Professional Dissertations DMin

Date of Award

1986

Document Type

Project Report

Degree Name

Doctor of Ministry

College

Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary

Program

Doctor of Ministry DMin

First Advisor

Arnold Kurtz

Second Advisor

Raoul Dederen

Third Advisor

Gottfried Oosterwal

Abstract

One of the most important concerns of the clergy and the laymen of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Germany is the future of the local congregations. There may be many reasons for the dwindling of a church's attractiveness and relevance in a given situation. One is how the local church lives its organizational life. Adequate church leadership and administration proves to be an important instrument for a healthy development of a congregation. That is why prospective ministers need special training in this field.

It was the purpose of the present study to develop adequate administrational strategies and to apply them to the student body of the SDA Theological Seminary in Darmstadt. This school was viewed as having the potential to play a key role through its graduates in influencing the organizational life pattern of the congregations in West Germany. The biblical data concerning the church in general, and the local congregation in particular, together with insights from the human sciences served as foundation and point of departure for the development of a theory of church administration. This constitutes the first part of the project.

The second part concentrates on systems theory as the best suited scientific framework for the content of church administration and on ten relevant action areas in the organizational field of a congregation.

Part three is the report of an attempt to implement the gained insights in a teaching situation. The single steps of implementation and the experiences from personal preparation and the work in the classroom are portrayed, analyzed, and evaluated.

Subject Area

Church management; Church growth--Germany--Seventh-day Adventists, Theology--Study and teaching--Seventh-day Adventists; Theological seminaries--Seventh-day Adventist--Germany

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/650

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