Leadership Education at Duke Divinity participates in the cultivation of thriving communities that are signs, foretastes and instruments of the reign of God. We address a yearning for greater strength and vitality among Christian institutions and for greater faithfulness and effectiveness in the leadership and management of those institutions. Thriving communities need vibrant Christian institutions, and both need excellent Christ-shaped leadership. In collaboration with leaders throughout the church, we have learned that four capacities are foundational in sustaining vibrant Christian institutions:

• Traditioned innovation, rooted in the story of the Trinity, invigorates the present and envisions the future by honoring the church’s past.
• Transformative leadership, responsive to God through the development of mindsets, activities, and traits, equips people to advance the church’s mission.
• Generative organization, in keeping with the Triune God’s intention in creation, continually orders human activities and relationships toward a common end by attending to issues of scale and scope, enhancing networks and overinvesting in the young.
• Sustainable design, in response to God's provision, calls forth the cultivation of human, intellectual, service, network and financial capital to enable institutions and communities to grow, prune and renew over time.

Working with our partners, we design educational services, develop intellectual resources, and facilitate networks of institutions that cultivate a coherent vision of Christian institutional leadership and form Christian leaders in the mindsets, activities, and traits crucial to thriving communities. Our offerings include open-application programs; an online magazine, Faith & Leadership; web resources; and collaborative working groups that address the deepest challenges facing Christian institutions.

We aim to create lasting change by strengthening the ecology of Christian institutions that enable U.S. congregations and pastors to flourish. We work with those institutions whose mission is the formation of Christians and who have the strength to have scalable impact: denominations, seminaries, church-related colleges, consultancies, large membership congregations, Christian non-profit organizations and others. We work in North Carolina and across the country, with current and future leaders, using expertise from disciplines as varied as theology, business, sociology and the arts.

Support is provided by a major grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. and on-going funding from The Duke Endowment as well as other donors.