Leaders, Guardians of the Gates: The Importance of Leadership

By Belinda Fontanez

Leaders, Guardians of the Gates challenges every leader to consider their leadership from a Christian worldview as well as secular leaders managing fortune five hundred companies. By providing a broad leadership scope, every leader who desires a fresh idea will understand the connection between biblical performance goals and current tea

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Jul 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781647730512

Book preview

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leaders, Guardians of thE gates

THE IMPORTANCE OF LEADERSHIP

BELINDA FONTANEZ, PHD

Trilogy Christian Publishers

A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Trinity Broadcasting Network

2442 Michelle Drive

Tustin, CA 92780

Copyright © 2020 by Belinda Fontanez

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, KING JAMES VERSION®, KJV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For information, address Trilogy Christian Publishing

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Trilogy Christian Publishing/ TBN and colophon are trademarks of Trinity Broadcasting Network.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Trilogy Christian Publishing.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Trilogy Disclaimer: The views and content expressed in this book are those of the author and may not necessarily reflect the views and doctrine of Trilogy Christian Publishing or the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-64773-050-5

ISBN 978-1-64773-051-2 (eBook)

For my family

Endorsements

Fontanez invites leaders to take a fresh and honest look at their own approach to leadership. With practical insights gleaned from decades of service in both sacred and secular organizations readers will find this book filled with relevant research written for leaders in the trenches. Using both newly researched topics as well as classic leadership principles, she equips us with the courage and tools to be organizational guardians.

—Dr. Steve Grusendorf,

Director for Ministry Studies

The Christian and Missionary Alliance

Dr. Belinda Fontanez is a natural leader. In her journey, she has identified leadership issues, challenged and taught leaders to overcome deterrents in their leadership. Her book, Leaders, Guardians of the Gates, proposes Dr. Fontanez’s concepts concerning how we need to march forward as leaders willing and ready to accomplish the task. Read her book, and you will get a sense of the struggles that many leaders must regularly handle. You will be inspired!

—Neal Gray, PhD,

Pastor, Baltimore Parkville Church of the Nazarene

Adjunct Faculty, Lancaster Bible College, Pennsylvania

Foreword

The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life

Life abounds in studying the wise

—Proverbs 13:14

Several years ago, I had the distinct privilege of meeting the author, Belinda Fontanez, a woman skilled in the art of living out life well with a practiced daily wisdom for her family, work and community. Since then we have had occasions to meet and talk, most recently during our participation in a tour group visiting Jerusalem for Pentecost 2019. As you will discover, she is an accomplished and learned leader of people, as this book reflects with its nuggets of wisdom on leadership and community.

When you meet her, which you will do in this reading, you become aware that she has an inquiring mind full of questions. When I was a college student, I remember our science professor making a profound challenge to us students, Always ask why. I wrote it down in the leaf of my textbook. The phrase has remained tucked away in my brain all these years since.

As you will discern from page to page, even to the very end of the book, the author is fertile with questions upon questions. She abounds with them to provoke critical thinking. She concludes near the end of the book, My own questions have not ended. On the contrary, I believe the quest continues. Indeed, it does.

Here is Belinda Fontanez, a spark of fire that lights up the minds of those who know her.

Amidst her questions on organization and leadership is an array of nuggets of wisdom that can be a fountain of life for you. Assuming you are a leader, she expounds on why egocentrism should be refuted and intellectual courage embraced to become a critical thinker, or at least a better one, and a more effective leader.

In her quest for knowledge and wisdom measured as an ethical response to the world, she raises the specter of meta-size influences that affect leaders, such as Modernity and Post-Modernity. In search of solutions for leaders, she then shows how to adjust to these watershed cultural challenges on a practical level for corporate and religious circles.

The read is not difficult. Though thought-provoking, her wise concepts are easily grasped. With care she adds repetition, circling her subject at hand until the reader is content to move forward.

May the sparks of her mind light up the torch of your mind, fueling your imagination, as you read her observations on leadership for today.

Ed Nelson

Executive Secretary-Treasurer

South Carolina District of the Assemblies of God

Preface

It has been several years since this book was first conceived. After being introduced to the concept of organizational governance during my doctoral work at Capital Seminary and Graduate School, a part of Lancaster Bible College, I became interested in how secular and religious organizations modeled leadership. Not only are organizations incorporating cultural diversity but including institutional logics (the way we perceive leadership through our background and belief systems that are blended), often without a clear pattern of governance with diverse missions or policy fields within one organization. More and more, organizations are coming under pressure to meet social community obligations.

I discovered that institutional logics and the blend of lived experiences, including education, were important factors of how individual leadership and empowerment perceptions were applied in an organization. I also noticed through many conversations with community Christian leaders that not one demonstrated a concern with how culture or regional differences were connecting issues pertaining to leadership and empowerment perceptions.

What is interesting is the fact that religious influences do affect institutional logics specifically how people view an organization’s leadership and empowerment practices in relationship to their positions in the organization.

I would like to acknowledge that through many dialogues with secular leaders, innovative researchers, and various Christian leaders helped to develop and shape this work. In this endeavor, I want to offer a practical yet thought-provoking resource for leaders who have brought to the discussion table the tried methodology of leadership, the frustrations of obtaining a balance between functioning in their religious organizations and secular jobs.

This book focuses on a broad collection of related ideas instead of one framework for leadership. However, I hope you, the reader, will discover a direct connection between leadership, character, and biblical civic participation. In this book, my desire is that you will understand and take away the importance of how leadership should be examined, explained, and implemented in the frame of corporate and religious organizations.

Acknowledgment

Thank you to my family members who have encouraged me through wisdom to rest and space myself through healing prayers and times of worship.

I have been blessed and greatly favored by the faithful God I serve. The Lord has given me perseverance, strength, and security in my spirit to lean on Him through all the challenges I have faced to this point in my life.

The Blueprint for Organizational Leadership, For Today’s Precision In Doing Leaders

Introduction

Within our culture, we have become somewhat calloused to the performance outcomes presented to us by corporations that fail in their leadership development, moral character, and employee development. There is a balance that we must expect within both corporate and religious organizations. Moral and ethical leadership is the beginning to this foundation.

As leaders, we are the guardians of the gates. Of what gates? The gates of truth and knowledge that stand between us and those we lead. The paths that we have investigated for ourselves and accepted or run from to avoid stress and sorrow. The gates which have left people questioning why there is no leadership access to that side of the road. We are the leaders who need to stand in the gap as we watch society ebb and flow; we are the guardians who must assist our communities, being present when no one else will stand up.

There are many books about leadership and religion. This book may not always find you nodding your head in agreement, but it gives you the space to consider your importance and how you are shaping or what has shaped your leadership. I hope that through this book, you will be challenged to think about your leadership. I am hoping that you will agree with me in areas of faith, value, and ethics. But like anything else, it is a tool that will open a dialogue and direct us to see how we may remain mindful in how we lead, how we develop character, and to stand for what we believe. I hope it should matter to you.

Part 1: The Challenge

Leadership and the Community Perspective

Now more than ever we are facing an extreme amount of political and religious pressure to fold our hands and dispense words filled with empty applause for those among us who fail as leaders. It is not a statement to cause division; I am not attempting to do that, just the opposite. I look forward to the day when I can speak among a group of religious and secular leaders who are not afraid to examine the veracity of what is spoken in the church and the marketplace.

If we are unable to do this simple act of communication, with what measure are we viewing and leading in the world? Whom do we decide is accountable? One of the greater questions I think about is, how does whom we follow reflect on the depths of who we are? I know you are probably thinking, why ask these questions or why is it even important? Why should we approach leadership and ethics through this lens? Leadership is now and will always