| Summary: | Mainline Protestant churches are in crisis. In the Episcopal Church, Sunday attendance has declined nearly 25% in the last decade. Clergy with limited leadership skills are unable to help reverse this trend. But the leadership skills clergy need can be taught. After reviewing literature from studies of church growth and the field of leadership studies, I created a list of vital leadership skills and used it as the basis for a questionnaire sent to the ten Episcopal seminaries. After reviewing these quantitative results and qualitative interviews, I identified organizational management and evangelism as relative weaknesses in Episcopal clergy formation. Interviews showed a variety of curricular and extracurricular strategies to form clergy leaders. Drawing on this research and on studies of professional education and leadership pedagogy, I outline a three-year leadership formation curriculum, which will serve as a model for leadership formation at Berkeley Divinity School.
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