A reflection by David Johnson, DAI Senior Consultant, Latin America

One week ago, I was disembarking from a weeklong trip aboard a riverboat named ‘Evangelista’ (Evangelist) with some fifty fellow travelers. We found ourselves climbing back up the steep embankment of the Amazon tributary, the Ucayali River, into relative civilization in the city of Pucallpa, Peru.

We were exhausted, dirty, hot, and saddened that we now had to say goodbye to one another. It was an extraordinary week, and that morning, as the riverboat wound its way back downriver, carefully avoiding the hidden sandbars, we each shared our thoughts about the week. For many, tears were shared as well.

Only six days earlier, most of us had never met. The majority were from various cities and towns around Peru, but there were others from Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Ecuador, and even two from the US. Very few had ever visited the Amazon basin and fewer yet had ever been to a village of one of the Amazonian tribes.

It was a floating missions conference on a riverboat that belongs to the first church ever established in Pucalla–Iglesia Evangélica Misionera de Pucallpa (Evangelical Missionary Church of Pucallpa). During the year, the riverboat hosts a variety of ministry activities, all directed toward the vast number of tribal groups that live along this system of tributaries, which flow into the Ucayali River and end up in the Amazon. Evangelism, medical care and health education, clean water projects, and much more take place. And it’s all based from this floating platform dedicated toward sharing God’s love to those who have not had many, if any, opportunities to hear the good news about Jesus Christ.

The conference is a product of a consortium of organizations; almost all of the leadership, preparation, teaching, and logistics are provided by Peruvian volunteers who sacrificially give of their time because they believe so strongly in the cause and the strategy of such a conference. RAP – Red Amazónica Peruana (Peruvian Amazon Network) is the name given the consortium, and it is made up of a number of both Peruvian and international organizations. Asociación Segadores, Iglesia Evangélica Misionera de Pucallpa, Misión Suiza, APOYO,  Red Trans Amazónica, Centro de Mobilización Misionera de Pucallpa, and others working alongside various associations of tribal pastors.

During parts of each day, we sat through workshops: The Biblical Basis for Missions, God´s Heart for Missions, Supporting Your Missionary, Working Amongst the Native Communities of Peru, and Strategies for Working in Tribal Communities. There were films in the evening, such as Peace Child and Ee-tow!, which demonstrated how God has worked amongst tribal groups in other parts of the world. But we also spent time in several villages, experiencing first-hand the realities of life in these isolated communities and putting into practice some of the things we learned about in the “classroom.”

Toward the end of the week we were divided up into teams, each one being assigned to a village in which to conduct a research project. It was an opportunity to try out some of the methodology and principals we heard about during the training sessions. My assigned village was Flor de Ucayali (Flower of the Ucayali), located on the Ukukinia River, which is a tributary to the Ucayali.

To me, this team was a reflection of how God is mobilizing the Peruvian church in missions. Ingrid was our team captain—coordinator of a missions program at her church in Lima. Marianna is the wife of an assistant pastor of one of Lima’s larger churches. She and her husband left their two young children with her parents (for the first time ever) because they believe God might be calling them to missions; her husband wept openly the day we returned while telling us how God spoke to him through the story of Jonah to open his heart to these people and missions. Nilsa, whose husband is pastor of a church in Puerto Rico that has missionaries in the Middle East, Central Asia, Spain, Peru and other counties, led the workshop on “Supporting your Missionary.”  While waiting at the airport to depart, she said: “I’ve been working with missionaries for years, but now I know the incredible difficulties and obstacles they face on a daily basis.” Kurt is a physical education teacher and college professor in the Peruvian highlands who feels God may be calling him to missions. Sofia is the missions pastor in a church in Machala, Ecuador, who knows she is called to missions and is in the process of training a whole group of young people for missions while she waits for her church to give her the green light to go. Another man by the name of Kurt, a 20-year-old American college student, has missionary relatives in Peru and is living with a Peruvian family to learn more Spanish this summer. His Peruvian “mother” signed him up without him knowing what the conference was about! I ended up being his translator for the week. Zaida, who is one of the leaders instrumental in putting this conference together and the key logistical person on the planning team. And finally, there was me. I heard of this conference when I was invited to Pucallpa to do a leadership training workshop both for and with a group of leaders that Americo Saavedra and the HCJB Global APOYO team had been working with for several years. It was that group of APOYO trained leaders that had birthed this Misión Abordo initiative.

Having done my master’s thesis on cross-cultural entry and culture shock issues, I was intrigued to see how all of the cross-cultural hurdles exist in reaching out to tribal groups as well. “Remember,” said Irma during our orientation of this tribe, “these people are not as warm and emotional as we are–you only shake hands. They do not hug or give kisses in greeting, and men must be very careful not to touch women and vice versa.”

Language as an issue surfaced quickly. In organizing some activities for children, it became clear that Spanish, though taught in the government sponsored schools, was not always understood, and one of the younger mothers had to be recruited to translate. The tendency to be task-oriented rather than relationship-focused on our part also lifted its head. We were loud—they were quiet. The tribal chief, who must always be sought out first to receive permission for any activity in the tribe, met us with great skepticism and was clearly uncomfortable with these “outsiders” who kept peppering him with questions. The team, made up of mostly Peruvians, discovered they were foreigners in their own country.

God’s pot was boiling in all of our hearts and minds. He brought some fifty strangers together in order to plant the seeds for the transformation of our world-views, our understanding of his kingdom and the aligning of our hearts with his heart for the lost.

My greatest takeaway was to see how the seeds of mentoring and training a small group of leaders, over several years in Pucallpa by Americo Saavedra and the APOYO team, led to unexpected and wonderful ministries being birthed that are now touching thousands of people. Men and women who saw beyond their own church, their own denomination, their own people, their own country, and who learned how to build networks and teams to do things that any one of them could never have done on their own. They had become Kingdom builders with a capital “K,” willing to serve, go and do, whatever and wherever the King asks.

Ministry Spotlight, an organization which exists to help connect people with ministries that match their passions, recently featured DAI on a podcast about leader development. Co-founder Henry Kaestner interviews DAI President Jane Overstreet about the impact of leader development around the world. Click either of the links below to listen!

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About the Ministry Spotlight Podcast: Every week we interview ministry leaders from around the world about their area of expertise. Ministry Spotlight exists to help connect you with ministries that match your passions, and also to help you discover and deepen your passions for ministry. This podcast brings you into conversation with the experts and helps you learn from their experience as we discuss different models, impact and movements in ministry. Find out more at www.ministryspotlight.org.

Leadership formation in Africa falls into three types according to my own personal observation.

First is a formal leadership development training run through institutions, seminars and workshops, where current, potential or emerging leaders are brought together to be lectured by “experts” for a period of time with the motive of improving their performances and effectiveness usually for the benefits of the institutions they work for and for their own benefits of raise. The content, mode of delivery, the philosophy and pattern of leadership emphasized in such trainings are mainly Western, not purely indigenous. This is true whether with purely profit-oriented institutions, the political institutions and even the Church.

The second type of leadership formation I have noticed is an adaptation of the first type, though still in training “centers” or “bases, and are shorter in terms of the period or duration. The curriculum is to a greater extent similar to the former, but there is more adaptation in the content and mode of delivery. More indigenous ideas and examples are injected into the content and more informal styles of presentation are employed.

However, there are some encouraging examples of what might be regarded as authentic African models of leadership formation in some traditional institutions of leadership, trade-crafts, and indigenous Christian groups. Such models as I have seen them are closer to the model of leadership formation which the Lord, Jesus Christ espoused, namely, apprenticeship and mentorship.

This third type of leadership formation in Africa is popular among the traditional leadership institutions whereby successors are groomed through apprenticeship and mentorship. They learn on the job through “instruction”, “supervision” and “practice”. This is also the method by which traders, family business networks, craftsmen, artisans, etc, perpetuate their professions, produce successors and expand their sphere of control and influence. The so called “African Independent Churches” spread faster than the very structured and more orthodox ones. Their (the AICs) method of leadership development is more by mentoring and apprenticeship than formal training. It is usually the followers or apprentices of the senior leaders that branch off to start a new center from which other apprentices will emerge to start new centers.

No wonder it was the same pattern of leadership formation that Jesus employed in Mark 3:13-15 which eventually produced the leaders after His kind who perpetuated the mission He came to accomplish after His return to heaven.

However, the argument about quality in terms of the effectiveness of the products of the various types vis-à-vis the content and the duration of the training, as well as the “academic background” of the ‘trainers’, still rages. But my own submission is to look at the testimonial in Acts 4:13-22 of the products of the Lord’s School of Leadership Formation (Mark 3:13-15).

Reuben Ezemadu is the Ministry Center Director for DAI Nigeria, International Director, Christian Missionary Foundation and Continental Coordinator, Movement for African National Initiative.

It is a well known fact that new mission movements are emerging particularly in the Global South and in the fringes of the older missions and denominational structures. These new ‘wineskins’ will definitely need “new” leadership styles and structures that will sustain the drive and enhance the cutting edge potentials of the new movements.

Whether movements remain so or fossilize into monuments depends on the type of leaders that are involved in the various stages of their evolution. Who raises such leaders and how they are raised are very critical to their (leaders’) effectiveness and success of the movements.  Therefore in discussing ‘Leaders Formation’ especially in the context of emerging mission movements, special consideration is given to, in the first instance, the kind of leadership that will maintain the purity of the ‘new wine’ and sustain the flexibility of the ‘new wineskin’ in the hands of the Holy Spirit, as well as how such leadership evolves. For this purpose, my focus is on “the Sheep-fold and Good Shepherd” metaphor drawn from both the story of the shepherd-boy who became the leader of the post-Saul era in Israel, the teachings of the Lord in John 10 and how He called and “formed” the twelve disciples (Mark 1:17; 3:13-15) who later became the leaders and progenitors of the then emerging ‘new testament movement’ – the Early Church.

In David’s example, his effectiveness depended on who trained him, how he was trained and the evidence (impact, outcome) of the training (or equipping) he received.  In Psalm 23, David revealed who trained him, how he was trained and the outcome of his training. Psalms 78:70-72 indicated the same and brought out more clearly the outcome of the training in his leadership: heart of integrity (character) and skillfulness (effectiveness).  Psalm 32:8 reveals the way the Lord equips us: instruct/teach, guide, and show. David also acknowledged that it is the Lord that teaches his fingers to fight battles (Psalms 144:1)

In Mark 1:17, the Lord’s recruitment invitation reads thus: “Come….after me and I will MAKE YOU TO BECOME Fishers of Men” (KJV). When they responded (3:13-15), “he ordained the twelve that they SHOULD BE WITH HIM, and that he might send them forth to preach, and to have power to heal sicknesses and to cast out demons”
From these two passages, we deduce three things about Forming Leaders:

1. The Process – The “Making” – and the context – “Be with Him”.
2. The Product – The “Being” – What they eventually BECOME
3. The Proof – The “Doing” – The Evidence of who made them and with whom they have been – the source of their credentials (note the testimony of their detractors in Acts 4:13 “…they took note that they had been with Jesus”)

If we compare the process, product and proof of the way Jesus ‘formed’ the leaders He used to kick-start the ‘new testament Church movement’ with the ones of the 20th century Christianity, we would observe very striking differences, hence the dire need of revisiting the process of forming the leaders that will be like the ones the Lord Himself formed at the inception of the ‘New Testament Church’ and guarantee that the Church of the 21st century and beyond will get the job done in the same spirit, zeal, character and power like the first century leaders of the Church.

The particular aspect of the ‘forming’ we need to revisit is the process/context. In the case of the twelve, they were ‘resident’ with the Master. They were close with Him and with one another. He imparted His life, zeal, passion, knowledge in them in very close range. He instructed them by words, yet He modeled the principles by His own real life examples. They watched Him, saw His actions and reactions from close proximity, heard His voice while reading His lips and observing His countenance. They felt His pulse and wondered at His zeal and passion for divine purposes. They experienced every demonstration of His love, care and commitment to people in need. No wonder they were infested by the same zeal, love, compassion, and commitment to the same purpose which, in the midst of persecutions, threats, opposition, made them to declare “ For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20 – NIV). John in the introduction to his first epistle said, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched – this we proclaim concerning the Word of life….We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard,…” (I John1: 1-3 NIV).

It is obvious then that the kind of ‘forming’ that will make emerging leaders to ‘become’ radical kingdom-minded leaders in the 21st century Christianity must not be done from a distance, must not be in words only, must not be done for a crowd but for a select few (and at best on individual or small group basis).

Below is a summary of the various means we can glean from the above examples and some contemporary insights into how cutting-edge leaders are ‘formed’.

Different Dimensions of the Forming Process

• Guiding: the process of directing an individual or a group along the path leading from present state to a desired state
• Showing: throwing light on something that is seemingly hidden from ordinary /casual sight; unveiling a somewhat hidden fact, illuminating
• Coaching: helping another person to improve awareness, to set and achieve goals in order to improve a particular behavioural performance
• Teaching: helping an individual or group develop cognitive skills and capabilities
• Mentoring: helping to shape an individual’s beliefs and values in a positive way; often a longer term career relationship from someone who has ‘done it before’
• Counseling: helping an individual to improve performance by resolving situations from the past.
• Modeling: being an example to others in words, character, conduct, in such a way they can unconsciously imbibe the desired behavior we intend them to have.

The emerging missions movement needs leaders like David who was a servant before he became a king and therefore remained “a servant leader”, who was shepherded by the Lord before he became a shepherd of the God’s people, shepherding them with a heart of integrity and led them with a skillful hand. The 21st Christianity needs leaders who are good shepherds, not the hirelings (mercenaries) that have dominated the ministry. The Church needs leaders who have been with the Master, sat at His feet, learned from His life and teachings, experienced His tender mercies and on a continuous basis, being formed and conforming to His own image. Such leaders cannot be produced in the kind of training programs and institutions that dot the Christian landscape today nor by the popular (conventional) methods that we employ in our training efforts these days. They also cannot be produced by many of the “teachers” that we have today because they themselves have not been ‘formed’ by the Lord and therefore can only produce their kinds.

We therefore need to go back to the Lord’s method of forming leaders in order to ensure the emergence of the ‘new wine skin’ that will both preserve and faithfully serve the ‘new wine’ which the Lord is now restoring to His Church.

Reuben Ezemadu is the Ministry Center Director for DAI Nigeria.

By Christie and Paul Borthwick

When we were young, we heard older leaders say that our lives would be the accumulation of our daily choices.  Now that we’re in our mid-50’s, we believe it.  We see in ourselves good things and bad which have resulted from repeated choices over the days, weeks, months, and years of our lives.  We are indeed reaping what we have sowed – for good and for ill.

Sometimes this thought scares us, but more recently it has motivated us to start looking at older men and women to examine what choices and patterns have made them what they are.

We’ve noticed two types of prominent patterns.  On the one hand, we’ve noticed some vibrant, resilient older folks.  These are the people we call “Calebs” because they, like Caleb in the Old Testament (Numbers 13 and 14; Joshua 14), live life to the fullest.  They maintain a faith-based optimism, a give-me-this-mountain attitude, and a soft heart of gratefulness and servanthood.  They have spent a lifetime living out Psalm 119:32 – running the ways of God’s commandments – so that now they have “enlarged hearts” towards life.  We want to be like these people.

But we fear becoming like the other type of person we’ve observed.  We don’t have a personal name for these folks; we just call them “shriveled souls.” Unlike the “Calebs,” these people never developed the disciplines and attitudes that have expanded their souls through the years of life.  Rather than demonstrating a spiritual resilience and vitality, they seem withered by life’s hardships.

Observing the two types of people, we came up with a list of things that we’ve observed about the long-term choices these folks have made concerning character, attitudes, and behavior.  We call the list our Ten Characteristics for Avoiding Shriveled Soul Syndrome.  Having observed them, now we’re trying to live out them out with Caleb-like positive responses, “following God whole-heartedly” (Joshua 14:8).  Here they are.

1)    Avoid gossip.  “Caleb”-like people try to find good news about other people.  They believe the best rather than muck around to assume the worst.  They spread good rumors and avoid judgmental condemnation.  Gossip shrinks our souls by diminishing our self-worth because we living at the expense of others.  We build our identity by tearing others down and saying, in effect, “I may not be much, but at least I’m not as bad as that guy.”

2)    Release bitterness.  Bitter people shrivel spiritually as they walk through life under the weight of “apologies owed me.”  Everyone else is to blame.  Caleb took responsibility for his own life.  Note in the biblical account that there is no record of Caleb or Joshua living the “if-only” life.  They could have exhausted themselves in bitterness by blaming the 10 disbelieving spies (“If only they had believed God, we wouldn’t be walking around this stinking wilderness”).  They released the people who hurt them and forgave without being asked, and in so doing, they liberated their own souls!

3)    Take risks.  Caleb gave the report, “Let’s go for it” – “we can certainly take this land” (Numbers 13:30).  The others cowered in fear of exaggerated giants.  Expanded souls step out in faith.  Shriveled souls run when no one is pursuing.  Expanded souls believe God and take risks.  Shriveled souls take no risks because they choose to live in fear of “what might happen.”

4)    Trust.  Living a life of worry guarantees a shrinking soul.  Expand your soul by singing Twila Paris’ song “God Is In Control.”  When we try to be God by having everything under control, we shrivel because we cannot bear the weight.  Enlarged souls live comfortably with the unknown because they choose to trust God.

5)    Don’t live for “stuff.”  Keep the rampant materialism of our Western world in check.    Those who live for the accumulation of things – either by purchasing these things or by constantly complaining about unfulfilled coveting (which is more likely in the case of those of us in ministry) – easily degenerate in shriveled souls.

6)    Master your appetites.  A person controlled by cravings will shrink their spiritual capacity because food, lust, or other unchecked desires will take over.  The “Caleb” person attends to physical as well as spiritual discipline; how else could Caleb have said, “I’m just as strong today as when we left Egypt 45 years ago” (Joshua 14:11)?

7)    Grow deep.  Enlarged souls think about the meaning of life.  They look for purpose.  They struggle to understand and live life based on a philosophical and theological foundation.  Shriveled souls get pre-occupied with drivel.  They burn up their intellectual energies on monumental facts like sporting scores or the weather, and then they find their conversations filled with superficiality.

8)    Be generous.  Stinginess might enlarge our bank accounts, but it shrinks the soul.

9)    Celebrate the past, embrace the present, and anticipate the future.  Enlarged souls learn from the past but don’t live there; they recognize that the “good old days” are mostly old.  They live today and – like the wife described in Proverbs – “smile at the future.  Shriveled souls dwell in the past, dislike the present, and tremble at the future.

10)    Think globally.  Enlarged souls follow the Lord of the Universe.  Shrunken souls want a village God who attends to their whims.  Enlarged souls celebrate the diversity of God’s creation.  Shrunken souls want a world just like them.  Enlarged souls see their role in serving the world.  Shrunken souls make THEIR world the whole world.

John Henry Jowett exhorted people to live life to God’s fullest and to avoid the shriveled soul syndrome.  He wrote,

It is possible to evade a multitude of sorrows through the cultivation of an insignificant life.  Indeed, if a person’s ambition is to avoid the troubles of life, the recipe is simple: shed your ambitions in every direction, cut the wings of every soaring purpose, and seek a life with the fewest contacts and relations.  If you want to get through life with the smallest trouble, you must reduce yourself to the smallest compass.  Tiny souls can dodge through life; bigger souls are blocked on every side.  As soon as a person begins to enlarge his or her life, resistances are multiplied.  Let a person remove petty selfish purposes and enthrone Christ, and sufferings will be increased on every side.

David anticipated an enlarged soul when he stated, “I will run the way of Thy commands, for Thou wilt enlarge my heart” (NASV) Psalm 119:32.  God’s people allow him to set their hearts free, and in so doing, avoid the shriveled soul syndrome.

Paul and Christie Borthwick have served on the staff of Development Associates International since 1998. You can catch up with Paul and Christie at their Facebook Group, Team Borthwick, or on their website, borthwicks.org

I was in a meeting last week of several important players in the world of Christian leadership development in the US. We spent a good bit of our time discussing how best to evaluate what we do.

One afternoon the discussions focused on what is “measurable”. We all agreed that it is relatively easy to measure whether or not a leader comprehends the material being taught. We agreed that in most cases it is possible to measure whether what was taught changed his/her life. In fact most of us agreed that it is even possible to measure whether or not it impacted how she/he does ministry. But, that is where the consensus ended because the next level of measurement is whether or not you can evaluate if this makes any difference within the local community. The idea some of us had, is that this is really the ultimate goal—changed communities that is—and most folks seemed to think that wasn’t really possible to measure.

While I can appreciate that sentiment, and arguably agree that many times it may not be possible to measure impact on the community, I was totally intrigued to receive the following report this week from one woman involved in DAI programs in North East India. Let’s call her Leah. Leah is the wife of a pastor, working among the very poor in their city. Unfortunately Leah’s husband had to leave the community to go to another large city to get work, leaving the congregation in Leah’s care.

With great excitement, Leah came to one of the DAI staff recently to report how moved she was by a recent DAI program about God’s heart for the poor and so encouraged by the sharing in the group about practical ways to live that out. As a result, she challenged her congregation to not celebrate Christmas the local traditional way, with a “love feast” on Christmas day for the church members, but to reach out to the children in a nearby leprosy colony that have been neglected by the government and social services.

Leah and her small congregation have decided rather than celebrating for themselves this Christmas, to sacrificially do something for those who rarely even have good food to eat. They are all contributing from the little they have and stepping out in faith to cook a full rice meal with meat (that’s a luxury!) for the 66 families in the leper colony, and eat it together with them. She said, “I want to personally touch and hug each of them so they know they are not outcastes, and give them tasty food.”  Her young people are also preparing a program for the children, and hope to have games and give prizes and a small gift to each child.

Remember the question being debated earlier?  Can you measure outcomes in a community due to a local Christian leader growing through a DAI program?  While there will be times when this is not possible, I think it will be easy to do exactly that in a leper colony in North East India this Christmas!

Jane Overstreet is the President and CEO of Development Associates International.

DAI President / CEO Jane Overstreet recently helped First Fruit complete their Global Trends Analysis. Below is a description of this important report.

Every ten years, First Fruit makes a careful analysis of major global trends and their impact on our world, to give context to our future grantmaking. After interviewing over 100 leaders in academia, policy, business, NGOs and Christian ministry, we have selected ten trends and five undercurrents which we think will most significantly influence the coming years. We have defined trends as important global shifts that will endure for a number of years. Undercurrents underlie all of the trends and, in fact, are what drive them. They are long-term, wide-ranging and largely empirically provable.

Here are a list of the trends identified. Click here for details on each:

Growth in Islam and Christianity

Prominence of the Global South Church

Destabilizing Youth Cohorts

Increase in Women and Children At-Risk

Renewed Vision for Societal Relevance by Evangelicals and Pentecostals

Rise of Radicalism and Grassroots Religious Persecution

Changing Philanthropy

Technology Moves Power to the “Edges”

Cultural Hybridization, Trend toward Religious Nominalism

Non-Readers on the Rise

Read the background on this study at firstfruit.org.