Leadership
SALT & MAF-LT Work to Multiply Latin America Leadership Training
Submitted by bfaller on Tue, 09/15/2009 - 10:22
As Gil Kinch struggles to reach rural and largely undeveloped areas of South America with Christian outreach, he often thinks there must be a more efficient and effective way.
Kinch, the Associate Director of SALT (Support and Leadership Training www.saltleadership.org), knows the challenge of reaching largely untrained pastors who struggle with the physical challenges, time and cost of travel. Also, he realizes the importance of keeping pastors as close as possible to their homeland, thereby decreasing the chance they will leave after gaining an education.
With these challenges in mind, he is seeking ways to increase by perhaps 10-fold the number of pastors currently reached by SALT (about 1,000) in Peru, Argentina, Paraguay and Chile.
More Resources for the Most Remote Christian Leaders
Submitted by rmanley on Fri, 04/17/2009 - 10:29
How do we reach the majority of Ugandan church leaders who cannot afford to leave their families or work for years of Bible study? Even if they could, most of them would struggle to learn through the highly literate approach used by most Bible schools because their learning preference is Oral, not literate.
Tony Okullu is meeting the need through by establishing a “Church Based Mobile Bible School.” This network of coordinators (such as Edola Francis, pictured at left) strategically places audio recordings of leadership and discipleship teachings on MP3 players with a speaker unit in trade towns. Pastors and church leaders gather to listen and learn. From there, more MP3 players are loaded with the teachings. The leaders can continue listening and share the teachings in even more remote villages where they work.
MAF-LT partners with Tony in providing free resources from our many partners. Together we are working to bring more resources to the most remote leaders and it is delivered in the same way that they prefer to learn - orally.
Leadership and Identity
Submitted by kslusser on Thu, 09/06/2007 - 10:00“The foundation of leadership is not thinking, behavior, competencies, techniques, or position. The foundation of leadership is who we are—our identity or foundational state.”
–Robert E. Quinn, Building the Bridge As You Walk On It
As I read this quote, I was reminded again of how grateful I am for the caliber of people God has brought to the Instructional Support (IS) team, and certainly to the whole Learning Technologies (LT) ministry. Indeed, the folks on our team are strong thinkers, highly competent, and trained in techniques. But the most powerful thing God has provided within all of our LT staff is our identity–our identity in Christ. As it relates to our work in instructional support, there are some specifics in our identities that bring deep quality to how we desire to work.
We are about enabling church leaders in various cultures around the globe–that means we must enable others to lead in the pattern of Christ, not the pattern of our personal cultures. On our IS team, many of us have been classroom teachers, a job where we can feel like we are exercising control and direction over precisely what we want to teach–we can have our own agenda. In working with leaders in various combinations of context, culture, language, and challenge, we cannot have our own agenda–we must be open to helping those we work with create the best educational solutions for them. We bring good principles to bear on the discussion, but we must let go any hindering educational biases we may have.
I am blessed beyond measure to work with people who long to see others empowered to become all that they can become, in Christ. We don’t need to see our names anywhere on the end result of what we assist in creating or developing–we want to see God’s fingerprints all over it.
