A History of Western Christian Leadership

This text is an exercise in historical sociology that is an outline of Western Christian leadership. The author attempts to document leadership types from the Apostolic period to the Postmodern Era. In the tradition of Max Weber and H. Richard Niebuhr, he posits ideal types (Weber) and types (Niebuhr) to structure this work. The term type comes from the Greek word tupos and can be translated as a pattern or a model. In the same spirit of Weber and Niebuhr, he presents two types of leadership: kenotic and secular. The term kenotic is rooted in the Christian tradition of kenosis-one who is empty of self or whose ego is distributed to the margins of one’s personality to be replaced by Jesus. The second leadership style is called secular. It is so termed because it is based on time and space in this world and not on the time-less (eternal) and the space-less (heaven). The etymology of the term has ancient roots from the Latin saeculum, ‘age’ or ‘world’. When applied to leadership, it is a type of leadership rooted in power, control, coercion and sometimes violence. The eras of the Western Society structure the work with examples of kenotic and secular leadership within each period.