The Center For Sharing started offering local leadership formation courses in servant leadership in the Philippines in May of 2008, at the invitation of Mindoro Bible College. The course consisted of roughly 160 hours of class time, not including field trips that are a part of the over-all course.
The course was held on the island of Mindoro at MBC in 2008 and 2009 with MBC students, administrative staff as well as ABBCOP (Association of Bible Christian Churches of the Philippines) pastors.
In our 2008 course, out of the desire to move servant leadership away from being perceived primarily as theory based, we took the class on a field trip around their own community of Guinhawa. There among many other unfortunate situations, they found a mother living in a Nipa hut (small house with no rooms) ready to take her and her daughter’s life because the mother had grown up with crossed eyes and didn’t want her daughter to go through the same taunting she had. Pong, the director of MBC was able to talk to her and help her and her daughter get surgery to take care of the crossed eyes.
The awareness and conviction of practicing servant leadership has helped MBC look differently at Guinhawa. Initially, after partnering with the Vista Hermosa Foundation, they were able to start pig raising projects to help the community become more self sustaining. They also started selling rice to help members of their local community get a better price for their rice. However during that time, they felt something still was not quite right. After reflection on their training, Pong said, “Then, we come to evaluate the authenticity of our intensions. We ask ourselves, “do we really love these people in our community?” To our amazement, our answer is a big NO! but why are we doing this to them? Is the big question now that we faced! We found out that we just do it for the sake of helping them; for the sake of pitying them; for the sake of power; for the sake of relevance showing that MBC is doing spectacular and relevant things in the community; and out of arrogance we are not a loving community! Pong now says, “We now find joy in the process of loving people before serving them. Learning from our mistakes we found new meaning in what we are doing. As Mother Theresa said, “Small things with great love. Love once you give it to God it becomes infinite.” We are now entering the second year of the project with new passion and motivation to love. Please continue to pray for us.“
With this cohort of servant leaders from 2008 and 2009, a new dream emerged around the concept of a Filipino led servant leadership school. We are pleased to see the seeds that were sewn during our time with them have grown and blossomed into SL classes that were held in 2010 and 2011 by their own Filipino group.
