Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

by Tod Bolsinger

Adaptive leadership, again, is about leading the learning process of a group who must develop new beliefs, habits or values, or shift their current ones in order to find new solutions that are consistent with their purpose for being.

At the heart of this work is a three-step process of “observations, interpretations and interventions.”4 Heifetz, Linsky and Grashow describe it this way:

Our church was not particularly good at helping people stay connected through life and church transitions.

If we had only listened to the committed people, we would never have gotten to the heart of the issues. David McRaney,

the tendency to talk a problem to death.

Growth, transformation and adaptation always means loss. Change is loss. And even experimental changes signal loud and clear that change—and loss—is coming.

What are we passionate about? What are we constantly talking about, praying about, involved in and concerned about? In the words of Jim Collins, “Nothing great can happen without beginning first with passion.”

What do we have the potential to do better than anyone else? Collins says that this is an awareness of self, not aspirations or hopes. It is the humble and clear perspective about the particular value we as a church, organization or ministry have to offer our community or the larger world. It is a statement of uniqueness, not arrogance; a statement of the distinctive contribution we are equipped to make in God’s work in the world.

What will pay the bills? What drives our economic or resource engine? What helps us continually create the resources that will keep us going? What brings us partners, money, opportuni...

The statement must be in this format: verb, target, outcome. And it can use only eight words.

Beyond Win-Win: Competing Values Stephen Covey wrote

Whenever the urgent pushes out the important, we fall into the trap of feeling as if we are busy accomplishing something while we are running on a treadmill—getting exhausted but not going anywhere.6

“A church bred under the protection of the state is not trained to fend for itself on the streets. So when state and society withdraw their special favor towards the palace-trained church, it gets a very rude awakening. Disorienting and painful, it can lead to despair, anger and denial.”8

In other words, the deep disorientation for those trained in Christendom can be helped by learning to look to and partner with those who have already been living in post-Christendom marginality.

“Our non-white brothers and sisters,” Yamaguchi reminds us, “lead churches that have generations of experience living on the edges, displaced from the center, as more than survivors.”9

For Christena Cleveland, associate professor of the practice of reconciliation at Duke Divinity School, this is not just a matter of leadership but discipleship. “People can meet God within their cultural context, but in order to follow God, they must cross into other cultures because that’s what Jesus did in the incarnation and on the cross. Discipleship is crosscultural.”12 But Cleveland doesn’t stop there; she argues that in a changing world the very act of crossing cultural differences and dealing with our unspoken (and often even unacknowledged) biases, and the conflict it often creates, is at the heart of Christian leadership today. When we’re rubbing elbows in Christian fellowship with people who are different from us, we can learn from each other and grow more like Christ. Like iron sharpens iron.

For this reason, I believe that churches and Christian organizations should strive for cultural diversity. Regardless of ethnic demographics, every community is multicultural when one considers the various cultures of age, gender, economic status, education level, political orientation and so on. Further, every church should fully utilize the multifaceted cultural diversity within itself, express the diversity of its local community, expertly welcome the other, embrace all who are members of the body of Christ and intentionally collaborate with different churches or organizations in order to impact the kingdom.13

My husband and I have been working in small congregations our whole ministry career. Every day, every week, and every year, we are faced with the

challenge of how to make church relevant in the community; how to make church healthier; and how to move the church to change with the changing demographics. This is reality. This is the wilderness. This is ministry. For smaller congregations, there isn’t a sense of perishing because the hey day left over 50 years ago. You have to HAVE something to feel like you are LOSING something.14

The interaction of the margins and the center creates the new possibilities. The combination of ideas and relationships, the sharing of experiences and especially the valuing of perspective come from a lifetime of living in uncharted territory that is needed for Christendom-trained leaders to move into uncharted territory. When the center engages the insights from the margins, the center comes alive and moves toward the future.

“As the church moves into the community, they find that women have already been there. In the schools, in the parks with their kids, in community organizations, with neighbors,” says Kara Powell. “Community life is even more important today and women are already the fabric of the community.”

Yes—it is worth repeating—leadership off the map is inherently risky and frequently lonely. Leaders are those who “separate themselves” from the emotional processes of the group around them and “go first.” But even beyond inspiration, exploration is also a profoundly powerful teacher with valuable lessons to bestow.

“It took European civilization almost three centuries to grasp fully that what it had found—North America—might be more important than what it was looking for.”13

Is the church really in decline, or is it the Western, Christendom, form of church life that is now less effective? Does dwindling church attendance mean that people are less interested in God or that society and culture have stopped giving preference to Christian traditions and institutions? Is the lack of culture support for Christians a threat to Christian witness or an opportunity to work together in ways that we didn’t have to do so before?

Escaping the Expert Expectation One of the signs of an organization that is resisting change is what Heifetz calls “the flight to authority.”22 Instead of accepting the adaptive challenge of learning and being transformed, the congregation, company or even family will decide to elect an expert to the do the work for them. The expert becomes the “technical solution,” which is actually “work avoidance” that creates the illusion that something is being done (“We brought in an expert to solve it!”) when in truth nothing is changing.

The internal and psychological stress of leading, exploring, learning and keeping an organization on mission is demanding. The fear of failure weighs heavy on all types of leaders, but perhaps even more so for pastors. When failing can mean losing your job (survival), community (acceptance), reputation (competence), even the possibility of failure can make us feel out of control. We start to pine for the security and stability that would come with being considered experts, being granted some kind of tenure, being considered successful. We long to be seen as the expert and experience the deference that people in our society offer to those of us who have made it.

My client—a strong leader—is also an insatiable learner. (Why else would he insist on having a leadership coach when his church is so successful?) He recognizes that not only does learning keep leaders relevant but expert expectation is a form of collusion between an organization that doesn’t want to change (“Our expert leader will fix the problems!”) and a leader who wants the security, in Jim Collins’s poignant distinction, of being the “time-teller” instead of a “clock builder.”23 Exploration challenges the expert expectation and indeed even offers us the escape. To publicly acknowledge that we are now in uncharted territory, where there are no maps and few answers, allows us the freedom to innovate through experimentation, to encourage humility and inquisitiveness, to ask questions, and to invite those with us into an adventure of learning.

“Make your goal in every conversation to have someone roll their eyes upward (which indicates that they are thinking differently) and say, ‘That’s a great question.’” A great question when asked, and attempted to answer, offers more than a solution—a transformation.

In uncharted territory the captains relied more on relationships than the rule book, more on influence than on courts-marshal or lashings.27

The most tragic tale of the Corps of Discovery, however, is the suicide of Meriwether Lewis. Today, Meriwether Lewis would be treated for severe depression. Even then, it had been noted by Jefferson that Lewis tended to get melancholy and exacerbated it with alcohol. But during the expedition, neither the depression nor any signs of excessive alcohol abuse were ever noted by Clark or the other men. While the long lapses in his journals likely indicate that there were times when his notable depression offered him a greater burden to carry, the toll of returning home, being under deadlines for his journals, suffering writers’

block and eventually having creditors on his back became too hard to carry. As a reward for his leadership, Jefferson had granted Lewis the governorship of the Louisiana Territory, but his personal problems overwhelmed him. In the early hours of October 11, 1809, while staying in a boarding house en route to Washington, Meriwether Lewis shot himself. In trying to make sense of it later, Thomas Jefferson wrote of the “depressions of mind” that his young friend had suffered for years. But Jefferson surmised, During his Western expedition, the constant exertion which that required of all the faculties of body & mind, suspended these distressing affections; but after his establishment in St. Louis in sedentary occupations they returned upon with redoubled vigor.29

Without intending to make too strong a case, it is worth noting that most leaders are at their best when facing a challenge, and that the desire for safety and security can lead us into the m...

Focus on your own transformation together, not on your church dying. Focus on the mountains ahead, not the rivers behind. Focus on continually learning, not what you have already mastered.

In a changing world, the leader must be continually committed to ongoing personal change, to develop new capacities, to be continually transformed in ways that will enable the organization’s larger transformation.

By doing the work of the kingdom, we become like the King.

If we want the organizations and communities we serve to thrive, focus on what God needs to do in you, change in you, makeover in you so he can use you in his mission. Focus on how you need to grow in technical competence, relational congruence and adaptive capacity, and especially focus on what you need to leave behind, let go and even let die so your church can become more and more effective at fulfilling its part in God’s mission. Don’t focus

on whether your church is dying; keep your focus on being transformed into the leader God can use to transform his people for his mission.

In uncharted territory, trust is as essential as the air we breathe. If trust is lost, the journey is over.

Leadership in the past meant coming up with solutions. Today leadership is learning how to ask new questions we have been too scared, too busy or too proud to ask.

There is no greater gift that leadership can give a group of people on a mission than to have the clearest, most defined mission possible.

But when leading adaptive change, win-win is us...

In uncharted territory visionary leadership is more likely going to come from a small Corps of Discovery while the board manages th...

Uncharted leadership is absolutely dependent on the leader’s own ongoing exploration, learning and transformation.

None of us in church leadership get the luxury of a single-focused call, no matter how important we think it is. None of us get to handpick our own Corps of Discovery with nothing but the best, bravest, faithful, loyal and mature. Every church and Christian organization I know is filled with people of varying degrees of competence, courage and capacity to embrace change. As leaders, our calling is to further the mission of the kingdom of heaven, to expand the proclamation and demonstration of the gospel, with the very people whom God has given us.

In the same way, relationships are more powerful than any one person in the system.

We can and must inspire the next generation to go where we have not. We can create the kinds of communities and organizations that encourage risk, humility, learning and experimentation.6 We can read, study, encourage and embolden emerging leaders by offering them prayers, support and opportunity. We can remind them that maps change, that mental models are always incomplete, that the leaders of the future are the learners, not the experts, of today. We can call them to experiment, and we can create the conditions for a church that is always, always, always focused on continually being transformed into the very likeness of Jesus. And—if nothing else—we can sound the call to the Lewises, Clarks and Sacagaweas of the church, who will be the true adventurers for the mission of God in a rapidly changing world.