ABSTRACT
Religious leadership is changing face. In the Western world, decades of religious decline, renewed interest in spirituality and the rise of extremist religious groups have created a dierent world with vital challenges to religious communities and their leaders. It raises questions such as: how is religious leadership changing, how do religious leaders shape their communities of faith and how do they inuence their followers? These are vital questions since religious leadership continues to have a signicant, worldwide impact, but its face has changed and its eect is sometimes dramatically destructive. So what are some of the important models of religious leadership? What are the key dimensions of such leadership? Even more vital, what makes religious leaders successful and how should they be trained? This chapter, then, aims to develop an understanding of the context, development, dimensions and key issues of religious leadership, in order to provide the tools to assess the eectiveness of religious leaders, and to design educational strategies for training and deploying them.
