Date
7-2020
Department
Rawlings School of Divinity
Degree
Doctor of Education in Christian Leadership (EdD)
Chair
Brian Pinzer
Keywords
Servant Leadership, Leadership Theories, Spiritual Formation
Disciplines
Christianity | Leadership Studies | Religion
Recommended Citation
Sironen, Rich J., "The Relationship Between Pastoral Servant Leadership and Congregational Spiritual Formation in U. S. Churches" (2020). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 2583.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/2583
Abstract
The purpose of this correlational study was to determine if a relationship exists between pastoral servant leadership and congregational spiritual formation in Protestant churches located in the United States of America. The context of this study was to assess possible relationships between pastoral servant leadership and congregational spiritual formation. The population of churches used for this study was comprised of Protestant churches located within the United States of America. The methodological research design for this study was a quantitative non-exploratory correlational approach, which is used to "describe and measure the degree of association (or relationship) between two or more variables or sets of scores" (Creswell, 2018, p. 50). The primary independent variable was pastoral servant leadership behavior as derived from the Self-Assessment of Servant Leadership (SASL) survey. The primary dependent variable was the spiritual formation of congregational members as derived from the Faith Maturity Scale (FMS) survey. The data analysis for this study was Spearman’s rho Correlation. This statistical procedure is a nonparametric measure that is typically used to quantify the association between two ordinal variables. The results of the analysis yielded a significant positive correlation between pastoral servant leadership and congregational spiritual formation.
