Last week I had the opportunity to sit in on the final presentations of students who took part in the Butler (University) Summer Institute. This year there were 29 young scholars, representing every college on campus and a wide variety of majors, who spent over two months researching under the direction of a member of the faculty. Many of them will take that summer research and turn it into either a departmental or university honors thesis. As I have told several people since BSI came to a close, it was by far one of the most enjoyable (and varied) academic "conferences" I have been to in a very long time.
For the purposes of this little blog of mine though, one of the presentations stood out. It was on servant leadership in the United Methodist Church by Brittney Stephan, a rising senior at Butler. Brittney has been interning with a local congregation (with the approval of the Indiana annual conference), studying the topic of servant leadership (for more, see the following) and what both laity and clergy mean by the term.
Like the other presentations, it was interesting and well done. Perhaps it struck a chord with me though because of my work on the Mainline. While I did not look at servant leadership, the idea that there might be a disconnect between the different levels of a denomination (top level bureaucracy, clergy, laity) over terms, ideas, or pronouncements was hardly surprising. That there has not been more study of these kinds of issues is surprising. Perhaps in the future, there will be.
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