Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

by Tod Bolsinger

In the movie Moneyball, Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. Oakland is a small-market team that doesn’t have the revenue to compete with the major-market teams like New York, Los Angeles and Boston. His best players keep leaving to make more money for those teams. His owner can’t give him any more money, and now he has to replace three star players. He gathers his staff together to explore what they can do about this problem. What does this highly trained, well-paid, experienced group of expert baseball minds do? They use the same thinking, the same approach, the same strategy they always use—which is not working.

That was the problem of Billy Beane’s scouting staff and of most church leaders today.

For most of us in ministry, our defaults that once worked so well are not working, and we become discouraged. So, what do we do? We talk longer—we preach more. We try harder—we go into our bag of tricks and bring out our best programs.18 We give a personal touch—we hope that caring for stakeholders will inspire them to change.

“We Presbyterians are so good at talking about problems that after awhile we think that we have actually done something.”

stuck systems cannot be unstuck simply by trying harder.”

Adapt or die.

What is needed? “A spirit of adventure,” where there are new, unexpected discoveries (serendipities) and ultimately “new perceptions.”

The answer is not to try harder but to start a new adventure:

before we can solve any problem, we need to learn to see new possibilities. And, ironically, because the solution will be an adaptation of the core values, identity and theology of the congregation itself, seeing those possibilities depends on first seeing ourselves and our congregations as we really are.

It is an enormous risk that requires the nerve to stand in front of a group of people and say out loud three words: I don’t know. Literally, “I don’t know what to do, and maybe, just maybe, no one knows what to do.” We need to clearly see that what we know to do doesn’t work. We need to

have the clear-eyed humility to take an honest assessment and recognize that this challenge is beyond our talking, trying or bag of pastoral tricks.

Eventually we will start a discipline of looking at our problems differently, acknowledging each time anew that this is not a situation that calls for a new tweak or new technique; this is an opportunity for adventure, exploration and transformation. This is a moment when our congregation can take on new life, begin a new season of faithful expression. We can start imagining different possibilities. And we can learn new ways of leading.

Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery were looking for a water route, but now they had run out of water. How do you canoe over mountains?

You don’t. If you want to continue forward, you change. You adapt.

We ditch the canoes, ask for help, find horses and cross the mountains. And when the time comes, we make new boats out of burnt trees. You let go, you learn as you go and you keep going, no matter what.

We are canoers who have run out of water. There is no route in front of us, no map, no quick fix or easy answer.

But . . . this is good news. This is a divine moment.

This is an opportunity to express even more clearly what it means to follow and serve the God who is King of the entire world. The church at its best has always been a Corps of Discovery. It has always been a small band of people willingly heading into ...

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. Tod Bolsinger

It was the still, small voice. Over a lot of years and through a lot of mistakes I have come to recognize it as the nudge of God in my life. It’s not audible as much as an impression, but I have learned to listen very closely.

Your people need you to lead them even more than preach to them.

That is, 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.”

But most of us think that apostolic is a description of our founding and not our purpose. For the church to be apostolic is not just to claim a name or credibility, but a vocation.

To live up to their name, local churches must be continually moving out, extending themselves into the world, being the missional, witnessing community we were called into being to be: the manifestation of God’s going into the world, crossing boundaries, proclaiming, teaching, healing, loving, serving and extending the reign of God.

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.

in the Christendom mental model under which most of us were trained, pastors weren’t missionaries and churches weren’t missions. (Indeed, my seminary had a separate school for that!) We were teachers, worship leaders and counselors. We were social workers, community organizers and program providers. We were mostly chaplains for a congregation within a Christendom culture.

if traditional

churches are going to become missionary churches, then pastors must become truly missional leaders of missional communities.

God’s calling creates, forms, equips, commissions, and sends the church to carry out the witness for which it exists.

Leadership therefore is about the transformation of a congregation so that they, collectively, can fulfill the mission they, corporately, have been given.

Today, preaching is not leadership but serves leadership.

Adaptive challenges, by contrast, are those that “cannot be solved with one’s existing knowledge and skills, requiring people to make a shift in their values, expectations, attitudes, or habits of behaviour.”6

These are “systemic problems with no ready answers” that arise from a changing environment and uncharted territory.

This is when the discovery of the Rocky Mountains requires us to ditch the canoes and look for new ways forward.

An

understanding of this kind of 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

Transformational leadership is a skill set that can be learned but not easily mastered. It is not a role or position, but a way of being, a way of leading that is far different than most of us have learned before. Transformational Leadership Model Leadership in uncharted territory requires the transformation of the whole organization: both leaders and followers will become vastly different people after they have ventured forth to live out the mission of God in a changing world. This transformational leadership lies at the overlapping intersection of three leadership components: technical competence, relational congruence and adaptive capacity (see fig. 3.1).

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

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.”

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 world.

And this is absolutely dependent on the leader’s own commitment to personal transformation.

We participate in Jesus’ mission to reestablish the will of God “on earth as it is in heaven,” while becoming more and more “conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29) to the glory of God.

Personally, it would require me to embody the transformation needed and invite others to join me in it.

leadership begins with the transforming work God is doing in us before anything else.

For Christian leaders today, this is the moment of truth. Are we willing to take the risks and get up the nerve to lead a big adventure? lead our people to face the challenge of a changing world? acknowledge that what is in front of us is not at all like the world where we have previously thrived? clarify and cling to our core convictions and let go of everything else that keeps us from being effective in the mission God has given us? let go of the tried and true default actions that have brought us this far? learn a new way of leading that begins with our own transformation? If so, let’s continue exploring what it means to become leaders who find new ways of facing the mountains ahead of us.

“If you have someone to show you a few tricks, you can adapt to anything.”

Jefferson was well aware that Lewis’s qualifications for leading Jefferson’s bold expedition to explore the West and find a water route to the Pacific Ocean

could come into question. Jefferson acknowledged as much to Dr. Benjamin Rush when he wrote asking for some tutelage and guidance to prepare Lewis for the journey. But for Jefferson, the young Lewis had experience that would make up for his lack of formal education: “knowledge of the Western Country, of the army and of all its interests & relations.”1 With military experience and a captain’s rank, a penchant for travel and adventure, a scientifically oriented mind, experience in navigation and cartography, all the requisite skills that come from running a plantation at a young age, and the subsequent tutorial that Jefferson would provide him in botany and frontier medicine, Lewis was uniquely qualified in Jefferson’s opinion. Years later, after Lewis’s death, Jefferson wrote of the combination of character, skill and discernment he saw in the man he selected:

Lewis and Clark offered to Jefferson and especially the men under their charge the competence and credibility required—and demonstrated—in leadership that would eventually go beyond their known world. Uncharted leadership begins then in on-the-map technical competence.

Surprisingly, transformational leadership does not begin with transformation but with competence.