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

As Loveday Alexander and Mike Higton point out in their penetrating and thoughtful Faithful Improvisation , 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 since the mid-1990s. Leadership is now one of the key criteria used to select candidates for ordination in the Church of England (C of E), and the now notorious Green Report has prompted a debate, at least in some circles, about the penetration of secular management ideas into the organisational thinking of the Church. This study is an attempt to check out the extent to which this perceived infiltration of secular ideas might be true at the ‘grassroots’ parish level: have the organisational structures of the Church of England in effect been colonised by secular thinking, or is there any evidence of countercultural values shaped by theological values?