Implicit Leadership and Followership Theory: the view from ’below’

As Loveday Alexander and Mike Higton point out in their penetrating and thoughtful Faithful Improvisation1, interest in leadership in the Church has grown exponentially in recent decades. The roots of this interest can be traced back at least to the early 1960s; but, driven significantly by the rise of the Church Growth Movement in the United States, leadership had become a dominant theme in ministerial discourse in the UK by the mid-1990s.2 Leadership is now one of the key criteria used to select candidates for ordination in the Church of England (C of E),3 and the highly controversial Green Report4 adds to a growing sense that secular management theory may have penetrated and perhaps colonised the organisational mind-set of the Church nationally. The focus of this study, however, lies at the other end of the C of E structure: what evidence is there, if any, of a distinctive approach to leadership in local congregations, or are secular models simply assumed and imported into day-to-day parish activity?