A Phenomenology of Pentecostal Leadership

A PHENOMENOLOGY OF PENTECOSTAL LEADERSHIP

Truls Åkerlund

A PHENOMENOLOGY OF PENTECOSTAL LEADERSHIP

Copyright © 2018 Truls Åkerlund. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part 1: Pentecostalism And The Study Of Religious Leadership

Chapter 1: Religion in Organization and Leadership Research

Chapter 2: Understanding Pentecostalism

Chapter 3: Present Understandings of Pentecostal Leadership

Part 2: A Phenomenology Of Pentecostal Leadership

Chapter 4: An Introduction to Method

Chapter 5: A General Structure of Pentecostal Leadership

Chapter 6: New Findings in Dialogue with Present Understandings

Chapter 7: Pentecostal Leadership and Organizational Leadership Research

Chapter 8: Conclusion and Suggestions for Future Research

Appendix A: A Note on Rigor

Appendix B: Illustration of Research Method

Bibliography

To her.

Who calls it a dance when I clumsily lead her over the kitchen floor on a rainy Saturday morning. Who makes our house a home, our arguments frustrating, and our marriage a joy.

Who for several years has patiently (and at a times impatiently!) shared my attention with German men with incomprehensible ideas and long beards. Honey, I swear they are back on the shelf now.

To Gro.

Without your support this project would never been realized. I love you!

Acknowledgements

While I take the sole responsibility for the results and claims of this work, others are included to share whatever praise it deserves. In addition to my wife, my deepest appreciation goes to our sons, Benjamin, Joel, and Aron. Thank you for bearing with my constant nagging about new research on this and that and for keeping me culturally savvy. It has been and still is the joy of my life to see you grow from boys to men, children to friends. I am forever thankful to my extended family, who never really grasped what I was working on but supported me nonetheless—especially to my late grandmother, Marit Fjeld Ingebrethsen, who always pictured me a doctor, albeit of the more medical type.

To colleagues and friends at the Norwegian School of Leadership and Theology: Thank you all for steadfast encouragement and support, financially as well as academically and personally. I am particularly indebted to Karl Inge Tangen for great conversations and much laughter, and for you being a role model in combining academic rigor with spiritual passion and sensitivity; to Bente Sandtorp for more laughter and corporation in teaching and ministry; and to Kai Tore Bakke and the Board of Trustees for giving me the opportunity to embark on doctoral studies as a part of my work obligations. This study would never be realized had it not been for this opportunity.

A special thanks goes to the faculty and staff at Regent University’s School of Business and Leadership for their generous support and encouragement, particularly to Corné Bekker for directing my curiosity, handling my frustrations, and celebrating my wins. Gratitude to Hennie Van der Mescht of Rhodes University, South Africa, for taking the time to share your experiences and discuss phenomenological bracketing with a novice Norwegian phenomenologist. Thanks also to Giorgi Amedeo, Frederick Wertz, Magnus Englander, Idun Røseth, Rob Bongaardt, and Olav Tangvald-Pedersen for personally helping my find my way in the maze of phenomenological methodology.

Thanks to my mentors and friends: to Joseph Umidi for shaping my philosophy of ministry; to Øystein Gjerme for providing an example of how to combine critical thinking and constructive ministry; to Egil Svartdahl for lending an ear and stretching out a hand; and to other pastors and friends in the Pentecostal movement for stirring my appetite for ecclesial leadership and inviting me into their lives to study and learn from it. And above all:

God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever. Amen. (

1

Tim

6

:

15

–

16

)

Introduction

According to historian Vinson Synan, the twentieth century was the century of the Holy Spirit.¹ From its humble beginnings in the ghettoes of Los Angeles, Pentecostalism has evoked the largest shift on the global religious scene over the last decades—with research estimating more than 640 million Pentecostal/Charismatics worldwide in 2015.² Despite the frequent references to divine providence and denial of any human contributions, Wacker contends that strong leadership has been an important ingredient of the Pentecostal movement from its very beginning:

If the essence of leadership was the ability to persuade people to do what needed to be done, the essence of effective leadership was the ability to persuade them to do it of their own accord. And in this respect the revival’s torchbearers proved skillful beyond their grandest dreams.³

Other observers concur and suggest that the astonishing growth of global Pentecostalism may partly be attributed to the movement’s entrepreneurial leaders and preachers.⁴

Given this prominent role of leadership and the numerous examples of famous and infamous Pentecostal leaders, it is quite surprising to learn how little is actually written on the topic of Pentecostal leadership. A title scan of published articles in major academic journals on Pentecostalism reveals that only sixteen of more than twelve hundred studies specifically address issues of leadership.⁵ This clearly illustrates how leadership is, to a large extent, ignored in Pentecostal studies to date. As is evident from the literature review in Part 1 of this book, the picture is not as grim as the article search assumes. Scholars inside and outside the Pentecostal community have discussed issues of power, influence, and charisma, and research specifically addressing Pentecostal leadership is emerging. Yet, Burns’s maxim that "we know all too much about our leaders, we know far too little about leadership" still holds true for leadership in the global Pentecostal movement.⁶ In Heuser and Klaus’ words,

Our inquiry into the state of Pentecostal leadership is less documented [than Pentecostalism’s quantitative growth] and may yield a wide range of discussions in attempts to interpret such messy realities. It is reasonable to expect certain characteristics of leadership to exist (for better or worse) in Pentecostal-charismatic leadership due, at least in part, to an ideology which shapes the tradition.⁷

It is these characteristics the present study sets out to explore.

The notion that leadership changes in context is addressed from various angles and paradigms, such as cultural, religious, constructivist, institutional identity, and sense-making perspectives.⁸ Though these approaches represent at times incompatible perspectives on leadership vis-à-vis each other, they agree that leadership varies in different contexts. This must be kept in mind when studying leadership in ecclesial settings. The steady stream of research addressing leadership from confessional or denominational angles reflects this awareness—one prominent example being Callahan’s reference handbook on religious leadership, which treats leadership in various religious and confessional contexts separately rather than lumping them together as if they represent one uniform phenomenon.⁹ The implicit premise is that leadership takes on distinct meanings and flavors in various religious contexts.

While churches certainly are organizations that are subject to the pressures and exhibit the characteristics of organizations,¹⁰ the ecclesia constitutes a special kind of organization with a distinct raison d’être. It is in many ways a child of two mothers—born of heaven and born of earth, so to speak—having both theological and sociological foundations and manifestations. To keep spirituality and administration in balance is thus a constant challenge for ecclesial leadership, one that may be solved by means of a religiously rooted normativity.¹¹ Consequently, one cannot simply assume that general leadership theories apply in ecclesial contexts, as they do elsewhere.

As Stewart points out, traditional organizational leadership research may at times describe and prescribe behaviors that are inconsistent with underlying assumptions in ecclesial organizations.¹² This is not to say that congregational leaders should refrain from learning from general leadership research. Rather, the argument makes a case for research that takes the dynamics of ecclesial leadership—in context—seriously by asking questions and using methodology that allow for its distinctiveness to surface. In this regard, observers of Pentecostalism warn about using categories and frameworks from other streams of research to describe the movement, as they may fall short in accounting for its unique character.¹³

Take, for instance, the use of Max Weber’s theory of charismatic leadership, which is a frequent companion in studies of Pentecostalism. Nelson notes that, although charisma may be a prominent organizing principle within Pentecostalism, it plays out differently in different contexts with minimal uniformity internationally and with considerable influence from the wider social environment.¹⁴ Further, Tangen points to the risk of downplaying theological aspects of charisma if relying too much on sociological explanations in studies of Pentecostalism.¹⁵ In short, it is beneficial to study leadership in Pentecostalism on its own terms—as it is experienced by the leaders in the movement. This is the road taken in the present work.

Purpose and Significance of the Study

There are personal and academic reasons to embark on this study. To begin with the first, I am a Pentecostal, exercise leadership at various levels in Pentecostal churches, teach at a school partly owned by a Pentecostal church, and provide education in leadership and theology from a Pentecostal perspective. As such, I am deeply involved in the topic addressed in this study, and my experiences of Pentecostal leadership in addition to my previous work on the topic have stirred the appetite to better understand the dynamics of leadership in Pentecostalism.¹⁶ Of particular interest is the paradoxical and, at times, perplexing fusion and/or conflict between pragmatism and primitivism, pneumatology and leadership theory, empowerment of marginalized groups and power to the anointed few.

However, these issues go beyond mere personal interest, as there are several reasons to study Pentecostal leadership from a scholarly perspective. First, the disproportionality between the growth of Pentecostalism and the relative lack of interest in leadership within its ranks speaks for an intensifying of research on the phenomenon in the years to come. While global Pentecostalism has changed the religious landscape of the world, our understanding of its leadership lags behind and draws largely on constructs imposed from other settings and contexts. By explicating and describing essential characteristics of Pentecostal leadership, the present work seeks to fill a void in the extant literature. While its primary aim and scope is academic, the study has the potential of contributing to more robust and healthy forms of leadership in Pentecostal organizations by bringing to the surface leadership dynamics that often remain tacit or hidden. To address such issues, I believe, is a necessary part of Pentecostalism’s ongoing journey into adulthood. In the last decades of the twentieth century, Pentecostal scholars were arguing that the movement was at a crossroad,¹⁷ experiencing a turbulent adolescence characterized by a search for new identity.¹⁸ A common concern was that Pentecostalism indeed has something to offer to the church and the world but that, to do so, Pentecostals must wrestle with their own characteristics and identities. Warrington lists issues related to leadership among the most significant challenges that needed to be addressed in the movement, and fears that the Pentecostal revival will slow down and even implode if these aspects [leadership, personal spirituality and a moral framework] are not seriously examined and conclusions carefully implemented.¹⁹ A goal of this study is therefore to illuminate the dynamics of Pentecostal leadership, a phenomenon that has received proportionately little attention, given the exceptional growth of the Pentecostal movement.

Second, by exploring experiences of Pentecostal leadership, the present work may shed light on organizational dynamics that are rarely addressed in mainstream management research. The religious soil is arguably ripe with leadership insights, not only for religious organizations but also for the wider field of organizational studies. In a fairly recent conference, leading management scholars, including Peter Senge, Christ Agyris, and Henry Mintzberg, called on theology (among other disciplines) to develop a new philosophical foundation for Management 2.0.²⁰ In a similar vein, Dyck and Wiebe argue for a theological turn in management research—witnessed not only in the increased interest in religious leadership, but also in the attention drawn to the inherently theological concerns embedded in organizational studies.²¹ In this regard, Dyck notes how religion can contribute to management research without any general acceptance of its truth claims.²² First, the fact that someone experiences God as a living phenomenon makes it worthy to study independent of the researcher’s personal beliefs. Second, there are reasons for the sake of theory development to assume that there is a loving God, even if all agreed that no such being existed: The theological turn enables humankind to conceive of, imagine, and theorize about concepts like altruism and genuine benefaction, concepts that have proven difficult to conceive within the conventional instrumental management paradigm.²³ Studies of religious beliefs or phenomena may introduce concepts that fall outside contemporary management models, and studies of religious leadership such as the present may, therefore, contribute a richer understanding of organizing and management beyond its immediate context.

It would be premature to solve at the outset of the study the enigma that drives the entire project: what is Pentecostal leadership, and how is such leadership experienced by leaders in the movement? Although no definition is possible or desirable at this point, there remains a need to identify the phenomenon under investigation. A leading historian of American Pentecostalism, Grant Wacker, concludes that leadership was essential to the Pentecostal movement from its very beginning—the evidence makes clear that strong, determined, clear-eyed leaders orchestrated the revival from first to last.²⁴ As in every social movement, influence was—and is—asymmetrically and unevenly distributed between the revivalists. What is not clear, however, is what constitutes the inner nature of such leadership. Studies of leadership in Pentecostalism are arguably especially promising as they take place in the intersections between human (dis)ability and spiritual empowerment and the rise of charisma and the elevation of the marginalized. It is powerful leadership worked out by the socioeconomic powerless. It is leadership claimed on a basis of divine endowment, yet ending every so often in human disaster. It is leadership exercised over and with millions of people around the globe, yet its dynamics of power and influence have largely taken place below the scholarly radar.

What is called for, then, is a description of the essential structure of Pentecostal leadership. As this study attempts to answer that call, it falls into two distinct, yet related, parts. In the first part of the book, the study of Pentecostal leadership is seen from the perspective of organization and religious leadership research. This is done to locate the study within a larger field of study, to take stock of the current understanding of the phenomenon by reviewing and categorizing the extant research literature on the topic, and to set the stage for the empirical phenomenological inquiry presented in Part 2. This second main segment of the book represents the most groundbreaking features of the work, and thus deserves a more thorough introduction and explanation. While procedural details are left for chapter 4, the following section will briefly sketch out the present research agenda and its accompanying methodology.

Toward a Phenomenology of Pentecostal Leadership

As alluded above, the overall research agenda of this book is to address the question of the meaning of Pentecostal leadership through the experiences of pastors in the movement, with the purpose of describing essential features of Pentecostal leadership in a general structure of the phenomenon. This meaning-oriented research question, combined with the relative ignorance of what characterizes leadership in Pentecostalism, calls for qualitative research strategy. It is generally accepted that exploratory qualitative studies are the better approach in areas where there is little prior research available.²⁵ Further, Conger argues for the prominence of qualitative strategies at all stages of leadership investigations due to the complexity of the phenomenon itself.²⁶ This has not always been the case in leadership research, however, as positivist paradigms have dominated the field until fairly recently.²⁷ Yet, if leadership essentially is about the management of meaning,²⁸ it is dubious that experiments and quantitative methods alone are sufficient to explain it. In Meindl’s words, Much of the trouble with conventional leadership research is attributable to the conceptual difficulties encountered when theorists and research scientists attempt to impose outside, objective, third-party definitions of what is inherently subjective.²⁹ This is arguably especially troublesome in studies on Pentecostalism, due to its highly flexible and diverse manifestations. Phenomenology, on the other hand, is an ideal framework for studying how people experience something because it aims at describing the essential meaning of a phenomenon in terms of subjective lived experience, hence overcoming the strait-jacket of encrusted traditions³⁰ by seeing leadership through the eyes of those who experience it. The foundational question asked in phenomenological inquiry is that of meaning, structure, and essence of the lived experience of this phenomenon for a person or group, and aims for a deeper and fuller understanding of what it is like for someone to experience something—in this study, leadership in Pentecostal churches.

More than thirty years after Sanders’ optimistic exclamation about phenomenology as a new star on the [organizational] research horizon,³¹ one may conclude that it indeed has been a slow-rising star. While phenomenology is a frequent companion in health and education research, the approach is still to reach its peak in leadership studies. Yet, a host of authors keep arguing that qualitative studies in general,³² and phenomenological research in particular,³³ should play a more pivotal role in leadership and management studies. Since phenomenology approaches phenomena holistically in search for their invariant meanings, it has potential to augment and expand the present knowledge on leadership by studying the lived experience of leaders. By understanding leaders’ meaning and sense-making, phenomenological inquiry can lead to startling new insights into the uniquely complex processes of . . . managing and leading.³⁴ In this way, phenomenology contributes to organizational research by presenting a fresh way of seeing what is discoverable and potentially there, but often ignored.³⁵

For the present research agenda, phenomenology is the perfect methodological match because it holds the potential to reveal and describe the essence of lived experience and, consequently, to understand leadership as a process