With an invitation from the Jordan Evangelical Council, nearly 40 church and para-church evangelical leaders in Jordan participated in a workshop on governance and transparency. The workshop held Saturday at the Evangelical Free Church in Amman’s Khalda neighborhood was led by international expert Dr. Gary Hoag founder and CEO of Global Trust Partners (GTP).

The American expert Hoag gave a presentation reflecting the negative and the positiveness of four boards mentioned in the Bible. Hoag presented the participants with templates they can use in choosing boards, in preparing meeting agendas, and gave practical advice on how to balance between policy making accountability and governance with the executive branch.

Rev. David Rihani the deputy president of the Jordan Evangelical Council said that the workshop is part of a process of organizing the evangelical home. “We aim to organize the evangelical home as we are in the unification process of five churches as per the royal directive with the goal of creating a national evangelical church that can be added to the annex of churches as per the Christian denomination’s law # 28 for 2014.” Rihani noted that other workshops will take place to raise the capacity of churches and church-related institutions in Jordan.

Egyptian Ereny Mounir the vice president of GTP for training led the discussion with any attempt to discover the main challenges facing evangelical churches and institutions in Jordan in terms of governance.

Andrew Mahfouz from Alexandria who is volunteering  with the Egyptian-based Nabla initiative presented the seven criteria of accountability governance and transparency. Mahfouz is in charge of accreditation reviewing applicants interested in their policies and practices being reviewed.