Meet Adam

Executive director of NCD.life

Adam is executive director and dis-comforter at NCD.life, helping us align with the principles of NCD in the most diverse imaginable contexts. He has developed many tools to help with the practical implementation of NCD and done pioneering work in the development of stewardship, worship and wholeness applied to individuals and communities. Adam is now leading the charge in connecting the global NCD community through the common language of universal principles.

Now that the formal part is out of the way, I thought I’d share some things that matter even more to me…

The principles of NCD shape every aspect of my life: my marriage; my parenting; my friendships; the way I engage with the created world… And most importantly, those principles are expanding and enriching my view of God and His Kingdom coming on Earth as it is in Heaven. When I was given my first NCD book, I read about those initial findings and processes through the night without stopping. A fuse had been lit within me. We joked at that time that it would be amazing if I could one day meet and speak with Christian Schwarz (now the joke is, “when is Dad going to be finished his meeting with Christian?!”)

Working with and being in a mutual mentoring relationship (his preferred posture) with Christian over nearly 25 years has been a privilege and an astonishing learning experience. It is rare to work with someone so committed to their own personal transformation and the desire to finish well by making space for the next generation to take NCD to places beyond his imagination. The very first email I received from Christian back in 2000 after he’d been told about some of my early development work did not come with a hype up “how exciting” tone, but with sober, careful, honesty. “Adam, the ministry you are embarking on is very challenging and the fruit will often take many years to appear, with lots of frustrations along the way. But it is deeply satisfying…” Let’s go!!

I have the delight of exploring the way of true life with many dear friends around the NCD world, each finding new insights and sharing them with each other. The further we go, the more we realise there is still so much more to discover. I have also been blessed to work over many many years with my dearly beloved friends, Jeff and Sheree (never seen secret agents in the NCD world) who design and build our multi-lingual and staggeringly complex web site systems. The things we have done with barbed wire and string…

In daily life, it is my greatest joy to see my oikos (the name we give to our extended household) flourish as we wrestle with the blindspots NCD reveals in our lives (it’s bittersweet how hard a test, that you yourself have helped to develop, can punch you between the eyes). We live in a bit of a happy hippie commune with my parents and father-in-law, my wondrous wife Melinda, four children (Taylor, Jordana, Lara, and Angus), two sons-in-law (Phillip and Callum), and two granddaughters (Victoria and Eleanor). As my daughters were growing up, we joked that when boys came calling, I would meet them at the door, not with a shotgun, but with NCD character surveys (as it turned out, I didn’t even need to bring the surveys since the girls took care of that themselves).

My most recent “hobby” was to build a house for my parents in our back yard (I’ve added slowest builder in the world to my resume). With that completed, I’m getting back into some of my other loves of gravel bike riding over long distances (next goal is a 322km ride in a day) and farming. Melinda manages a social project plant nursery on a large farm near us. We are working on the dream of developing it to become “Wholeness Farm”, a large scale experience of a community of people working together guided by NCD principles. Watch this space.

While I plan on making progress on a few more things, like addressing the world-wide discipleship deficit and transforming global government beyond the current version of democracy, I’m not a person comfortable in the limelight. As anyone close to me knows, one of my greatest markers of achievement will be when our many current NCD projects are up and running in the hands of amazing people around the world, and I’m free to be out on the farm shovelling Clydesdale manure. In that place, I will enjoy talking to anyone who drops in and wants to explore the way of true life with me.

Just don’t forget to bring your shovel.