Rev. Dr. Romerlito C. Macalinao, M.A., Ed.D. 1/6

Adapted from Reggie McNeal (2000) (2000), “A Work of Heart,” Jossey-Bass Publishers

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Culture. This is the first major player in the leader’s heart development. It creates a backdrop for all the rest of the story lines. Culture is broadly defined to include all environmental influences that shape the leader’s life and ministry context. These include the historical period, political situation, societal mores, and traditions. All these create the cultural milieu in which the leader operates. Culture is not neutral; it contains both positive and negative forces. Nor does it serve merely as a background. Culture creates a story line in itself, for the leader’s heart cannot be explained apart from its cultural influences.

What cultural influences in your early years have shaped you most significantly?

How have these influences fashioned your uniqueness?

Are you a student of culture?

Do you know what is going on in the world?

Do you look for ways to connect with the culture or seek ways to escape it?

How comfortable or angry are you with those outside the faith?

What is your track record of influencing people toward Jesus?

Call. Every leader will admit to having some sense of destiny, whether great or small. In spiritual leaders, we can refer to this as the awareness of a call. The call is the leader’s personal conviction of having received some life assignment or mission that must be completed. The call orders the leader’s efforts, affecting decision in every area of life. How the leader comes to an understanding of the life mission and how to pursue it provides a significant subplot for the leader’s life drama.

What did you answer the call to do?

Have you seen the attendant gifts, talents, and passion come along?

What has God anointed?

When do you feel most alive in ministry?

How has your understanding of your call changed over time?

How is the call being expressed in why you are doing right now?

Who is your audience?

Community. Leaders do not develop in isolation. They emerge within a community that plays a vital role in shaping them. Actually we should speak of multiple communities in the leader’s development. The family of origin, or initial life community, provides a beginning place for understanding this subplot in the leader’s story. However, other key communities come into play. These may include the leader’s friendships and faith-ministry communities.

What gifts have you brought forward from your family of origin?

What have you claimed responsibility for?

What level of intimacy have you achieved with your family? Why or why not?

Who will attend your funeral?

What will they say about your relationship with them?

What kind of community are you building through your ministry, co-workers?

Who among your leadership constituency?

Who would be a good person or group to talk to about your answers to the above personals?

Communion. This aspect of heart-shaping reflects the leader’s conscious cultivation of a relationship with God. Spiritual leaders deal in spiritual currency. The value of this currency depends directly on the strength of the leader’s deposit into the relationship bank with the Almighty. The communion subplot opens the door to the intimate interactions between the leader and the Leader.

Do you have regular dates or coaching sessions with God?

What other images invite you to spend quality time with Him?

When God thinks about you, what expression comes over his face?

Does he smile or frown? Why?

What can you do to improve your communion?

What do others know about the conversations you have with God?

How do you keep God on your heart throughout the day?

How are you cultivating God’s friendship?

What is the last thing you have learned about God in your times together?

Conflict. One could naively suspect that because spiritual leaders focus on healing, grace, peacemaking, restoration, forgiveness, and reconciliation, they escape from a lot of conflict. Just the opposite is true. The nature of the work places the spiritual leader in a combative position against destructive powers, the dark side of spiritual forces. Spiritual leaders find themselves thrown into the thick of the fray. These conflicts, whether personal, interrelational, demonic, or organizational, are not tangential developments. Rather, they are central heart-shaping events and episodes.

What family-of-origin issues influence how you deal with conflict?

What are you memoirs of early leadership conflicts?

What happened during your most recent conflict experience?

What if anything, would you do differently now?

Commonplace. A lot of heart-shaping activity goes on in the everyday, run-of-the-mill, when-nobody’s-looking activity of the leader. The defining moments in leaders’ lives rarely offer a study in discontinuity. Usually leaders come to believe that all of life served to prepare them for that crystallizing event. The ordinary and routine serve to shape the leader’s character. How the leader responds to everyday challenges and opportunity reflects a basic predisposition toward God’s work in the leader’s life.

Where have you seen God lately?

What joys can you recite?

How have others blessed you today?

How have you been a blessing?

What beauty surrounds you?

What pain drives you to God?

What kindness have you received recently?

Who have you befriended in the last few days?

What small or large obediences to God can you celebrate?

Is your heart song one of gratitude?

Seminar-Workshop Topics

Learning Styles. Everyone engaged in the teaching ministry will benefit from an understanding of how people learn. Knowing how people learn will help teachers craft their teaching styles accordingly. Why do people learn differently? How to know when a person learns better in a certain way? How to make use of the understanding that people learn differently?

Reviewing Techniques. If education is expensive, think about ignorance? Children need not breeze through school without really learning. Something can be done to maximize their learning. How can children improve their academic performance in school? What are the study habits they need to learn? How to enhance their memory in order to boost confidence and excel in studies?

Research Strategies. With the advent of the World Wide Web or the Internet, the problem now is not the lack of information but the enormous amount of it. Therefore, the challenge is the nature of the information, the reliability and veracity of the information, and the usefulness of the information. How to make use of both traditional research methodologies and internet research?

Effective Parenting. With all the efforts put into work, supporting the family, and securing the future, there is one thing that parents need not forget: the ultimate investment is the nurture of children towards responsible personhood. How can parents effectively invest in the lives of their children? What are the values and convictions that children need? How to create or make use of learning moments?

Strategic Planning. It has often been said that without vision the people perish. Crafting a vision statement is easy. But how do we know that this is the right vision when we are surrounded with so many needs, concerns, and options? We need to ask, what is business and how is business? How do we translate vision into reality?

Creative Discipline. Spare the rod, spoil the child has often been heard. It is generally agreed the some form of conformity to standards is required of our children. However, what do we do when that standard is met or unmet? Do we become passive, reactive, aggressive, or what have you? What are the means of preventing our children from doing the undesirable? How do we motivate them from doing what is good? Why is it important to instruct our children from learning to choose good rather than evil?

Single Mingle. In a fast-paced world, developing healthy, truthful, and significant relationships do not come easily. Electronic connections tend to describe the mode of most relationships. Harnessing the internet through emails, chats, and video conferences or the ubiquitous celfone through texting, a person to person and face to face meeting tends to be minimized. How can one protect oneself from scammers and sexual predators? How can one cultivate that ideal relationship that could last a lifetime?

Church Life Cycle. The birth, growth, maturity, and expansion of local churches have a specific framework that congregational leaders need to become aware of. Such an understanding is indeed crucial if a local church would become effective in its nurture and development of one’s congregation. What are these stages? What are the leadership tasks in each stage? What are the challenges at each stage? How do we identify at which stage is a local church?

Personal Inventories. People are unique and have individual differences. What do we know of ourselves in terms of personality styles and preferences? How can we use this understanding of ourselves in order to best position ourselves in any human endeavor? With an awareness of what we are, how can we improve ourselves all the more?

Marriage Enrichment. How long have you been married? Do you know that there is a marriage life cycle and that at each level are certain tasks and expectations? Have you ever wondered at what stage your married life is? What do spouses need to learn in order to enhance their married life?

Appreciative Inquiry. What is the problem and what is the solution, or the problem-solving approach is loosing ground in this century. Change and development from a positive core is the cutting edge organizational development tool of the century. David Cooperrider, et al, a recent award winner of the American Society of Training and Development, an award given to notable people like Peter Drucker, Senge, et al, pioneered this approach. Also known as Whole Systems Design, FutureSearch, Positive Design, or Appreciative Inquiry, what is this and how to make use of it?

Love Languages. Parents and adults are the first models of love if children and the young become loving individuals. What are the many ways of showing love? Why is it important to intentionally show love? How to integrate from day to day the many ways of giving and receiving love?

Leadership Inventory. James Kouzes and Barry Posner, authors of the best selling book, “The Leadership Challenge” (Jossey Bass Publishers) developed the “Leadership Practices Inventory”. This assessment tool helps both start-up and seasoned leaders to find out their leadership qualities and personally design their leadership development. Following this could be a design and implementation of a leadership development program.

Unite the House. Can it not be said, “let us unite the house” rather than “let us divide the house”? The latter is based on the “Robert’s Rule of Order” and the other is an alternative called the “Consensus Model”. The former ends with winners and losers whereas the latter ends with unanimity. What is the consensus model and how to adapt this in our communities in order to bring unity and harmony instead of chaos and strife?

Leading Change. Congregations pass through different cycles of growth and inertia, of peaks and plains. Leaders need to assess where their congregations are and lead where their congregations should be. How to do this? Following the lead of John Kotter of Harvard Business School and Jim Herrington, et al of the Leadership Network, leading congregational change will be learned and applied by Christian leaders in their specific communities. Highlighting this topic are themes on spiritual and relational vitality, learning disciples, and the systems-approach.

Other topics that can be availed of are: Social Development of Children, Multiple Intelligences, Educational Leadership & Management, Creating a Learning Organization, Developmentally Appropriate Practices, Helping Your Child With Homework, New Learning Strategies for Generation X, Practical Mentoring, Creativity and Innovation, Team Building, Discipleship Strategies, Curriculum Development, Teacher’s Training, Teaching Strategies, Values Formation, Ministerial Skills & Biblical Knowledge, Building Community, Effective Communication. Other topics or themes may be developed as persons and organizations contract our services.

About The Services: The time allotment varies. We design the duration of the services based on the training needs assessment or on the specific requirements of the requesting party. The cost of the services is negotiable.

Who Can Avail Of These Seminars And Workshops: In schools, we provide seminars or address topics of concern for parents and teachers meetings, retooling seminar-workshops for teachers, etc. In Churches, Christian organizations, and other companies, we provide the complete line of services and other topics of interest upon request. Consultancy services are also available.

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