Date
8-20-2026
Department
Rawlings School of Divinity
Degree
Doctor of Education in Christian Leadership (EdD)
Chair
Daniel Thompson
Keywords
mentorship, leadership succession, emerging leaders, spiritual formation, transformational leadership, aging clergy
Disciplines
Educational Leadership | Leadership Studies
Recommended Citation
Hankinson, Carol Anne, "Passing The Mantle: An Explanatory Sequential Study of Mentoring and Succession in Ministry" (2026). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 8739.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/8739
Abstract
This project developed an eight-week mentorship framework to address leadership succession in collaborative organizations. According to the Barna Group (2023), the aging of the American clergy has reached crisis levels for the Church. Christian institutions of worship must adopt a plan of action to address this concern. Scripturally and historically, mentorship has been God's plan for passing the mantle from senior to junior leaders (Akoto, 2024). Burns's (1978) theory of transformational leadership advocates relational mentorship to advance an organization's mission and purpose. To this end, the researcher explored an intentional mentorship program with 28 participants. A mixed-methods explanatory sequential design was used to assess the mentorship project's impact on leadership succession. Quantitative findings showed significant growth for mentors in leadership readiness, role clarity, and decision-making authority, while mentee results showed little measurable change, resulting in null findings. Qualitatively, meeting irregularity between mentors and mentees was a likely contributor to the asymmetrical results. Significant themes from the qualitative study illustrated a positive outlook for both groups regarding mentorship, intergenerational relationships, the value of relationships, and the importance of spiritual formation through discipleship. These findings suggest that a consistent and intentional mentorship program can address leadership succession and, therefore, the aging clergy crisis. This dissertation describes the collaborative organization and its need for intervention, as well as the theology, study results, and theory that support such a mentorship initiative.
