About Christian Leadership Conferences (CLC)

The Christian Leadership Conference is an academic conference, which takes places bi-annually in Europe and South Africa. The idea was born in 2012 and grew out of a long-term partnership between GBFE (Gesellschaft für Bildung und Forschung in Europa), a network of North European colleges, and the University of South Africa (Unisa).
Two observations led to starting a new conference. Firstly, there were a lot of popular books and popular conferences on Christian Leadership (like for example the Willow Creek Leadership summit). But there was no conference to present academic research on Christian Leadership. Secondly, as a general observation the market of leadership publications has been very much dominated by US authors. This is even more true of the field of Christian Leadership. We were looking for a place where perspectives from other cultures could be brought in and the cultural diversity of (Christian) Leadership becomes visible.

The history of the CLC is also decribed in a journal article, published by verbum et ecclesia https://doi.org/10.4102/ve.v44i1.2896

The history of CLC:

CLC I: Christian Leadership in the workplace, Pretoria (ZA), 21-22. 2. 2013;
published as special edition “Christian Leadership in the workplace”
with the journal Koers – Bulletin for Christian Scholarship 79(2).

CLC II: New Christian Leadership in changing times: Perspectives from Africa and Europe, Bergneustadt (D), 30.9.-1.10.2014;
published in J. Barentsen, V. Kessler & E. Meier (eds.), Changing Leaderhip in a changing world: Perspectives from Africa and Europe (Leuven: Peeters, 2016)

CLC III: Increasing Diversity, Leuven (B), 29.-30.4.2016;
published in J. Barentsen, S. van den Heuvel & V. Kessler (eds.), Increasing Diversity: Loss of control or adaptive identity construction (Leuven: Peeters, 2017)

CLC IV: Metaphors for Leading – Leading by Metaphors, Burbach (D), 25.-27.4.2018;
published in S. Jung, V. Kessler, L. Kretzschmar & E. Meier (eds.) Metaphors for Leadership: Leading with metaphors (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019)

CLC V: “The last shall be the first” – Theological and ethical reflection on (Christian) leadership, Pretoria (ZA), 19.-21.6.2019; published as special edition “Christian Leadership”, edited by W. Bentley with the journal HTS Theological Studies 76(2).

CLC VI: Sustainable Leadership – in times of uncertainty, Oslo (N), 18.-20.5.2022; published in special editions “Sustainable leadership” with two journals, the Scandinavian Journal of Leadership and Theology and Verbum et ecclesia.

What is specific for CLC, its DNA?

  • (academic) reflections on Christian Leadership
  • Addressing scholars and reflective practitioners
  • Interdisciplinary, contributions from theology, management sciences and beyond
  • Sensitive for cultural diversity
  • Topics which are relevant for today
  • Open atmosphere which allows participants to not only share their success stories but also learn from failures