grew up a charismatic Baptist, migrated to the Anglican church after an eight-year journey. Whitfield also was raised Baptist and was recently ordained.

The men see a beauty in the traditional Anglican worship but enjoy modernizing the worship experience by using contemporary music.

Sunday services are held at 10 a.m. at 315 W. Spotswood Trail in a yellow building and are followed with locally-roasted coffee and a dessert.

More information on Church of the Lamb is on the congregation's Facebook page and on its website at elktonchurchofthelamb.org. For more information on Church of the Incarnation, call (540) 432-5533 or visit theincarnation.org.

From Secretary To CEO: Fiorina talks values at JMU

April 16, 2014 Daily News-Record

• By CALEB M. SOPTELEAN

HARRISONBURG - "What you are is God's gift to you; what you make of yourself is your gift to God."

With those words given to her by her mother when she was a teen, Carly Fiorina moved forward in life, a life that has seen her go from being a secretary to CEO of Hewlett-Packard, one of the largest technology companies in the world.

Fiorina, 60, who has been a member of James Madison University's board of visitors since 2012, spoke to a large audience last week at James Madison University's Wilson Hall.

Fiorina gave advice on the topic of "Foundations of Ethical Reasoning."

"No success story is without its setbacks," said the breast cancer survivor who ran for U.S. Senate in California in 2010 and lost. "I've had triumphs and tragedies."

Fiorina graduated from Stanford with a bachelor's degree in medieval history and philosophy and dropped out of law school after one semester because she hated it.

"It was the most difficult decision of my young life," she said. "I had no idea what I was going to do with my life." But she knew one thing: "If I didn't love it, I couldn't be good at it."

She started work in the middle of a recession in the 1970s. Her first full-time job was as a Kelly Girl working as a receptionist for a small commercial real estate company.

In that low-level job, she learned a lesson she never forgot: Anyone can make a difference. Just six months on the job, two men told Fiorina that they decided to hire the company because of how she did her job. She was surprised. "They saw possibilities in me that I hadn't imagined before," she said.

She then taught English in Italy for a year and later got a master's degree in business administration.

That led to a sales job with the Bell telephone system in Washington, D.C., in 1979. She worked as part of a two-person team. Her partner was a male co-worker who scheduled their first meeting with a client at a strip club. She didn't miss a beat, though, going to the meeting and holding her own, winning the respect of her co-worker in the process, she said.

At another meeting, she was introduced as the company's "token bimbo." In spite of that, she succeeded.

Times have changed and conditions are much improved for women in the workplace, she said, but along the way she learned she could work with anyone as long as they both focused on a common goal. Fiorina also learned that she liked challenges.

"I kept taking jobs people told me not to take," she said. "I learned how to overcome my own fear ... and there were people I could collaborate with who could help me figure it out."

In 1999, Fiorina became the first woman to lead a Fortune 100 company. She did that until 2005.

Overcoming fear is like exercise, Fiorina said.

"The more you do it, the more you want to do it," she explained.

Fiorina said she learned that everyone has potential.

"Find your gifts," she said. "Have the courage the use your potential. Find what work brings you joy because you will use all of your gifts. Define yourself. Don't let others do it."

She encourages leaders to seek diversity of opinion and collaboration.

"It is worth your time to understand others," she said. "Ask questions. Successful collaboration requires respectful questions. If you go into a setting and everyone thinks alike, you'll probably get the wrong answers. If you ask the right questions of the right people, you come up with the right answer.

"Leadership has nothing to do with title or position. Leadership is about unlocking potential in others."

She related a question she asked an executive about why women were not using his company's smartphones. They weren't buying the early models because their fingers didn't generate enough heat on the touch screen as men's fingers, Fiorina said.

She asked him if any women were on the company's design team. There weren't. She suggested he add some. He added women to the team and sales improved, Fiorina said.

She defines judgment as "knowing the difference between what's important and what's not." Challenges, she explained, are not black and white.

"The tough times will come," she said. "Remember that in those tough times are the greatest blessings. It's often the tough times that make us what we are. We control nothing but our own choices."

Responding to a question about how she balances her work and personal time, Fiorina said it's hard because no matter what one chooses, someone is going to be unhappy.

"You have to own your choices. How you spend your time becomes your life," she said.

Values must trump results, she said. "The real test of ethics and values is: what do you do when no one is looking and you don't think anyone will ever find out?"