What does authority have to do with leadership? As humans, we want leaders, but we often do not want authorities. As we learn to live in community in classical Christian schools, we often find ourselves in states of confusion over what authorities to trust and how to lead well. In this series, we hope to empower community leaders, parents, administrators, teachers, and students at classical Christian schools to steward authority well as they lead.

In this episode, we define authority and its many manifestations within a classical Christian school setting. We consider auctoritas, authority's connection to ethos, and authority's connection to various types of power. We discuss reward power, coercive power, referent power, expert power, information power, and legitimate power in terms of the family and school settings. (For more on the types of power, see Leadership: Theory and Practice by Northouse.) We discuss the ways in which power and authority are connected to leadership, and how to rightly steward authority.