Leadership: Giving Through Receiving

- By MA Leadership faculty member Jeanine Parolini

A Picture of MA Leadership Faculty Member Jeanine Parolini

"When someone has been given much, much will be required in return;

and when someone has been entrusted with much, even more will be required."

Luke 12:48 NLT

What do you think of when you reflect on these words from Luke? For me, I consider how much God has given me especially in the area of personal and leadership development. I’m grateful for the formal and informal educational opportunities that God has used to invest in my life and leadership. When I consider this verse, I immediately think about how much God has provided me in this area and I am prompted to give back!

You might find this surprising! Are you aware that most pastors and ministry leaders in India are lucky to graduate from high school, let alone attend college and then seminary or even some other kind of Master’s level training? Therefore, most leaders are not likely to gain the theological and leadership education they need to guide and shepherd a church or ministry

This fact motivates me return to India for the last two week of April 2010! I will work again with leaders of Northern India Community Outreach (NICO). Their headquarters and ministry is impressive as it reaches out to local village pastors/churches in the northern area of India, amidst the beautiful Himalayas. Each church has approximately 60 to 600 attendees and NICO has trained over 60 pastors in the local community. Last year, I facilitated a week-long conference for almost 30 of their pastors on Biblical peacemaking and reconciliation. After the conference, I spent four days meeting with individual pastors and leaders as well as preaching at the local church.

The purpose of this year’s trip in April is to invest in the NICO staff pastors and leaders as individuals and as a team so that they can then train pastors and leaders within their community. I plan to provide individual and team development opportunities that build in a variety of assessments including DiSC (Dominance Influence Steadiness Conscientiousness) profile, Kiersey Bates, spiritual gifts, life skills, and passions. I will need to translate those assessments for them while I am on site. It is worth the effort as this type of individual and team training is so important to Indian leaders. First, it develops them in self-awareness, self-leadership, emotional health, and in understanding their best leadership role/contribution. Second, it will help them collectively have a better understanding of how to work together as a team. Third, it will provide a training process that they can replicate with the other church and ministry leaders in their community.

Additionally, my work in India will also include individual interviews of the staff so that we can assess the culture and climate of the ministry. Then I will work with the founders to help them determine areas of strength and improvement to develop a plan for transformation of the organization. The ministry is growing and the founders are seeing the need to take new steps in terms of vision, mission, values, strategy, culture, climate, and structure of the ministry.

Would you join me in praying that God would be able to invest in whatever ways He would like through my time in India? Would you pray that these Indian leaders would be filled and renewed with all the new wisdom and understandings that God has to offer them?