Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

by Tod Bolsinger

Management is a kind of s...

Management cares for what is. Leadership is focused on what can...

Management is about keeping promises to a constituency; leadership is about an organization fulfilling its mission an...

let me offer three leadership principles that shape my work in leadership development (mostly in c...

1. Leadership is e...

Leadership is not measured by corner offices with heavy furniture, higher salaries or august job descriptions. To be authorized or to have a title does not equate to leadership.

Leadership is a way of being in an organization, family, team, company, church, business, nation (or any other system) that, in the words of Ronald Heifetz, “[mobilizes] people to tackle tough challenges and thrive.”9

Therefore, leadership is always about personal and corpor...

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 ...

2. Leadership is expressed in behaviors.

Leaders act. Leaders function.

While speaking is indeed a form of behavior, and many leaders are known for their words in times of crisis, leadership is mostly expressed in ac...

Ed Friedman said, “The leader in the system is the one who is no...

Leaders are “in the system.” That is, they have stayed in relationship with those they are called to lead. You can’t lead from outside the system.

At the same time, leaders are not blaming anyone (or, for that matter, any circumstance) for the challenges they face but are solely focusing on personal responsibility, looking to what they can do—how they can act—differently. That doing is not just impulsive reacting but thoughtful, reflective responding.

Perhaps the single most transformative moment of all is when a leader says, “I don’t know what to do,” and then goes about the hard work of leading the learnin...

3. Leadership is d...

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.

But, and this is critical, leadership is learned in the doing and by reflecting on the doing.

Leadership requires developing what Friedman calls “self-regulation.” Because our brains don’t process information and learn well when we are highly anxious, leaders must develop emotional maturity and the ability to persist in complex emotional systems without either distancing or taking resistance personally.

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

Since we are not developing leaders, there is a lack of leadership in action. Without essential leadership behaviors, most organizations are not growing, not transforming and certainly not facing their toughest challenges or thriving.

We have to learn to lead all over again.

- 2 - Adventure or Die

Captain Meriwether Lewis. The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri River, & such principal stream of it, as by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean . . . may offer the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Meriwether Lewis

Conceptually stuck systems cannot become unstuck simply by trying harder. For a fundamental reorientation to occur, that spirit of adventure which optimizes serendipity and which enables new perceptions beyond the control of our thinki...

President Thomas Jefferson had indeed commissioned Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery for just this moment, declaring that they should find the cherished water route that everyone believed existed and would insure the young nation’s prosperity: “The most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce.”

For the second assumption at work in the minds of the explorers of the day was that the geography west of the Continental Divide was the same as the geography east of it.

To be sure, the Mandans had told Lewis and Clark that the mountains ahead needed to be crossed. But when they thought of mountains, they pictured the rounded tree-topped bluffs of the Appalachians.

In the words of Corps sergeant John Ordway, “the mountains continue as far as our eyes could extend. They extend much further than we expected.”4 Or as another said, they were “the most terrible mountains I ever beheld.”5

Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery were about to go off the map and into uncharted territory. They would have to change plans, give up expectations, even reframe their entire mission.

There were no experts, no maps, no “best practices” and no sure guides who could lead them safely and successfully. The true adventure—the real discovery—was just beginning.

In every field, in every business, every organization, leaders are rapidly coming to the awareness that the world in front of us is radically different from everything behind us.

In the words of futurist and 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.

This VUCA world will only become more so in the days ahead and will require all leaders to learn new skills.

Just as Lewis and Clark functioned under a set of geographical assumptions, leaders of the church in the West today have been operating under a set of philosophical, theological and ecclesiological assumptions.

All that we have assumed about leading Christian organizations, all that we have been trained for, is out of date.

How Do We Keep Our Churches from Dying?

The statistics of the Western church’s steady decline are well known.7 But most of us have been unprepared for how accelerated and disorienting that pace has become through the rapid and demonstrable marginalization of the church in Western society.

As pastors, we were trained to teach those who come on their own, to care for those who call for help, to lead those who volunteer and to administer the resources of those who willingly give and participate.

Now we are called on to minister to a passing parade of people who treat us like we are but one option in their personal salad bar of self-fulfillment. To do so will take a significant shift in thinking about pastoral leadership.

Farewell to Christendom

After forty years as a missionary and bishop in India, Lesslie Newbigin retired and returned home to Great Britain in the 1970s. What he found in his beloved homeland was a more difficult mission field than he left behind. He wrote, “England is a pagan society and the development of a truly missionary encounter with this very tough form of paganism is the greatest intellectual and practical task facing the Church.”10

During the last decade of the last century, Darrell Guder and his colleagues in the Gospel and Our Culture Network used the term missional to differentiate certain congregations from those that were primarily organized around the maintenance of Christendom culture and faith practices.

Missional churches are those that understand “the church as fundamentally and comprehensively defined by its calling and sending, its purpose to serve God’s healing purposes for all the world as God’s witnessing people to all the world.”

The apostolic mission was not merely the saving of souls and their collecting into communities of the saved. The apostolic strategy, whose message was the event of salvation accomplished in Jesus Christ and whose method was defined by the earthly ministry of Jesus, was the formation of witnessing communities whose purpose was to continue the witness that brought them into existence.

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.”

Further, “missions” is no longer one of a number of activities requiring patronage and participation that a church provides to Christian constituents (alongside worship, education, care, hospitality and outreach), but in the words of Alan Hirsch, the mission or “sentness” of a congregation is its “true and authentic organizing principle”:

Missional church is a community of God’s people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God’s mission to the world. In other words, the church’s true and authentic organizing principle is mission. When the church is in mission, it is the true church.

The rise of the digital age, the default emphasis on individualism and the shifts in media, philosophy, science and religion15 have all led to the now widespread agreement that we are amidst an epochal change.