PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
Faith & Leadership
When Lewis and Clark reached the Continental Divide, they expected to find a river that would allow them to paddle easily to the Pacific Ocean. What they saw instead were the Rocky Mountains.
That's the type of challenge facing church leaders today -- so daunting, so new and so unexpected that the old solutions won't work, says Tod Bolsinger, the vice president and chief of leadership formation and an assistant professor of practical theology at Fuller Theological Seminary.
"It's not going to do you any good to paddle harder," he said. "You have to make an adaptation, and the key to adaptation begins with going back to your deepest core value."
In his book Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory, Bolsinger draws upon leadership theory as well as his experience as a pastor and seminary professor and administrator to offer a "trail map" for Christian leaders navigating a rapidly changing world.
Bolsinger, who also has extensive experience as a leadership consultant and executive coach, has served Presbyterian (U.S.A.) churches in Hollywood and San Clemente, California.
He spoke recently to our colleagues at Faith & Leadership about his book and the real hero of the Lewis and Clark journey (the only one who wasn't lost): Sacagawea.
When Lewis and Clark reached the Continental Divide, they expected to find a river that would allow them to paddle easily to the Pacific Ocean. What they saw instead were the Rocky Mountains.
That’s the type of challenge facing church leaders today -- so daunting, so new and so unexpected that the old solutions won’t work, says Tod Bolsinger, the vice president and chief of leadership formation and an assistant professor of practical theology at Fuller Theological Seminary.
“It’s not going to do you any good to paddle harder,” he said. “You have to make an adaptation, and the key to adaptation begins with going back to your deepest core value.”
In his book “Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory,” Bolsinger draws upon leadership theory as well as his experience as a pastor and seminary professor and administrator to offer a “trail map” for Christian leaders navigating a rapidly changing world.
Q: Why did you use the metaphor of the Lewis and Clark expedition for the title and framing of the book?
For a while, it felt like everybody was saying the leadership issue was a “vision problem.” If you’ve got the right vision statement, you get the right compelling narrative, you get the right thing worthy of giving ourselves for, then we’ll go.
I began to recognize that leadership was more about capacity building, and I explained it to somebody this way. I was talking about Lewis and Clark, and I said that it’s more like a bunch of folks who are experts at river rafting coming face to face with a set of mountains that are bigger than their imagination could fathom.
It’s not going to do you any good to paddle harder. You have to make an adaptation, and the key to adaptation begins with going back to your deepest core value.
For Lewis and Clark, who were men of the Enlightenment, at a moment when they realized that their mission was a failure -- there was no water route [to the Pacific Ocean] -- they didn’t stop.
Because they had this deeper value that a growth of human knowledge would lead to a growth of human happiness. So more important than discovering a water route was discovering a whole new world.
For many people who are Christian, there are certain markers of success and certain measurements that we’re used to and certain strategies that go along with them. A moment of crisis takes us back to our deepest value -- there’s a reason for this journey to continue. It’s worthy of giving our lives for.
It’s way bigger than the size of our offering plates or our sanctuaries or the number of people in our pews.
There’s something about the way in which God wants to be made real in the world that we can embrace. It will motivate us forward and will teach us how to go through the painful process of learning and dealing with loss.
Of course, the title itself is an irony, right? It’s called “Canoeing the Mountains,” and the whole point, of course, is that you have to drop the canoes.
Q: All the canoeists out there must be disappointed when they get into it.
I can’t tell you how many places I’ve shown up where people have had a canoe on a chancel as a way of saying, “Look, we got a canoe because you were coming.”
I walk over and say, “These things are beautiful. Somebody built this. But this is worthless when you run out of water. Letting this go is our challenge. How do we stop being expert canoeists?
“Instead, become people who are humble learners who will work with new kinds of experts in a new day to learn new ways and new collaborations in order to keep moving.”
Q: What was the biggest lesson of the book?
The most important discovery of the book for me is embodied in the story of Sacagawea.
What we have here is this person who is a Native American, teenage nursing mother, who had been kidnapped as a child. She had no voice, no privilege, no power whatsoever, and she becomes the key to their being able to continue on. She wasn’t in unfamiliar terrain; she was going home.
I believe this is a model for the fact that the church will move forward the more we’re able to embrace that people who did not have power and privilege in a Christendom world are the experts.
If our institutions, our schools, our churches don’t create the places for those who were not formed in Christendom to be able to have not only a voice but influence and collaboration with people who are currently in power, I think we’ll never move forward.
The biggest adaptive change is for the dominant church to embrace that God has already been at work in the Majority World. And the immigrant communities, people of color and women -- particularly in our culture -- are the folks who are trained for the new world. They’ve lived in this uncharted territory already.
The reason why people who look like me are at the top of the food chain in organizations is because we were privileged 30 years ago. But the future doesn’t look like me. The future is going to look more like Sacagawea. How do we embrace that as a gift of God?
Q: You integrate a lot of leadership theories, including Ronald Heifetz’s. What was your challenge as a thinker and as a writer to adapting this to a church context? Because there can be resistance to “business stuff,” as you acknowledge in the book.
It is the single biggest criticism that I get from religious folks who are resistant to the change.
Ronald Heifetz is Jewish. Ed Friedman was a rabbi. One of my favorite most recent books is [former British Chief Rabbi Lord] Jonathan Sacks’ commentary on the Torah after having read adaptive leadership material. It’s called “Lessons in Leadership.” It’s beautiful. It’s just beautiful weekly readings on leadership.
But I think there is something really resonant in the Hebrew Scriptures that are part of the Christian backdrop. They allowed us to mine our own tradition, but with a different lens.
Yes, it is business, but it was also much more about organization and mission and communal life that allowed a different voice to speak into church life that would open us up.
It also has been really gratifying to watch people who have been trained in, say, organizational change theories all of a sudden see that they have something to contribute to their congregations.
It’s a “holding environment” between the pastor, who is the custodian of the tradition, who is trying to figure out, “What does a faithful adaptation of our core DNA look like?” and the skill set of business people, who say, “We have to do that exact same thing all the time in our careers in adapting to a rapidly changing world, and here’s how we can work together on this.”
For me, that’s been really gratifying, and it’s been helpful.
Q: It kind of reminds me -- we did a series on Faith & Leadership called “What’s Christian about Christian leadership?” In fact, Ronald Heifetz was one of the people we asked. So what’s Christian about the leadership advice and guidance you give?
Here’s what’s predominantly Christian. The very first thing to become an adaptive leader is you have to be a learner. We actually have a biblical word for that: the word “disciple,” the notion of being a committed learner who has to be humble enough to keep growing and be self-reflective.
The second part that is central to Christian faith is that leadership and transformation comes from loss. Every time I preach on this or speak about this, the New Testament text I use is out of John 12, where Jesus says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” He then says, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:23-24 NRSV).
So partly, it allows us to say, “Our Christian tradition believes that transformation comes through loss. The fruitfulness of giving up power or privilege so that something much greater than any individual can be birthed is central to what we believe.”
So I talk about loss and learning as central to adaptive leadership, central to the Christian faith.
You see this actually in the New Testament, right? There is not a rejection of our Jewish roots. There instead is a clear adaptation that now we have a new people of God who are made up of Jews and Gentiles who are meant for the same calling, which is the redemption of the whole world and the restoration of the creation.
What is the DNA that needs to adapt, and what is the DNA that is discarded? What’s the part of this living organism that has to change? The third part of the Christian faith that has to be central to adaptive leadership is discernment.
I say all the time, to every session group or board group or group leadership team, “Your fundamental practice is the practice of discernment. What of this do we hold on to because if we lose this, we stop being ourselves? What is it that we let go of because if we don’t let go of it, we will give up our opportunity to fulfill our mission?”
You see that in Lewis and Clark’s travels, but you [also] see it in every adaptive people, every system that thrives into a new change, whether it’s a business or organization or a community, a city, a church.
If you lose your core, deepest core identity, then you stop having something to offer the world. Bluntly, I think that’s the struggle right now in the mainline church.
Q: What do you see as the role of the seminary in leadership development?
One of the ways that I think about this in the seminary is this: Seminaries’ roots are in the spiritual formation of people who will be leaders for congregations and movements. That predates the institution, predates the higher education, predates the university.
In one sense, it’s going back and asking these questions about our core purpose, and I would say the purpose for seminary is ultimately leadership formation, spiritual leadership formation.
How do you raise up people to be Christians -- and in my case, Christian spiritual leaders -- who will be people of influence for the mission of God to go forward into the world? What do you do in a diminishing market where fewer people need graduate degrees to do that?
There’s still, I believe, a dramatic need for scholarship and reflective practice, for educated clergy and educated Christian leaders, but in a much more diverse and globalized world where not every denomination requires an M.Div.
Some of the places in the world where the gospel is most vibrant, the leaders there would not meet the entrance requirements for Duke Divinity School or for Fuller Seminary. How does that recast our calling?
When there is less need for theological graduate degrees and more need for theological education, spiritual formation and leadership development, what does that require of institutions of theological higher education?
Q: What would a church look like that follows your advice? How would that look on the ground?
The struggle is that you have to create an urgency to keep changing without lurching to a quick fix that will take away the anxiety. A good leader is leading the people through.
It’s a creation of a holding environment, a deeper sense of trust, an awareness and a reality of facing the changing environmental conditions, the changing world we’re in.
And then a capacity to begin to experiment your way forward, because we only learn through experimentation.
Churches that I work with that have had some degree of success do two things. No. 1 is as soon as they embrace this understanding of leadership, they stop lurching to quick fixes, which means that in one sense, everything slows down.
They also give up their denial, which means that everything keeps moving.
I think what you develop is a high degree of trust, a high degree of urgency, a lessening of anxiety. That’s kind of a paradox. That can show up in lots of different ways, and it shows up fundamentally as a reframe around our deepest core value.
Read the interview with Tod Bolsinger »
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: ADAPTIVE CHANGE
It takes a strong sense of purpose to help evolving organizations assess what to preserve and what to leave behind as they adapt and change, said Marty Linsky, co-founder of Cambridge Leadership Associates, which specializes in teaching the practice of adaptive leadership.
Linsky is a consultant, facilitator, teacher and trainer in leadership and is on the faculty of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He graduated from Williams College and Harvard Law School and has been assistant minority leader of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and chief secretary and counsel to former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld.
Linsky spoke with Faith & Leadership in CLA’s New York office about his book “Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading,” co-written with Ronald Heifetz. The video clip is an excerpt of the following edited transcript.
Q: In “Leadership on the Line” you write that leadership is a risky -- even dangerous -- undertaking. Why?
People who exercise leadership push against the prevailing wind. They deliver messages that people don’t want to hear. They try to get people to face up to difficult issues that they’d prefer not to face up to, and so people who are trying to exercise leadership meet resistance. And that resistance makes people vulnerable, and that puts you at risk. You take chances of losing your position and getting marginalized and pushed aside.
Q: What is it about adaptive leadership that makes it worth an organizational leader living dangerously?
Well, it’s really the question of purpose. People who are willing to take the risks of exercising leadership do so on behalf of something they care deeply about. We use the word purpose to talk about that. For some people we work with, it’s a question of helping them clarify what their purpose is. What would it be worth taking those risks for? And for some people who are clear about their purpose, clear about what they want to accomplish, it’s a question of helping them think about how to do it to maximize the chances of success.
Q: What are key ways leaders can address the losses that occur as part of adaptive change?
Beginning by acknowledging the losses -- that’s step one. Many people trying to exercise leadership are so imbued with their purpose that they don’t appreciate that their good ideas feel to other people like a threat or a loss. Acknowledge that publicly; say, “I understand how difficult this is.”
Step two is to manage them through a period of loss. We’ve all experienced what it means to go through loss and what kind of support we need. Some people aren’t going to make it through the transition. Help them get along with their lives.
Q: Can you tell us more about how leaders can employ smart risks?
Well, we are trying to help people avoid becoming martyrs. This is not about noble failure. We spend a lot of time with people helping them diagnose the situations they’re stepping into, trying to think about what the factions are and who their potential allies are. What are the ways of getting to groups and individuals that don’t seem obvious in the first instance? It’s about being thoughtful and deliberate about how you exercise leadership, and not just barging ahead.
Q: How does having a clear sense of purpose tie in to leading adaptive change?
If you don’t have a clear sense of purpose, you don’t know what you’re doing. People who are good at exercising leadership are able to apply that sense of purpose to the most apparently mundane day-to-day decisions. What should I do when I come back from lunch? Which phone call should I answer? Should I do this piece of work, or should I hand it off to someone else?
If you’re clear about what your purpose is, then you can use that frame to influence the way you deal with a myriad of little decisions, all driving toward that central idea or some central ideas.
Q: How important is preservation in the process of adaptive change?
When plants and animals evolve, they give up part of their DNA as a species, but they preserve most of their DNA. Our DNA as human beings is 96, 97 percent the same as chimpanzees’ DNA; you’re not talking about much loss in percentage terms. That means a huge amount of preservation. Adaptive work is as much about deciding what is essential and what needs to be brought forward as it is about what needs to be left behind.
Q: How do you recommend that a leader make and act on assessments of potential alliances with and resistance to adaptive change?
You have to understand what people care about; empathy is an absolutely critical skill for exercising leadership. If I understand you really well, then I understand ways that I may be able to get you to do something you otherwise wouldn’t want to do. It may not be the same reason I’m doing what it is. You may have different values, and I need to appeal to your values, not to my values, to convince you to move ahead.
Q: How do smart leaders give the adaptive work back to the people?
It takes a lot of discipline; most people who have gotten to the top of the pyramid in an organization have done so because they’ve been willing to take the work off of other people’s shoulders: Mr. Fix-It, Ms. Fix-It. One of the challenges of exercising leadership is making people who have to live with the results of decisions work those issues through.
When two people come in your office and say, “Gee, we can’t figure this out; whatever you decide is OK with us,” that’s a good signal that you ought to send them into the conference room and lock the door and shove pizzas under the door and tell them to figure it out themselves.
Q: Why is it important to a leader to distinguish between self and role?
One of the ways people get taken out or pushed aside when they’re trying to exercise leadership is that the system -- other people -- perceive[s] their vulnerabilities. If you don’t like conflict, people will create conflict. It’s important not to take anything that’s coming at you personally.
Q: How do adaptive leaders make the determination between what to preserve and what to leave behind?
Those are really hard choices. Look at the issue about the location of the mosque near Ground Zero, the site of the 9/11 tragedy. We are being asked to choose between competing values. One is preserving the sacredness of that area, and the second is religious tolerance. Those are both very high values, and choosing between them is really painful work. That’s excruciating. That’s hard. That’s what makes leadership difficult.
Q: What happens if a people or organization or institution or nation gets stuck and doesn’t make that determination?
Well, I think the status quo gets preserved. The reason that individuals or families or companies or countries stay locked in place is because they don’t want to face those difficult choices, resolve those value conflicts. That’s the prescription for the status quo.
Q: Could you speak about some defining characteristics of an organizational “reset”?
All over the world we see organizations making choices about how to treat the current turmoil. Some organizations are hunkering down -- put your head down, fire people and hope that somehow you put your head up and everything will be OK.
Ones that we admire are organizations that are seeing the current turmoil as an opportunity to invent the future, to run experiments, to do some things that they couldn’t do if the stress level wasn’t as high as it was.
Q: How has your faith influenced your leadership?
It’s something I’ve thought about a lot. I was born Jewish. I did the ritual things when I was a youngster, and I’ve tried to think about what about my religiosity affects the work I do.
There are two things that seem to me to have come from the tradition I was brought up in. One is incurable optimism. I believe people can change the world. They can change themselves. They can change their families. They can change their communities. I’m deeply optimistic about the possibilities of change, and that comes from the spiritual training that I had.
The second is a sense of interconnectedness. I think if 9/11 taught us anything, it taught us that we are connected to everybody else everywhere. If you’re in pain, I’m in pain; and those seem to be the two characteristics that have influenced the way I work.
The third piece of that is there’s a tremendous tradition in Judaism of curiosity and inquiry. I find one of the things that keeps me young in my dotage is curiosity. I’m interested in people. I’m interested in how people think. I try very hard not to filter what I hear through my own judgment but to be curious about it.
Read more from Marty Linsky »
Even grown-ups like to play dress-up.
We revel in the crisp fall evening filled with masks and capes. The good saints barely have time to comfort our memories; before the stroke of midnight, Christmas begins to fill the stores, and carols to fill the air. Then the King cake is hardly in the oven before Mardi Gras arrives, and the masks and costumes come out again.
Who doesn’t enjoy donning a mask, with its warm childhood associations of innocence and cheer? But for a leader, it’s important sometimes to drop the mask, even though it can be frightening. Challenging. A step into the unknown.
Taking the step to drop the mask and respond to a problem honestly -- not with a “that’s fine” or a “that’s nice,” but enacting what clearly needs to be done -- is what Ronald Heifetz and Martin Linsky might call a “technical” change. Technical change entails putting in place a solution to a problem for which you know the answer. The change might be difficult, but it’s known.
“Adaptive” change comes in keeping the mask off -- making a change that’s not just routine but that also involves changing hearts and minds. Adaptive change can alter a whole system.
Perhaps you recall the mask and cape worn by Darth Vader. Not the original Darth, but the winsome boy in the Volkswagen ad during Super Bowl 2011.
I thought of this when I read that the actor -- a 7-year-old boy named Max Page -- has undergone heart surgery to correct a congenital defect. While his surgeons prepared to do the technical work of open-heart surgery, Max did the adaptive, internal work that would change his life and the lives of those he encountered.
As the surgery approached, Max focused on the possible outcomes. With the help of his mom and brother, he decided to make a “can do” list, and to “fun up” his house. He thought about life after surgery and all the things he would be able to do, as well as the things he could do beforehand to make ready, so he would be equipped to cope with the recovery.
Then he re-imagined his home -- turned it into a place of intrigue and creativity -- with themed rooms, special rules and secret codes. He utilized the resources that had been preparing him for just such a time -- his most articulate, adaptive self.
Perhaps that is the greatest attraction of adaptive change: the “can do” spirit of those who venture into the unknown and emerge on the other side. It’s neither “fine” nor “nice.” It is real.
I have some experience with this in my own life. It was a chilly day as the nurse assisted my dad into my car. I drove him from the hospital where he was a patient to another across town for specialized testing. He was in excruciating pain. The doctors couldn’t figure out why, but Daddy and I knew that the answer could not possibly be good.
At 20, I wasn’t ready to be without a dad. But we both knew that I soon would be.
“You’ll see, Daddy; I’ll grow up well,” I promised him. “One day I’ll do something that would make you so proud. I love God … I’ll put God first. You’ll see.”
For two months after that car ride, I worked nights and stayed with my dad during the day. I grew up fast. He died the Friday after Thanksgiving. The conversations we had during that time were raw, authentic -- and life has never been the same. I had no idea at first how I would keep my promise.
I began by leaning into what frightened me most, by embracing a change, stepping out beyond the edge of my known world. Adaptive change demands new learning. Falling down, getting up; falling down, getting up. Adaptive change nearly always requires some sort of reconsideration of what we thought was so but have learned is not. Things concerning our family. Our work. And most often, our inner selves.
Taking off the mask requires immense courage. It is not work for cowards, or those who refuse to lean into pain. Whether at work or at home, on the playground or on campus, transformation begins within us. Speak the truth. Have the courage to confront. Stay focused on the purpose, and do not be drawn off. Risk hostility and sabotage. Be willing to choose between what appear to be conflicting values. Adaptive change does not happen without cost.
“Mighty Max” -- whose surgery was successful -- still uses his mask and cape to help kids like himself face their fears. He teaches us what he has learned: even intense pain can lead to great, new gain. He uses his talents to raise money for children with heart defects. His mom reports that he says to them, “Kids, if you use your FORCE and dream big, you can achieve anything. We may be small -- but we’re mighty!”
I want
Read more from Virginia O. Bassford »
Editor’s note: This is the third in a four-part series. Read parts one and two.
One of my definitions of good leadership is the ability to take advantage of crises.
What do I mean by that? A good leader is always tending a vision of the future -- using whatever crops up as an opportunity to move beyond where we are now.
The challenge, however, is that as a species we greatly prefer stability to change. That means we are often far more reactive than proactive, changing only when we have to. And that makes advancing a positive vision of the future difficult, as we would often prefer to make do with a less-than-adequate but known present than a promising but unknown (and therefore risky) future.
Which is where crises come in.
A crisis demands immediate action and provides the thoughtful and prepared leader with an excuse to make changes that he or she knew were necessary but seemed too difficult to contemplate previously.
This is what the church needs today: leaders who see the need to change what we are doing and so tend and promote a vision of the future where all of God’s people have responsibility for understanding and sharing the faith. Simultaneously the leaders understand that sometimes it’s not until a crisis that we can muster the will to make the necessary changes.
Fortunately for today’s church leaders, crises abound!
Make no mistake, however, that such leadership takes courage and always exacts a cost. Change is hard. Change is threatening. Change makes people nervous that they aren’t just losing a way of doing church but actually their whole identity as the church.
A scene from Moneyball offers a vivid picture of this. (Editor's note: The video that originally showed this scene is no longer available on YouTube.)
Take note that John Henry, the owner of the Red Sox, names that for baseball traditionalists, Billy Beane’s take on the game is “threatening not just a way of doing business but, in their mind, it’s threatening the game.” In this regard, it’s helpful to remember the sage insight attributed to Ron Heifetz: people don’t fear change; they fear loss.
Which helps to explain the resistance to change that adaptive leaders often encounter. It’s not that those who oppose us are unduly stubborn -- though a few may be. Rather, it’s that they are afraid of losing something of great value. And so they are willing to fight to protect something that has provided a great deal of their identity and security for a very long time. Which is why, as Henry says, “The first guy through the wall always gets bloody. Always.”
We need to cultivate not just leaders working faithfully and creatively on their own, but a supportive network of colleagues who are willing to experiment with each other, learn from each other and remind each why we’re doing this in the first place.
We also need to spread the vision, inviting our people into the future we imagine.
In my experience, there are two important moves to make in this invitation. First, honor the tradition. Acknowledge that whatever you’re planning to change -- hymns, style of worship, policies -- has been important to your conversation partner and to you, that it has been a faithful mediator of the faith, that it has, in short, worked. That shouldn’t be hard to do, as most of us are where we are today because of the faithful practices of previous generations.
Having honored the tradition, the second thing to do is to ask what I call the question: “I know this thing has worked for you just as it has worked for me. But does it work for your children and grandchildren? Does it work for your neighbors and friends? Are there people not with us in church who you would love to see here?”
Because here’s the thing: there is a reservoir of grief in our elders as they see that the faith they cherished is not being passed to their children and grandchildren. And we all have friends, neighbors and family members we wish were at church but aren’t. As much as we love “the way we’ve always done it,” we love our children and grandchildren more.
Asking this question moves the conversation from what-- the particular changes we are working at and the larger vision we are advocating -- to why -- our hope and call to draw people we love into our life of faith that they may be transformed by the gospel.
This isn’t easy work to be sure, but it sure is good work. Work worth giving your life to. Thanks for your part in it.
This post originally appeared on David Lose’s blog.
Read more from David Lose »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
The Turnaround Church: Inspiration and Tools for Life-Sustaining change by Mary Louise Gifford
The Turnaround Church is the story of Wollaston Congregational Church United Church of Christ, a 130-year-old congregation that once was thriving in ministry, membership, mission, music, and money. For half a century, however, the church had slowly declined and was considering closing its doors.
The two dozen remaining members knew they had to change, but did not know how. They had very little money left, but they were willing to risk it all. With few resources, members hired Mary Louise Gifford, a new seminary graduate, to be their full-time minister. Wollaston is now a vibrant, Spirit-filled faith community-a turnaround church. Changes in worship, stewardship, and priorities, combined with the congregation's resilience and Gifford's optimistic leadership, have transformed this church.
Gifford tells us how. Addressing a wide audience, Gifford shows church leaders they have options and reason for hope. People in dying churches will find assurance that they are still a part of the body of Christ. Clergy serving these struggling churches will discover tools and resources to help them guide change. Judicatory leaders will appreciate an inspiring story they can tell about a church that turned around in spite of the odds. The Turnaround Church, while not a prescription for all churches, is a call to make long-lasting, life-sustaining changes.
Learn more and order the book »
That's the type of challenge facing church leaders today -- so daunting, so new and so unexpected that the old solutions won't work, says Tod Bolsinger, the vice president and chief of leadership formation and an assistant professor of practical theology at Fuller Theological Seminary.
"It's not going to do you any good to paddle harder," he said. "You have to make an adaptation, and the key to adaptation begins with going back to your deepest core value."
In his book Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory, Bolsinger draws upon leadership theory as well as his experience as a pastor and seminary professor and administrator to offer a "trail map" for Christian leaders navigating a rapidly changing world.
Bolsinger, who also has extensive experience as a leadership consultant and executive coach, has served Presbyterian (U.S.A.) churches in Hollywood and San Clemente, California.
He spoke recently to our colleagues at Faith & Leadership about his book and the real hero of the Lewis and Clark journey (the only one who wasn't lost): Sacagawea.
Tod Bolsinger: What does it mean to stop "canoeing the mountains"?
Image courtesy of InterVarsity Press
Using the metaphor of Lewis and Clark’s exploration of the American West, a Fuller Seminary vice president explores the leadership challenges for the church in a post-Christendom world.When Lewis and Clark reached the Continental Divide, they expected to find a river that would allow them to paddle easily to the Pacific Ocean. What they saw instead were the Rocky Mountains.
That’s the type of challenge facing church leaders today -- so daunting, so new and so unexpected that the old solutions won’t work, says Tod Bolsinger, the vice president and chief of leadership formation and an assistant professor of practical theology at Fuller Theological Seminary.
“It’s not going to do you any good to paddle harder,” he said. “You have to make an adaptation, and the key to adaptation begins with going back to your deepest core value.”
In his book “Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory,” Bolsinger draws upon leadership theory as well as his experience as a pastor and seminary professor and administrator to offer a “trail map” for Christian leaders navigating a rapidly changing world.
Bolsinger, who also has extensive experience as a leadership consultant and executive coach, has served Presbyterian (U.S.A.) churches in Hollywood and San Clemente, California.
He spoke to Faith & Leadership about his book and the real hero of the Lewis and Clark journey (the only one who wasn’t lost): Sacagawea. The following is an edited transcript.Q: Why did you use the metaphor of the Lewis and Clark expedition for the title and framing of the book?
For a while, it felt like everybody was saying the leadership issue was a “vision problem.” If you’ve got the right vision statement, you get the right compelling narrative, you get the right thing worthy of giving ourselves for, then we’ll go.
I began to recognize that leadership was more about capacity building, and I explained it to somebody this way. I was talking about Lewis and Clark, and I said that it’s more like a bunch of folks who are experts at river rafting coming face to face with a set of mountains that are bigger than their imagination could fathom.
It’s not going to do you any good to paddle harder. You have to make an adaptation, and the key to adaptation begins with going back to your deepest core value.
For Lewis and Clark, who were men of the Enlightenment, at a moment when they realized that their mission was a failure -- there was no water route [to the Pacific Ocean] -- they didn’t stop.
Because they had this deeper value that a growth of human knowledge would lead to a growth of human happiness. So more important than discovering a water route was discovering a whole new world.
For many people who are Christian, there are certain markers of success and certain measurements that we’re used to and certain strategies that go along with them. A moment of crisis takes us back to our deepest value -- there’s a reason for this journey to continue. It’s worthy of giving our lives for.
It’s way bigger than the size of our offering plates or our sanctuaries or the number of people in our pews.
There’s something about the way in which God wants to be made real in the world that we can embrace. It will motivate us forward and will teach us how to go through the painful process of learning and dealing with loss.
Of course, the title itself is an irony, right? It’s called “Canoeing the Mountains,” and the whole point, of course, is that you have to drop the canoes.
Q: All the canoeists out there must be disappointed when they get into it.
I can’t tell you how many places I’ve shown up where people have had a canoe on a chancel as a way of saying, “Look, we got a canoe because you were coming.”
I walk over and say, “These things are beautiful. Somebody built this. But this is worthless when you run out of water. Letting this go is our challenge. How do we stop being expert canoeists?
“Instead, become people who are humble learners who will work with new kinds of experts in a new day to learn new ways and new collaborations in order to keep moving.”
Q: What was the biggest lesson of the book?
The most important discovery of the book for me is embodied in the story of Sacagawea.
What we have here is this person who is a Native American, teenage nursing mother, who had been kidnapped as a child. She had no voice, no privilege, no power whatsoever, and she becomes the key to their being able to continue on. She wasn’t in unfamiliar terrain; she was going home.
I believe this is a model for the fact that the church will move forward the more we’re able to embrace that people who did not have power and privilege in a Christendom world are the experts.
If our institutions, our schools, our churches don’t create the places for those who were not formed in Christendom to be able to have not only a voice but influence and collaboration with people who are currently in power, I think we’ll never move forward.
The biggest adaptive change is for the dominant church to embrace that God has already been at work in the Majority World. And the immigrant communities, people of color and women -- particularly in our culture -- are the folks who are trained for the new world. They’ve lived in this uncharted territory already.
The reason why people who look like me are at the top of the food chain in organizations is because we were privileged 30 years ago. But the future doesn’t look like me. The future is going to look more like Sacagawea. How do we embrace that as a gift of God?
Q: You integrate a lot of leadership theories, including Ronald Heifetz’s. What was your challenge as a thinker and as a writer to adapting this to a church context? Because there can be resistance to “business stuff,” as you acknowledge in the book.
It is the single biggest criticism that I get from religious folks who are resistant to the change.
Ronald Heifetz is Jewish. Ed Friedman was a rabbi. One of my favorite most recent books is [former British Chief Rabbi Lord] Jonathan Sacks’ commentary on the Torah after having read adaptive leadership material. It’s called “Lessons in Leadership.” It’s beautiful. It’s just beautiful weekly readings on leadership.
But I think there is something really resonant in the Hebrew Scriptures that are part of the Christian backdrop. They allowed us to mine our own tradition, but with a different lens.
Yes, it is business, but it was also much more about organization and mission and communal life that allowed a different voice to speak into church life that would open us up.
It also has been really gratifying to watch people who have been trained in, say, organizational change theories all of a sudden see that they have something to contribute to their congregations.
It’s a “holding environment” between the pastor, who is the custodian of the tradition, who is trying to figure out, “What does a faithful adaptation of our core DNA look like?” and the skill set of business people, who say, “We have to do that exact same thing all the time in our careers in adapting to a rapidly changing world, and here’s how we can work together on this.”
For me, that’s been really gratifying, and it’s been helpful.
Q: It kind of reminds me -- we did a series on Faith & Leadership called “What’s Christian about Christian leadership?” In fact, Ronald Heifetz was one of the people we asked. So what’s Christian about the leadership advice and guidance you give?
Here’s what’s predominantly Christian. The very first thing to become an adaptive leader is you have to be a learner. We actually have a biblical word for that: the word “disciple,” the notion of being a committed learner who has to be humble enough to keep growing and be self-reflective.
The second part that is central to Christian faith is that leadership and transformation comes from loss. Every time I preach on this or speak about this, the New Testament text I use is out of John 12, where Jesus says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” He then says, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:23-24 NRSV).
So partly, it allows us to say, “Our Christian tradition believes that transformation comes through loss. The fruitfulness of giving up power or privilege so that something much greater than any individual can be birthed is central to what we believe.”
So I talk about loss and learning as central to adaptive leadership, central to the Christian faith.
You see this actually in the New Testament, right? There is not a rejection of our Jewish roots. There instead is a clear adaptation that now we have a new people of God who are made up of Jews and Gentiles who are meant for the same calling, which is the redemption of the whole world and the restoration of the creation.
What is the DNA that needs to adapt, and what is the DNA that is discarded? What’s the part of this living organism that has to change? The third part of the Christian faith that has to be central to adaptive leadership is discernment.
I say all the time, to every session group or board group or group leadership team, “Your fundamental practice is the practice of discernment. What of this do we hold on to because if we lose this, we stop being ourselves? What is it that we let go of because if we don’t let go of it, we will give up our opportunity to fulfill our mission?”
You see that in Lewis and Clark’s travels, but you [also] see it in every adaptive people, every system that thrives into a new change, whether it’s a business or organization or a community, a city, a church.
If you lose your core, deepest core identity, then you stop having something to offer the world. Bluntly, I think that’s the struggle right now in the mainline church.
Q: What do you see as the role of the seminary in leadership development?
One of the ways that I think about this in the seminary is this: Seminaries’ roots are in the spiritual formation of people who will be leaders for congregations and movements. That predates the institution, predates the higher education, predates the university.
In one sense, it’s going back and asking these questions about our core purpose, and I would say the purpose for seminary is ultimately leadership formation, spiritual leadership formation.
How do you raise up people to be Christians -- and in my case, Christian spiritual leaders -- who will be people of influence for the mission of God to go forward into the world? What do you do in a diminishing market where fewer people need graduate degrees to do that?
There’s still, I believe, a dramatic need for scholarship and reflective practice, for educated clergy and educated Christian leaders, but in a much more diverse and globalized world where not every denomination requires an M.Div.
Some of the places in the world where the gospel is most vibrant, the leaders there would not meet the entrance requirements for Duke Divinity School or for Fuller Seminary. How does that recast our calling?
When there is less need for theological graduate degrees and more need for theological education, spiritual formation and leadership development, what does that require of institutions of theological higher education?
Q: What would a church look like that follows your advice? How would that look on the ground?
The struggle is that you have to create an urgency to keep changing without lurching to a quick fix that will take away the anxiety. A good leader is leading the people through.
It’s a creation of a holding environment, a deeper sense of trust, an awareness and a reality of facing the changing environmental conditions, the changing world we’re in.
And then a capacity to begin to experiment your way forward, because we only learn through experimentation.
Churches that I work with that have had some degree of success do two things. No. 1 is as soon as they embrace this understanding of leadership, they stop lurching to quick fixes, which means that in one sense, everything slows down.
They also give up their denial, which means that everything keeps moving.
I think what you develop is a high degree of trust, a high degree of urgency, a lessening of anxiety. That’s kind of a paradox. That can show up in lots of different ways, and it shows up fundamentally as a reframe around our deepest core value.
Read the interview with Tod Bolsinger »
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: ADAPTIVE CHANGE
Faith & Leadership
Leadership is dangerous because people resist change, says the co-founder of Cambridge Leadership Associates. But leaders who care about their purpose should face that resistance.
Marty Linsky: Pushing against the wind
Leadership is dangerous because people resist change, says the co-founder of Cambridge Leadership Associates. But leaders who care about their purpose should face that resistance.It takes a strong sense of purpose to help evolving organizations assess what to preserve and what to leave behind as they adapt and change, said Marty Linsky, co-founder of Cambridge Leadership Associates, which specializes in teaching the practice of adaptive leadership.
Linsky is a consultant, facilitator, teacher and trainer in leadership and is on the faculty of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He graduated from Williams College and Harvard Law School and has been assistant minority leader of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and chief secretary and counsel to former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld.
Linsky spoke with Faith & Leadership in CLA’s New York office about his book “Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading,” co-written with Ronald Heifetz. The video clip is an excerpt of the following edited transcript.
Q: In “Leadership on the Line” you write that leadership is a risky -- even dangerous -- undertaking. Why?
People who exercise leadership push against the prevailing wind. They deliver messages that people don’t want to hear. They try to get people to face up to difficult issues that they’d prefer not to face up to, and so people who are trying to exercise leadership meet resistance. And that resistance makes people vulnerable, and that puts you at risk. You take chances of losing your position and getting marginalized and pushed aside.
Q: What is it about adaptive leadership that makes it worth an organizational leader living dangerously?
Well, it’s really the question of purpose. People who are willing to take the risks of exercising leadership do so on behalf of something they care deeply about. We use the word purpose to talk about that. For some people we work with, it’s a question of helping them clarify what their purpose is. What would it be worth taking those risks for? And for some people who are clear about their purpose, clear about what they want to accomplish, it’s a question of helping them think about how to do it to maximize the chances of success.
Q: What are key ways leaders can address the losses that occur as part of adaptive change?
Beginning by acknowledging the losses -- that’s step one. Many people trying to exercise leadership are so imbued with their purpose that they don’t appreciate that their good ideas feel to other people like a threat or a loss. Acknowledge that publicly; say, “I understand how difficult this is.”
Step two is to manage them through a period of loss. We’ve all experienced what it means to go through loss and what kind of support we need. Some people aren’t going to make it through the transition. Help them get along with their lives.
Q: Can you tell us more about how leaders can employ smart risks?
Well, we are trying to help people avoid becoming martyrs. This is not about noble failure. We spend a lot of time with people helping them diagnose the situations they’re stepping into, trying to think about what the factions are and who their potential allies are. What are the ways of getting to groups and individuals that don’t seem obvious in the first instance? It’s about being thoughtful and deliberate about how you exercise leadership, and not just barging ahead.
Q: How does having a clear sense of purpose tie in to leading adaptive change?
If you don’t have a clear sense of purpose, you don’t know what you’re doing. People who are good at exercising leadership are able to apply that sense of purpose to the most apparently mundane day-to-day decisions. What should I do when I come back from lunch? Which phone call should I answer? Should I do this piece of work, or should I hand it off to someone else?
If you’re clear about what your purpose is, then you can use that frame to influence the way you deal with a myriad of little decisions, all driving toward that central idea or some central ideas.
Q: How important is preservation in the process of adaptive change?
When plants and animals evolve, they give up part of their DNA as a species, but they preserve most of their DNA. Our DNA as human beings is 96, 97 percent the same as chimpanzees’ DNA; you’re not talking about much loss in percentage terms. That means a huge amount of preservation. Adaptive work is as much about deciding what is essential and what needs to be brought forward as it is about what needs to be left behind.
Q: How do you recommend that a leader make and act on assessments of potential alliances with and resistance to adaptive change?
You have to understand what people care about; empathy is an absolutely critical skill for exercising leadership. If I understand you really well, then I understand ways that I may be able to get you to do something you otherwise wouldn’t want to do. It may not be the same reason I’m doing what it is. You may have different values, and I need to appeal to your values, not to my values, to convince you to move ahead.
Q: How do smart leaders give the adaptive work back to the people?
It takes a lot of discipline; most people who have gotten to the top of the pyramid in an organization have done so because they’ve been willing to take the work off of other people’s shoulders: Mr. Fix-It, Ms. Fix-It. One of the challenges of exercising leadership is making people who have to live with the results of decisions work those issues through.
When two people come in your office and say, “Gee, we can’t figure this out; whatever you decide is OK with us,” that’s a good signal that you ought to send them into the conference room and lock the door and shove pizzas under the door and tell them to figure it out themselves.
Q: Why is it important to a leader to distinguish between self and role?
One of the ways people get taken out or pushed aside when they’re trying to exercise leadership is that the system -- other people -- perceive[s] their vulnerabilities. If you don’t like conflict, people will create conflict. It’s important not to take anything that’s coming at you personally.
Q: How do adaptive leaders make the determination between what to preserve and what to leave behind?
Those are really hard choices. Look at the issue about the location of the mosque near Ground Zero, the site of the 9/11 tragedy. We are being asked to choose between competing values. One is preserving the sacredness of that area, and the second is religious tolerance. Those are both very high values, and choosing between them is really painful work. That’s excruciating. That’s hard. That’s what makes leadership difficult.
Q: What happens if a people or organization or institution or nation gets stuck and doesn’t make that determination?
Well, I think the status quo gets preserved. The reason that individuals or families or companies or countries stay locked in place is because they don’t want to face those difficult choices, resolve those value conflicts. That’s the prescription for the status quo.
Q: Could you speak about some defining characteristics of an organizational “reset”?
All over the world we see organizations making choices about how to treat the current turmoil. Some organizations are hunkering down -- put your head down, fire people and hope that somehow you put your head up and everything will be OK.
Ones that we admire are organizations that are seeing the current turmoil as an opportunity to invent the future, to run experiments, to do some things that they couldn’t do if the stress level wasn’t as high as it was.
Q: How has your faith influenced your leadership?
It’s something I’ve thought about a lot. I was born Jewish. I did the ritual things when I was a youngster, and I’ve tried to think about what about my religiosity affects the work I do.
There are two things that seem to me to have come from the tradition I was brought up in. One is incurable optimism. I believe people can change the world. They can change themselves. They can change their families. They can change their communities. I’m deeply optimistic about the possibilities of change, and that comes from the spiritual training that I had.
The second is a sense of interconnectedness. I think if 9/11 taught us anything, it taught us that we are connected to everybody else everywhere. If you’re in pain, I’m in pain; and those seem to be the two characteristics that have influenced the way I work.
The third piece of that is there’s a tremendous tradition in Judaism of curiosity and inquiry. I find one of the things that keeps me young in my dotage is curiosity. I’m interested in people. I’m interested in how people think. I try very hard not to filter what I hear through my own judgment but to be curious about it.
Read more from Marty Linsky »
Faith & Leadership
Adaptive change demands new learning. A United Methodist Church district superintendent finds an example of adaptive change and transformation in the story of a courageous 7-year-old boy.
Virginia O. (Ginger) Bassford: Adaptive change and transformation
Adaptive change demands new learning. A UMC district superintendent finds an example of adaptive change and transformation in the story of a courageous 7-year-old boy.Even grown-ups like to play dress-up.
We revel in the crisp fall evening filled with masks and capes. The good saints barely have time to comfort our memories; before the stroke of midnight, Christmas begins to fill the stores, and carols to fill the air. Then the King cake is hardly in the oven before Mardi Gras arrives, and the masks and costumes come out again.
Who doesn’t enjoy donning a mask, with its warm childhood associations of innocence and cheer? But for a leader, it’s important sometimes to drop the mask, even though it can be frightening. Challenging. A step into the unknown.
Taking the step to drop the mask and respond to a problem honestly -- not with a “that’s fine” or a “that’s nice,” but enacting what clearly needs to be done -- is what Ronald Heifetz and Martin Linsky might call a “technical” change. Technical change entails putting in place a solution to a problem for which you know the answer. The change might be difficult, but it’s known.
“Adaptive” change comes in keeping the mask off -- making a change that’s not just routine but that also involves changing hearts and minds. Adaptive change can alter a whole system.
Perhaps you recall the mask and cape worn by Darth Vader. Not the original Darth, but the winsome boy in the Volkswagen ad during Super Bowl 2011.
I thought of this when I read that the actor -- a 7-year-old boy named Max Page -- has undergone heart surgery to correct a congenital defect. While his surgeons prepared to do the technical work of open-heart surgery, Max did the adaptive, internal work that would change his life and the lives of those he encountered.
As the surgery approached, Max focused on the possible outcomes. With the help of his mom and brother, he decided to make a “can do” list, and to “fun up” his house. He thought about life after surgery and all the things he would be able to do, as well as the things he could do beforehand to make ready, so he would be equipped to cope with the recovery.
Then he re-imagined his home -- turned it into a place of intrigue and creativity -- with themed rooms, special rules and secret codes. He utilized the resources that had been preparing him for just such a time -- his most articulate, adaptive self.
Perhaps that is the greatest attraction of adaptive change: the “can do” spirit of those who venture into the unknown and emerge on the other side. It’s neither “fine” nor “nice.” It is real.
I have some experience with this in my own life. It was a chilly day as the nurse assisted my dad into my car. I drove him from the hospital where he was a patient to another across town for specialized testing. He was in excruciating pain. The doctors couldn’t figure out why, but Daddy and I knew that the answer could not possibly be good.
At 20, I wasn’t ready to be without a dad. But we both knew that I soon would be.
“You’ll see, Daddy; I’ll grow up well,” I promised him. “One day I’ll do something that would make you so proud. I love God … I’ll put God first. You’ll see.”
For two months after that car ride, I worked nights and stayed with my dad during the day. I grew up fast. He died the Friday after Thanksgiving. The conversations we had during that time were raw, authentic -- and life has never been the same. I had no idea at first how I would keep my promise.
I began by leaning into what frightened me most, by embracing a change, stepping out beyond the edge of my known world. Adaptive change demands new learning. Falling down, getting up; falling down, getting up. Adaptive change nearly always requires some sort of reconsideration of what we thought was so but have learned is not. Things concerning our family. Our work. And most often, our inner selves.
Taking off the mask requires immense courage. It is not work for cowards, or those who refuse to lean into pain. Whether at work or at home, on the playground or on campus, transformation begins within us. Speak the truth. Have the courage to confront. Stay focused on the purpose, and do not be drawn off. Risk hostility and sabotage. Be willing to choose between what appear to be conflicting values. Adaptive change does not happen without cost.
“Mighty Max” -- whose surgery was successful -- still uses his mask and cape to help kids like himself face their fears. He teaches us what he has learned: even intense pain can lead to great, new gain. He uses his talents to raise money for children with heart defects. His mom reports that he says to them, “Kids, if you use your FORCE and dream big, you can achieve anything. We may be small -- but we’re mighty!”
I want
Read more from Virginia O. Bassford »
Faith & Leadership The risks and rewards of adaptive change
Most people want to avoid change. But the astute leader will help his team members move forward by inviting them to think not just about what will change but also why it needs to change.
David Lose: The risks and rewards of adaptive change
Most people want to avoid change. But the astute leader will help his team members move forward by inviting them to think not just about what will change but also why it needs to change.Editor’s note: This is the third in a four-part series. Read parts one and two.
One of my definitions of good leadership is the ability to take advantage of crises.
What do I mean by that? A good leader is always tending a vision of the future -- using whatever crops up as an opportunity to move beyond where we are now.
The challenge, however, is that as a species we greatly prefer stability to change. That means we are often far more reactive than proactive, changing only when we have to. And that makes advancing a positive vision of the future difficult, as we would often prefer to make do with a less-than-adequate but known present than a promising but unknown (and therefore risky) future.
Which is where crises come in.
A crisis demands immediate action and provides the thoughtful and prepared leader with an excuse to make changes that he or she knew were necessary but seemed too difficult to contemplate previously.
This is what the church needs today: leaders who see the need to change what we are doing and so tend and promote a vision of the future where all of God’s people have responsibility for understanding and sharing the faith. Simultaneously the leaders understand that sometimes it’s not until a crisis that we can muster the will to make the necessary changes.
Fortunately for today’s church leaders, crises abound!
Make no mistake, however, that such leadership takes courage and always exacts a cost. Change is hard. Change is threatening. Change makes people nervous that they aren’t just losing a way of doing church but actually their whole identity as the church.
A scene from Moneyball offers a vivid picture of this. (Editor's note: The video that originally showed this scene is no longer available on YouTube.)
Take note that John Henry, the owner of the Red Sox, names that for baseball traditionalists, Billy Beane’s take on the game is “threatening not just a way of doing business but, in their mind, it’s threatening the game.” In this regard, it’s helpful to remember the sage insight attributed to Ron Heifetz: people don’t fear change; they fear loss.
Which helps to explain the resistance to change that adaptive leaders often encounter. It’s not that those who oppose us are unduly stubborn -- though a few may be. Rather, it’s that they are afraid of losing something of great value. And so they are willing to fight to protect something that has provided a great deal of their identity and security for a very long time. Which is why, as Henry says, “The first guy through the wall always gets bloody. Always.”
We need to cultivate not just leaders working faithfully and creatively on their own, but a supportive network of colleagues who are willing to experiment with each other, learn from each other and remind each why we’re doing this in the first place.
We also need to spread the vision, inviting our people into the future we imagine.
In my experience, there are two important moves to make in this invitation. First, honor the tradition. Acknowledge that whatever you’re planning to change -- hymns, style of worship, policies -- has been important to your conversation partner and to you, that it has been a faithful mediator of the faith, that it has, in short, worked. That shouldn’t be hard to do, as most of us are where we are today because of the faithful practices of previous generations.
Having honored the tradition, the second thing to do is to ask what I call the question: “I know this thing has worked for you just as it has worked for me. But does it work for your children and grandchildren? Does it work for your neighbors and friends? Are there people not with us in church who you would love to see here?”
Because here’s the thing: there is a reservoir of grief in our elders as they see that the faith they cherished is not being passed to their children and grandchildren. And we all have friends, neighbors and family members we wish were at church but aren’t. As much as we love “the way we’ve always done it,” we love our children and grandchildren more.
Asking this question moves the conversation from what-- the particular changes we are working at and the larger vision we are advocating -- to why -- our hope and call to draw people we love into our life of faith that they may be transformed by the gospel.
This isn’t easy work to be sure, but it sure is good work. Work worth giving your life to. Thanks for your part in it.
This post originally appeared on David Lose’s blog.
Read more from David Lose »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
The Turnaround Church is the story of Wollaston Congregational Church United Church of Christ, a 130-year-old congregation that once was thriving in ministry, membership, mission, music, and money. For half a century, however, the church had slowly declined and was considering closing its doors.
The two dozen remaining members knew they had to change, but did not know how. They had very little money left, but they were willing to risk it all. With few resources, members hired Mary Louise Gifford, a new seminary graduate, to be their full-time minister. Wollaston is now a vibrant, Spirit-filled faith community-a turnaround church. Changes in worship, stewardship, and priorities, combined with the congregation's resilience and Gifford's optimistic leadership, have transformed this church.
Gifford tells us how. Addressing a wide audience, Gifford shows church leaders they have options and reason for hope. People in dying churches will find assurance that they are still a part of the body of Christ. Clergy serving these struggling churches will discover tools and resources to help them guide change. Judicatory leaders will appreciate an inspiring story they can tell about a church that turned around in spite of the odds. The Turnaround Church, while not a prescription for all churches, is a call to make long-lasting, life-sustaining changes.
Learn more and order the book »
Follow us on social media:
Copyright © 2018. All Rights Reserved.
Alban at Duke Divinity School
1121 West Chapel Hill Street, Suite 200
Durham, North Carolina 27701, United States
***
No comments:
Post a Comment