Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

by Tod Bolsinger

But chief among the topics is the acknowledgment that leadership—and especially leadership development—must be dramatically different than it was during Christendom.

Seminaries that produced pastors to be the resident expert in biblical studies, theology and church history; the resident professional for teaching, counseling and pastoral care; and the local manager of the church business and bureaucracy are reconsidering both the demands of the current curricular expectations and the challenges of the changing world around us.

Darrell Guder observes, If, like Lesslie Newbigin, we are challenged to recognize that our own context has become, within an astonishingly short time, a post-Christian mission field, posing enormous challenges to the received forms and attitudes of Western Christendom, then that inward-oriented, church-maintaining approach to theological education...

While I am indebted to the missional thinkers of our day, it’s become apparent a missional mind shift alone doesn’t lend itself to the capacity building that actually brings change.

But if we are convinced that a change is necessary, how do we bring it without alienating the whole church? How do we face the losses and fears in our congregations, the opposition and resistance in our leaders, and the anxieties and insecurities in ourselves to truly lead the church through this adventure-or-die moment? How do we develop leaders for mission in this rapidly changing, uncharted-territory world?

A Church without...

If you are like me, indeed, like most people, what you do is default to what you know. You do again, what you have always done before.

Steve Yamaguchi, the dean of students at Fuller Theological Seminary, says that when his spiritual director took a flying lesson, he asked the instructor why they use flight simulators so much. The instructor said, “In the moment of crisis, you will not rise to the occasion; you will default to your training.”

So, what do we do? We talk longer—we preach more. We try harder—we go into our bag of tricks and bring out our best programs.18 We give a personal touch—we hope that caring for stakeholders will inspire them to change.

Morgan Murray, the senior pastor at Walnut Creek Presbyterian Church in California, likes to say, “We Presbyterians are so good at talking about problems that after awhile we think that we have actually done something.”

Congregational systems guru Ed Friedman writes, “When any . . . system is imaginatively gridlocked, it cannot get free simply through more thinking about the problem. Conceptually stuck systems cannot be unstuck simply by trying harder.”

Friedman clarifies the challenge in front of us: We are “imaginatively gridlocked.” We can’t see our way to a new way of being, a new response.

Ed Friedman continues: “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 thinking processes must happen first.”21

What is needed? “A spirit of adventure,” where there are new, unexpected discoveries (serendipities) and ultimately “new perceptions.” To be sure, this is an adapt-or-die moment.

The answer is not to try harder but to start a new adventure: to look over Lemhi Pass and let the assumptions of the past go. To see not the absence of a water route but the discovery of a new, uncharted land beckoning us forward—yes, in the face of the uncertainties, fears and potential losses—to learn and to be transformed.

What is needed? An adventure that requires adaptive capacity. The tests we face are not

Adaptive challenges are never solved through a quick fix. If talking, trying or tricks work, they would have worked already. They are only going to be solved through new insight into the context, the values and the systemic issues at play in the congregation and within the leaders themselves.

In other words, before we can solve any problem, we need to learn to see new possibilities.

Once we understand that, perhaps the most terrifying task of leadership begins. It is an enormous risk that requires the nerve to stand in front of a group of people and say out loud three words: I don’t know.

*REORIENTATION* If you can adapt and adventure, you can thrive. But you must let go, learn as you go and keep going no matter what.

Eventually we will start a discipline of looking at our problems differently, acknowledging each time anew that this is not a situation that calls for a new tweak or new technique; this is an opportunity for adventure, exploration and transformation.

Back to the Pass

What would he do now? Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery were looking for a water route, but now they had run out of water. How do you canoe over mountains?

You don’t. If you want to continue forward, you change. You adapt. Meriwether Lewis looked at the miles and miles of snow-covered peaks and knew that to continue his journey he would have to change his entire approach.

The same is true for all who are called to lead beyond the boundaries of what is known. We go through a personal transformation of identity and mission intention. We ...

You let go, you learn as you go and you keep going, no matter what.

Ultimately, this book is about the kind of leadership necessary for the local church to take the Christian mission into the uncharted territory of a post-Christendom world. It is about the kind of leadership needed when the world has so dramatically changed that we really don’t know what to do next.

3 - A Leadership Model for Uncharted Territory Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed. Romans 12:2

Leadership is energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared mission in the face of a changing world. Tod Bolsinger

The Last Thing You Want to Hear from God Before Preaching

Your people need you to lead them even more than preach to them.

Think about the best leaders of the last two centuries. Who would you put on that list? Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr.? (Yes, there are others.) What is the one characteristic they have in common? Now, think of the Christian leaders of the last two centuries?

What is the one characteristic they have in common with the previous list? Indeed, for most church members, leader is synonymous with pulpiteer.

*REORIENTATION* In the Christendom world, speaking was leading. In a post-Christendom world, leading is multidimensional: apostolic, relational and adaptive.

Preaching and leadership were essentially synonymous. The leader was a person with authority, title or position who was given a voice and charged with offering a vision for faithfulness and mission.

When those in authority were speaking, they were leading. More often than not, their vision was of repentance and return.

a Christendom context the leader’s primary responsibility was to bring a people back to God, returning to the church, turning back to the values they had strayed from. Preaching reiterated the shared story, the shared vision of life, the shared values of a culture they had once learned and now forgotten.

But what kind of leadership do we need today in a culture that has become again a mission field?

What does leadership look like in a day when the moorings of society have become disconnected from the anchors of faith? What is leadership in a world where the task isn’t so much to re-mind as to encounter and engage, to proclaim and demonstrate a completely different world that is available and yet beyond awareness of or even interest to so many?

What does leadership look like in a post-Christendom day when we have left behind rivers filled with the waters of shared Christian culture and are facing ...

The Recovery of Leadership for an Apostolic Church

In their book The Permanent Revolution, Alan Hirsch and Tim Catchim recover the concept that the church—literally, “the ecclesia”—is an apostolic movement.2 Nurtured by a fivefold model of leadership (apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers) found in Ephesians 4:1-16, they demonstrate that the church’s very nature is apostolic.

For Darrell Guder this is indeed the very purpose of the ecclesia, the apostolate, that is, “the formation of the witnessing communities whose purpose was to continue the witness that brought them into existence.”3

This points to a reorientation that gives us a clear, reenergizing reason for being a part of the “one, holy and apostolic church.” But most of us think that apostolic is a description of our founding and not our purpose.

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.

In short, churches need to keep adventuring or they will die. We need to press on to the uncharted territory of making traditional churches missionary churches.

Frankly, not with another seminar on being a missional church, not changing the labels on our committees or the names of our churches, not through rearranging organizational...

Traditional churches will only become missionary churches as those in authority (and even those without formal authority) develop capacity to lead their congregations through a long, truly transformational process that starts with the transformation of the leaders and requires a thoroughgoing change in leadership functioning.

To be sure, in the Christendom mental model under which most of us were trained, pastors weren’t missionaries and churches weren’t missions. (Indeed, my seminary had a separate school for that!)

We were teachers, worship leaders and counselors. We were social workers, community organizers and program providers. We were mostly chaplains for a ...