Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

by Tod Bolsinger

No one is going to follow you off the map unless they trust you on the map.

The very unity, discipline and alignment needed to bring the church together to rebuild the campus around our vision were now stifling creativity, passion and energy.

Leadership is not authority.

You can’t lead from outside the system.

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.

“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.”

Conceptually stuck systems cannot be unstuck simply by trying harder.”

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

Preaching reiterated the shared story, the shared vision of life, the shared values of a culture they had once learned and now forgotten.

“Much of what the Bible demands can be comprised in one imperative: Remember!”

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.

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.”

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

To that end, all true leadership will be anchored in the principles of adaptive 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.”

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.

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.”

trust is based on a leader’s own self-definition.”

According to Osterhaus, “Trust is gained like a thermostat and lost like a light switch.” A leader builds trust slowly over time by constantly monitoring the conditions and actions that create the climate of trust in the room.

Relational congruence is about both constancy and care at the same time.

create and change culture, while management and administration act within culture.

Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Culture is the air current that lifts the bird, the water that holds the swimming fish, the background and frame that draws the eye to the center of a picture. It is all the unnoticed, taken-for-granted and powerfully present elements that shape our lives and work.

A church can say that it values hospitality, discipleship and transparency, but these become part of the DNA of the church only when they are so resiliently present that they happen automatically, by default, because all aspects of the organizational life reflexively support and reinforce them.

The actual behaviors of those in authority express and shape the actual values of the organizational culture.

That is, in times of stress or change, if we do not deliberately and consciously pay attention to what we are doing, we will default and run to what is known, familiar and embedded within the organizational life. This is normal coping. This just happens.

Creating a healthy culture with the capacity to experiment, innovate, take risks and adapt is one of the primary preparatory tasks of a leader.

the primary work of technical leadership is clarifying and reinforcing shared values.

A statement of shared values, no matter how inspiring, does not make a healthy culture.

Ronald Heifetz said, “You don’t change by looking in the mirror; you change by encountering differences.”

To be sure, fear of differences can keep us resolutely committed to the status quo, to rejecting what seems foreign and to circling the wagons to keep out the intruder.

“Adaptive leadership consists of the learning required to address conflicts in the values people hold, or to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they face.”

Even more so, adaptive work pays attention to the deeper underlying causes that keep a group perilously perched in a state of inaction.

at least in part because of the way Christians cared for people during some of the worst epidemics.

if you are not learning anything new, it is not adaptive work.

They are not mechanistic religious production lines but bodies that need to be tended, cared for, challenged and strengthened so they can adapt to their environment.

Understanding living systems as a function of elements, relationships and purpose (all at the same time) enables us to understand even more clearly the work that is before us in leading transformation,

Only listening to a different interpretation allowed them to find the right solution.

Be clear on what will never change before you start messing with stuff.

These experiments will not go away if people get upset; we are not going back to the status quo.

Growth, transformation and adaptation always means loss. Change is loss.

Leadership is disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb.

Leadership is taking people where they need to go and yet resist going.

a significant part of the greatest challenge is internal.

Edwards Deming, “your system is perfectly designed to get the results you are getting.”

Start with conviction, stay calm, stay connected, and stay the course.

Conviction is the core ideology in action.

In one sense followership is irrelevant. Leaders start being leaders by acting on conviction.

Transformational leadership and the adaptive change necessary requires us to go beyond win-win to make hard, oftentimes forced choices.