Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

by Tod Bolsinger

To be a pastor requires being stewards of Scripture and souls, but also the teams and tasks that the community takes up.

It is to know the people, the Scriptures and the organizational systems where the Word struggles to take root, grow in the souls and bear fruit in the lives of actual persons in actual towns and cities and cultures.

In the same way, a leader can be the very best, most personally attentive, loving, caring, engaged and involved shepherd attending to the sheep, but if the farmer doesn’t build a safe sheep pen, the wolves come.

For most leaders, the organizational part is harder than the personal part.

The church organization needs as much pastoring as any person, and this is exactly where most of us are ill-prepared. We till the soil, we plant the seed, we water and wait for harvest—and then the fences fail, the roof caves in, the well runs dry and the backhoe needs a new battery. The

With a growing dissatisfaction of impersonal organizational models, the answer isn’t to create a false divide between personal and organizational.

The answer is to repersonalize the organizational and to learn the ways of organic organizational pasturing, to recover again the rich biblical concepts of the church as a body that expresses a larger systemic reality of members, parts and ligaments that make up a larger interconnected, interrelated whole, to reconsider our organizational models around the actual descriptions of health and fruitfulness that the Scriptures teach and humans need.

Failing Our Way to God’s Plan A

“Tod, I believe that our plan A is never God’s plan A, and we only get to God’s plan A when our plans A, B and C fail. So, you need to fail as soon as you can, so we can learn as quickly as possible.”

But he wanted me to know that failure is a necessary part of learning and therefore a necessary part of leading. And if we want to make sure that we learn the lessons from our experimentations in innovation, then we need to fail with as much credibility and competence as possible.

We need to make sure that when our attempts at innovation go awry it’s because we have something to learn, and not because we mishandled an otherwise good idea.

Or in the indelicate words of our unofficial team motto, “We can fail...

In the same way, leaders must demonstrate competence in fidelity to Scriptures and traditions, the nurture of souls and communities, and fruitfulness in tasks and teams of people running the work of the church in order to develop the credibility that will be necessary later when the harder work of adaptation and dealing with loss begins.

Even more, while critical, the credibility of technical competence is not enough to lead genuine change, there must also be present a deep personal trust, which can only come through the relational congruence of a leader.

- 5 - Preparing for the Unknown

This is an undertaking freighted with difficulties, but my friend I do assure you that no man lives with whom I would prefer to undertake such a trip as yourself. . . . My friend, I join you with hand & heart. William Clark, Letter to Meriwether Lewis, July 24, 1803

It is possible to prepare for the future without knowing what it will be. The primary way to prepare for the unknown is to attend to the quality of our relationships, to how well we know and trust one anot...

Preparing for the Unknown

Navigational Guide for Organizations

Christian Leadership, Crosscultural Partnership

As both a senior leader who has brought experienced marketplace executives into the church and the academy, and as a consultant who has worked with many frustrated marketplace leaders who came to work in the nonprofit sector only to feel as if their expertise was rejected or marginalized, I am of the conviction that marketplace leaders need a translator or guide to help them navigate the unfamiliar territory with its different traditions, customs and language.

At the seminary, when we talk about translating materials from one language to another, we describe it as having two different dynamics: the literal translation and the cultural translation. And without the latter, the former fails.

Partnership is a necessity in a strange land for those of us who are trying to live out the values of Christianity in the marketplace or the skills of the marketplace in a Christian organization.

Beyond Credibility

lead into uncharted territory is to reconsider the cherished narratives and assumptions, and as Ronald Heifetz reminds us, “Refashioning narratives means refashioning loyalties.”

To ask church members to close down a once-cherished ministry to make room for something new, to reallocate support from a beloved foreign missionary to a new local missional initiative, to experiment with new forms of worship, to restructure the staff for less ministry to church members and more projects to reach out to the unchurched, or to even reconsider their very “beliefs, habits and values” (the core of adaptive work) will require far more than agreeing that the pastor “knows what he is doing.”

Even if we agree that we are in an adapt-or-die (even adventure-or-die) moment, the urgency of the situation is not enough. When given that particular choice, 90 percent choose dying.

As Ronald Heifetz says, “We have the technology to fix the heart, but not change it.”

True change of heart, true transformation, is so profoundly challenging because “the sustainability of change depends on having the people with the problem internalize the change itself.”9

The transformational leader cannot rely on competence and credibility alone.

an address to a Duke Divinity School Convocation, Ronald Heifetz said, “Adaptive processes don’t require leadership with answers. It requires leadership that create structures that hold people together through the very conflictive, passionate, and sometimes awful process of addressing questions for which there aren’t easy answers.”10

When we think of structures, we tend to think institutionally, but what Heifetz and his colleagues refer to often as a “holding environment” or “containing vessel” is far more an expression of relationships than ...

“A holding environment consists of all those ties that bind people together and enable them to maintain their collective f...

What was this bold leadership move? Convening the team.12 Creating a holding environment of healthy relationships that will keep the work before the people.

The ability to innovate, to be creative, to consider new options, to “shift habits, beliefs or values” requires “a sturdy, trustworthy space” fashioned out of healthy relationships.

Margaret Wheatley observes, “The primary way to prepare for the unknown is to attend to the quality of our relationships, to how well we know and trust one another.”

Building Trust

Trust must be added to credibility. Relationships must be healthy, life-giving and strong. The web of connectedness within the organization must be able to hold each other in the midst of all the chaos that comes from not knowing what is to come.

How is congregational trust increased in a world where pastors are now considered less inherently trustwor...

Through actions.

“There is only one thing that builds trust: the way people behave,” say Dennis and Michelle Rea, experts in helping corporations rebuild trust after a tragedy or scandal.

But to be considered truly trustworthy, those actions can’t be one-off events or one-time responses to a particularly critical situation; they must be a consistent expression of the character and values of the leader.

Psychologist, executive coach and consultant Jim Osterhaus of TAG Consulting takes it one step further: “The irreducible minimum in leadership is trust, and trust is based on a leader’s own self-definition.”

Corporate trust is anchored in a leader’s own self-definition, and that self-definition requires repeated, consistent actions. Trust comes from the congruence of leaders repeatedly doing what we say.

When we are experienced as congruent, trust goes up; when we are incongruent—when my words don’t match my actions—the trust level goes down. According to Osterhaus, “Trust is gained like a thermostat and lost like a light switch.”

In order to establish and deepen trust, the leader must add to his or her own technical competence what I call “relational congruence” (see fig.

Relational Congruence

Relational congruence is the ability to be fundamentally the same person with the same values in every relationship, in every circumstance and especially amidst every crisis.

Relational congruence is about both constancy and care at the same time.

It is about both character and affection, and self-knowledge and authentic self-expression.