Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory
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Back then, if a man didn’t come to church on Sunday, his boss asked him about it at work on Monday.”
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Christendom,
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“Seminary didn’t train me for this. I don’t know if I can do it. I just don’t know .
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common thread is that they finally got worn down by trying to bring change to a church that was stuck and didn’t know what to do.
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In this changing world we need to add a new set of leadership tools.
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This is a guidebook for learning to lead in a world we weren’t prepared for.
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Using the story of Lewis and Clark’s expedition and applying the best insights from organizational leadership and missional theology, we will learn together what it means for Christians to lead when the journey goes “off the map.”
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once we realize that the losses won’t kill us, they can teach us.
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opportunity put before us by God for adventure, hope and discovery—all
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a truly missional movement that demands leadership
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The world in front of you is nothing like the world behind you.
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No one is going to follow you off the map unless they trust you on the map.
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Only when a leader is deeply trusted can he or she take people further than they imagined into the mission of God.
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In uncharted territory, adaptation is everything.
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adaptive challenges require learning, facing loss and negotiating the gaps of our values and actions.
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start with conviction, stay calm, stay connected and stay the course.
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You can’t go alone, but you haven’t succeeded until you’ve survived the sabotage.
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Learning from those who are most at home in uncharted territory is one of the great opportunities that most leaders miss.
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The world in front of you is nothing like the world behind you. No one is going to follow you off the map unless they trust you on the map.  In uncharted territory, adaptation is everything. You can’t go alone, but you haven’t succeeded until you’ve survived the sabotage. Everybody will be changed (especially the leader).
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The success of a unified vision had given birth to an overly centralized institution.
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You were trained for a world that is disappearing.
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these problems are very often the result of yesterday’s solutions.
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Adaptive challenges are the true tests of leadership. They are challenges that go beyond the technical solutions of resident experts or best practices, or even the organization’s current knowledge. 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.
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“What got us here wouldn’t take us there.”
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Leadership is not authority.
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Leadership is focused on what can be or what must be.
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leadership is about an organization fulfilling its mission and realizing its reason for being.
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Leadership is a way of being in an organization, family, team, company, church, business, nation
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lead the transformation necessary to take us into the future we are resisting.
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leadership is mostly expressed in actions, relationships and responsibility.
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focusing on personal responsibility, looking to what they can do—how they can act—differently.
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leadership is learned in the doing and by reflecting on the doing.
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“We don’t learn from experience, we learn by reflecting on experience.”)
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embrace an adventure-or-die mindset,
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VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
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When the church is in mission, it is the true church.
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Education for maintenance is not the same thing as education for mission.
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But if we are convinced that a change is necessary, how do we bring it without alienating the whole church?
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“In the moment of crisis, you will not rise to the occasion; you will default to your training.”
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most of our congregations are filled with people who were blessed by what once worked. And so, we default back to those things.
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So, when talking longer or trying harder doesn’t work, what next? Mostly, we turn to tricks and tweaks. We use PowerPoint or Twitter. We add an electric guitar or an accordion. If we have the money, we buy new stuff.
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stuck systems cannot be unstuck simply by trying harder.”
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If talking, trying or tricks work, they would have worked already.
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before we can solve any problem, we need to learn to see new possibilities.
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We need to clearly see that what we know to do doesn’t work.
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begin a new season of faithful expression.
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We keep on course with the same goal, but change absolutely everything required to make it through this uncharted territory.
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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.
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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.
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We need to press on to the uncharted territory of making traditional churches missionary churches.
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