Is the Seminary Relevant? A Critical Examination of the Relevance of Leadership Preparation at Ghana Christian University for Training Transformational Leaders

The project was an evaluative study of the leadership development at Ghana Christian University (GCU) to discover whether it is adequately preparing its graduates for ministry as transformational agents in its current context. Utilization-focus design was employed for this study. The study gathered data from two sets of stakeholders. Stakeholders A comprised all faculty of GCU, representation from staff, representation from students, and representation from alumni. Stakeholders A met for a day's general evaluation session and provided information rich data around two themes: (1) perceptions concerning Ghana Christian University's vision and mission and their implications for the University's mission, (2) perceptions concerning the University's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Stakeholders B comprised twenty-five alumni from two regions, the Greater Accra region (eleven) and the Ashanti region (fourteen). The twenty-five answered questions designed to measure three aspects of the participant's perceptions concerning the leadership preparation they had received at Ghana Christian University.

This study found that while Ghana Christian University, through its Seminary, is effective in preparing leadership with basic and specialist ministry skills, it is generally weak in equipping these leaders with competency for engaging with social realities. While Ghana Christian University may benefit from this study, this study recommends similar study with larger samples and end-users' perceptions in order to validate generalized findings of evaluation of the University's leadership program.

The scope of this project evaluates the perceptions of the adequacy of the leadership preparation at Ghana Christian University for training transformational leaders who minister as transformational agents in their communities. The study involved convenient data collection from stakeholders due to ease of availability. The major limitation of this study is that it is conducted within the scope and framework of the leadership development at Ghana Christian University. The results of the study cannot be generalized to all Seminaries in Ghana or other regions with similar Christian leadership development programs. Larger number of respondents comprising other regions could possibly reveal contrasting findings. This study is also limited by the fact that assistant researchers were in charge of data collection and may have skewed the respondents in a particular direction. The project is further limited by not including respondents from endusers of the alumni services.