Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

by Tod Bolsinger

Reportedly, upwards of fifteen hundred pastors leave the ministry every month.3

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

Christian Leaders:

You were trained for a world that is disappearing.

Adaptive challenges are the true tests of leadership.

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.

We can’t lead a Christian business and organization to further the mission of Jesus (seven days a week!) unless the Christian servant-leaders become more like Jesus (every day)!

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.

Therefore, leadership is always about personal and corporate transformation. But

because we are hard-wired to resist change, every living system requires someone in it to live into and lead the transformation necessary to take us into the future we are resisting. The person who takes personal responsibility to live into the new future in a transformative way, in relationship to the others in the system, is the leader. If someone is not functioning as a leader, the system will always default to the status quo.

many leaders are known for their words in times of crisis, leadership is mostly expressed in actions, relationships and responsibility.

Ed Friedman said,

“The leader in the system is the one who is not ...

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. At

leadership is learned in the doing and by reflecting on the doing. (John

“We don’t learn from experience, we learn by reflecting on experience.”)

good folks at the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center like to say, leaders must be able to “stay calm, stay connected, and stay the course.”

Distinguished Fellow of the Institute for the Future, Bob Johansen, after centuries of stability and slow, incremental change, in less than a generation our world has become VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.

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.

Spirituality has become wildly popular but so deeply individualistic that the fastest-growing “religious affiliations” among those under thirty are “none” and “spiritual-not-religious.”

Christopher Wright has reminded us that the sending of the church as the apostle to the world goes to God’s very purposes: “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.”13

Steve Yamaguchi, the dean of students at Fuller Theological Seminary, says that when his spiritual director took a flying lesson, he asked the instructor why they use flight simulators so much. The instructor said, “In the moment of crisis, you will not rise to the occasion; you will default to your training.”

We preachers are such good talkers. In fact, Morgan Murray, the senior pastor at Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church in California, likes to say, “We Presbyterians are so good at talking about problems that after awhile we think that we have actually done something.”

the money, we buy new stuff. Congregational systems guru Ed Friedman writes, “When any . . . system is imaginatively gridlocked, it cannot get free simply through more thinking about the problem. Conceptually stuck systems cannot be unstuck simply by trying harder.”20 Friedman clarifies the challenge in front of us: We are “imaginatively gridlocked.” We can’t see our way to a new way of being, a new response.

What is needed? “A spirit of adventure,” where there are new, unexpected discoveries (serendipities) and ultimately “new perceptions.” To be sure, this is an adapt-or-die moment. This is a moment when most of our backs are against the wall, and we are unsure if the church will survive to the next generation. The answer is not to try harder but to start a new adventure: to look over Lemhi Pass and let the assumptions of the past go. To see not the absence of a water route but the discovery of a new, uncharted land beckoning us forward—yes, in the face of the uncertainties, fears and potential losses—to learn and to be transformed. What is needed? An adventure that requires adaptive capacity.

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

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. Meriwether

This is the leadership moment of the church today. 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.

The church at its best has always been a Corps of Discovery. It has always been a small band of people willingly heading into uncharted territory with a mission worthy of our utmost dedication.

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

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

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.

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

At the heart of this book is the conviction that congregational leadership in a post-Christendom context is about communal transformation for mission.

In a post-Christendom world that has become a mission field right outside the sanctuary door, 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.

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.7 These

are challenges leaders face when the world around them changes so rapidly that the planned strategies and approaches are rendered moot. This is when the discovery of the Rocky Mountains requires us to ditch the canoes and look for new ways forward.

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.

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 credibility gained in competence must be increased through acts of demonstrated character, care and constancy.

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.”

We exist to reveal the presence and character of God in the world, being transformed as we participate in God’s transforming work in the world.

leadership into uncharted territory requires and results in transformation of the whole organization, starting with the leaders.

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