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The title of this article expresses a hope as much as it describes a reality. "Leadership and administration" is indeed emerging, but this is perhaps too placid a verb; the field is bubbling over with an effervescent energy that is infectious for many who hold church leadership positions or teach the subject. At the same time, the literature and modes of teaching or modeling leadership and administration are burgeoning so rapidly that the critical observer has great difficulty separating the evanescent from the lasting, the merely spectacular from the insightful. The field, much more an open and broad-ranging field of interest than a discipline at this point, has yet to develop a consistent method or even to define more clearly the subjects or practices such a method would address. A new generation of teachers and scholars in leadership and administration must take up this practical theological challenge.
A Field, yet Not a Field
Leadership and administration are only meaningful in the context of institutions, organizations, or communities in which they are practiced. A discussion of them thus can hardly begin without attention to the institutional context in which the field itself is emerging. In the United States, the institutional structures that have supported the development of other practical theological disciplines in the academy are only nascent or rudimentary in leadership and administration. Few theological schools, normally the focal point of the scholarly connections and intellectual energies that drive practical theological disciplines, offer courses with these two terms in the title. Many absorb these interests into courses on missions, evangelism, or pastoral theology. Even fewer theological schools devote a faculty position to the field. I am one of a handful of full professors with the term "administration" in my professorial title. Most courses are taught by adjuncts (usually pastors) or as an occasional offering by professors who teach mainly in other fields such as pastoral care or education.
Teachers of leadership and administration in the U.S. have not yet become a collegial guild comparable to other fields, though they have met together across denominations or traditions sporadically since the 1960s. In 1998, Scott Cormode, Professor of Church Administration and Finance at Claremont School of Theology, obtained a grant from The Lilly Endowment to underwrite gathering...