By: gfesadmin on October 20, 2012
“After seeing you in ministry and leadership it seems to me that women leaders are fairly well accepted in India”, remarked a friend of mine here in the U.S. There is some truth to that generalization. Like the West, the India too has dynamic women at the helm of leadership in politics, government, business, and…
By: gfesadmin on October 19, 2012
My all-time favorite question I ask when interviewing leaders for American Baptist Homes of the West is “Tell me about your leadership values and how you have used them to lead others in your past experiences?” I very seldom get a well thought-out response. I am not surprised as I have found few leaders have…
By: gfesadmin on October 19, 2012
Acts chapter one and verse eight reads, “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” The power proclaimed here is an inner transformational type…
By: gfesadmin on October 18, 2012
In the Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice under the heading “Leadership as Meaning-Making” we find the following quote: “The preoccupation of classic social theorists with the meaning-making capacity of leaders can be traced to an even more fundamental concern with the uneasy relationship between the capitalist mode of exchange on the one hand, and…
By: gfesadmin on October 18, 2012
In their book “Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice,” Mayo and Nohria points out that, “Although we find evidence of a prototype design in leadership research, there is no clearly dominant theoretical perspective on leadership.” While this statement may in fact be true, it hasn’t stopped researchers and people from the general public alike…
By: gfesadmin on October 18, 2012
At a local church a priest, a rabbi and a imam (no, this is not a bar joke) all met in a church to talk about interfaith understanding. They had developed a relationship after 9/11 to talk about how faith communities can break down biases and suspicions between them. The interchange was respectful and civil.…
By: Joy Mindo on October 18, 2012
On October 15, 2012, CNN ran a story on the absence of good leadership in Africa following the lack of eligible candidates. No leader met the criteria needed to win the award excellence in leadership. The prize is $5 million award paid over 10 years and $200,000 annually for life after that. Since 2006, three…
By: gfesadmin on October 18, 2012
It is so rare to see a musical band stay together for more than a decade. Sure, there is U2, Aerosmith and a few others, but most break apart. After a period of time, crazy schedules, the pressures of fame, life on the road and often a lack of significant leadership cause bands to simply…
By: gfesadmin on October 18, 2012
“Without Integrity Nothing Works”* are powerful words (Erhard, Jensen, Zaffron 2008). Reading those quoted words in the present reading assignment book from Harvard Business School caught my attention. Integrity is a word pregnant with numerous nuances of meaning and many are morally charged. So, I was naturally curious about how the issue of integrity as…
By: gfesadmin on October 18, 2012
Leadership is an interesting word and concept. It seems to be that everyone instinctively understands the word and derives significant meaning from it. That is everyone knows what a leader is and looks like. At the same time, my guess would be that if you began to ask individual people what exactly a leader is…
By: gfesadmin on October 18, 2012
As the title itself suggests, the book Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice edited by Nohria and Khurana is quite a comprehensive and thorough narrative of various facets of leadership. I decided to delve deeper into Chapter 12 titled ‘power and leadership’ and chapter 13 ‘Leadership and Cultural context’ as they are closer inrelevance to my…
By: gfesadmin on October 17, 2012
KFC, Fanta and the BBC If you travel, you know what I’m talking about! I can be pretty certain that whenever I spend the night in a hotel, anywhere in the world, I know that the one English language station on the television will be the British Broadcasting Company – or BBC. I am able…
By: gfesadmin on October 17, 2012
In honor of today’s post I’ve got a little video that should bring back some memories. Check it out, and then read on! The relationship between power and pastors is often a tenuous one. In Handbook of Leadership and Theory and Practice, Joseph S. Nye writes about the connection of leadership and power. Nye breaks down power into…
By: gfesadmin on October 12, 2012
Irrelevant is a word that has been thrown around a lot to describe church. Some churches have worked hard to be relevant to their culture. It usually means attempting to get people to go to church. But young adults are increasingly choosing not to go to church. Do they feel it is irrelevant to their…
By: gfesadmin on October 12, 2012
The journey to gaining an understanding of reality was a long and arduous one for me. You might say that as I set out on this journey of understanding God and my Christian beliefs, I found all of the pot holes any one could imagine. In fact, these pot holes nearly stopped me on several…
By: gfesadmin on October 12, 2012
It has been said that theology is simply what one believes to be true about God. One thought is that God is very relational. Not only is He involved in a personal relationship with humans, but he is concerned with how they interact with one another. Below are two examples of human interaction that we…
By: gfesadmin on October 11, 2012
Some quotes by David F. Ford out of the video: “What a theology department is about is trying to do is lead people to think as well as possible about the questions that are raised.” “When I was in Ruanda last Christmas, we came up on people who had survived that 1994 genocide, where a…
By: gfesadmin on October 11, 2012
50 years ago, October 11th 1962, Pope John XXIII with about 2500 catholic cardinals and bishops opened the Second Vatican Council. (1962-1965) The council is one of the most important events in Church history of the 20. Century. The dominant term of the council “Aggiornamento” (update) opened the church towards the world by opening a…
By: gfesadmin on October 11, 2012
The other evening, I was having dinner with a group of friends and we began to talk about the condition of the world. We talked about the recent assassination of the American Ambassador in Libby and the potential extreme Muslim terrorists who may have committed the act. We then began to talk about the presidential…
By: Joy Mindo on October 11, 2012
Africa theologizes through music. The songs reflect the theological trends that are prevalent in society. Africans love music and every event, ideology, personality is celebrated in song. Songs are part and parcel of everyday life. Since theology in the academia is not so prevalent, music and song are the foundation of the theology of the…
