Eating spaghetti bolognese reminds me of leadership. 

It’s messy.  Try as you might to slurp discreetly it is just impossible to eat spag bol with elegance.  It is not ‘first date’ food!  With leadership, it’s the frequent tangle with status, celebrity, elitism, hierarchy and control that makes the mess.  Simply avoiding it often seems like the safest option. 

But then we’d be back to the ostrich problem.

Untangling leadership and what it does and doesn’t involve is, as you might suspect given the name, central to the Leadership Programme.  The idea is to inspire people to ‘step up to the line’ and be willing to lead the conversations that will shape future culture.  Big dream?  Definitely.  Funny thing is though, it often begins very small. 

This is an uncomfortable reality to face.  We want to make an impact, we want to know the formula for being a ‘great leader’; we want the glory, even if we dress it up as ‘holy kudos for Jesus’, without having to go through the personal refining process.  So we avoid it or we dismiss it as ungodly navel gazing.  At least that’s my tendency.

And in many ways during my year on the Programme this is exactly what I did.  I felt guilty that so frequently the focus seemed to be on me; on my strengths, my weaknesses, my visions, and my future.  The alarm bells regularly sounded and were followed by a stern admonition to self that life is not all about me, it is about God.  Yet questions of identity and character just kept on recurring. 

 The thing is knowledge and understanding of key cultural issues, the ability to bridge the gap between worldviews, and the skill to speak a language that is understood by those around you all count for nothing if a life of character and integrity is not on display.

 And that, at root, is what I discovered the Leadership Programme to be about: equipping men and women of integrity who are willing to accept responsibility and wrestle with the challenges of power and influence that leading in the public sphere entails.

Hi, I’m Katie McAvoy, an alumnus of the Institute for Faith and Culture run by CARE and formerly the IFC’s Associate Director.  I’ve been involved with the CARE Leadership Programme since 2008. 

The Programme equips the rising generation of Christians (that’s you and me!) to be leaders in the world of public policy and wider culture.  If what I’ve been talking about excites you then you can find out more about the Programme by visitingwww.care.org.uk/leadershipprogramme.