Here’s an excerpt from our interview with North Brisbane Salvos, whose leaders Donna and Craig Todd and their team, build their healthy and vitality through initiatives such as this.
Read the conversation below.
NCLS: So, in terms of empowering leadership that you’ve mentioned. How do describe the way that happens in creating more leaders or growing more leaders?
DT: When kids go to high school we encourage them to find a place to serve in the church. It’s very common here to see 12-year olds serving in the café or welcoming people at the door, or helping out in kids ministry on the AV team and the worship team. So, that from a young age they’re instilled with this idea of serving in church. We also have a new initiative that stated last year called, Sisterhood Rising, and it’s particularly about empowering women in leadership in the church. And we’re into our second season of that.
There’s just a small group of women, they all have a mentor and they meet, it goes on almost for a year. We have group sessions as well and they all have to have a ministry in the church to help them grow. They all do leadership things like spiritual gifts and personality tests to help them. And they get a journal and workbooks to work through to help them grow. We had a pilot one last year and out of that we’ve seen three of the seven girls, one of them, she’s now on a leadership team.
Another one, she’s now a life group leader, and a third, she was the assistant director of Crash, and she’s now on the contributions team. So, we’ve seen some of these girls really take on more in the church as already from that pilot programme, Sisterhood Rising.
NCLS: Did you say that has been going for about a year?
DT: Yes, last month I think we started our second intakes of women.
NCLS: And that’s any age?
DT: The pilot one we did with young women aged 18 to 25, but this time we’ve got a few young and old. But we target particular women there to do the programme.
NCLS: So, you recognise something in them and you invite them to participate?
DT: Absolutely, yes.
NCLS: You mentioned before that phrase, who are we not seeing?
DT: Yes, who are we not seeing? Because you always think of the same people to do the same things. Or you think you want to get a team, who you do want on it? Okay, right, now who is it we’re not seeing? Who are we not seeing there who could be part of this? We try to get a few from left field.
