How to Lead When You Don't Know Where You're Going: Leading in a Liminal Season

by Susan Beaumont

My clients valued the work I was doing with them, but I was growing increasingly frustrated. The accelerated pace of decline in the mainline church was overwhelming. Nothing in my work seemed to mitigate the loss.

I was dismayed at the growing disconnect between the spiritual and organizational lives of congregations. As I worked with governing bodies and staff teams, it was rarely evident that I was working in a faith-based environment.

My clients were working in overdrive to reverse decline and improve organizational effectiveness. Few were engaging God as a partner in the striving. Increasingly, I felt that the organizational work was replacing the spiritual center of the institutions I served.

This is when I claimed a subtle but important vocational shift, discerning that I was called to function as a spiritual director to the organizations I served, not the leaders of those organizations.

“tending the soul of the institution”

Victor Turner’s

you will be invited to stand firm in a disoriented state, learn from your mistakes, and lead despite your confusion.

Liminality refers to a quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs during transition, when a person or group of people is in between something that has ended and something else that is not yet ready to begin. Transition experiences follow a predictable pattern that involves separation, liminality, and reorientation.

The success of any leadership intervention rests upon the quality of the leader’s attention to all that is unfolding—on her or his ability to remain non-anxious, to be self-reflective, and to self-differentiate personal issues from the issues of the organization.

three spiritual shifts that help leaders respond more effectively in liminal seasons: from knowing to unknowing, from advocating to attending, and from striving to surrender.

a proximate purpose centered around four basic questions: Who are we? Who are we here to serve? What do we stand for? What is God calling us to do or become next?

it is important to note that every story you will read is a fictionalized telling of the truth.

Sometimes, the processes described aren’t what a congregation really did, but what I hoped they might do. Often, the best course of action isn’t evident at the time of decision-making, and I wrote with the privilege of hindsight, able to reflect on what a better alternative might have been.

There is a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens; the key is to be able to linger there without panicking. —Ed Catmull (Pixar)

A liminal organization needs to unlearn old behaviors, challenge the status quo, experiment, take risks, and learn. To do these things Jon will have to employ leadership skills that are different from the skill set that got him hired. Jon will need to demonstrate a leadership presence that is both deeply spiritual and organizationally savvy. He will need to tend the soul of the institution, as well as care for the souls in the institution.

All significant transitional experiences, like becoming parents, follow a predictable three-part process. Something comes to an end. There is an in-between season marked by disorientation, disidentification, and disengagement. Finally, and often after a very long and painful struggle, something new emerges. Separation: A period in which a person, group, or social order is stripped of the identity and status that previously defined it. Liminal Period: A disorienting period of non-structure or anti-structure that opens new possibilities no longer based on old status or power hierarchies. New identities are explored, and new possibilities are considered. Reorientation: A reforming period in which the person, group, or social order adopts a new identity, is granted new status, and designs new structures more appropriately suited to the emerging identity.

Adam and Eve’s fall from grace in the Garden of Eden sets up the biblical story as one large liminal experience. Humankind leaves the garden and begins an ongoing journey toward redemption and salvation.

The Christian story is, by design, an invitation into liminality. The hoped-for reign of God is already inaugurated in the figure of Jesus Christ, but not yet complete.

We have to allow ourselves to be drawn out of “business as usual” and remain patiently on the “threshold” (limen, in Latin)

This is the sacred space where the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed. If we don’t encounter liminal space in our lives, we start idealizing normalcy. The threshold is God’s waiting room. Here we are taught openness and patience as we come to expect an appointment with the divine Doctor.

Why then are we resistant to living in a liminal state? Isn’t it clear that God is working on us and with us in liminal seasons? Why is the disorientation that we experience so intolerable? Why do we stand outside of our own story and pray for liminality to end, when the liminality is itself an invitation to transformation? Our resistance stems from the fact that liminality always begins with an ending, an experience of loss. And humankind resists loss. We also resist the unknowing inherent in “not yet”—the loss of control over our own destiny.

Our modern use of the term “liminality” was coined in the field of anthropology in 1909 by Arnold Van Gennep in his seminal work Les rites de passage. Van Gennep created the term to talk about rituals in small-scale societies, rituals such as coming of age, anointing tribal leadership, and marriage. Van Gennep claimed that such rituals exist in every culture.

Victor Turner. Turner borrowed the term liminality and expanded its usage, beyond its application in ritual settings. Turner applied liminality more broadly to the social, political, and behavioral sciences.

Most of the liminal experiences described so far can be resolved in relatively short time frames. In a matter of hours, days, or months we can move through a separation, a liminal period, and reorientation. Sometimes, liminality takes decades, generations, or even centuries to resolve. When an entire civilization or society moves into a prolonged liminal state, we call this a liminal epoch.

Liminal seasons are threshold experiences where the continuity of tradition is called into question, and uncertainty about the future fuels doubt.

Our old operating structures may no longer work. Our denominational polity, our governing board and committee structures, our staffing arrangement—all were suited for conditions that have evolved. Our strategic identities—who we are, who we serve, and what we feel called to do or become—were shaped by old experiences. We may no longer be served well by these outdated constructs, but we aren’t certain what we need next.

Liminal seasons are not the same as seasons of intentional change management. During change management, leaders know where they stand and where they are headed. In change management, the leader must build consensus, overcome resistance, and remove obstacles that stand in the way of a desired future. During liminal seasons, our destination is not yet clear.

Butler Bass asserts that the institutional Church is losing its efficacy, and its membership, because people are experiencing too great a distance between the old structures of the Church and their lived experience of this richer understanding of God.

But is the understanding of God actually richer?

It is exhausting trying to keep the old structures intact, managing the anxiety of the transition, and making space for the birth of the new thing—all at the same time.

Many would argue that the mainline church is approaching pure liminality.

William Bridges is well known for his book Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change.

distinction between change and transition. Change is situational and depends upon the arrival of something new: moving to a new site, calling a new leader, assigning new team roles, adopting the new policy. In contrast, transition is the psychological process people go through to come to terms with the change.

A leader doesn’t create or eliminate loss. Rather, he or she tries to control the pace at which people experience the loss. He or she protects people from experiencing too much of the loss at one time. In this way the organization continues its adaptive work and eventually moves toward reorientation.

Just when you’ve decided that the hardest part of managing transition is getting people to let go of the old ways, you enter a state of affairs in which neither the old ways nor the new ways work satisfactorily.

when the change is deep and far-reaching, this time between the old identity and the new can stretch out for months, even years. This is a time when you’ve let go of one trapeze with the faith that the new trapeze is on its way. In the meantime, there’s nothing to hold on to.

Anxiety rises; motivation falls. People question their attachment to the organization or the cause. They wonder if they want to continue the relationship.

detachment of some places additional stress on others who find they must pick up the slack of those taking a breather.

The primary work in leading people through the liminal phase is to normalize the experience and to frame/define the season as acceptable and even desirable. One of the most difficult aspects of liminality is that people don’t understand it and they tend to think of it as undesirable and aberrant.

People often frame the liminal experience as organizational failure, believing it occurs because leaders aren’t doing what they are supposed to be doing, which is to keep followers happy and safe. People expect to move in a straight line from the old things to the new, and the waiting and confusion feels meaningless or counter-productive.

This season in Kathryn’s congregation isn’t simply about deciding how to combine two worship services into one. That’s an easy “problem” to solve. Kathryn can figure out the logistics of that quite easily. The real challenge is in helping the congregation adapt its self-image.

Kathryn cannot do this adaptive work on behalf of the congregation. She can coordinate the actual combination of services, but she can’t make the people engage the transition work. She can invite them to it. Kathryn needs to provoke disorientation. But she also needs to monitor anxiety so that the disorientation doesn’t become too intense.

she seeks to intensify the disorientation.

There are moments when Kathryn will provoke and challenge. Other moments when she will cajole and comfort. She will always be drawing the people back to who they are, who they serve, and what God is asking of them.

Pilgrims at the outset of a journey often introduce themselves to one another according to what they do, where they live, and the accomplishments of their lives. As the journey gets underway, those social constructs disintegrate. The sojourners become co-workers on mission, fellow pilgrims in a shared sacred space.

When old structures, policies, and procedures are left behind, an organization is remarkably susceptible to false leaders and prophets. Victor Turner personified this danger when he coined the term “the trickster”—dangerous figures who look like charismatic leaders but are incapable of living well in community.

the senior minister worked in conjunction with the personnel committee to address Michael’s dysfunction. Once new systems of accountability were put into place Michael voluntarily chose to leave. He claimed that the dysfunction in the system made his role impossible. Michael was losing his ability to manipulate others and he knew it.

It didn’t appear at first that the congregation was going to accept my leadership. In fact, it was six full years before they granted me the authority to lead. It wasn’t six years of misery. We had some successes. But it was clearly six years before they began to trust me to drive the thing.

let the people do their own adaptive work. A leader cannot impose reorientation on a people not yet ready to yield. Solutions are achieved when “the people with the problem” go through a process together to become “the people with the solution.”[23] This requires more than changed minds—it requires changed hearts and behavior.

A liminal season requires a personal presence that is different from leadership during stable times. Problematically, however, many church leaders invest their energy in traditional leadership activities: vision casting, advocating for big new ideas, striving for growth, and mastering new skills. These practices may provide a false sense of control and momentum; however, they don’t fundamentally impact liminality.

Moses emerges at the end of an era; he watches over the disintegration of the social structure that oppressed his people in slavery. Moses guides them through their liminal era and then turns the leadership reins over to the next generation. There is little in the way of accountable success in Moses’ story, and yet he is one of our greatest leadership heroes. Most of us will not be in leadership on the other side of this liminal era. The individual congregations we lead may move in and out of seasons of liminality, but the institutional Church will likely remain liminal for some time. Like Moses, we may never enter the promised land. We are liminal leaders, charged with taking the Church through this scary season of disorientation, disengagement, and disenchantment.