Massah

Massah is a ten-week summer programme that takes college-age Jewish believers through training and outreach in Israel and India. I led it for four summers, from 2008 through 2012, with teams of fifteen to twenty-four people.

It arrived as a question at a conference. I had just left JPL and was praying privately about ministry, having told nobody. The programme's founder approached my wife and me at the Jews for Jesus Ingathering in Santa Cruz and said he knew it was a long shot, given that we were both mid-career, but would we pray about spending four months in Israel and India the following summer. They needed a married couple.

We said yes to one summer. It became nine years of full-time ministry.

What running it involved

Everything. That is why I count it as something I built rather than somewhere I worked.

The programme itself. Writing and teaching the curriculum. Scheduling ten weeks across two countries. Coordinating logistics between continents and interfacing with local contacts in each.

The inputs. A programme that has to be re-staffed, re-funded and re-filled every single year is not a thing you run; it is a thing you rebuild annually. I assembled the leadership team, recruited the participants, raised the funds — speaking in churches and building relationships with foundations — and did the follow-up with people who had been through it in previous years.

The people. Twenty young adults, ten weeks, unfamiliar countries, long days, and work that is emotionally taxing by design. You cannot manage that group by authority; there is nowhere for authority to come from. You manage it by being clear, being present, and being the person who has already thought about what happens when it goes wrong.

That last part is the most concentrated leadership education I can imagine, and I have drawn on it in every technical lead role since. A team shipping a feature under deadline pressure is a strictly easier problem than a team of twenty in Delhi in July.

It outlived me

I stopped leading it in 2012 and left the organisation in 2016. Massah still runs, which is the outcome you want from something you built and handed on — and a better measure of the work than anything I could say about my four summers of it.