ChangeMakers Podcast Featuring Dr. Chris Lambert, CEO of Life Remodeled

Foreign welcome to the Change Makers podcast produced by City Current and powered by higginbotham. I'm your host, Jeremy Park. On this episode, we're diving into faith, nonprofit leadership, neighborhood and community revitalization. That's why we're honored to have with us Dr. Chris Lambert. He is the founder and CEO of Life Remodeled, award winning author of Next level nonprofit and founder of the Next level nonprofit organization Operating System. How are you doing, Jeremy bro?

It's great to be with you. By the way, feel free to call me either just Lambert or Lambo and I'm excited to dive in with you.

I like Lambo, so we'll go with that.

So, okay.

All right, let's start the fun of Change Makers as we get to know your personal story and how that plays out with everything you're doing professionally. We'll talk all about how you're powering the good in so many different ways. But let's start with your childhood. Tell us about where you grew up.

I was born and raised in a small town, and when I say small town, I mean we didn't have a four way stoplight until I was in middle school in Northern Indiana. So the words urban, neighborhood, revitalization were three words. I never.

That plays out with everything you're doing professionally. We'll talk all about how you're powering the good in so many different ways. But let's start with your childhood. Tell us about where you grew up.

Heard in succession as a child.

What about brothers, sisters, family, mom and dad? What all did they do?

I have an older sister. She's four years older. She's wonderful. She now lives in the Houston area of Texas. And my mom and dad were school teachers. They taught for 40 years in public education.

So for you, faith plays an important role which we'll weave in throughout. But was that a big piece of you growing up?

So my parents would take us to church service maybe once a month because they felt like it was the right thing to do. But I can't ever remember them talking about God in the home for whatever reason. I was this really passionate spiritual kid about the person of Jesus in particular. And I do want to say that although we'll unpack some of my journey, the organizations I lead now, Life For Model and Next level nonprofit, are very intentionally not religious organizations. But my faith continues to be the center at the driving force of anything good that I do. Anything that I do that's not so good. I, I don't want to give Jesus the credit for that.

Well, we Talk about city current. I mean, I do personally, in terms of being a corporate ministry, in terms of doing all that we do to help nonprofits lift the community. So I think it, it, it ties in when you talk about the work you do missionally, personally, and how that plays out, obviously, corporately, to be able to make a difference. So all of that, that's why this personal journey is so important. So carry that in, because I know for you, you were looking at, you know, going and being a lawyer, and so you had very different career aspirations. Talk about the, the pivots through school. So walk us through school and college and where the pivots start to happen.

So. So I'll go back to the, the, the Jesus passionate kid that I was growing up in eighth grade. Other kids at school called me Lambert the Jesus Freak. And I tried to convert everybody to Christianity. I wasn't very effective. And my high school was actually about the size of the town that I grew up in, because different cities all went to the same high school. And I eventually hit a growth spurt right before I turned 16 and became kind of a big fish in a small pond with athletics. Got some school records, whatnot. And I started looking around at my buddies who were not following God. And I came to the conclusion that they were having a lot more fun in life than me and Jesus. So I said, goodbye, Jesus. Really, to be completely accurate, I kind of gave him the middle finger.

And.

And for the next six years of my life, I basically did whatever I wanted to do, whatever I thought was going to make me the most happy. And I went to Indiana University. I studied business. My plan was to go to law school, as you said, and become a real estate developer. Because my motivation was to make as much money as I could to fund the lifestyle I thought I wanted. And I figured that was a great way to do it. At iu, I joined what was then the largest fraternity on the campus so I could have more of all the things that I was looking for at this time of my life. But my junior year of college, I decided to move to Australia for six months to study. And I'm putting that in air quotes overseas. And while I was in Australia, I experienced what I would call a radical encounter with God that changed the entire trajectory of my life. And it was a series of events that culminated in I met a couple guys who became my best friends there. They happened to be Jesus followers. They were pretty fun guys, though, that could go out to a bar and have a few drinks and go home. And meanwhile, I'd stay out doing the things they weren't doing. They kept trying to get me to come to church service and I was like, dude, that ain't going to happen. I was doing some traveling in Southeast Asia, the Pacific Rim, Australia, and I began to realize the world was a very big place. It did not revolve around me and my 22 year old ego. So all of these different factors played into. Eventually I'm in a church service with these guys and this guy tells a story that in many ways outlines my life to a T, or at least key components. I ended up hearing God speak to me for the first time in my life. And it was not an audible voice, but it was more clear than anything that I'd ever heard another human being saying. I had this, I make a decision at this point. I basically, I got down on my knees, I looked up, I said, God, from this moment forward, I'm going to stop doing whatever you want me to stop doing. I'm going to start doing whatever you want me to start doing by faith in you, Jesus. Amen. And the biggest transformation that happened very quickly in my mind and heart and my soul was prior to this experience. You know, I loved my family, my friends, my fraternity brothers, but I had no interest in the world outside my little bubble. Immediately I had this very strong sense of curiosity with people that I would meet. I'd want to know who they were, what they were going through, if they were going through, anything I could help with. And I come back to Indiana University for my senior year. Before I left iu, there was not a single Jesus follower or Christian in this entire fraternity of 180 guys before I got back. This had nothing to do with me. My three best friends in the fraternity actually also had these crazy encounters with God, plus my drug dealer who was an atheist before I left. I come back, they see I'm now this Jesus follower, they're Jesus followers. We get this Bible study going in the fraternity, we start leading tons of guys to faith. It was crazy. I started thinking about my future. I realized, eh, I don't want to go to law school and become a real estate developer because now I no longer care about money as the center of my passion. I just want to help people connect with God. I felt like he was calling me to be a pastor. So I moved to la, studied at a seminary, met the woman who became my wife. We felt led to come to Detroit and start a church. And then we did what most people do. We moved to Africa for nine months. I Lived in a mud hut in a Muslim village with no running water in Liberia, became a community developer, knew nothing about that, learned it on the fly. That experience radically reshaped my view of why I'm here on Earth and really my view of Jesus's ministry in particular. And I realized that he spent the majority of his ministry with people who were the most marginalized and oppressed. And he was calling us to spend a whole lot of our time, talents, and resources doing the same. So when we started this church in Detroit in 07, it was to try to reach people who were experiencing a lot of those life challenges that kind of align with suffering and what I just described. And that was 07. And then in 2010, I got another vision to start a nonprofit called Life Remodel. And so I'll stop there and say, where do you want to go next?

Well, and I think Life Remodel is a great place to carry it forward, because when you look at the revitalization and the passion going back originally to developing real estate, right? Like, in a way, when you look back and you think all of these passions over here and experiences, how in the world are they ever going to line up? And then you start looking back and it's like, oh, wait a second. All of these things actually carry forward to what I'm doing today. The path is very windy, but it still plays.