Date of Conferral

2-4-2026

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Management

Advisor

David Goodman

Abstract

Despite the widespread decline in church membership and attendance among all mainline denominations, there was a particular concern about retaining the millennial generation. Church leaders need to understand this concern as a key indicator of millennial retention in nonprofit churches. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the relationship between millennial membership growth and perceived leadership styles, including authoritative, partnership, democratic, team oriented, relationship oriented, serving, people oriented, task oriented, and goal oriented leadership. The social exchange theory and resource-based view theory grounded this study. The archival data from 2011 to 2022 comprised 17,012 Millennial participants from 665 nonprofit churches in the United States. They completed the Natural Church Development survey; of these, n = 376 were analyzed in Christian years across 10 groups. The one way ANOVA showed a statistically significant difference among the groups, F(9, 17,003) = 20.97, p < .001, indicating that the group membership was associated with significant variation in the number of Christian years reported. Results indicated statistically significant differences among the groups; however, effect sizes were small, showing that only about 1% of the variance was explained by group membership. Although statistically significant, these differences have limited practical meaning for nonprofit church leaders. Understanding this relationship could help church leaders develop strategies to apply effective leadership styles that resonate with Millennials to improve membership and retention. Implications for positive social change include the potential for nonprofit church leaders to encourage faith communities to strengthen alliances to achieve their mission of impacting the Millennial membership for sustainable growth, attendance, and retention worldwide.

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