Benjamin Paul Dean, Director of Global Partnerships, Orlando,
USA.
E-mail: bdean@piorl.com
Abstract
Bicycles and Bibles: Report on a Crosscultural Leadership Intervention in the Evangelical Church of Congo
This paper reports on a case study of a national ministry
organization in a Central African country. The organization was experiencing
serious problems of poor morale among its pastors, a lack of leadership focus,
and a declining reputation for ministry effectiveness and integrity. The report
focuses on the Eglise Evangelique du Congo (the EEC; translated the Evangelical
Church of Congo), a national church in the Democratic Republic of Congo (former
Zaire). The EEC was experiencing a serious and immediate need for the diagnosis
and correction of certain organizational and leadership problems. As recently as
the beginning of 2003, the organization was suffering very poor morale among its
pastors and a general lack of focus – to the point that the EEC was falling into
complete disarray organizationally and almost irreconcilable disunity among its
national leadership. The EEC’s national leadership reputation for integrity –
and indeed that of the EEC as a ministry organization – had suffered
significantly, not only among the members of the organization, but also in the
eyes of the wider community. The problems also manifested through an apparent
lack of growth in the existing churches and a decline in the number of new
congregations being started. These serious organizational and leadership
conditions were compounded, but not created, by the fact that the country has
experienced an extended period of civil war that divided the country into two
parts, East and West.
The EEC’s only major Western supporter is International Outreach Ministries (IOM),
a mission supporting agency based in the United States. The board of IOM
concluded that the EEC as an organization was unable to initiate an internal
intervention to resolve its problems on its own and that it had become
appropriate and necessary for IOM to offer to intervene to assist the EEC. IOM
followed through in February 2003 by sending a delegation to the EEC to conduct
an on-site evaluation and diagnosis. The delegation engaged in diagnostic and
organizational learning activities, and then made specific recommendations for
immediate change. The organizational and leadership intervention revolved around
two major activities. One was that the delegation engaged in a series of
personal interviews with each of the national leaders, district pastors, and
zone pastors. The other major activity was that the delegation prepared and
conducted a leadership training conference for an assembly of over 400 EEC
pastors who had been able to make the difficult trip to Lodja.
The case study reviews and analyzes several alternative diagnostic explanations
for these major organizational and leadership problems. The report also
describes the academic basis for the diagnosis, the intervention recommendations
that the delegation presented to the ministry, the practical steps the EEC took
to implement the recommendations, and, finally, the positive outcomes that have
continued to yield benefits for the ministry organization and its leadership.
Author: Benjamin Paul Dean, J.D., LLM. He has also completed his CAGS as a Ph.D.
candidate at Regent University’s School of Leadership Studies, located in
Virginia Beach, Virginia. His focus of study is intercultural leadership
development in ministry organizations. He and his wife Nancy serve in fulltime
missions ministry with Pioneers, working with nationals in ministry leadership.