Emerging Leadership in the Pauline Mission
Cód:
491_9781610972444
Synopsis:Where did Paul find leaders for his new churches? How did he instruct and develop them? What processes took place to stabilize the churches and institute their new leadership? This book carves a fresh trail in leadership studies by looking at leadership development from a group-dynamic, social identity perspective. Paul engages the cultural leadership patterns of his key local leaders, publicly affirming, correcting, and improving those patterns to conform to a Christlike pattern of sacrificial service. Pauls own life and ministry offer a motivational and authoritative model for his followers, because he embodies the leadership style he teaches. As a practical theologian avant la lettre, Paul contextualizes key theological themes to strengthen community and leadership formation, and equips his church leaders as entrepreneurs of Christian identity. A careful comparison of the Corinthian and Ephesian churches demonstrates a similar overall pattern of development. This study engages Pauline scholarship on church office in depth and offers alternative readings of five Pauline epistles, generating new insights to enrich dogmatic and practical theological reflection. In a society where many churches reflect on their missional calling, such input from the NT for contemporary Christian leadership formation is direly needed.Endorsements:In this highly readably text, Jack Barentsen rises to the challenging task of using the latest thinking on the psychology of leadership to provide a thoroughgoing, fresh, and highly convincing analysis of leadership in early Pauline communities. The result is not only an excellent theological monograph, but also a model of integrative scholarship that is much more than the sum of its theological and psychological parts. Indeed, as a forensic case study of leadership this is very hard to beat--and there is more to be learned from this volume than in the greater part of the vast managerial literature on this topic.--Alexander
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