HOW WE BECAME FLOP
When I tell people the name of our organization, I often get a confused look… Followed by a long silent pause.. implying a question like: “What? Why did you name your organization FLOP?” At which point I usually explain that FLOP is short for our full name: FOR LOVE OF PEOPLE. Then I get a light sigh of relief and I am able to explain our mission, but I rarely get to explain how I chose our name. Well, I want to take this opportunity to share the story behind FLOP and to go deeper into our vision and what we plan to accomplish.
I need to give a little background here, for you to have a sense of how I got to this point. In 2007, I felt a strong sense of calling in my life to make serious changes because I knew God was planning to use me for something big. I had no clue what that meant at the time and it took several unique experiences and many years before I would.
I served first in a Street Ministry with people suffering from addiction, mental health, and severe poverty. I then began youth ministry in the church and learned to preach and later became a church elder. I soon found that I was in way over my head, preaching a Bible I barely understood. This led me to University and Seminary to learn Theology and to begin to equip myself for ministry. If I was going to do this, to serve God for real, I wanted to do it well and I needed to know what I was talking about.
At this point, everyone around me was either going to pastor a church or go on to teach theology themselves as those were the only career paths available, other than chaplaincy, which I only knew to be military at the time, and I am not the military type. The problem was, I was being called to something different. From the very onset of my burning desire to serve God, it has always been to serve people who needed it and wanted it. I always recall Jesus saying “It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick...” (Mt. 9:12).
My experience while serving in the church was that people believed they were healthy and it was uncommon to see a strong desire for spiritual growth. Instead, I always felt like I had to keep up an appearance that I was spiritually healthy but never had the opportunity to address the areas I felt deep spiritual pain. I know this is partly because I quickly went into leadership and there is far more pressure to be upright in that position, but this just reveals more of the flawed expectations to just somehow be spiritually healthy rather than to become healthy by working on yourself and healing and growing. This is of course a process the Bible calls sanctification and speaks of the natural spiritual growth and development that one will experience throughout a lifetime of walking with God.
So in 2015, after I graduated from Seminary, and was offered a position at a dreamy little country church in Southern Oregon that would provide me with a cushy job and security for my family… I turned it down. The reason is that I knew God was calling me to build something different from just another church catering to Christians.
Instead, God gave me a vision for an organization that would be independent of any church or religion, with a mission to equip and empower all kinds of people with tools I was discovering that actually brought healing and restoration, and hope back into my life. I was discovering so much growth and development in my own life, and I was imagining a ministry that would be able to teach these practices to others. God was stirring up a passion to build an organization that could provide the best of all Spiritual therapies and personal disciplines, to all kinds of people, regardless of religion, race, or bank account.
I knew God was calling me to create something bigger than a church or a charity. God was calling me to create a movement, or rather to contribute to a movement that is occurring all around the world. This is a movement of spiritual healing. For the first time, tools for spiritual growth and development are available at our fingertips, and we have unlimited resources and potential for higher states of consciousness and spiritual awareness.
God was calling me to build an organization that provided these tools and resources to the many who are searching for hope. To the many individuals who are seeking a better life, who want tools to heal from their trauma, people who are asking for help, have tried everything else, and are running out of time. I knew this was urgent and needed to be accessible to anyone and available everywhere. Most importantly, I was fully aware that this organization’s services needed to be available at low to no cost.
So basically, God was asking me to start an organization that would provide the best possible services available today in spiritual health and personal development, drawing carefully from all sacred traditions and modern neurosciences. As far as I know, this kind of service is currently only available to elites and likely for prices that put it out of reach for most individuals. I think that’s why the craziest thing about this is that this was all going to be for free or close to it.
I still remember the day when I was walking and praying through this on my lunch break, and basically said out loud in frustration to God, “This will never work! This idea is a FLOP!” At that moment, I saw the acronym in my mind “FOR LOVE OF PEOPLE” and felt like God smiled at me with a little humor and said, “ Exactly. You can't do this without me. I will provide everything you need.”
It was kind of a Noah’s Ark moment for me that day. I believed God and took him at his word, and began expecting the resources to show up for my build… And the most amazing thing happened… The resources came and the journey to build FLOP began.
What began as a daily time of prayer and daydreaming with God about what a ministry could look like if nothing was holding me back, started to take shape in reality. I began to truly ask myself what were the best tools available to a person seeking to grow spiritually. Maybe they had gone to church, maybe not? I soon developed a realization that this is almost beside the point, and the key was providing powerful tools that give results to people who want them.
The tools I was finding healing from were new for me but this was because of a change that occurred in me, not the tools. Meditation, mindfulness, and fasting for example have been around for millennia, but it was my own misunderstandings that prevented them from being a resource for me. I had even been exposed to some kinds of meditation but never with a pure heart and so I never experienced any healing effects whatsoever and discredited the practice altogether.
For me, it was important to let go of various restrictions I had adopted or adapted in order to begin to experience healing from new practices. I learned to follow my own intuition and soon discovered I had a wealth of knowledge and guidance within what I have come to know as my Internal Guidance System. This guidance system allows all of us who access it to trust ourselves rather than doubt ourselves. I felt for the first time in my life, I could safely go and explore other sacred traditions as well as modern neurosciences to gather the best resources I could find for spiritual growth and development.
For the next few years that is exactly what I did. While I had a Master’s degree in Theology, I had limited experience with religions other than Judaism and Christianity, and the teaching I received often was from a place of skepticism. So I began to look closely at other sacred traditions with an open mind, reading source documents whenever possible to develop a nonbiased understanding of the world's religions. When it felt appropriate, I experimented with various practices and discovered a great deal of commonality with my own traditions. This gave me further ease to explore more of what I believed God was exposing me to.
As I continued to try on different practices, my healing journey progressed and I began to see radical spiritual growth in my life. Parts of my past I never thought possible to heal now felt like there was hope. I was slowly peeling back the onion, and it felt like with every passing day, I was reborn.
By 2017, I started to see major changes in my life as well. My health, family, and finances were all in bad shape after finishing seminary, and now all these areas were restored and thriving. I have written about this time in my life in detail in previous blog posts so I won’t do so here, other than to say I was experiencing a paradigm shift in all aspects of my life, and I was more excited than ever to share this renewed hope with everyone around me. I felt like I had reunited with all of humanity and was one with all people, free to love and serve all people again, learn from all religions, and feel love from all around me.
Finally at a place of wholeness and filled with hope for all people, in 2019 I began working as a chaplain, and I had the absolute gift of meeting dozens of people a day and I took every opportunity to learn all about what they believed to be sacred and Holy! Working as an interfaith chaplain not only exposed all the best practices from the world’s religions but also allowed me to meet amazing people from just about every religion and faith tradition under the sun. During this time, I learned without a doubt that religion is a lot like race, there are both good and bad people from all sides, and the name of the religion is irrelevant, but it is the motive of the heart that tells the truth about a person.
As I have continued to meet many amazing people, I am constantly gathering tools along the way. Working in hospitals and hospices for the last 3 years gave me more exposure than I could have ever imagined. I was able to gather some of the best tools in spiritual health and personal development and had countless opportunities to see these tools work their magic! While working in the Behavioral Health Unit here in Eugene, Oregon, I taught people how to love themselves and treat themselves with compassion, and it changed their lives! I was able to see the way the tools helped me… now help others. When you see people who were once hopeless and suicidal, now filled with hope and joy and equip with the tools they need to thrive in life, you realize you have something that is life-giving and absolutely beautiful.
I hope this post gives you all a sense of who FLOP is and what we are about. I have been on this journey since 2007 and am more excited today than ever!
Let me close with these 4 Big Steps our Organization has Completed in the 1st Year:
For Love Of People was Established on May 18, 2022, and recognized in the state of Oregon as a Nonprofit Organization. On Feb. 6, 2023, our 501(c)(3) Tax-Exempt status was APPROVED by the IRS (Tax ID# 88-3029317), which is retroactive to our birthday, May 18, 2022. (As I write this, we are celebrating our 1-year Organizational birthday! 🎂👏🏽💚)
None of this would have been possible without our Directors. When we started FLOP, to ensure our Board members understood their specific roles and duties we together completed 3 sessions of formal training, led by a legal team who specializes in Nonprofit Law. High-Functioning Monthly Board meetings are key to the guidance and growth of our organization. To learn more about our Directors, click here.
We began providing Live Kundalini Yoga classes twice a week on ZOOM! This has been a way for students from around the world to come together in a sacred healing space, without the burden of travel or concern of expense. (Recorded versions of these classes will soon be available on our website!) To check out Kundalini click here.
As our vision is to be donor supported and provide all services for free, we depend on generous donors who believe in our vision. Most people said this would never work. They said you can’t just do it for free. Well, we did it anyway and we provided all services and classes in our first for free and we will always make sure everything we do is available at low to no cost because we never want money to be the reason a person doesn’t get to heal and grow spiritually. We are For Love Of People. We are donor supported.
I am blessed to report that because of the amazing generosity of FLOP’s Donors, we have received over $105,000 in tax-deductible donations in our first year of operation, as well as over 2000 Volunteer Hours Donated to our organization! To learn more about Supporting FLOP, click here. We have many ways to DONATE and all are fully Tax-Deductible.
I am truly grateful to be on this journey with you all. Thank you for reading the story behind our name. We Are FLOP.
© 2018-2023. Christopher Joy. All Rights Reserved.