Enhancing Leadership in the Christian Community: A Case

This study addresses the problem of underdevelopment in the region of Shobra El Khema, Egypt. Underdevelopment is a multidimensional phenomenon including personal, collective, institutional, cultural and ecological dimensions. These dimensions are interrelated as cause-effect-consequences. Cause-effect relationships may be analyzed both from an historical and from an existential perspective. What may have been the cause of the problem may take on an independent existence or it may have been part of each dimension of underdevelopment in the Shobra El Khema region. Several dimensions were discovered through the research of this study.

As a result of studying the area, the author and his team found it worthwhile to investigate the situation and to try to find a method for further developing the leadership within the Christian community in Egypt. The potential is that leaders could change the situation of people not only in the diocese of Shobra El Khema but also in other dioceses in Egypt.

The team, in partnership with the congregation, decided to do this work by establishing the 'Christian Community Development Association-Egypt" (CCDAE). An approach called the 'cluster strategy, '.based on the methods used by Moses in leading the Israelites, is described and applied to the training of people in the Shobra El Khema region. The method was revised somewhat to provide more inclusion of the clergy, but the method has shown a success rate as high as 80 percent,. The team hopes to expand the renewal methods used in this study to all of the sixty dioceses in Egypt, involving some twelve million Copts.