Relational Principles for Effective Church Leadership

Abstract

This descriptive study used an interview protocol developed by the Center for Creative Leadership with 50 college student leaders to determine what key developmental events young college leaders experience and the leadership lessons learned from these events.Students discussed 180 events and 734 lessons learned from them. Most events defined by students were challenging assignments, although events dealing with other people, coursework, and formal leadership programs were also mentioned. Top lessons included communication, self-identity, leadership identity, and developing leadership task and management skills. While many lessons could be learned in a variety of different ways, a number of challenging assignments stood out as important for learning certain lessons.

Discovering Servant Leader Relations with New Followers in Nonprofit Organizations: Does a Servant Leader Always Serve First?

“…If the problem of clarity addressed in this research about the initial first steps of the servant leadership theory is not settled and clarified for all management situations (Parris & Peachey, 2013b), then the proper treatment of new followers (Hoption, 2014) using servant leadership may be diminished. This is particularly true with regard to the theoretical understanding of servant leader empowerment (Greasley & Bocârnea, 2014;Sun, 2013;van Dierendonck, 2011) (Schneider & George, 2011), and large organizations but not the church or pastors (Parris & Peachey, 2013b;Watt, 2014). Pastors are trained in many aspects of the church management and may hold a sensitive and permanent position where they are aware knowledge about past actions is in their domain, and where they may have experiences that would be beneficial to share (Watt, 2014).…”

“…Several unique obstacles face a researcher attempting to evaluate churches and pastors specifically for management techniques to empower and communicate to followers (Watt, 2014). There is an attitude among some pastors and chaplains who view the church as a sacred entity that is primarily concerned with the spiritual elements and should not be subject to the secular principles and systems of management (Pfang, 2015) like servant leadership.…”

“…There is an attitude among some pastors and chaplains who view the church as a sacred entity that is primarily concerned with the spiritual elements and should not be subject to the secular principles and systems of management (Pfang, 2015) like servant leadership. Pastors and chaplains have to understand church government, theology, the spiritual formation of the followers, and, even, politics with sometimes little to no management training (Watt, 2014).…”

“…The usage of servant leadership by pastors of Christian churches in their enabling of their new followers in servant leader empowerment is analogous to the enabling of empowerment in small businesses (Van Winkle et al, 2014), volunteer service organizations (Schneider & George, 2011), and large organizations (Parris & Peachey, 2013b;Watt, 2014). The concern with using a quantitative study is the sample size needed for such a study and the nature of abstracting the broad experiences, beliefs, relationships, feelings, and values of a pastor or chaplain into closed questions (Smith et al, 2009).…”

“…Determining and identifying empowerment for followers on the part of a leader using servant leadership is challenging (Parris & Peachey, 2013a;van Dierendonck, 2011). When the servant leader was a pastor or chaplain of a Christian Church, the identification of necessary leadership carries additional challenges (Pfang, 2015;Watt, 2014) as the followers may have volunteered (Parris & Peachey, 2013a) in a unique spiritual environment.…”