Tod Bolsinger

Changing the Way Pastors are Trained

If western societies have become post-Christian mission fields, how can traditional churches become then missionary churches? Lesslie Newbigin

An older pastor looked at me with a sigh. He is nearing retirement.  And he remembers well how, not that long ago, life was really different.  “You know, when I began my ministry in a church in the south, I never worried about ‘church growth’ or ‘worship attendance’ or ‘evangelism’.  Back then if a man didn’t come to church on Sunday, his boss asked him about it on Monday.”

It was different “back then”.  Some of us have heard about it.  Others can remember it.  For some of us, those were the “good old days”. For others, those days were anything but good. (Did you see the reference to “man” in the old pastor’s statement?) But it was different.  Really different.

Sociologists and theologians refer to this recently passed period as Christendom, the 1700-year- long experiment with Christianity at the privileged center of western cultural life.  Christendom gave us “blue laws” and the Ten Commandments in school.  It gave us “under God” in the pledge of allegiance and exhortations to Bible reading in the national newspapers. (I have a copy of the Los Angeles Times from December 1963 that has a stories on the Warren Commission, the 9000 member Hollywood Presbyterian Church and a list of Daily Bible Readings for the upcoming week.) It was the day when every “City Father” laid out the town square with the Courthouse, the Library and a First Church all within the very center of the city.

And for most of us, these days are gone.  Long, long gone.  When cities are now  using eminent domain laws to replace churches with tax-revenue generating ‘big box’ stores; when Sundays are more about soccer and Starbucks then they are about Sabbath; when the fastest growing “religious affiliation” amongst young adult is “none”; when there is no real moral consensus built on Christian tradition (even amongst Christians), then Christendom as a marker of society, has clearly passed.

And most of us were not trained for this.

Most pastors were trained in the skills that were necessary for Christendom. When churches functioned primarily as "vendors of religious services" for a “Christian culture” then the primary leadership tool box was teaching (for providing Christian education), liturgics (for leading Christian services) and pastoral care (for offering Christian counsel and support).  Pastors weren’t “missionaries” and churches weren’t “missions” (Indeed, my seminary had a whole separate school for that!).   We were teachers, worship leaders and counselors. We were “chaplains” for a congregation within a Christendom culture.  And for many of us in mid-career, it’s like we woke up one morning and found ourselves ministering in a cross-cultural setting where we don’t understand the customs, the language or the values.  We are now in uncharted territory and needing to “adapt or die.”

One of my life “BHAGS” (ala Jim Collins, “Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals”) is to change the way pastors are trained. I don’t have any illusions that this will be easy.  Seminaries are well aware of the urgency and all that is at stake, even if by and large they have been slow to adapt. (See this Commentary from the Chronicle of Higher Education) If traditional churches are going to become missionary churches, then pastors must become truly missional leaders.  And while teaching, liturgics and care will always be needed, the leadership skills for taking a missionary church into uncharted territory (let alone transforming a traditional church into a missionary church) are for most of us as unfamiliar as the very setting we now find ourselves in.  

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When Win-Win is Wrong-Wrong.

Reposting an article on the single biggest leadership obstacle that most of us ever learned.  I spend more time coaching this one "out'" of pastors I work with than almost anything else. 

The first leadership book I ever assigned my staff team was Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Effective People. It was, as my pal Charlie would say, “the right tool for the job.”  My team indeed became more "effective" in lots of meaningful ways.  One of the concepts that helped us the most was Habit #4: “Think Win-Win.”

Coming into a situation where there had been lots of “every ministry for itself” thinking and little teamwork around a unified vision, we needed to learn how to think “Win-Win” in as many situations as possible.  And it worked.  Within a remarkably short time, we became a “Win-Win”-seeking bunch of teammates all working together around a clear vision of what our church could be for our community.

Fast-forward a decade and the same “Win-Win” team finds itself “Stuck-Stuck”.  We had made a lot of good changes, the church had grown and we had re-built our entire campus.  Things were good. Mostly.

But now we faced far more complex challenges.  Challenges that had no clear cut solutions. Challenges that were more systemic in nature.  Challenges that required us to learn what we didn’t know.  Challenges that couldn’t be solved through a conference or a video series or a program.  What Ronald Heifetz calls an “adaptive challenge”.   Adaptive Challenges are the true tests of leadership.  These are the enduring tough problems that require PEOPLE to change in order for problems to get solved.  And, by definition, an “Adaptive Challenge” CANNOT be solved through Win-Win. 

Adaptive Challenges can only be solved through careful, wise, discerning, collaborative decision making that results in someone losing.  Indeed, if the organization or church (or  business or state, or country!) doesn’t face this hard reality and insists on “win-win”, the only real result will be “lose-lose.”

One executive pastor of a large Presbyterian church put it to me this way:  “Until now, we could solve every problem in our church through ‘addition’.  If there was a problem, we simply added another ministry, added more money to the budget, add more staff to the team. But now we can’t afford to add anything more.  Any changes we make now are going to have to come through making hard decisions and ‘subtraction’.” For a church that’s used to addition, ‘subtraction’ is really, really painful.

In our own church, getting beyond “win-win” required me to learn to lead differently.  Specifically, while the first decade of my ministry was built around getting “wins” together as we moved toward our vision, if we were going to truly fulfill our mission, we were going to have to make many more tough choices where someone was going to lose.  Perhaps for me, the most important day in my ministry at SCPC was when I realized that if we were going to move beyond “Win-Win” to bring genuine, missional, faithful, change the first “loser” was… me. 

More next post.

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Hemorrhaging Pastors

Reposting this from a couple of years back. This story, sadly, is becoming far too common.  I will use this to kick off a new discussion about the training pastors need in a post-christendom day.

Three. In one day. 

On Monday, I heard of three of my pastor friends who all resigned this week.  No affairs, no scandal, no one is renouncing faith.  But three, really good, experienced, pastors all turned in resignations and walked away.  Two are leaving church ministry all together.

The details are as different as the pastors themselves, but the common thread is that they finally got worn down by trying to bring change to a church system that was stuck.

I have been hearing from more pastors these days.  Some of it is related to my work with TAG Consulting, a lot of it is because I am, well, one of them.  We chat and email and text and the common thread is always the same: “The church is stuck and we don’t know what to do.”

Stuck and declining. Stuck and clinging to the past. Stuck and lurching to quick fixes, trying to find an easy answer for what is clearly a systemic challenge. (“If only you could preach better, pastor!” “If only you were more ‘pastoral’ and caring, pastor!”  “If only our worship was more dynamic, pastor!” “Please, pastor, DO something…That is what we pay you for isn’t it?”)

In some cases, the leaders of the church had turned on the pastor making him the scapegoat.  In others, there was a sense that the church just wanted to stop any change process.  For some, they are early in their tenures and are trying to get at the core issues early and bravely, looking squarely at what Jim Colllins calls “the brutal facts.”  But most of them are so far into their ministry at the church that it seems like whatever they do is too little too late.  After trying so hard, it seems that the church just gave up and hunkered down.  As one of my friends said, “This church has gone deaf to my voice.”  And soon after the finger-pointing begins, immediately followed by a big severance, a disillusioned pastor and a crippled church.

Most of my pastor friends acknowledge that they contributed in some way to the very circumstances that are forcing them out of the calling they love.  All of us acknowledge that seminary didn’t prepare us for this.  But, trying to rise to the occasion, they find themselves facing a wall of resistance that quickly turns into a voice of rejection.  The underlying, unspoken issue seems to be: “If only the pastor would stop trying to lead us and just pastor us, then we’d be fine.” 

Except we are not fine.  The culture is changing, the world is changing and churches are facing change on an unprecedented scale.  We are heading into uncharted territory and pastors and lay leaders need to learn to lead a mission together where there are real obstacles, real challenges and where the future is nothing like the past.

Until we do, we’ll keep bleeding pastors and we will watch our churches wither away.

Is That a Lion or Not: Another Lesson for Good Disappointing Leadership

Continuing a re-post of the series from 2010.  Many of us in leadership know about the need to attend to our anxiety, we just don't always know why...

In the harsh mid-summer African heat, a herd of impala find an increasingly rare water hole.  They rush to drink, crowding in, fearful of not getting enough water to sustain them.  Suddenly, one impala raises his head in high alert.  Immediately every other Impala stops drinking, and stands at attention.  No impala moves, none utter a sound. But the tension is palpable, there seems to be a crackle of electricity in the air.  Every impala at that moment has a life or death decision to make:  “Is that a lion or not?”

If there is a lion lurking near that whole and they don’t run,  they become lion lunch. If there is NOT a lion lurking near the whole and they DO run, they lose their place at the watering hole and could die of thirst. If there is a lion and they do run, or if there is NOT a lion and they do not run, they live another day.  But all that matters is: “Is that a lion or not?”

And everything in their impala-beings is focused on making that crucial life and death decision.  Just like they do every day. Numerous times a day.

Part of what helps the impala make that decision is the “herd energy”, the “animal anxiety” that permeates the group and that causes them to share listening, hearing, deciding together.  And depending upon how the “system” responds to anxiety is one of the key factors for the health and ability to weather threats and face changes in climate or challenges in terrain for a herd, a family, a church or organization.

In this series, we have been looking at what it takes to be a “good disappointing leader”, that is what it takes to “disappoint your own people at a rate they can absorb” so that they will take on the challenges, make the changes and continue to move toward the goals (or watering holes) that will insure their vitality, longevity and “mission” of the family, church, organization or company.  Over the last few posts we have been examining the leadership mantra:  "Start with a conviction, stay connected, stay calm and stay the course."  In my last post, I discussed the leader as “Crockpot thermostat” regulating the heat of a system so that it will continue toward transformation without scorching and ruining the system.

A significant part of “staying calm” and “regulating heat” specifically, is in understanding that the “heat” that most hinders organizational systems from moving toward their aspirations and goals is anxiety.  Anxiety isn’t a bad thing; it’s a ‘creaturely’ thing. It just is. We feel anxious when we are reacting to a threat that is either real or imagined.  Sometimes the anxiety is a gift that tells us that there is something bad that is threatening the clan (A fire alarm going off, the sixth sense that someone is lying to you, the motivation to lose weight when the doctor tells you that your cholesterol is so high you wont live to see grandchildren.) This is called “acute anxiety.”  It motivates us to do something to get ourselves or our loved ones out of danger (for example, when there is a lion at the watering hole.)

“In and of itself, anxiety is neither functional or dysfunctional.  It is a state of readiness to do something or other that may or may not be appropriate in response to a threat that may or may not be accurately perceived.”  (Jeffrey Miller, The Anxious Organization: Why smart companies do dumb things, p. 14)

But the key difference between animals and humans is that with humans real or “acute anxiety” often becomes “chronic anxiety”, lingering in a family or social system even after the threat is gone.  Acute anxiety is a pervasive stance of being that continues even after the threat is gone.  (Soldiers with post-traumatic stress who wake up on high alert even while safe at home in their beds, depression-era senior citizens who stock up on eggs or toilet paper years later, an adult who grew up in an abusive home who winces every time someone raises their voice even the smallest bit.)  Chronic anxiety is present when the threats of the past continue to hold power even though the system is no longer really in danger. 

There have been lots of studies about the affects of stress and anxiety in life today.  We are taught good stress reducing tricks like exercise or deep breathing or taking “mini-vacations” while at our desks, lowering our anxiousness by thinking of a ‘happy place.’  These things are all good for our personal well-being.  But in the midst of leading change, they miss the point.

For leaders, the point of “calming down” is not to feel better; it’s to make better decisions.  And when people are too “hot”, they don’t. The only issue is: Is there a lion or not? Is there really a threat or are we making this up?  Do we really need to run, or should we stay here and get water and then calmly continue our journey? Do we really need to be this angry, fearful, defensive or is there a better decision that we can make that will take us where we want to go? 

For leaders, this is the point to remember about anxiety: People who are overly or chronically anxious don’t make good decisions.  When anxiety spikes we revert to more “primitive” ways of being.  We fight, we flee, we freeze.  We turn on each other instead of working together.  We run from danger and leave others to face the lions alone.  Or we capitulate and allow the herd to be overrun.

Peter Steinke: “To lead means to have some command of our own anxiety and some capacity not to let other people’s anxiety contaminate us; that is, not to allow their anxiety to affect our thinking, actions, and decisions.”

Perhaps the most important task of leadership is to cultivate the ability to make good decisions.  Good, wise, discerning, decisions for the sake of both the health and mission of the herd.  And that will take both “regulating the heat” and thinking well while doing so. 

Both of which are necessary to face the absolutely unexpected threat that is coming to knock you "off course" as you lead your people.  Which is where we will pick this up next...

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