Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

by Tod Bolsinger

If western societies have become post-Christian mission fields, how can traditional churches become then missionary churches? Darrell Guder, “The Missiological Context”

Back then, if

man didn’t come to church on Sunday, his boss asked him about it at work on Monday.”

A couple of years ago I learned that three of my pastor friends around the country had resigned on the same day. There were no affairs, no scandals and no one was renouncing faith. But three good, experienced pastors turned in resignations and walked away. One left church ministry altogether. The details are as different as the pastors themselves, but the common thread is that they finally got worn down by trying to bring change to a church that was stuck and didn’t know what to do. Their churches were stuck and declining, stuck and clinging to the past, stuck and lurching to quick fixes, trying to find an easy answer for what were clearly bigger challenges. What all three churches had in common was that they were mostly blaming the pastor for how bad it felt to be so stuck.

This is a guidebook for learning to lead in a world we weren’t prepared for.

Lewis and Clark’s expedition to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase was built on a completely false expectation. They believed, like everyone before them, that the unexplored west was exactly the same geography as the familiar east. This is the story of what they did when they discovered that they—and

and everyone else before them—had been wrong. And how instructive and inspiring that story can be to us today.

Using the story of Lewis and Clark’s expedition and applying the best insights from organizational leadership and missional theology, we will learn together what it mean...

“off the...

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.

Leading off the map: In uncharted territory, adaptation is everything.

Relationships and resistance: You can’t go alone, but you haven’t succeeded until you’ve survived the sabotage.

T. S. Eliot wrote that the “end of our exploring” was to “arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

Learning from those who are most at home in uncharted territory is one of the great opportunities that most leaders miss.

Nobody thinks that you are trying to build the church around you, but that is in fact what is happening. Unconsciously, the message going out is that everybody here thinks it is their job to support the ministry that you are having here. And that model of leadership is out of date.

Adaptive challenges are the true tests of leadership. They are challenges that go beyond the technical solutions of resident experts or best practices, or even the organization’s current knowledge. They arise when the world around us has changed but we continue to live on the successes of the past. They are challenges that cannot be solved through compromise or win-win scenarios, or by adding another ministry or staff person to the team. They demand that leaders make hard choices about what to preserve and to let go. They are challenges that require people to learn and to change, that require leaders to experience and navigate profound loss.

I had to lose my identity as the resident expert and learn to lead all over again.

Leadership is not authority.

Leadership is different from management.

Leadership is focused on what can be or what must be.

leadership is about an organization fulfilling its mission and realizing its reason for being.

Leadership is a way of being in an organization, family, team, company, church, business, nation (or any other system) that, in the words of Ronald Heifetz, “[mobilizes] people to tackle tough challenges and thrive.”9

leadership is always about personal and corporate transformation.

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.”

You can’t lead from outside the system. (You can be a prophet or critic or consultant or supporter, but not a leader.)

Perhaps the single most transformative moment of all is when a leader says, “I don’t know what to do,” and then goes about the hard work of leading the learning that will result in a new faithful action.

But any person who is willing to take personal responsibility, convene a group to work on a tough problem and persist in the face of resistance is a leader.

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.”)12

say, leaders must be able to “stay calm, stay connected, and stay the course.”

More than anything, this moment

requires those of us in positions of authority (and even most of us who are not) to embrace an adventure-or-die mindset, and find the courage and develop the capacity for a new day. We are heading into uncharted territory and are given the charge to lead a mission where the future is nothing like the past.

For over three hundred years explorers of at least four sovereign nations had been looking for a water route that would connect the Pacific Ocean to the Mississippi River. And everyone just knew it was out there somewhere. It was a broadly believed, persistent assumption about the way the world was arranged.

Lewis believed that he would walk up the hill, look down a gentle slope that would take his men a half day to cross with their canoes on their backs, and then they would see the Columbia River. After fifteen months of going upstream they looked forward to letting the current swiftly whisk them to the Pacific Ocean. They would crest the hill, find the stream and coast to the finish line. They could not have been more disappointed.

What Lewis actually discovered was that three hundred years of experts had all been completely and utterly wrong.

For the second assumption at work in the minds of the explorers of the day was that the geography west of the Continental Divide was the same as the geography east of it. All had assumed that in the same way the land rose gently over thousands of miles to a peak, it would also descend gently to the Pacific Ocean. In the same way they had been able to take a keelboat and canoes up a river, they’d be able to drift downriver to the ocean.

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.

We now have to use every bit of what we know and become true learners who are ready to adapt to whatever comes before us.

brutal truth:

All that we have assumed about leading Christian organizations, all that we have been trained for, is out of date. We have left the map, we are in uncharted territory, and it is different than we expected. We are experienced river rafters who must learn to be mountaineers. And some of us face “the most terrible mountain we have ever beheld.”

As pastors, we were trained to teach those who come on their own, to care for those who call for help, to lead those who volunteer and to administer the resources of those who willingly give and participate. Now we are called on to minister to a passing parade of people who treat us like we are but one option in their personal salad bar of self-fulfillment. To do so will take a significant shift in thinking about pastoral leadership.

“England is a pagan society and the development of a truly missionary encounter with this very tough form of paganism is the greatest intellectual and practical task facing the Church.”10

The apostolic mission was not merely the saving of souls and their collecting into communities of the saved. The apostolic strategy, whose message was the event of salvation accomplished in Jesus Christ and whose method was defined by the earthly ministry of Jesus, was the formation of witnessing communities whose purpose was to continue the witness that brought them into existence.12

“It is not so much that God has a mission for his church in the world, but that God has a church for his mission in the world.”

in the words of Alan Hirsch, the mission or “sentness” of a congregation is its “true and authentic organizing principle”:

Missional church is a community of God’s people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God’s mission to the world. In other words, the church’s true and authentic organizing principle is mission. When the church is in mission, it is the true church.14

Education for maintenance is not the same thing as education for mission.17

day, it’s become apparent a missional mind shift alone doesn’t lend itself to the capacity building that actually brings change. But if we are convinced that a change is necessary, how do we bring it without alienating the whole church?

How do we face the losses and fears in our congregations, the opposition and resistance in our leaders, and the anxieties and insecurities in ourselves to truly lead the church through this adventure-or-die moment? How do we develop leaders for mission in this rapidly changing, uncharted-territory world?

We are in uncharted terrain trying to lead dying churches into a post-Christian culture that now considers the church an optional, out of touch and irrelevant relic of the past. What do you do? If you are like me, indeed, like most people, what you do is default to what you know. You do again, what you have always done before.