The Perceived Leadership Crisis Within the Baptist Church

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate church congregants’ ratings of church deacons’ leadership skills utilizing the MLQ instrument and compare those ratings among 4 selected churches in Memphis, Tennessee. Because the church has experienced a rapid rate of growth in its membership and has been focused on dealing with those congregation-wide growing pains, it has neglected to provide the support to the deacons, which is necessary for their development.

The problem related to rapid growth has resulted in empirical and anecdotal statements by various congregants that church leadership is lacking, particularly in regard to crisis management. In order to investigate whether these perceptions of the church leadership issues are valid, 50 congregants from 4 selected churches were asked to complete the MLQ survey in order to assess deacon leadership skills. The results of this study results indicated that church congregants from all 4 selected churches had generally low average ratings of transformational leadership related questions and subscales as applied to church deacons.