I wish you were with us at our graduation ceremony.
There were over 1,000 people packed into the Bolosse Baptist Church just down the hill from the seminary and was ridiculously hot. While I sat there with the faculty, sweating into my regalia, something happened that brought me such encouragement.
As the speaker was in the middle of his commencement address, something caught my eye down in the audience. A group of my students in the front row were looking at me, nodding their heads and smiling.
What are they smiling about? I thought. Is my hat on crooked?
The address was being given in French, not Creole, so I couldn’t understand it. But when I saw the reaction of my students, I leaned in to listen and see what I could pick out.
“In a few minutes, we’re going to give you a License in Bible and Theology, he said, but if we’re following Jesus model, it should really be a License in Service.
It turns out that he was giving a commencement address on the subject of Servant Leadership and my students were making a connection.
Just a few days before, I finished teaching my course “Leadership Chrétien” (Christian Leadership) at STEP. It was an entirely new course for the seminary, a course where we spent the whole semester talking about Servant Leadership and what it looks like in the Haitian context. Ideas that were now being reinforced in this graduation speech.
To be honest, I had been nervous for much of the semester. It was my first time teaching a full seminary course and it was my first time teaching in Creole. Are they understanding this? Am I communicating ok? The feedback was good, but I wondered if it was really sinking in.
Sitting on the platform, I shifted my gaze away from the speaker and back down to my students. The smile on their faces confirmed for me: they caught it, it and they wanted me to know. What an encouragement!
Would you pray for these students as they put the principles of servant leadership into practice in their own ministries?
