Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

by Tod Bolsinger

“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.”

“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.”

the goal of the Christian faith is not simply to become more loving community but to be a community of people who participate in God’s mission to heal the world by reestablishing his loving reign “on earth as it is in heaven.”

the point of calming down is not to feel better; it’s to make better decisions.

calm, like anxiety, is contagious.

Very often the same people who applaud the stirring vision resist the implementation.

An ally is anyone who is convinced of the mission and is committed to seeing it fulfilled.

A big mistake that many leaders make is to assume that all friends are allies.

To be a confidant, a person must care more about you than they do about the mission of the organization.

Confidants are not invested in the outcome of the change initiative, because they are far more invested in you whether the change initiative succeeds or fails.

Potential opponents are stakeholders who have markedly different perspectives from yours and who risk losing the most if you and your initiative go forward.

Very often the leader in uncharted territory is not the authorized leader but someone tasked to explore the new terrain.

In any transformational leadership effort there will be casualties.

Pay extra attention to those who are going to experience the change most personally and dramatically.

The early naysayers are the canaries in the coal mine. They will help you see how opposition will take form and will raise the arguments that eventually will come to full volume.

Giving dissenters a voice keeps the system open and transparent,

this team should be ready to disband,

For inspired ideas to take root within the culture of an institution, there must be a series of intentional actions.

When a group of people bring a complaint, don’t jump to fix it but instead engage those who raised the complaint in the process of transformation.

it is “your own people” who are going to try to knock you off course.

Saboteurs are usually doing nothing but unconsciously supporting the status quo.

not taking it personally, we can keep monitoring ourselves and keep from reacting in a way that will make the situation worse.

the death of Christendom in the West simply means there are more brothers and sisters joining them at the margins,

“People can meet God within their cultural context, but in order to follow God, they must cross into other cultures because that’s what Jesus did in the incarnation and on the cross. Discipleship is crosscultural.”

Is the church really in decline, or is it the Western, Christendom, form of church life that is now less effective?

To publicly acknowledge that we are now in uncharted territory, where there are no maps and few answers, allows us the freedom to innovate through experimentation,

In uncharted territory the captains relied more on relationships than the rule book, more on influence than on courts-marshal or lashings.

focus on what you need to leave behind, let go and even let die so your church can become more and more effective