Sorensen Awards
We are excited to announce the Sorensen Center Awards!
These awards highlight BYU faculty, staff, and students who strive to lead as Jesus Christ does. Honorees exemplify the principles of expressing love, honoring agency, and inviting accountability in the way they live, work, and serve. Through their relationships and responsibilities, these individuals balance tensions and make decisions—both practical and inspired—that reflect a life centered on the Savior.
In 3000 characters or less, please nominate someone you know who should be recognized as someone who is striving to exemplify the doctrines and principles of the Christ-Centered Leader Model.
- How do they demonstrate the principles of expressing love, honoring agency, and inviting accountability?
- How does the way they navigate their relationships and responsibilities reflect someone who is striving to center their life on Jesus Christ?
- How do they balance tensions to center their life on Jesus Christ, which might allow them to make both the practical and seemingly-illogical decisions required to be a Christ-centered leader?
As a Center, we seek to highlight one faculty member, one staff member, and three students who exemplify these principles. Feel free to use the survey more than once to nominate more than one individual.
What is the Christ-Centered Leader Model?
The Christ-Centered Leader Model is the distillation of doctrines and principles that provide important framing and considerations for leaders.
- Christ-centered leaders strive to center their thoughts, words, priorities, and actions on the Savior.
- They balance the needs, wants, obligations, and privileges presented to them by the variety of relationships they must navigate.
- They balance the responsibilities that come with the demands and opportunities that are theirs to carry.
- They strive to balance the tensions that arise from a leader’s effort to express love, honor agency, and invite accountability.
Where did the Christ-Centered Leader Model come from?
The Christ-Centered Leader Model was a campus-wide collaboration, facilitated and directed by the BYU Sorensen Center for Moral & Ethical Leadership.
The Vision of the Sorensen Center is to “inspire and equip individuals to lead people as Jesus Christ does.” The effort to fulfill this vision is found in the mission statement; “we develop leaders and character and capability who edify families, congregations, communities, organizations, and society.
The BYU Sorensen Center for Moral & Ethical Leadership uses Acts 10:38 as the foundation for how it defines leadership:
“…Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power…who went about doing good,…healing all that were oppressed…for God was with him.”
Nazareth was not a place that had any particular strategic or political advantage, nor was it a place of any renown. Like Christ’s origin, we believe that position, title, or status is not required to be a leader. His confidence came from another source: the sense of self and divine heritage that comes from the constant companionship of the Spirit and the sense of power and empowerment and comes through righteousness.
Making a conscious effort to exert a positive influence in the world is maybe a more complicated way to say that leaders are those “who [go] about doing good.”
But what determines whether or not what a leader does is truly good? There may be a lot of ways to examine what is good, but Christ-centered leader turns to God to define good. This verse highlights the fact that the exemplar of goodness “healed all that were oppressed.” So too should Christ-centered leaders, strive to seek relief for all those who are suffering in body, mind, and spirit.
The phrase, “for God was with him” suggests that the purest good comes from efforts that are divinely inspired and guided. This requires meekness, humility, and the courage to do God’s will when it may be unpopular or detrimental.
The Sorensen Center is looking to recognize leaders—unheralded, altruistic, compassionate, and inspired—with the Christ-Centered Leader Model award.