In his book, “Leading Cross-Culturally: Covenant Relationships for Effective Christian Leadership“, Sherwood Lingenfelter says that the most difficult challenge in leading multi-cultural teams or communities is to build trust within that team or community.   So he places great importance on this leadership task of forming a community of trust, which he goes on to call a “covenant community”.  In fact, he goes on to say that “instead of giving first priority to attaining vision, meeting goals and productivity, they (leaders) must rather give highest priority to the formation of a community of trust and then to doing the hard ‘bodywork’ of creating both community and trust.” This is not the typical advice we give to a new team leader, not even to a missionary team leader.   But when we have served on or worked with a team or church in which its members no longer trust one another,… Read the whole post