A Disruptive Generosity by Mac Pier

Author:Mac Pier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian Living/Inspirational;REL012000;REL063000;REL012070
ISBN: 9781493412327
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

Tony Lembke

Tony Lembke was another member of the initial core group that launched the NYC Leadership Center in 2008. He attends The Presbyterian Church at New Providence in New Jersey, led by Jeff Ebert. Jeff invited Tony to a luncheon we had at the Hilton Hotel at 53rd and 6th Avenue, and within a few weeks Tony followed up with me. He wanted to join the core group of investors to launch the NYCLC. Tony felt a strong call to get involved when he heard that a goal was to create a “tipping point” of Christian grace to the world’s most influential city and to bring leadership resources to pastors and Christian leaders in the NYC metro area.

Tony grew up in Indiana in a strict German Lutheran household and then finished high school in Michigan and attended the University of Michigan. In the summers, he worked on a farm and observed that if anyone should have faith, it’s farmers. He was surrounded by great spiritual role models in his family, including his grandfather, who was a pastor in the Lutheran Church. Despite these role models, Tony was skeptical of religion.

He studied chemical engineering, landed a job in New Jersey with Exxon, and met his wife, Diane, who is originally from Long Island. After working in the field for a few years, he concluded that engineering wasn’t the place he wanted to land. He wanted faster feedback on his ideas, and the capital markets offered that by the minute.

After leaving Exxon, Tony found himself working on Wall Street in mortgage-backed securities. He parlayed his quantitative skills into a role at a Wall Street investment bank, Kidder Peabody, in their mortgage-backed securities research group. This would begin a thirty-year career in the mortgage-backed market—the biggest bond market in the world. Tony became an “All American” analyst and then an award-winning investor who launched an investment fund in 1999 with just over $10 million and grew it to nearly $3 billion over the next fifteen years.

His professional development coincided with his spiritual development. He says, “I came back to Christianity in the 1980s. I eventually joined the firm MKP Capital. Chip Perkins was a committed Christian and became a good friend. I had a great deal of respect for his spiritual leadership.”

Tony has been a cornerstone in the development of the NYCLC’s Leadership Fellows Program. Every year fifty to seventy-five nonprofit leaders attend a nine-month training course. At the end of the course, students graduate with a two-year business plan. Tony has been an important faculty for LFP. He has taught on finding the place of your leadership genius and has also provided one-on-one coaching for Fellows students.

I asked Tony why he was so committed to the Leadership Fellows Program. He said, “What resonated with me was the idea that providing leadership resources to pastors and nonprofit leaders was a great leverage point. In making these leaders more effective, they could scale their impact by ten times or even one hundred times.”2 The Leadership Fellows has trained more than three hundred leaders in its first seven years.

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