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March 3 - March 15, 2024
Capt. Lewis is brave, prudent, habituated to the woods & familiar with Indian manners & character. He is not regularly educated, but he possesses a great mass of accurate observation on all the subjects of nature which present themselves. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Benjamin Rush, February 28, 1803
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).
Stewardship, therefore, is on-the-map authorization, and technical competence describes the leaders’ ability to do the job they were hired to do—to navigate the known territory—before beginning the transformational leadership process.
Usually, before a community of faith will even consider undergoing costly change, there must be a sense that leadership is doing everything within their power and their job description to be as effective as possible.
Before people will follow you off the map, gain the credibility that comes from demonstrating competence on the map.
people need to experience the love of God as they are led into the mission of God. If they don’t feel loved, they will likely not let anyone lead them anywhere.
To be a pastor requires being stewards of Scripture and souls, but also the teams and tasks that the community takes up. It is to know the people, the Scriptures and the organizational systems where the Word struggles to take root, grow in the souls and bear fruit in the lives of actual persons in actual towns and cities and cultures. Being a leader is the difference between Johnny Appleseed and an apple farmer. The farmer has to attend to both seeds and soil, and indeed even more than the soil. The farmer must be personally connected to the land, yes, but also to the fences, the barns, the
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The farmer must pay personal attention to the environment, the weather, the terrain and the seasons. The farmer must attend to the whole organic system that is the farm. In the same way, a leader can be the very best, most personally attentive, loving, caring, engaged and involved shepherd attending to the sheep, but if the farmer doesn’t build a safe sheep pen, the wolves come.
Competence gives us the credibility needed to learn from our mistakes.
It is possible to prepare for the future without knowing what it will be. The primary way to prepare for the unknown is to attend to the quality of our relationships, to how well we know and trust one another. Margaret Wheatley, “When Change Is Out of Control”
Perhaps the most unexpected, challenging and delightful work of transformational leadership is when it becomes the shared work of friends.
In a similar way, when a marketplace leader steps into a nonprofit, church, school or mission organization, there is an ongoing need for translation. For
Partnership is a necessity in a strange land for those of us who are trying to live out the values of Christianity in the marketplace or the skills of the marketplace in a Christian organization.
“Refashioning narratives means refashioning loyalties.”6 To ask church members to close down a once-cherished ministry to make room for something new, to reallocate support
As Ronald Heifetz says,
“We have the technology to fix the heart, but not change it.”
“Adaptive processes don’t require leadership with answers. It requires leadership that create structures that hold people together through the very conflictive, passionate, and sometimes awful process of addressing questions for which there aren’t easy answers.”
“There is only one thing that builds trust: the way people behave,” say Dennis and Michelle Rea, experts in helping corporations rebuild trust after a tragedy or scandal.
When we are experienced as congruent, trust goes up; when we are incongruent—when my words don’t match my actions—the trust level goes down.
According to Osterhaus, “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.
It is the internal capacity to keep promises to God, to self and to one’s relationships that consistently express one’s identity and values in spiritually and emotionally healthy ways.
Relational congruence is about both constancy and care...
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Murray Bowen: Someone who has clarity about his or her own life goals, and, therefore, someone who is less likely to become lost in the anxious emotional processes swirling about. I mean someone who can be separate while still remaining connected, and therefore can maintain a modifying, non-anxious, and sometimes challenging presence. I mean someone who can manage his or her own reactivity to the automatic reactivity of others, and therefore be able to take stands at the risk of displeasing.
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. As
But it is crucial to remember again that the goal of the expedition was not to build a family—it was to find a route to the Pacific Ocean. Similarly, 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.”
It can’t be just to be a family but to actually do something!!!
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
Leaders shape culture by default or design. Bob Henley
The most critical attribute a congregation must have to thrive in uncharted territory is a healthy organizational culture.
Culture, as Andy Crouch describes it, is “what we make of the world.”2 It is the combination of “the language we live in, the artifacts that we make use of, the rituals we engage in, our approach to ethics, the institutions we are a part of and the narratives we inhabit [that] have the power to shape our lives profoundly.”
Organizational culture, as defined by John Kotter, is the “group norms of behavior and the underlying shared values that help keep those norms in place.”
In short, organizational culture is “the way we do things around here.”
Culture is the combination of actual values and concrete actions that shape the warp and woof of organizational life.
JR Woodward writes, “While management acts within culture, leadership creates culture.”
According to Patrick Lencioni, “organizational health” is the “single greatest advantage” any company, organization or congregation can have toward accomplishing its mission, and is perhaps the single biggest differentiating quality between successful and less successful organizations.
For Patrick Lencioni, organizational clarity and organizational health are virtually synonymous.
(or what I have called the “Really, Really Important Rule #8”).
“If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.” What we are calling “shared values,” Paul terms as the “same mind.” And that same mind is more than thinking the same way; it is about common cause, common care and a shared commitment to look out for the others.
But today a genuine culture shift requires voluntary submission to shared values.
“People typically do not look to written codes for clues about how to behave; they look to others.”
So after two days discussing this increasing sense of disengagement, I suggested to Kevin that perhaps we should start working on realigning the organizational chart around a more collaborative model of ministry. Kevin responded, “Don’t change anything in the infrastructure yet. Just start living into the new way of being. Start functioning differently and let’s see what happens.”
Only as we began to act differently would we then know what infrastructure changes were needed to reinforce the new culture.
John Kotter puts it this way: “How does culture change? A powerful person at the top, or a large enough group from anywhere in the organization, decides the old ways are not working, figures out a change vision, starts acting differently, and enlists others to act differently.”
It is a great paradox that love is not only the key to establishing and maintaining a healthy culture but is also the critical ingredient for changing a culture.
“You change the DNA of any living organism through birthing something new. The new birth won’t be all you or all them but a new creation, a new living culture that is a combination of the past and the future you represent. But you have to communicate that you really love them, or they will never let you close enough
to them to take in the different perspective, experiences and vision that you bring.
Those who follow Jesus embody fluidity, adaptation, and collaboration. It’s what we call the third-culture way. Adaptable to changing circumstances. To challenging cultures. To complex crises and problems. If there’s one quality that matters most to the fate of the church in the twenty-first century, it’s adaptability. Dave Gibbons, The Monkey and the Fish
Anybody who has ever visited London has seen the ubiquitous “Mind the Gap” signs in the underground subway system. They warn travelers to watch their steps because of the small chasm between the train and the platform. Adaptive leadership is exercised in helping our communities “mind the gap” between our aspired values and our actions, between our values and the reality we face. It is a shared realization of a group’s inability to live out its own most cherished values with vibrancy and effectiveness in a changing context.
