Sharon Yoder, IMMC Conference Co-Minister, shares how leading in the church is like working in a camp kitchen.

During college, I spent several summers working as the head cook at a summer camp. When I first began the role, I knew a fair bit about cooking and less about leadership. I knew nothing about how those words fit in the same sentence. Yet here I was—orchestrating meal preparation for 100 to 150 staff and campers.

This was possible only because I had an amazing leadership mentor who believed in me and supported me. She walked me through innumerable administrative details and showed me how to delegate tasks to kitchen volunteers who changed every day. After setting up cooking stations with everything a volunteer needed to prepare a specific dish, I had to release concern about how the job got done. It simply mattered that the food was prepared by the time the dining room was teeming with hungry campers.

My leadership mentor, along with the hundreds of volunteers I worked with those summers, taught me more about leadership than I’ll ever be able to name. What I can name, however, are the values of collaborative leadership and listening to the wisdom of others around me. The way my mom taught me to cook is not the only right way. Older and wiser volunteers taught me there are countless ways to prepare delicious meals.

Leadership in the church, support from pastoral mentors, and differing congregational cultures are something like the leadership that happened in that camp kitchen and the various cooking cultures introduced to me by camp volunteers. As a community of congregations, IMMC is committed to engaging justly across cultural differences. We want to listen to one another and learn from one another. We want to listen and learn from our two Chin congregations in Indianapolis. We want to listen and learn from our French- and Spanish-speaking congregations. We want to listen and learn from our English-speaking congregations. There is endless wisdom among us. May we listen deeply.