DAI is a ministry that is passionate about growing effective servant leaders across the world. Its focus is on developing a leader’s spiritual growth and effectiveness at managing people, money and organizations, with servant leadership as the core principle.
Working with Christian leaders, mainly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, DAI provides training workshops which encourages participants to think through what it means to be a Christian leader in their community and nation. Traditionally, many leaders of churches and Christian organisations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, have modelled their approach to leadership on the leaders they see in their culture around them. These leaders tend to be dictatorial and autocratic, who use their power to protect their position, and who tend to ride rough-shod over the people they lead and serve. This is true of leaders in governments and business, but sadly also for those leaders in the church and in Christian ministry. This is a very different model of leadership to that which Jesus Christ advocated in the Gospels and which should be the pattern for Christian leaders. DAI encourages those who attend their training workshops to compare the cultural approach to leadership which they see around them with Servant Leadership as encouraged in the New Testament, and to develop a leadership approach accordingly.
Charles Onencan
Charles Onencan, a Ugandan Christian who works at the Centre for Peace, Education and Development in Kampala, is currently mid-way through a 3-year Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership which is run by DAI in partnership with Uganda Christian University. Writing about the impact of the programme on his ministry and his life, Charles wrote “the course calls for deeper soul-searching and reflection on what kind of leadership we have been professing and should be practicing. It has helped me re-examine my leadership purpose and for me, it has demystified the common notion of leadership, especially here in Uganda, where to be a leader means accumulating wealth and ‘eating as much as you can’ in total disregard of others and of God’s design for leadership.”
The 3-year degree programme that Charles is studying is offered by DAI in partnership with other Christian Universities and Seminaries in 18 countries across Africa and Asia. DAI also offers a variety of biblically-based workshops to address the specific needs and issues facing Christian leaders living in these regions as well as in Latin America.
Last year DAI worked with more than 33,000 leaders around the world. Those who attend DAI’s training say that they experience a transformation that impacts how they lead at home, at work and in their community.
