Learning to lead: Factors that contribute to leadership legitimacy for pastors of rural county churches in South China

China's churches have experienced tremendous change from oppression to rapid growth to a transfer of leadership to a group of younger leaders. Using grid-group theory and implicit leadership theory, I study the formal, nonformal, and informal educational processes by which younger pastors learn how to lead and attain leadership legitimacy in county-level rural churches of South China. Grid-group theory explains that individual behavior within any social environment is constrained by the combined factors of group orientation and role specialization that define that environment, while implicit leadership theory posits that there are culture specific idealizations of leadership traits that are unarticulated but nonetheless strongly held. Together these theories show that leaders are accepted by followers only to the extent that match the expectations of their followers. I find that Chinese pastors attain leadership legitimacy through an informal, personal apprenticeship to established local church leaders, in which the learn to narrate their life stories so as to demonstrate an unusual experience of God's grace and power in their conversion, a settled conviction of God's call to lifelong service, and a willingness to sacrifice personal comfort and/or material gain in order to accept the burden of leadership. The pastors informally learn how to exhibit a set of character traits, including humility, authenticity, propriety, and wisdom that are advocated by traditional Chinese values and interpreted through Chinese Christian perspective; by gaining superior knowledge, ministry skills, and status through the successful completion a series of loosely ranked nonformal and formal training programs endorsed by the hierarchy of provincial church leadership and by informally learning how to manage contradictions that arise in relationships due to competing interests between themselves and their congregations, among believers, and between the local church and relevant government agencies.