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Moving Forward Together: A Story from the Philippines
Eleazar Fernandez
Community is a significant core value of my leadership and ministry in the educational institution I am currently serving. I view community as a life-constituting principle, orienting compass, ethical norm, spiritual vehicle, and organizing strategy. This core principle has guided and informed my vision, goals, strategic initiatives, and style of leadership and governance. I start with the assumption of the fundamental nature of community: we are not individuals first and then join a community; we are individuals only because we belong to a community and communities. Community belonging is a basic human need. The destiny of one is intertwined with the destiny of the community. I am because we are (the African concept of "Ubuntu").
I have employed "ubuntu" ways of thinking and doing in leading the various stakeholders of the educational institution I am serving who, in spite of avowed claims that they are a community with a common mission and shared values, often behave as if the interest of one were antagonistic to the other. In this setting, I have to articulate clearly the mission of the institution and the common interest, not the watered-down least common denominator, if the institution is to move forward toward its vision. As a leader I work hard so that the various stakeholders (church denominational leaders, Board of Trustees, faculty, staff, students, etc.) own the vision and, consequently, actively play a distinct and important role in realizing the vision.
If we want to go fast, we must go alone; but if we want to go far, we must go together, says an African proverb. Or, following Thich Nhat Hanh, "If we are a drop of water and we try to get to the ocean as only an individual drop, we will surely evaporate along the way. To arrive at the ocean, [we] must go as a river."
The community is our river into the ocean of new possibilities!
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Eleazar Fernandez member of Mayflower Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, Minneapolis, Minnesota, serves with the United Church of Christ in the Philippines. He serves as President of Union Theological Seminary, Philippines. Eleazar is also the author of Burning Center, Porous Borders: The Church in a Globalized World which "articulates what the church is and is called to be about in the world, a world now globalized to the point that the local is lived globally and the global is lived locally."
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