PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
"How to Support the Innovators in Your Congregation: LEADERS OFFER STRATEGIES TO NURTURE TALENT"
Innovative ideas -- and innovative colleagues -- can present challenges when budgets are tight, staff is shrinking, time is short and traditions run deep.
But wise senior leaders cultivate a mindset of experimentation, identify and develop emerging, creative leaders, and seed an institutional culture in which innovative ideas are welcomed and explored.
What are the best ideas and practices for clearing space and welcoming innovators in your midst? How do you identify innovators and then understand their potential for strengthening Christian community? How do you then provide supportive environments in which they can experiment and flourish?
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WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR?
Explore the narratives and resources about one Houston congregation's ministry with refugees »
CONGREGATIONS, INNOVATION
Tips to support the innovators in your midst
Hannah Terry, left, holding the microphone, leads prayer at a Wednesday night gathering at the Los Arcos apartment complex in Southwest Houston. As part of Westbury UMC's innovative ministry, Terry lives nearby in intentional Christian community. Photo courtesy of Westbury UMC
Learn from seasoned leaders and books strategies to identify and nurture talented people and ideas.
Innovative ideas -- and innovative colleagues -- can present challenges when budgets are tight, staff is shrinking, time is short and traditions run deep.
But wise senior leaders cultivate a mindset of experimentation, identify and develop emerging, creative leaders, and seed an institutional culture in which innovative ideas are welcomed and explored.
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What are the best ideas and practices for clearing space and welcoming innovators in your midst? How do you identify innovators and then understand their potential for strengthening Christian community? How do you then provide supportive environments in which they can experiment and flourish?
Cultivate the right mindset
What is the mindset leaders need in order to identify and support innovators?
The Rev. Janice Riggle Huie, the bishop of the Texas Annual Conference, knew that the city of Houston was changing, yet many of its United Methodist congregations, like Westbury UMC, weren’t connecting with the city’s new residents.
Bishop Janice Riggle Huie. Texas Annual Conference
She set out to address the issue by appointing “creative, more entrepreneurial, deeply spiritual, wanting-to-reach-the-community” pastors such as the Rev. Tommy Williams, then the Rev. Taylor Fuerst and the Rev. Hannah Terry. These pastors had the mindset of asking questions, not supplying immediate answers.
Huie said she is “always on the lookout” for ways to “build stronger, deeper connections” with diverse communities. She saw the value in the mindset of these pastors who were starting with good and faithful questions -- What is the purpose of this church? Why did God put Westbury here? Who is my neighbor? What gifts does this group of neighbors bring?
When Terry moved into a nearby apartment community that was home to many refugees and other immigrants, she was able to establish a “ministry of presence” there, but it took time and patience.
Huie acknowledged that cultivating the mindset to support innovators like Terry takes time and patience as well -- a willingness to give the seeds a chance to grow and put down their roots. “Just leave it alone and see what God will do here,” Huie said. “It is a time when it is ‘both-and.’ It’s both bringing along the church that was, and at the same time, you’re doing a new thing, this new connection with the community.”
Delve deeper: Supporting innovators in this situation means taking on the mindset of asking questions and looking for others who are also willing to ask questions. The next step is walking alongside innovators with patience and openness as they seek and then do their work. Explore our discussion guide for questions your ministry team can consider together.
Stay future-focused
The Rt. Rev. C. Andrew Doyle. Photo courtesy of Episcopal Diocese of Texas
For most Christian leaders, the day-to-day tasks of ministry are not particularly innovative or farsighted. But the Rt. Rev. C. Andrew Doyle, the Episcopal bishop of Texas, calls leaders to be intentional about envisioning the church of the future. “We need to imagine the world in which we want to be doing ministry,” he said.
If you stay focused on the day-to-day, you will remain mired in what doesn’t work in your organization, he said. But if you can envision a church that is adaptive, light and structurally flexible, you can grab hold of that vision and work toward it.
This requires leaders to take time not only to dream about a future church but to “imagine the tasks and the work and the ministry,” he said, in order to cultivate young leaders for that future church.
“What we know is that creativity, innovation, adaptability are all characteristics that come out of actually doing work, trying new things, being placed in circumstances that demand people’s best efforts,” Doyle said.
The first step is “allowing space where people [can] fail generously and not get persecuted for it,” he said.
Delve deeper: Where and when could you clear the space for people -- including yourself -- to dream? Read “Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works(link is external)” by Roger Martin and Sally R. Osberg to learn about innovators who transform systems into better, more just organizations.
Scatter seeds broadly
"Life of Jesus Mafa" by Bénédite de la Roncière. Used with permission
In the parable of the sower, the planter scatters seeds with abandon, unconcerned with where they land -- on the sidewalk, among thorns and rocks -- and knowing that not every seed will grow.
“The farmer doesn’t fertilize the soil, dig around it, apply insecticide, carefully cover the seed over,” said Vancouver School of Theology homiletics professor Jason Byassee in a 2011 sermon. This farmer flings seeds as though he has “seed to spare” and “likes to see what can grow where it’s not supposed to grow.”
byassee.jpg
Byassee used the parable of the sower to point to the rich ministries that can spring up when Christians pursue innovative ideas. Many of the church’s most cherished traditions were first someone’s crazy idea, he said. We in the church need to be willing to let people try a variety of ideas, knowing that some will fail, some will fall on rocks and thorns, and others will blossom into wonderful, innovative ministries.
You may have less control than you’d like to think, so you need to scatter your seeds broadly. “What wild, unexpected seeds might you be holding in your hands, friends?” Byassee asked.
Delve deeper: What wild ideas have you heard lately that might be God-given? How might you stay with them long enough to see their merit? Read “The Mad Farmer Poems(link is external)” by Wendell Berry to explore this mindset that chafes against the status quo and beyond our expectations.
Stop ‘helping’ people
The staff and congregation at Broadway United Methodist Church in Indianapolis have changed the way they view their neighbors. They have learned to see them as people with gifts, not people in need of charity.
When the Rev. Mike Mather’s declining downtown congregation decided its call was to be good neighbors rather than bestowers of blessings, they began to close down their traditional ministries -- food pantry, clothing closet, summer youth program -- and instead begin a listening campaign. They hired a “roving listener” who spent time with people in the neighborhood, approaching them as children of God with gifts and talents.
The Rev. Mike Mather talks with the youth during a service at Broadway United Methodist Church. Photo by Kelly Wilkinson
With asset-based development in mind, the church asked people questions like, “What three things do you do well enough that you could teach others how to do them?” They discovered that people within the community had solutions to many of their own problems. The church found individuals who could repair cars, cook wonderful meals, garden, make quilts, write poetry and paint.
With the church’s encouragement and connections, many of these people started small businesses and began to live into their own God-given abilities.
Delve deeper: Mather believed that his church’s neighborhood was full of God-given gifts that needed to be cultivated and allowed to grow. What gifts surround you in your institution or community? Where could you see abundance instead of scarcity? How might seeing abundance encourage you to cultivate innovation? Read “Becoming Human(link is external)” by Jean Vanier for another perspective on how we can open ourselves to those whom society considers powerless or inferior, thereby enriching our ideas about ourselves and our community.
The art of neighboring
Like Broadway UMC, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, has innovated through an intentional focus on its neighbors. This church remained in historic downtown Richmond when other churches moved to the suburbs. As a result, when the city experienced a rebirth, the congregation was in a position to ask, “How can we contribute to the flourishing community?”
After several years of conversation, St. Paul’s decided that its focus would be on the art of neighboring, said the Rev. Wallace Adams-Riley, the church’s rector. Not knowing what they might find, they asked groups and individuals throughout the city the question, “What do you need that we could provide?”
The Rev. Melanie B. Mullen laughs as she and other Richmond downtowners engage in a session of "pub theology." Photo by Dean Hoffmeyer
They hired the Rev. Melanie Mullen to be the “downtown missioner,” focused on bringing St. Paul’s parishioners out of the church and into the community and building relationships with downtown and its residents. The ultimate goal, Mullen said, was to inspire Richmonders, even those unaffiliated with the church, to put community first.
The congregation has partnered with other civic groups, supported existing programs and made its presence known in the community in innovative ways, such as offering a Stations of the Cross exhibit at a nearby farmers market, distributing “Ashes to Go” on the streets on Ash Wednesday and holding Mullen’s Friday office hours at a local bakery. While they don’t know where such efforts might lead, they are committed to this innovative movement out into the city.
Delve deeper: Where do you need to explore the art of neighboring? With whom might your institution partner? What innovators might you discover? For further thinking about how to partner in the neighborhood as St. Paul’s has, read the memoir “Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx(link is external)” by Heidi Neumark.
Unlock imaginations
Marlon F. Hall leads a seminar. Photo by Jessamyn Rubio
After studying how doctors treat patients with amnesia, pastor and anthropologist Marlon F. Hall and his Awakenings Movement colleague Danielle Fanfair developed a set of practices to help downtrodden people remember “a more illustrious past.” (Hall is the filmmaker who produced the video that accompanies this story collection.)
“We seem to have no memory of who we are, who God is and what he has called us to do,” Hall said. “In order to imagine the future, we have to remember the past.” So Hall and Fanfair developed a weeks-long, multistep process for helping people recover their cultural memory and core identity and pursue goals in their personal and professional lives.
The process is designed to unlock imagination by removing obstacles to memory, Hall said. It involves five practices: journaling; excavating key moments from personal history and finding parallel biblical stories; engaging in “automatic” drawing while listening to music; exploring fears and dreams through art therapy; and crafting a detailed plan for reaching new goals.
Hall used this “amnesia therapy” to unlock imaginations in a low-income African-American Houston neighborhood, a process that resulted in a series of art installations around the area, reminding residents of their rich cultural and political histories and further stimulating imagination and positive responses.
Delve deeper: Hall knew that he needed to unlock the imaginations of the community in order to unleash their creative potential and their cultural history. Who and where are the people with imagination in your organization? Would Hall’s process work to cultivate and support your own innovators or constituents? Read “Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative(link is external)” by Ken Robinson for additional ideas about how to cultivate creativity and innovation.
Conclusion
Dave Odom. Photo by Jessamyn Rubio
Dave Odom, the executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity, has noted that supporting innovation is not about “heroic efforts by a leader.”
“Rather,” he said, “it is about a process of setting up a fence around the innovation to protect it from the forces that smooth the edges off creativity. The senior leader identifies the talent to work in the disruption and provides the tools and resources necessary to experiment and learn.”
What might be preventing you from clearing and protecting this space?
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THE IDEA IN ACTION
"Why focus on developing your staff as leaders?"
The mindset that should inform the way many organizations look at developing leaders is more akin to agriculture than to industry. Those with responsibility for guiding the organization cultivate the conditions for the work to flourish. This means cultivating the people.
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CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Dave Odom: Why focus on developing your staff as leaders?
Bigstock/PapaBear
The challenges facing Christian institutions today require innovative solutions in all aspects of the work. Senior leaders must cultivate the conditions for the work to flourish, which means nurturing talent across levels and roles, says the executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
Editor's note: In this reflection, the executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity introduces a series on leadership development and explains why cultivating people is a crucial task for today's Christian leaders.
Years ago, several denominational executives summoned me to discuss recruitment for a yearlong leadership development program for young clergy. As the meeting got underway, it became clear that they were particularly concerned by the fact that the program was enlisting youth ministers.
Why, they asked, did I think youth ministers were leaders?
These denominational leaders believed that leadership is limited to people with certain roles and titles, with work that has particular scale and scope. They were -- and are -- not alone.
Training opportunity: Send your staff to Foundations of Christian Leadership(link is external), a formational program that cultivates theological and practical imagination in emerging leaders
In the Industrial Age, American Protestant congregations and related institutions all too often adopted a mechanical view of their employees. Leaders could afford to hire more people and push ineffective or inefficient employees to the side. With labor plentiful, it was far easier to bring in someone new than to cultivate talent within the current employee ranks. Everyone was replaceable.
Today, the distinction between leaders and followers is increasingly complicated in most organizations. In many places, nearly all the employees are involved in producing services, managing budgets and developing relationships.
Given the complexity of the challenges most companies face, innovative solutions are needed in every aspect of the work. Improving services, controlling costs and managing multiple priorities is the work of every employee.
These challenges require employees, across levels and roles, to exercise leadership skills to understand the situation, make sense of how to respond and involve others to make things happen. They also require senior leaders to adopt a new mindset about nurturing talent to prepare employees at most levels of responsibility to work in this increasingly complex environment.
The mindset that informs the way many organizations look at developing leaders is more akin to agriculture than to industry. Those with responsibility for guiding the organization cultivate the conditions for the work to flourish. This means cultivating the people.
In practice, this means considering every assignment as both a project to be accomplished and an opportunity for leadership development. A critical aspect of developing leaders is assigning all employees work that is small enough to do and big enough to matter. In an interview with Faith & Leadership, longtime Reformed Church in America executive Ken Eriks describes executive team meetings in which senior leaders identify staff members who show potential and then look out for assignments that will stretch them, even if such assignments are outside the individuals’ job descriptions.
In the midst of a massive realignment and reorganization, the RCA invested in sending many of its staff to a single leadership conference. Employees also took the same leadership inventory so that they could help each other understand strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement.
Suzii Paynter, the chief executive of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, describes similar efforts with a feedback tool and seminars for the entire staff. When she came into office a year ago, she tripled the number of staff members who report to her and made a plan to encourage individual and team development. Paynter now has a “senior” staff of old hands and younger people. She is creating the conditions for them to help each other as they experiment, learn and experiment again.
Eriks and Paynter have been shaped themselves by the processes they describe. They are receiving feedback and figuring out their own work in the midst of developing others. Cultivating others and cultivating oneself are interrelated.
The phrase “leadership development” often conjures images of a classroom, a ropes course or a psychological test -- and indeed these are valuable exercises. Many initiatives (including Leadership Education at Duke Divinity(link is external), which publishes Faith & Leadership) offer such carefully designed learning experiences.
These experiences are part of Leadership Education’s work, which is to encourage leadership development efforts within the larger, theological vision of cultivating thriving communities that are signs of God’s reign.
In five years of offering such educational programs, we have discovered that congregations and institutions need to encourage particular practices to prepare leaders to navigate current challenges.
Those practices are:
- Making developmentally appropriate assignments
- Adopting a common language to describe the vision for the ministry and the current conditions in the world
- Structuring meetings to reflect the most important aspects of the work
- Overinvesting in young people
- Encouraging experimentation
Institutions need a simple, fair system for evaluation and goal setting. It is important to solicit feedback from members or constituents. But the most helpful feedback focuses on needs and opportunities, not the performance of an individual for the purpose of determining the person’s pay. No amount of effort devoted to developing an elaborate performance system will be worth as much as what groups like the Reformed Church in America and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship are doing.
Meeting the challenges congregations and institutions face today requires a strategy that is more basic, radical and ongoing than annual performance reviews. It requires a mindset that can be cultivated by considering what you are learning in the midst of the challenging assignments you face. How can you encourage others to take on challenging assignments and learn from their experiences?
Those denominational executives that I met years ago did not stop my training for youth ministers and all sorts of other staff people in the denomination. Today, that denomination has a host of leaders now assigned to developing programs and addressing challenges. Leadership development is ultimately about preparing future generations for the work.
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"Training is not always enough "
We tend to think that proper training is the answer to most problems. Get a degree. Earn a certificate. Hone a skill. Apprentice under the experts. Develop a specialty to keep yourself in demand in a quickly changing marketplace. But, an effective leader needs to know how to apply skills to changing circumstances.
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MANAGEMENT, LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT, STRATEGY
Victoria Atkinson White: Proper training is not always enough
Would proper training have been enough to have saved the life of Dr. McDreamy? Photo courtesy of ABC Studios
To adapt in a rapidly changing world, leaders must have skills as well as the wisdom to know when and how to use them, writes a managing director at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity.
Hearts across America broke. Social media exploded. How could it be? The dashing neurosurgeon Dr. Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd on ABC’s hit series “Grey’s Anatomy” was dead.
Broadsided by a truck, McDreamy had been rushed to a hospital that was ill-equipped to handle his traumatic injuries. An argument ensued as the medical team swarmed around him, ordering tests, medications and treatments.
One doctor advocated for a CT scan to check whether McDreamy’s brain was bleeding. Another doctor denied the CT, ordering instead immediate surgery to find and repair the source of abdominal bleeding. Despite the first doctor’s multiple pleas for a scan, McDreamy was rushed to surgery, and ultimately died -- of a brain bleed.
McDreamy narrated the unfolding tragedy, but only those watching the show could hear him; his injuries were so extensive he could not direct his own care. One of the last times viewers heard his voice, he said, “I’m going to die because these people aren’t properly trained.”
In his book “Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World(link is external),” retired U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal explains the difference between thinking like “a well-oiled machine” -- for which the goal is speed and efficiency -- and what he calls “an adaptable, complex organism, constantly twisting, turning, and learning."
In “Grey’s Anatomy,” both doctors were working toward the same goal: saving the patient. The doctor pushing for abdominal surgery was attacking the known problem: bleeding in the patient’s abdomen. He had a plan: see a problem, fix it, move on to the next problem.
The doctor pushing for the CT scan, on the other hand, was adapting to the patient’s vital signs as well as his responses to pain and stimuli. She was listening to her instincts that she needed more information. Her thinking was more flexible and strategic than her colleague’s.
We tend to think that proper training is the answer to most problems. Get a degree. Earn a certificate. Hone a skill. Apprentice under the experts. Develop a specialty to keep yourself in demand in a quickly changing marketplace.
These are fine steps to take, but McChrystal argues that they are not enough. An effective leader needs to know how to apply skills to changing circumstances.
Consider a story McChrystal tells in his book. In 1978, United Airlines Flight 173 crashed, killing 10 passengers and crew members and seriously injuring 23. The well-trained and experienced pilot knew the plane had a problem with its landing gear; he spent so much time focusing on the manual’s instructions for handling the noncatastrophic malfunction that the plane ran out of fuel and crashed.
“The structure, not the plan, is the strategy,” McChrystal writes.
The pilot tried to follow the manual’s plan for landing a plane with gear issues. In doing so, he ignored the critical structure of the flying experience: you need fuel more than you need landing gear to make it safely to the ground. The plan prescribed a series of steps to execute without question; a structure allows for leaders to adapt and improvise as conditions warrant.
An adaptable structure could have saved the lives on Flight 173. An adaptable structure could have saved McDreamy’s life.
- What could an adaptable structure save in your setting?
- What would happen if your institution had a “strategic structure” instead of a “strategic plan”? Is your organization a well-oiled machine, with best practices and detailed plans, or a sound structure that allows for adaptability?
But then Jesus the Messiah comes, and life happens. A little girl dies. A hemorrhaging woman reaches out and touches his cloak. A blind man begs to see. And 5,000 people need to be fed.
There is little that is speedy or efficient in Jesus’ ministry.
Instead, Jesus is, in McChrystal’s language, “an adaptable, complex organism, constantly twisting, turning, and learning.” He lives and ministers within a structure of love of God and love of neighbor. Everything else can be adapted to meet the quickly changing demands of those around him.
Institutions invest significant time and money into well-worded strategic plans that often sit on shelves, resurfacing only for board meetings or evaluations. But a vibrant institution is both a bearer of tradition and a laboratory of learning. Tradition can provide the strength and perspective a structure needs to adapt and thrive in a constantly changing environment.
The old proverb “Man plans, God laughs” is said with both truth and sarcasm. We like predictability and well-oiled machines. Our plans, however, will get us only so far, until we need to adapt to our quickly changing surroundings.
Jesus’ structure of loving God and loving neighbor allowed for the dead to rise, the sick to be healed, the blind to see and the hungry to feast. The structure Jesus models for us is one at which God laughs -- not with sarcasm -- but with delight and joy in God’s beautifully dynamic and adaptable creation.
CONTINUE YOUR OWN DEVELOPMENT
ONLINE COURSE: Sourcing Innovation
Join visual anthropologist and filmmaker Marlon Hall and a community of other Christian leaders for a five-week online course as we move step-by-step through the process of learning from a community. Explore how to capture true need through listening and observation. Then translate those insights into a story that's powerful enough to spur action.
June 6 - July 12, 2016
(No class the week of July 4)
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FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
TOMORROW'S SYNAGOGUE TODAY
This book stimulates the reader to unleash the power of synagogues to exponentially influence people's Jewish lives.
MINISTRY GREENHOUSE
The goal of this book is to help seminary students, their supervisors, and lay leaders who work with them create the best environment for leadership development through a beneficial internship.
LEARNING WHILE LEADING
This book uses case studies to describe the challenges congregational leaders face, providing readers with specific techniques to become more aware of how they function and how they can learn new ways to lead.
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