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Part One UNDERSTANDING UNCHARTED TERRITORY
The World in Front of You Is Nothing Like the World Behind You
1 - Seminary Didn’t Prepare Me for This
If western societies have become post-Christian mission fields, how can traditional churches become then missionary churches? Darrell Guder, “The Missiological Context”
When churches functioned primarily as vendors of religious services for a Christian culture, the primary leadership toolbox was
teaching (for providing Christian education) liturgics (for leading Christian services) pastoral care (for offering Christian counsel and support)
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.
We will discuss and seek faithful responses to the following questions: How do we lead a congregation or an organization to be faithful to the mission God has put before us when the world has changed so radically?
What are the tools, the mental models, the wise actions and competing commitments that require navigation?
And mostly, what transformation does it demand of those of us who hav...
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As a seminary administrator, a professor of practical theology, an ordained minister, a consultant on organizational change and an executive coach for leaders, I have written this book with three purposes in mind:
To reframe this moment of history for Christians in the west as an opportunity put before us by God for adventure, hope and discovery—all the while embracing the anxiety, fear and potential loss that comes from answering this call.
To recover the calling for the church to be a truly missional movement that demands leadership that will take up the gauntlet of Guder’s charge: “If western societies have become post-Christian mission fields, how ...
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To discover—even more than the uncharted territory around us—the capacity fo...
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This book is structured around five vital lessons that every leader of a Christian congregation or organization has to le...
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Understanding uncharted territory: The world in front of you is nothing lik...
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The on-the-map skill set: No one is going to follow you off the map unless they trust you on the map.
Indeed, without demonstrating technical competence on the map, a leader will never be given the chance to lead a true expedition off the map.
Only when a leader is deeply trusted can he or she take people further than they imagined into the mission of God.
Trust is not just a one-on-one relationship between a leader and follower, but the organizational air that allows a transforming adventure to be even possible.
Leading off the map: In uncharted territory, adaptation is everything.
Relationships and resistance: You can’t go alone, but you haven’t succeeded until you’ve survived the sabotage.
Transformation: Everybody will be changed (especially the leader).
T. S. Eliot wrote that the “end of our exploring” was to “arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
When You Discover That You Are the Problem
To begin, let’s summarize the five vital lessons that make up the structure of this book:
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 ch...
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Unconsciously, the message going out is that everybody here thinks it is their job to support the ministry that you are having here.
And that model of leadership is out of date. It’s a model from the past that is unsustainable in a changing world, and is slowly sapping the passion from the church.
Kevin gave me three hard options: (1) do nothing and trust that the church would bounce back, (2) resign and let the church have a new leader, o...
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*REORIENTATION* Christian Leaders: You were trained for a world that is disappearing.
Leadership for a Changing World
Even more complicated, these problems are very often the result of yesterday’s solutions. They are what Ronald Heifetz calls “adaptive challenges.”7
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 ...
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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 lead...
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But for me it all began almost ten years ago with understanding that for our church mission to win I had to lose.
To paraphrase Marshall Goldsmith, “What got us here wouldn’t take us there.”
So, I had to lose some of my status, power and control. I had to lose “say” over certain aspects of the mission, and mostly I had to lose my identity as the resident expert and learn to lead all over again.
Navigational Guide for Organizations Disruption and Discipleship
“Because we are Christians in business and not a ‘Christian business,’ we need more discipleship, not less, to lead in business.”
Christians in disruptive marketplace sectors need as much discernment and discipleship as a commitment to innovation.
Because the stakes of leadership are experienced tangibly and economically on a daily basis, there is an ever-present temptation to return to a sacred-secular split that separates the moral and spiritual of Sunday morning from the rough and tumble of Monday to Friday.
The growing faith-and-work movement points to the reality that marketplace leadership requires wisdom to discern not only right from wrong but also prudent from folly, prescient from rash.
This discernment requires ongoing discipleship. Christians who provide leadership to businesses need just as much spiritual and biblical understanding of the priorities of the kingdom of God as they do the economics of market forces.
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)!
What Is Leadership, Really?
Leadership is not authority. It is not the title or position that a person holds.
Leadership is different from management. Leadership is not running good meetings, keeping good books, overseeing good programs and making good policies (as important as those are!).
