Canoeing the Mountains Quotes

“Trust is vital for change leadership. Without trust there is no “travel.” When trust is lost, the journey is over.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“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.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“the working definition of leadership we are using here: 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, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“Trust is gained like a thermostat and lost like a light switch.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“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 another. Margaret Wheatley, “When Change Is Out of Control”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“This transformational leadership lies at the overlapping intersection of three leadership components: technical competence, relational congruence and adaptive capacity (see fig. 3.1).”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“Don’t focus on whether your church is dying; keep your focus on being transformed into the leader God can use to transform his people for his mission.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“Transformational leadership is always a two-front battle: On one side is the challenge of a changing world, unfamiliar terrain and the test of finding new interventions that will enable the mission to move forward in a fruitful and faithful way. On the other side is the community that resists the change necessary for its survival.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“In any type of institution whatsoever, when a self-directed, imaginative, energetic, or creative member is being consistently frustrated and sabotaged rather than encouraged and supported, what will turn out to be true one hundred percent of the time, regardless of whether the disrupters are supervisors, subordinates, or peers, is that the person at the very top of that institution is a peace-monger.2 For Friedman the “peace-monger” is the leader whose own high degree of anxiety leads him to prefer harmony to health, to appease complainers just to quiet them, but who will not actually demand that they take responsibility for their own part in the organizational problem. Throughout this book, we have repeatedly”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“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”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“How does culture change? A powerful person at the top, or a large enough group from anywhere in the organization, decides the old ways are not working, figures out a change vision, starts acting differently, and enlists others to act differently.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“We can fail, but we can’t suck.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“Adaptation, even adaptive leadership, begins in the nuts and bolts of surviving and thriving, in the lessons passed on by those who are a few steps down the road, in the tricks and tips of “technical competence.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“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, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“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.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“The leader in the system is the one who is not blaming anyone.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“Management is about keeping promises to a constituency; leadership is about an organization fulfilling its mission and realizing its reason for being.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“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.14”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“We don’t learn from experience, we learn by reflecting on experience.”)”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“ministry is not only the means to bring the gospel to the world, ministry together is how God makes a congregation into a corps that is ready to continually bring the gospel in new ways to a changing world. As missionaries who have been thrown together into unfamiliar surroundings with little more than a sense of call and commitment to each other, when we love each other and are dedicated to our mission, we change.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“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 another. Margaret Wheatley, “When Change Is Out of Control”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“When I was beginning my work establishing the division of vocation and formation at Fuller Seminary, one of my new mentors said to me, “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.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“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?”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“Guder’s charge: “If western societies have become post-Christian mission fields, how can traditional churches become then missionary churches?”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“If, as I define it, 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, then leadership is always relational. It is focused on a community of people who exist to accomplish a shared mission.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“To stay calm is to be so aware of yourself that your response to the situation is not to the anxiety of the people around you but to the actual issue at hand.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“The core ideology of any group functions as both a charter and an identity statement. This is who we are, we say. If we stop being about this, we stop being.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“So, I asked, “If we knew that Youth Sunday hadn’t worked to help teenagers feel more connected to the church, why did we suggest it?” After talking about it a while we came to the conclusion that we were talking about it, because it was the only thing we knew how to do.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

“Right now, they know you are disappointed in them, and they don’t want to do anything but resist you. But seeing and embracing differences, if we know that we are loved and cherished just as we are, is also the way that we become open to the new possibilities. Love precedes change.”
― Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory