Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

by Tod Bolsinger

I have written this book with three purposes in mind: To reframe this moment of history for Christians in the west as an opportunity put before us by God for adventure, hope and discovery—all the while embracing the anxiety, fear and potential loss that comes from answering this call. To recover the calling for the church to be a truly missional movement that demands leadership that will take up the gauntlet of Guder’s charge: “If western societies have become post-Christian mission fields, how can traditional churches become then missionary churches?”4 To discover—even more than the uncharted territory around us—the capacity for leadership within us.

*REORIENTATION* Christian Leaders: You were trained for a world that is disappearing.

problems are very often the result of yesterday’s solutions.

Management is a kind of stewardship. Management cares for what is. Leadership is focused on what can be or what must be. Management is about keeping promises to a constituency; leadership is about an organization fulfilling its mission and realizing its reason for being.

live into and lead the transformation necessary to take us into the future we are resisting.

leadership is mostly expressed in actions, relationships and responsibility. Ed Friedman said, “The leader in the system is the one who is not blaming anyone.”

leadership is learned in the doing and by reflecting on the doing. (John Dewey reportedly wrote: “We don’t learn from experience, we learn by reflecting on experience.”)

Because our brains don’t process information and learn well when we are highly anxious, leaders must develop emotional maturity and the ability to persist in complex emotional systems without either distancing or taking resistance personally.

And at that moment everything that Meriwether Lewis assumed about his journey changed. He was planning on exploring the new world by boat. He was a river explorer. They planned on rowing, and they thought the hardest part was behind them. But in truth everything they had accomplished was only a prelude to what was in front of them. Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery were about to go off the map and into uncharted territory. They would have to change plans, give up expectations, even reframe their entire mission. What lay before them was nothing like what was behind them.

We too—maybe even more so than other entities—have entered uncharted territory. Just as Lewis and Clark functioned under a set of geographical assumptions, leaders of the church in the West today have been operating under a set of philosophical, theological and ecclesiological assumptions.

All that we have assumed about leading Christian organizations, all that we have been trained for, is out of date.

For Guder the church is sent into the world as the rightful and faithful continuation of Jesus’ own sending by God (“As the Father sent me, so I send you” [John 20:2]) and so each congregation is a “witnessing community” to its very locale; each particular congregation has itself a unique and apostolic mission to fulfill.

leadership—and especially leadership development—must be dramatically different than it was during Christendom. Seminaries that produced pastors to be the resident expert in biblical studies, theology and church history; the resident professional for teaching, counseling and pastoral care; and the local manager of the church business and bureaucracy are reconsidering both the demands of the current curricular expectations and the challenges of the changing world around us.

Education for maintenance is not the same thing as education for mission.

before we can solve any problem, we need to learn to see new possibilities.

*REORIENTATION* If you can adapt and adventure, you can thrive. But you must let go, learn as you go and keep going no matter what.

Ultimately, this book is about the kind of leadership necessary for the local church to take the Christian mission into the uncharted territory of a post-Christendom world. It is about the kind of leadership needed

Leadership is energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world.

*REORIENTATION* In the Christendom world, speaking was leading. In a post-Christendom world, leading is multidimensional: apostolic, relational and adaptive.

the church is the embodiment of the work of the original twelve disciples who became the first apostles, “sent” to the world, and equipping and being equipped for the sending. For Darrell Guder this is indeed the very purpose of the ecclesia, the apostolate, that is, “the formation of the witnessing communities whose purpose was to continue the witness that brought them into existence.”

Traditional churches will only become missionary churches as those in authority (and even those without formal authority) develop capacity to lead their congregations through a long, truly transformational process that starts with the transformation of the leaders and requires a thoroughgoing change in leadership functioning.

Empowering those without formal authority

Christian community is about gathering and forming a people, and spiritual transformation is about both individual and corporate growth, so that they—together—participate in Christ’s mission to establish the kingdom of God “on earth as it is in heaven.”

adaptive leadership have three characteristics: a changing environment where there is no clear answer the necessity for both leaders and follower to learn, especially the leader’s own ongoing transformation the unavoidable reality that a new solution will result in loss

In this new post-Christendom era, the church leader will be less a grand orator or star figure who gathers individuals for inspiration and exhortation, and more a convener and equipper of people who together will be transformed as they participate in God’s transforming work in the world. To that end, I offer this definition of leadership: Leadership is energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world.

Nothing changes until there is a change in behavior. Nothing has changed until people start acting differently.

Transformational leadership begins in technical competence. That is, leadership for transformation starts long before engaging the challenge of uncharted territory. Indeed, the men of the Corps of Discovery likely would not have followed Lewis and Clark over the unknown Rocky Mountains if Lewis and Clark hadn’t demonstrated their ability on the familiar waters of the Missouri River. In the same way, before a missional community can take on the challenges of a changing world, the leadership must earn the credibility that comes from competently handling the basic management skills that serve the organization.

Transformational leadership is validated in relational congruence. The credibility gained in competence must be increased through acts of demonstrated character, care and constancy. Think of it this way: If you were going to climb a difficult and potentially dangerous mountain, you would insist that your guide be an experienced professional with lots of demonstrable skills. But what would you do if you discovered your guide had a reputation as an adrenaline junkie who often takes unnecessary risks just for thrills? Would you still want him or her to be your guide? Maybe so, but you’d probably ask some very hard questions in order to discern if that guide is trustworthy. Relational congruence is a leader’s ability to be the same person in every setting, every relationship, every task. The personal maturity and emotional stability to make calm, wise decisions creates the necessary health and trust in an organization that enable it to “let go, learn as you go and keep going.” When leaders function with relational congruence, they strengthen the bonds, deepen the affection and create the wellspring of trust needed to go off the map.

Leadership becomes transformational through the integration of adaptive capacity. Adaptive capacity is a leader’s ability to help his or her community “grow, face their biggest challenges and thrive.” It is the capacity to lead a process of shifting values, habits and behaviors in order to grow and discover solutions to the greatest challenges brought on by a changing w...

Leadership requires a commitment to transformation, and transformation is the goal of leadership. To put it another way: leadership into uncharted territory requires and results in transformation of the whole organization, starting with the leaders.

transformational leadership does not begin with transformation but with competence. At the same time, many of us assume that it begins with character, that is, the personal attributes that make up a good, wise and effective leader. But in reality, the opportunity to lead usually begins with technical competence (see fig. 4.1). The best player on the team becomes the team captain.

Agree or disagree?

Stewardship precedes leadership. Biblically, stewardship is about faithfully protecting and preserving what is most important, about growing and developing the potential of everything and everyone under one’s care. It is about faithfully discharging the duties and carrying out the responsibilities that we have been authorized to do. It is the first and most basic act of being human, the first charge given in the garden to “cultivate and keep” (Genesis 2:15). Jesus used the metaphor of the steward (manager) to describe the basic faithfulness of the disciple (Luke 16:1-15). To be sure, stewardship is not just maintenance; it is also about growth, protection and taking care of all God has delegated to us (Matthew 25:14-30), so that God will be revealed in the world. Stewardship is a response to God’s “manifold grace” and is expressed in serving “one another with whatever gift” we have received and with the “strength that God supplies” (1 Peter 4:10-11).

*REORIENTATION* Before people will follow you off the map, gain the credibility that comes from demonstrating competence on the map.

the focus here is on developing credibility for potential leadership that mobilizes people to grow and address their biggest challenges, not expertise for problem solving. So to that end, let me suggest three basic tasks that leaders must exercise with technical competence before they have the credibility to go off the map into uncharted territory.

Competent stewardship of teams and tasks. Competent stewardship of Scriptures and tradition. Competent stewardship of souls and communities.

see Scott Cormode, “Innovation and Imagination in Christian Organizations” (unpublished paper presented to the Academy of Religious Leadership, April 2015).

Most real change is not about change. It’s about identifying what cultural DNA is worth conserving, is precious and essential, and that indeed makes it worth suffering the losses so that you can find a way to bring the best of your tradition and history and values into the future.

Before there can be leadership, there must be a demonstration of faithful stewardship to the Scriptures and your own tradition.

repersonalize the organizational and to learn the ways of organic organizational pasturing, to recover again the rich biblical concepts of the church as a body that expresses a larger systemic reality of members, parts and ligaments that make up a larger interconnected, interrelated whole, to reconsider our organizational models around the actual descriptions of health and fruitfulness that the Scriptures teach and humans need.

I believe that our plan A is never God’s plan A, and we only get to God’s plan A when our plans A, B and C fail. So, you need to fail as soon as you can, so we can learn as quickly as possible.” Now to be sure, this man was not advocating for sloppy work or shoddy planning.

“We can fail, but we can’t suck.” Competence gives us the credibility needed to learn from our mistakes.

“We have the technology to fix the heart, but not change it.”

*REORIENTATION* In uncharted territory, trust is as essential as the air we breathe. If trust is lost, the journey is over.

to be considered truly trustworthy, those actions can’t be one-off events or one-time responses to a particularly critical situation; they must be a consistent expression of the character and values of the leader.

“Trust is gained like a thermostat and lost like a light switch.”

Relational congruence is the ability to be fundamentally the same person with the same values in every relationship, in every circumstance and especially amidst every crisis.

The trust needed to bring organizational transformation in a changing context is not built sitting in a circle. It isn’t built in bull sessions or ropes courses. It’s not built over drinks in a bar or by telling our family histories. It’s not even built in small groups or Bible studies. Those activities may create connections, strengthen affinities and even conceive friendships. But only “meaningful work together” develops the kinds of relationships that will endure into uncharted territory.

For Christian leaders this means that ministry is not only the means to bring the gospel to the world, ministry together is how God makes a congregation into a corps that is ready to continually bring the gospel in new ways to a changing world.

the goal of the Christian faith is not simply to become more loving community but to be a community of people who participate in God’s mission to heal the world by reestablishing his loving reign “on earth as it is in heaven.”

If one wishes to distinguish leadership from management or administration, one can argue that leaders create and change culture, while management and administration act within culture. Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership

The most critical attribute a congregation must have to thrive in uncharted territory is a healthy organizational culture.

Culture is the set of default behaviors and usually unexamined or unreflective practices that make up the organizational life and ethos of a company, organization, family or church. In short, organizational culture is “the way we do things around here.”