Were I a persuasive female voice,
That could travel the wide world through,
I would fly on the beams of the morning light,
And speak to men with a gentle might,
And tell them to be true;
I would fly, I would fly, o'er land and sea,
Where'er a human heart might be,
Telling a tale or singing a song
In praise of the right, in blame of the wrong.
Were I a consoling female voice,
I'd fly on the wings of air;
The homes of sorrow and guilt I'd seek,
And calm and truthful words I'd speak,
To save them from despair;
I would fly, I would fly, o'er the guarded town,
And drop, like the beautiful sunlight, down
Into the hearts of suffering men,
And teach them to look up again
Phoebe Palmer wrote those lines in 1858 in her book The Promise of the Father[1] as a transition to introduce the powerful witness of one of her female friends, a professor of religion, who found complete freedom in her relationships by opening up to a powerful relationship with God as the Father, the Redeemer, and the Holy Ghost. The purpose of this intimate relationship that she had developed was to stand up for justice and to be a beam of hope for those suffering and in despair.
Closer to us, Faith Mambura Ngunjiri quotes one of her friends, Ms. Kaara, “The courage comes from the spirit within . . . who empowers her to be what I am . . . the spirit gives her the capacity to pursue the truth without illusion. The spirit emboldens her within the parameters of my Christian faith to seek liberation until I die . . .”2 This Kenyan female
Christian leader had a burning desire for truth to be unfolded in the community around her.
What’s more, she was ready to stand up for truth and the development of just and peaceful [2]African communities.
A century and a half separate these two women. Oceans separate these two women. However, they have integrated the empowerment that each African female Christian leader can experience under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to stand up with courage for truth, and justice in order to develop shalom communities around them.
The short biographies of the following two West-African female leaders, the first living in Burkina Faso, and the second one in Côte d’Ivoire will encourage each reader to be open to the leading of the Holy Spirit. He will lead them to far more than what they could have anticipated, to speak up for those without voices and contribute to showing forth Christ’s shalom kingdom in the communities entrusted to them.
These two leaders are from West-African countries that lag behind in many of the references of the Social Institutions and Gender Index for their individual countries. The rate of female illiteracy is still very high in both countries, with Ivory Coast’s rate increasing to reach close to that of Burkina Faso. [3] In the area of political life, on the other hand, Ivory Coast seems to provide a stronger legislative support to women than in Burkina Faso.[4] For example, two years ago, Côte d’Ivoire promulgated a law allowing both spouses to be considered as co-heads of the family for the first time in the country’s history. However, a major gap between the legal framework and the actual practices are evidenced in both countries, especially due to the cohabitation of both the legal and the traditional frameworks governing society. The scope of this chapter will not allow further comments. However the reader is able to check the references in the footnotes and thus recognize the very challenging environment in which female leaders and especially Christian female leaders are called to model out a shalom leadership in the church and in the world.
“Spiritual leadership is a thing of the Spirit and is conferred by God alone. When His searching eye alights on a man who has qualified, He anoints him with His Spirit and separates him to his distinctive ministry. . .”[5] This affirmation fits well with Joanna’s personal life, which summarizes her desire to serve God and others.
Joanna was an adolescent when she had her real encounter with the calling of the Lord. In the work that follows, through the different stages of her life, Joanna is one of those whom God in his grace uses to do his work because of her willingness to be shaped.
Joanna’s mother was a simple but hardworking woman. She was also very attentive to her children. She knew how to support her children.
Joanna’s mother had multiple pregnancies with eleven living children. Very early in her life, her mother said, "Do everything to succeed in your studies; try to get yourself a job before getting married." Because of economic reasons and lack of education, she found herself “stuck” in her marriage, often feeling like the mere slave of her father’s will. Her life represented what a great majority of African women have to live through. The only way to change was education and financial independence. Joanna found herself in a situation where, as Chantal Kalisa writes, “stories affirm the survival of not only the storyteller but also the listeners, who ‘survive because they have learned from the story.’ In the context of violence, storytelling derives heavily from what Dori Laub calls ‘the imperative to tell,’ especially after a traumatic event.”[6] Joanna, however, did not wait to have a job before she got married. Perhaps she was not quite as convinced as her mother was of the need for financial independence, or she had not really grasped her sufferings.
Joanna is the second of eleven children, the eldest of seven daughters, and was nearly swept away by measles early in her life. Thanks to the perseverance of a courageous and hardworking mother, she survived. Her mother was thus her first role model as a strong female leader. She did not give up on her young daughter in spite of her poor physical condition but persevered creatively trying to find the ways and means to get her to a healthier level. Thus, early on, she taught Joanna a very valuable lesson on the necessity to creatively care for those who are the weakest and most despised in a society that cherishes maleness and strength. Although women are generally considered as the weaker members in the African community, mothers are usually the pillar of their families and their communities[7]. Their strength and creativity to find ways to serve unselfishly their family and community members is so many ways. Joanna’s mother was such a woman.
Joanna’s father was a Republican Guard and his duties and assignments took the family to various cities and villages in Burkina Faso. Joanna doesn’t talk much about her father except to state that her parents always made an effort to educate their children in the
Word of God and laid a strong biblical foundation in the children at a very early age. However, as a child, she discovered the benefits of traveling to different places and interacting with ethnic groups other than her own Mossi group, learning languages such as
Dioula, the Gulmantchéma. Joanna’s exposure to a variety of cultural and ethnic practices highly impacted her in her views and apprehension of cultural differences. At a very early age, Joanna learned about different ways of living and thinking, which later opened her to be very understanding of communities that were different from her with an incarnational perspective as she interacts with them.
One night when she had some discipline issues at her Catholic girls’ high school, two of her classmates talked to her and she was convicted of her wrongdoing. From that night on, God used her two friends to bring Joanna back on track; he changed her behavior and all those who had known her before were amazed at the transformation has taken place in her life. The positive leadership of her classmates had a definitive impact on her life and turned it around. This is a vivid illustration of what Betty Mould Iddrisou wrote in an article entitled
Women leaders and politicians need the support of their sisters, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, classmates and cannot thrive without their active and vocal support. Women are generally thought of not to being supportive of each other and the experience of many women leaders shows this to be a harsh reality. It takes a lot of inner strength and thick skin.[8]
When Joanna wanted to stop her studies to go to Bible school, church elders advised her to continue her studies. They had visions for her that stretched far beyond the common expectations of her Burkinabe context; they anticipated her future and her impact on the God’s people. This visionary aspect of leadership heavily influenced her as she realized later how God-sent advice this has been. She often wonders, “Do I have such a visionary outlook and impact on the young people that I am called to coach or serve at this present time?”
Joanna married a pastor and together they had three children. The experience of living with her mother, somehow, helped her marriage as a wife and a mother. Although her husband was not as violent as her father was, she faced a variety of challenges in her own marriage. Searching the Scriptures for how to best handle difficult situations, she persevered in prayer and meditation of the Word for encouragement and the ability to support her spouse. After thirty-four years of married life, the greatest lesson she learned was that "the prosperous couple is the couple that agrees together." When one is able, despite their differences to listen and focus on the essentials, God makes the couple prosper and blesses what belongs to them and what they do. Such harmony does not necessarily mean agreeing with the opinion of the partner but knowing how to create the peace and serenity required for the intervention of God in spite of divergent viewpoints. This is such a contrast to the traditional African or Burkinabe view of the husband’s role: an authoritarian role where the wife has no say in major decisions and often serves as a servant or slave to her husband. Joanna and her husband had the privilege of understanding early on the necessity of focusing on God himself as the center of their marriage instead of the husband focusing mainly on having his needs met. As a mother, the sense of sacrifice always animated Joanna; she did everything in her power for the success of the children that God had given them. As the Domestic Violence Taskforce (1993, p. 61) acknowledges: “We realize that our Christian perspective comes from a variety of sources taught to us, modeled for us or gleaned from our own reading. The Bible and tradition are the main sources, but are we clear as to the specific source of our beliefs and attitudes?”[9] Joanna kept teaching her children to make the Bible their reference book for all aspects of their lives. Today, by the grace of God all her children are still following the Lord and attend church regularly and have succeeded in their studies. [A]Leadership in Her Professional Life: Intellectual Pursuit
Besides having obtained a master’s program in Modern Literature at the University of Ouagadougou, Joanna was able later on to do theological studies in England for two years and enroll in leadership development programs that provided her with the conceptual framework to exercise her leadership in the various organizations that she felt called to develop and lead. Throughout these educational endeavors, there were people or groups of people who believed in her, encouraged her, and told her that she can make it happen. They stood by her as she was facing a variety of challenges to move up in her education.
Joanna’s hunger for further training and need for intellectual freedom was part of what she felt that her mother had yearned for. This acknowledges what Lufuluvhi Maria
Mudimeli discussed in her doctoral dissertation[10] regarding the need for higher education for African women. More specifically, Joanna believed higher education could empower many women for leadership in the church as it did for her.
When Joanna completed her studies at the University of Ouagadougou, she asked to be a teacher of the French Protestant College in October in Ouagadougou, inspired by the influence of missionaries who taught her when she was young. Her teachers had not only practiced their profession, but also had seized the opportunity to be good witnesses of Christ in all areas of their lives. Convinced that their example has allowed her to know the Lord and remain faithful to Him, she is committed not only to teaching intellectual knowledge but to sharing the gospel with students of her classes.
During the course of the next thirteen years, Joanna’s professional capacity increased enormously. She founded The Contact Magazine and became the director of publication. She was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Radio Gospel Development (RED), a position she held for the next eleven years. She was elected the President of the National Association of Audio-Visual Communications of Burkina Faso, the consortium of all private radio stations in Burkina. Eventually, she resigned as CEO of RED and founded the Christian Action Association, All for Solidarity (ACTS Ministry), a ministry that shows God's love in tangible ways to orphans and widows who have been affected by poverty and the AIDS pandemic— the most vulnerable individuals in Burkina Faso. They are the forgotten ones.
Some ministries that ACTS provides include orphanage, preschool through secondary education for 800 village children, vocational training for orphans, and a meal program for students and orphans. Through a medical center it provides healthcare for the community and disaster relief for poor village families; the women's cooperative programs reach 9,000 women; and it sponsors adult literacy programs for women as well as evangelistic outreach ministries to rural communities. It has been a real joy for Joanna to develop and serve these communities of the poorest leading them to experience of a small part of the divine shalom, which we are called to extend here on earth. The Burkinabe government recognized her contributions several times throughout these years.
Since January 2014, Joanna has served as Executive Secretary of the Pan-African Christian Women Alliance (PACWA),[11] a movement that seeks to empower Christian women to reach to the full potential that God desires them to be. She feels a strong call as a female leader to encourage other Christian African women throughout the African continent to grow and be empowered. As a female leader, she realized that once she could move on with her life and enjoyed her husband’s blessings, there was almost no limit to the areas of leadership she could be called to. All her previous professional and educational experiences seemed to converge for her in a powerful way so that she could serve Christian women throughout the African continent.
As a female Christian leader, God made her aware that she was not a prisoner of her past or of her ethnic and cultural background. God used her past to build his glory in her life and in his sovereignty equipped her to become a Christian female role model for African women. Because of who she is in Christ, she can speak to and serve the youngest child, while meeting the next day with some of the most important rulers of this world. The intimacy of her relationship with God has moved her to a nearly constant attitude of praise and adoration.
As Joanna says, “He is worthy of my praise and worship!”
A story of another woman shows how God raises up a woman leader in another WestAfrican country, Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). Pierrette is another doctoral student who stands out with her determination to serve the Lord at all cost.
Pierrette
Every leader has a background, a past that fixes her present and determines her future. Thus the leader who refuses, despises or even ignores her past is like the blind person Jesus describes. "Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit?"(Lk. 6: 38). To avoid suffering the same fate of the blind following the blind, spoken of by the Lord, Pierette has willingly taken time to scrutinize her past (pre-conversion and conversion) and to reflect on her current situation (post-conversion) with a view of anticipating her future with the Lord, the Servant Leader above all others.
Born in the 1960s, Pierette had a turbulent childhood and adolescence, due particularly to the loss of her father at age three. Then later she was negatively influenced by non-Christian friends. The consequences and effects of these past years remained with her as "bad company corrupts good character" (1 Corinthians 15:33). Then she was adopted by her stepfather, who introduced her to a new life, a Christian family and different disciplines. Within her new family, meditation of the Word, prayer, praise and personal evangelism were part of everyday life.
However, although she was a Sunday school member from the age of five and a member of the young adult group in the Methodist Christian community of Yopougon SICOGI in Abidjan, she led a double life. Her parents engaged in constant quarrels and gave little attention to their children; eventually they divorced and Pierrette went to live with her mother. Later, to enroll in high school, she was separated from her mother. During her first year of high school, she was attracted by the family spirit of some of her classmates who brought her into their gang. She learned karate to defend herself against other groups from the ghetto which sowed terror. Under the pressure of gang members, Pierrette started to smoke, drink, assault people, and miss school. She lived this double life for several years, a thug during the week and a Christian on Saturdays and Sundays. Although she lived this life of shame, the seed of the Word of God kept germinating in her heart. She grew increasingly thirsty and hungry for God. This life became unsustainable; she was the laughingstock of her friends from the ghetto to whom she tried to share her faith in Jesus Christ. Their mockery made her aware of her state of misery.
However, it was impossible for Pierrette to stop smoking and drinking. She would manage to stop it for one or two weeks and then her habit would flare up again. This vicious cycle kept getting worse and she wanted not only to be no longer a slave to these vices but also to stop being the subject of mockery of her friends from the ghetto. She was able to convince her parents to help her transfer schools and bring her back to her mother, a decision that changed the course of her life. Back home, because her mother had managed to work through the failure of her marriage and made a fresh start, Pierrette had her full attention. Her mother was very strict with her daughter and controlled her friendships. Her mother gave firm instructions to one of the church youth members to lead Pierrette to all the youth activities of the church. Pierrette submitted to all the restrictions with a lot of resentment until the day she gratefully was ready to accept Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior.
One day her church youth group organized a day of fasting and prayer. During the program, the speaker spoke of the heavenly Jerusalem in Revelation 22:1–2. The speaker said the only way to go there was to invite Jesus Christ into one’s heart. As he preached, Pierrette’s desire to be in the presence of the Lord was gradually growing. At the end of the message, when the speaker made an altar call, Pierrette sensed a struggle between a desire to accept Jesus as her Savior and a desire to resist. Then she was delivered from the struggle at which point she stopped smoking and drinking. The following year, she chose to preach and participate in additional activities in the youth group and the choir. Little by little, over several years of perseverance, abnegation, and studies, Pierrette became a minister of God in the Christian community that simultaneously witnessed her growth, the Methodist church.
She was ordained as a pastor in that church in 2003.
Pierrette credits her female predecessors in the Methodist church for paving the way for women like her to move to become a female Christian minister. Although the Methodist church only grant a limited form of ordination to women in 1911, the leadership of women in the Methodist church dated back to Susanna Wesley (1669–1742)[12] and has developed throughout the growth of this church movement. It was only in 1974 that women could be fully ordained in the Methodist Church.[13] In Africa, the process has been a bit slower with the first African woman ordained in the Ivory Coast in 1994[14].
Pierrette is now working on a doctoral degree at the Faculty of Evangelical Theology of the Christian Alliance (FATEAC). Although God originally had educated her at the beginning of her life, sin and evil company had distorted Pierrette. The love of the Lord Jesus Christ transformed her and remodeled her as a servant leader. Indeed God has made of a turbulent childhood and a challenging youth an adult who, after passing between the hands of the potter in the home of the potter (Jeremiah 18: 1–12), became a vessel of honor for the glory of the Transformational Leader above all, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. The history of her spiritual development leads us to review the circumstances and people that helped shape her, such as family, economic, political, and religious factors.
The Lord has used many people to forge her personality. The first of all these people was her mother. This woman of character has impacted her life through a very rigorous education. Sometimes Pierrette wondered if her mother was her birth mother, as she was so harsh at times. Her mother, however, had faced her share of trials and challenges and reflected on these experiences with her daughter. Consequently they developed an intimacy that was crucial to Pierrette’s growth in incarnational leadership and emotional intelligence. Laura A. Davis asserts that “Great leaders aren’t just their intellects or brains. They also use their hearts and souls as well as their minds. They understand the power of thoughts and emotions in creating results.”[15] Pierrette’s leadership was significantly enhanced by understanding how to recognize and acknowledge, reflect on, and manage her emotions and those of the people she was in touch with, and later on, leading. Her ability to recognize the influence of her emotions on how she was interacting with those whom she led as well as the emotions of those whom she led, gave her the capacity to increase exponentially the impact of her leadership in a non-threatening and compassionate way.
Then comes Pierrette’s paternal grandmother. She realized later on that Pierrette was leaving the Abouré Culture and saw the influence of Anyi culture and language—the language and culture of her stepfather on Pierrette. Her education, at the culinary, medicinal, cultural and linguistic levels contributed significantly to build Pierrette’s identity as an Aboure African woman. Thus Pierrette became culturally knowledgeable in two different ethnic groups. Through the experience with her paternal grandmother, she started to understand the value and richness of cross-cultural interactions – which significantly increased as she moved on with her pastoral calling to the point of crossing countries’ borders and oceans. She never forgot who she was, while espousing, appreciating and learning from the diverse cultural setting she was later on exposed to.
As she moved into her doctoral program in Transformational Leadership, Pierrette had several professors as role models in leadership styles from servant leadership to incarnational leadership to prophetic leader.
[A]Transformational Leadership Aspects—Areas of growth and sources of satisfaction
The eight basic foundational perspectives of transformational leadership that consolidated the success of Pierrette’s personal transformation are: vocational leadership, incarnational leadership, reflective leadership, servant leadership, contextualized leadership, global leadership, shalom leadership and prophetic leadership. There may be many other perspectives. Some remain a source of difficulties for her. If they seem difficult to integrate, she works, by the grace of God, towards integrating them more fully in her life and that grace fulfills her.
When there is a gap between the need and action, then leadership becomes more than necessary. So where does it come from that she feels that she still has trouble saying no to all the requests that come to her? Why does it happen too often that she am committing to a mission with euphoria and without having estimated the pros and cons beforehand? Why can’t she do like Nehemiah whose nocturnal journey (Nehemiah 2: 11–12) made him take the time to assess the situation before taking action? In her desire to become an excellent female leader, it seems to her that she still thinks that the positive aspects of her leadership stems from what she is doing instead from who she is in Christ. She really wants to focus on finding rest in her identity as a female child of God who does not need to respond to each solicitation in order to find appreciation or give personal meaning to her leadership. She really seeks to learn more from Christ who said, “If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).
Furthermore, she sometimes feels that she can please everyone and even encourage partisanship. She wonders why, instead of following the example of the impartial leader that Nehemiah was (Nehemiah 5:7) who did not favor the person of the rich over the poor but made a plea to defend the underprivileged, she happens to give in. Pierrette feels that she is still too much influenced by her natural cultural environment which is highly community oriented and where she has been trained since early childhood to take care of those who are close by and blood-relatives. She would like to spend more time really reflecting on the parts of her culture of origin that need to be transformed by the Lord’s presence and the Holy Spirit in her so that she will be able to exercise a more powerful prophetic leadership in the communities that she serves.
J. Oswald Sanders summarizes the leadership of Nehemiah, saying, "Nehemiah emerges as a man who is vigorous in administration, calm in crisis, fearless in danger, courageous in decision, thorough in organization, disinterested in leadership, persevering in opposition, resolute in the face of threats, vigilant against intrigue – a leader who won and held the full confidence of his followers.”[16] Pierrette really wants to integrate this kind of leadership. Like Nehemiah, she attempts to be in constant connection with God through a life of prayer. She is full of courage and daring for the salvation of souls, more people than work oriented. Her ministry that is focused on God's shalom is confirmed by the testimonies of men and women she assisted during her fourteen years of ministry. She had the grace to be an instrument in the hands of the Divine Master to make positive changes in spiritual, social and economic conditions of some members of our communities.
She feels within her the call for leadership to accomplish some of this transformational work for orphans, children at risk and widows through her NGO. In terms of incarnational leadership, guided by compassion and empathy, she shares the daily burdens of this segment of society that is often overlooked. She defines herself better as a servant leader. Serving God through the poor in humility has always energized her. For as Ziglar says, “Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.”[17]
The leader who brings shalom to his community knows and practices self-sacrifice. This sacrificial offering of herself is copied from the model of Jesus Christ, the servant leader never fully imitated. Pierrette also made reconciliation the focus of her ministry. At the risk of her life and that of her family members, she visited Bouaké (North of Ivory Coast[18]) many times in 2003 with the objective to bring together the parties at war in the Ivorian crisis. From Abidjan to Paris, from Accra to Lome, she has contributed to the search for peace, the divine shalom, because of the love of God and the love of her nation of Côte d'Ivoire. She is a leader who desires to bring God’s shalom into her environment. Through her activities, she is helping the church to pursue reconciliation between individuals, between individuals and their environment, and between God and individuals. In fact, her life’s commitment is to develop the well-being, the abundance and the integrity of the community and the individuals in her church and in the communities around her. Finally, she yearns to develop a prophetic leadership to give a voice for the voiceless (Proverbs 31:8).
Finally, she wants to highlight the leadership model that characterizes her. She is glocal. She has a clear comprehension of the complexity of the global, pluralistic, urban, economic and political aspects of today’s world, and sees the church as a global church entity that is called to respond to these global challenges. She believes in the future of the body of Christin as a concerted action of all the home churches or local churches who, in their specificities and diversity contribute to the richness of the Global Church.
The different perspectives of transformational leadership she studied led her to see herself in the clear mirror of her realities in order to act to build a strong leadership through personal transformation and assessment. She lives on this earth to be a servant leader in the full sense of the term in response to the call of the perfect Servant Leader.
Both Joanna and Pierrette have become in their respective countries epitomes of female leaders according to the heart of God. Both of them needed to emerge in a society where women becoming leaders have innumerable traditional and societal challenges to overcome.
How did they do that? Both of them had a mother who had already paved the way for them and modeled how to overcome life’s challenging circumstances to transform them into opportunities. Both of them also were advised wisely by their mothers to move on with their education in order to have a greater panoply of opportunities in life later on, with a strong focus on biblical teaching. Both of them had also decided that they would not consider marriage in the traditional way, but dared to develop their marriage relationships within the biblical framework of a working partnership, thus moving ahead of the legislation and the traditions of their countries. The truth of Word had set them free (John 8:32) and they both have chosen to believe God’s word first and foremost.
We can echo Makanjula’s words: “I wish to state categorically and unequivocally that those factors always used in preventing women leadership in the church in Africa are no longer tenable. If other continents have outlived such prejudices, Africa should stop lagging behind in implementing divine mandate of giving the women the room to display their God given talents.”[19] Will more African women believe in God’s mandate on them for the advancement of God’s kingdom and step forward to show forth God’s glory throughout Africa, and thus throughout the world?
[1] Phoebe Palmer, (1858) The Promise of the Father (Holiness Data Ministry, 1858), accessed June 2015 http://wesley.nnu.edu/wesleyctr/books/2401-2500/HDM2485.pdf, 174.
[2] Faith Mambura Ngujiri,Women’s Spiritual Leadership in Africa (2010), DOI: 10.1108/09578231011079601.
Accessed in June 2015 from: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Faith_Ngunjiri/publication/254188607_Lessons_in_spiritual_leadership_fro m_Kenyan_women/links/55096d9c0cf2d7a2812cb229.pdf .
[3] See for instance comparative data at: http://knoema.fr/WBHNPStats2015Jan/health-nutrition-and-populationstatistics-world-bank-january-2015?tsId=1090070
[4] See for instance http://genderindex.org/country/burkina-faso and http://genderindex.org/country/coted039ivoire.
[5] Oswald Sanders, Spiritual Leadership (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2007), 18-19.
[6] Chantal Kalisa (2009). Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women’s Literature. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press
[7] A very powerful example of this can be found in Kilunga Fatuma Kongo’s text, Femmes et paix dans la ville de Bukavu de 1996 à 2006 (Kinshasa: EDUPC, 2009) where the role of women in the construction of peace in this community is very vividly descriped.
[8] Betty M. Iddrisou, 10 Things About African Women’s Leadership (2012), accessed June 2015, http://www.pambazuka.net/en/category.php/features/83528.
[9] Domestic Violence Task Force 1993. The Church and Domestic Violence. A Training Package for Clergy and
Pastoral Workers. A joint project of the Anglican Church and Edith Cowan University. Perth: Anglican Church Office in Anna Margareta Van Dyk (2000), The voices of women and young people who experienced domestic violence. Thesis presented at the University of South Africa. Accessed June 2015
http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/16296/dissertation_vandyk_am.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
[10] Lufuluvhi Maria Mudimeli, The Impact Of Religious And Cultural Discourses On The Leadership
Development Of Women In The Ministry: A Vhusadzi (Womanhood) Perspective, (Ph.D. Diss., University of South Africa, 2011), accessed June 2015 http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/5726/thesis_mudimeli_l.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.
[11] http://www.aeafrica.org/commissions/pan.htm
[12] Susanna Wesley was the mother of Charles and John Wesley, the pioneers of the Methodist movement. See for example : http://xntdnn.azurewebsites.net/gcsrw3/Leadership/WomeninUMChistory.aspx
[13] See previous website.
[14] According to Pierrette herself.
[15] Laura A. Davis, Emotional Intelligence/Personnal Growth (2014), accessed June 2015, http://www.lauraadavis.com/personal-growth.html.
[16] Oswald Sanders, Spiritual Leadership (Chicago : Moody Press, 1977), in Jonathan C. Liu (1995).
Developing a Pastoral Leadership Guide In Light of the Biblical Teachings and the Contemporary Management Concepts. Ph.D. diss. Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, 1995), accessed in June 2015 http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1260&context=doctoral, 58.
[17] Zig Ziglar (n.d.). Downloaded from http://www.ziglar.com/quotes/your-attitude-not-your-aptitude
[18] During that decade, the country was separated into two parts, the North and the South. Bouaké was one of the leading cities in the North and thus was in conflict with the South led by the city of Abidjan.
[19] Mepaiyeda Solomon Makanjuola, “Assessing the Hypotheses Against Women Leadership in African
Christianity”, CS Canada. vol. 9, 4, 2013: 71-78. DOI: 10.3968/j.ccc.1923670020130904.3258. Accessed in
June 201, http://www.cscanada.net/index.php/ccc/article/viewFile/j.ccc.1923670020130904.3258/5069
