Biblical Based Servant Leadership and the Liberian Methodist Church: Lessons from the Christological Hymn in Phil. 2:7-11

Sometimes a biblical understanding of leadership challenges cultural and traditional understanding. It’s the context of the Liberian traditional and cultural understanding of leadership that my research will focus on. My project will show the continued need for servant leadership, which is demonstrated by the portrait of Jesus in the Christological hymn and the Gospel. The theses will focus on contrasting traditional Christian leadership within the United Methodist Church in Liberia with the humility of Jesus’ servant leadership. This research hopes to offer academic authentic transformative ideas of servant leadership and intentional examples to the continuous study of servant leadership. However, the research intent to also provide a fresh look at how cultural and traditional orientations in Liberia, can pose a challenge to the impact of servant leadership and hope to submit practical ways the leaders understand the transformative nature of power (Linthicum, 2003) Therefore, the inquiry will consider scholarly works of literature in the area of servant leadership, primarily drawing resources from Servant of All: Status, Ambition, and The way of Jesus (Hill, 2016), Culture and leadership in Africa: a conceptual model and research agenda (Kuada, J. 2010), the impact of Carmen Christi (Fee, G. 1992), the servant example of Christ in the Gospel, and suggesting applicable knowledge from my research, and personal experience that’s workable within the Liberian context; as opposed to a king and ruler cultural/traditional 4 understanding of Christian leadership (Mansago, 2009). Secondly, this research hopes to contribute to the current scholarship on Christian leadership based on the Christological hymn as it challenges from a cultural or traditional context (Jones, 2012)