My focus here in Philippines has shifted: earlier in my trip I visited CCT’s programs and saw their ministry firsthand. Now the emphasis is on leadership training. I am here with leaders and board members of Christian development ministries from around the world. We have moved out of downtown Manila and are now in Tagaytay, which is about 50 miles outside of town. It is a beautiful setting. CCT has a retreat center here where they host visitors and bring staff members for all sorts of training.
The countries represented in my training cohort are Moldova, Haiti, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and Guatemala. There are also leaders here from PEER Servants and endpoverty.org, two Christian development organizations based in the U.S., both of whom are long-standing CCT partners. Finally, there are six leaders from within CCT who are taking this training for their own development. It’s inspiring to hear their stories, and notable that all of us in this sector face very similar challenges. How do we provide both God-honoring ministry and technically excellent development programs? How do we recruit, train, and develop staff members in countries where there are few Christians? How do we do our work with faithfulness when worldly realities are knocking on our door every day?
During this leadership training we are studying Spiritual Leadership, by Henry and Richard Blackaby. Their definition of spiritual leadership is “moving people on to God’s agenda.” We will be covering many aspects of spiritual leadership, including decision-making, direction setting, and ongoing management. We will also be discussing the pitfalls commonly encountered by Christian leaders (tomorrow’s post).
This morning I ate balut for the first time. Balut is a Filipino delicacy (described here on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balut_(egg) ). My CCT hosts applied some loving peer pressure, I caved, and it was actually much better than I expected. It was like a hard-boiled egg with personality.
