Professional Dissertations DMin

Date of Award

2011

Document Type

Project Report

Degree Name

Doctor of Ministry

College

Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary

Program

Doctor of Ministry DMin

First Advisor

Stanley E. Patterson

Second Advisor

Erich W. Baumgartner

Third Advisor

Jeanette Bryson

Abstract

Problem

The Napa Community Seventh-day Adventist Church did not have an active, engaged, and participating leadership core throughout the previous ten years of church life. Current leaders, while demonstrating faithfulness and desire, were not actively being engaged and challenged to grow in their own leadership understanding and practice. The absence of such an ongoing process contributed to the lack of leader and leadership renewal within our faith community.

Methodology

The combined introduction of Implicit Leadership Theory (ILT) and Transformational Leadership (Bass & Riggio 2006) through an eight-week process would provide a means to inject into our community an external theory of leadership and to examine the tacitly held mental models of leadership each participant held. This renewal process would also include a way to measure whether a shift had occurred over those weeks together. This initiative would launch with an assessment through the Organizational Description Questionnaire (ODQ) and conclude with an end line assessment through the same instrument to determine if any shifts had occurred.

Results

The results from the ODQ indicate that a significant shift occurred within the perceptions of the participants toward identifying the type of transformational culture the Napa Community Seventh-day Adventist Church represented. While the baseline indicator identified the congregation as moderately transformational in nature, the end line indicated the significant shift by identifying the culture of the congregational leadership as “coasting.”

Conclusions

The combined introduction of an external “objective” theory of leadership with the examination of each participants own mental models of leadership assisted in assessing the local organizational congregational culture and invigorating the participant leaders. This process will be encouraged as a means of identifying a vision of leadership for a local faith community as well as innovation of a process of renewal for each participant. At the very least, encouraging and facilitating leaders of local congregations to examine their churches through a process of direct external and internal leadership theory and practice can invigorate leaders to begin stepping up their commitment to lead and pursue mission.

Subject Area

Christian leadership--Seventh-day Adventists; Christian leadership--California; Transformational leadership--California; Leadership--Religious aspects--Seventh-day Adventists; Napa Community Seventh-day Adventist Church (Napa, Calif.)

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/dmin/53/

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