Authentic Leadership and its Relationship to Ministerial Effectiveness Among Pastors in the Church of the Nazarene

This study examined the authentic leadership of pastors in the Southwest Educational Region of the USA/Canada Church of the Nazarene to determine whether there is a positive correlation between authentic leadership and ministerial effectiveness. While authentic leadership is a theory with clear definition measured by multiple validated instruments, ministerial effectiveness is a concept that involves more ambiguity. For the purposes of this study, ministerial effectiveness was measured using the Ministerial Effectiveness Inventory. While this study was built on previous research that found a significant relationship between authentic leadership and ministerial effectiveness in pastors in the Indiana District of the Lutheran Church---Missouri Synod (Puls, 2012), the study avoided the controversy created by retracted articles and limits to use caused by the proprietary nature of the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire by using the Authentic Leadership Inventory (ALI). The ALI has been shown reliably to measure the same construct as the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire without these limitations. The study found significant positive relationships in all three clusters of respondents---pastoral selfraters, follower other-raters, and sets with at least one follower other-rater---between ministerial effectiveness as measured by the Ministerial Effectiveness Inventory and authentic leadership as measured by the ALI. Additionally, the study found a significant positive relationship between ministerial effectiveness and all four components of authentic leadership as measured by the ALI: self-awareness, internalized moral perspective, balanced processing, and transparency. As expected, female pastoral participation was low and thus limited the ability to find significant results specific to female pastors. The results of this study could contribute to church health by providing a resource to improve the ability of the Church of the Nazarene to prepare effective ministers, inform the personal development of active ministers, and guide the pastoral search process for churches seeking to call ministers who will effectively lead the ministries of a church to congregation and community