In March, we encouraged our disciple, Little, to attend an 18-day leaders’ training in Malaysia conducted by a close ministry friend of ours. After our home-trip back to Singapore, we went over to Malaysia to join her. Although we missed out on the first half of the seminar, we arrived just in time for the most important segment of the training!
Actually we have plans to bring this 18-day leaders’ training track back with us to East Asia, as part of our 2-in-1 East Asia Training Centre program. Therefore we made sure we attended it before heading back. No doubt the design of the entire course is creatively geared towards the context and mindset of East Asia.
God had also something extra in store for us. One of the topics in this 18-day training is “Personality Test and Traits.” I’m sure this topic isn’t new to many of us, because we’ve gone through this course about 10 years ago in Singapore. But due to the facilitator’s lack of proper instruction then, many of the participants who attended this course were conveniently “labeled” and it somewhat hampered their personal development and ministry. We weren’t spared either. This time round, the facilitators took care and effort to thoroughly explain the basis of this topic and they brought across its goal very effectively. This ensured that participants knew not only their personalities but also how they can better bless the church and one another. This corrected quite a bit of false beliefs and brought a great sense of release and healing especially for the both of us.
Throughout this course, we managed to pick up many useful tools and attitudes in teaching and training from the trainers. The way they taught gave us a fresh perspective and insight to teaching. Not only did they teach from their heart in and out of the classroom, they introduced interactive learning, group discussions and one-to-one personal workshops. Ultimately they upheld their belief that everyone is made differently and in spite of our uniqueness, we are all called to accomplish the same task. Our personalities are not cast in stone – it changes through the seasons and the environment around us. We find that this is a very applicable tool for ministry, especially for marriage counseling.
On the whole, we went away from this session impressed by the sacrificial love and serious commitment of the team who put this training together. They gave of their time and resources in order to train and equip East Asian leaders for ministry in their home churches and communities. Let’s pray for them that after this 18-day training, participants will be better able to shepherd their churches when they return home.
