Two and a half years ago I was asked to take on leadership for InnerChange's Cambodia team. I don't think anyone can be offered such a thing and not feel a measure of pride. I certainly experienced that. But simultaneously I felt fear of such a task. At the time we numbered around 14 team (plus kids). From my perspective at the time there were a lot of challenges for team leadership.
All teams have history and Cambodia was not exception. I was hesitant to face these on my own. Samantha and I were also having a difficult time in marriage. Adjusting to being new parents, as well as adjusting to Cambodia (we'd been there two and a half years by then I guess). I don't know that I felt I was adjusting to Cambodia, but our marriage was definitely exhibiting stress signs. The thought of adding team leadership to an already stressful home life felt foolish.
Eventually we (the team) hit on the idea of a leadership council, especially in the interim, allowing people's gifts to dictate how they would contribute to the council. I pushed for this option as I saw in it a way to leasen the stress from leading the team and the benefit of wisdom from two others. So Hayden became country director and Lisa and I served as his 'deputies' for a year. It worked well (from my point of view). I was able to contribute some systems thinking as we went through two years of transitioning people out of the team. First Mark and Susan, then the Colombaras, the Chos, the Everitts and lastly, Kent. That's a lot of team to say good-bye to. We also gained Matt and Heather in September 2007.
In April or May of 2008 we invited Kim Zovack from CRM Australia to take the team (then down to 8 adults - Hims, Baker Evens, Hayden, Kent and the Allans) through a process of clarifying our ministry direction. We didn't want to do a re-visioning process because we'd tried that before and could never get past a lowest common denominator result where we basically stated what we were doing, and giving no real vision. We also felt that InnerChange's vision statement was plenty enough and we simply needed to add "in Cambodia" to the end.
Kim was extremely helpful to us, and was able to draw out from each of us our desires, passions and distill them down to a more manageable size. We ended up with three focus groups: an exploration for a potential new team site, a focus on contextualised discipleship and a focus on peace and justice.
The following year gave us time to focus more on these three groupings, but I think we realised that they were still too broad, and we still were working broader than that: namely, Treasures from the Heart and Sunrise. But I think it gave us enough focus to be more positive about who we were as a team and to identify what we were calling new team to be involved in.
By the Conference in 2008 Kent was leaving the team and the team felt strongly it's identity as the "new" Cambodia team. It had taken over a year to really feel in our guts that we were now a fundamentally new entity standing on it's own two feet, making our way in the world. This was a great break-through as I had been encouraging us to see ourselves as a new team since the first people started leaving the year before. But, as I am finding out, change takes time. More than I'd like, but I'm coming to appreciate the time it takes, and the opportunity it gives us to go to deeper places of knowing each other and ourselves.
Following Conference I was feeling challenged to go deeper into Cambodian culture and language, and some of us began talking of spending a month in a rural area, I think Mondulkiri, to enhance our language skills. We didn't make it there, as we realised we had a lot of other work to do. And as it turns out, many people are from indigenous ethnic groups and don't speak Khmer so much! But it planted a seed.
Hayden began talking about his desire to live outside of the city before (possibly) ending his time with InnerChange in 2010. Matt had travelled with Dave while Dave was still in country and felt a desire to be 'out there'. The Hims were obviously thinking about being out of Phnom Penh as they were already looking to Battambang. Finally, Samantha and I were getting itchy feet. Though we were not thinking outside Phnom Penh. Rather, we felt we would stay in PP so Patrick could continue his schooling at Hope School, but that we'd look seriously at moving in with a community at-risk of being evicted. We wanted to support a community well before an eviction was inevitable, to build up their internal strength as a community so they could resist the tactics of those seeking the eviction. I approached colleagues in human rights and asked where they recommend we move. The response was essentially, "Phnom Penh has enough support, go elsewhere". That took Sam and I by surprise but quickly tapped into the ongoing conversation on the team. We decided, then, that we should check this out, "Maybe God is calling our team to something new?" we thought.
In January, not a week after the Hims had arrived home from a six-month furlough to the US, the fifteen of us (7 adults and 8 kids) squeezed into a minvan for a ten-hour drive to Mondulkiri, then Kratie and finally Kampot to look into what life and ministry could look like in these places.
We had a lot of fun.
Travelling to and discovering new places together brought us together in a way that excited us all. We also felt that "we could do this", that there was nothing major preventing us from a successful go in one of these places. Finally, today, we settled on Kampot. It's the 'easiest' place to live which is important. The risk-taker in me doesn't necessarily value this, but the process we've been through has taught me to value the place where all can go, not just the 'toughest'.
In the midst of all this, I felt a huge opportunity opening up for us as a team. Here was a real chance of us all starting something new at the same time. We will all need each others' support, and we can really build each other up and, in the words of Johnny Wilson, build trust, respect and acceptance for each other.
The future is exciting
As I mention above, time is crucial to change management, building trust and vision. If I was asked, "will you take two years to build up the level of trust on your team so that you might have a chance at pursuing a vision together?", I would have said, "No". When I was offered team leadership two and a half years ago (perhaps more) I wanted to say no. But as I look back I am inclinded to think it was all well worth it. Definitely the hardest part was the first year of saying so many good-byes. Some were harder than others. And having to make decisions that would exclude some (when inclusivity is such a high value). Then there was the long slow process of trust-building with team members who'd felt on the outer for a long time.
I would say that, paradoxically, inclusiveness can in fact become exclusive. There comes a time when a group, team or community needs to define itself. When it cannot it no longer becomes attractive and healthy. Yet an inability to accept a wide and diverse group of people to join the vision is also unhealthy and limiting. I have no hard and fast ideas on this, but there is a tension. To acheive a place where community can be healthy in it's diversity it cannot be amorphous and atomized. There must be cohesion and relational integrity. There needs to be focus and clear mission.
Peace,
Chris
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