Tod Bolsinger

Leading into Uncharted Territory

If leadership experts, missional theologians, pastors, CEOs of Christian organizations, Christian leaders in the marketplace and higher education all converged to hear the adventure story of Lewis and Clark and discuss what it means for leadership today, this is what they'd say...

http://amzn.to/1QA1yvq 

"When Fuller Seminary decided to launch out in our own uncharted terrain, we called on Tod Bolsinger to join our leadership team. When you read Canoeing the Mountains, you'll immediately understand why. Bolsinger's ability to translate the most important organizational leadership material into the day-to-day challenges of the Christian leader is without peer. His vulnerability and authenticity resonates as he shares his own leadership learning journey. This is the leadership book the church needs today." (Mark Labberton, president, Fuller Theological Seminary)

"A superb book on the need for adaptive leadership in the twenty-first-century church. Bolsinger challenges leaders in the Christian community to recognize the unsettling reality of being 'off the map.' Illustrated with vivid metaphors and real-world examples, resulting in a seminal book on how to navigate this new world. A must-read for everyone interested in church leadership." (Uli Chi, former board chair, Regent College Board of Governors)

"Since the missional church discussion began to develop real momentum, the constant question has been how does this theological vision of the church after Christendom translate into the practice of real congregations struggling with enormous challenges?...Bolsinger's book is a major step forward. It is based on solid missional theology, rooted in concrete congregational experience, shaped by provocative research of many diverse voices and communicated energetically and creatively. Most importantly, it is shaped by theologically informed hope, not just optimism, and takes the risks that must be taken for the sake of faithful witness today. I strongly commend this book!" (Darrell L. Guder, Henry Winters Luce Emeritus Professor of Missional and Ecumenical Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary)

"Ministry in post-Christendom is indeed uncharted territory. In Canoeing the Mountains, Tod Bolsinger cleverly solicits imagery and vocabulary that today's pastors and leaders can cling to as they begin to truly climb the mountain of adaptive change necessary to transform churches to better health. While there are many books about adaptive change, the process takes years to grasp and understand. Tod's retelling of the story of Lewis and Clark provides concrete stepping stones to a fluid journey and repackages these concepts in a way that is digestible, inspiring and thought provoking. I will use this book with my own congregation..." (Theresa Cho, copastor of St. John's Presbyterian Church, San Francisco)

"Canoeing the Mountains is a must-read for pastors and church leaders who want to understand the precarious religious landscape in America today. Seasoned pastor Tod Bolsinger draws on his experience as a church consultant and student of contemporary leadership theory in order to tackle the most pressing ministry leadership issues of our day. Employing Lewis and Clark's experience of exploring the Louisiana Purchase as a driving metaphor for the leadership that is needed in the church, Bolsinger issues a bold challenge to contemporary pastors to learn how to lead all over again..." (Thomas K. Tewell, executive director, Macedonian Ministry)

"In a most winsome and engaging way, Tod Bolsinger weaves together the best of current leadership research―adaptive change, systems theory, organizational transformation―with the real-life challenges of a pastor/practitioner who has spent years trying to put all this together in a congregation ...Like a master storyteller, Tod also weaves in the story of Lewis and Clark as a historical parable of the change and challenge in which we find ourselves today in the church. This is a book that you simply must read!" (Jim Singleton, associate professor of pastoral leadership and evangelism, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary)

 

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Of Collaborators and Winter Coats

By Tod Bolsinger

“No one would live in Boston without owning a winter coat. But countless people think that they can exercise leadership without partners…” -Ronald Heifetz

“I’m going to need new clothes,” my daughter warns me.

“It’s just a weekend trip,” I remind her.

“I mean, if I go to college there. If I do, then I’ll need a whole new winter wardrobe,” she says trying to demonstrate how reasonable she is being.

I have to concede her point. My eighteen-year-old soon-to-be college freshman is looking at two different schools that are in very different climates than the southern California beach city that she grew up in.

One in the Pacific Northwest, one in the upper Northeast. Both mean winters with lots of snow. Her stylish t-shirts and hoodie sweatshirts aren’t going to cut it, I know, and she is already planning the shopping spree. It is a reasonable, even necessary reality. She is going to need a winter coat, at least. And even tightwad Dad knows that.

But my daughter is also looking only at universities that support women in Christian leadership. And somewhere amidst the discussion of coats is a more important one about collaboration and the time of leadership needed in these harsher conditions of a rapidly changing, post-Christendom world.

Boston Public Garden Snowfall, by Bill Ilott. Flickr Commons.

Harvard Leadership guru Ronald Heifetz compares a winter coat with the need for partners in trying to survive the “harsh elements” of leadership. For Heifetz, leading alone is as foolish as my daughter trying to make it through a Boston winter wearing beach apparel.

But we do it all the time, don’t we?

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/fuller/2015/02/of-collaborators-and-winter-coats/#ixzz3RJaswV2P

 

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The Whisper that Made Me Leave My Church

It was the whisper that made me leave my church. 

 It was the one line that I heard over and over again in the five years that I traveled across the country first in leading a commission for my denomination and then as a consultant in organizational change. 

 “Why didn’t seminary prepare me for this?”

 I would hear that line echoed in my mind long after each conversation was over.  I had a sense that it was going to be shaping my future call.  I even wrote a blog post about it in December 2012.  

 And then a year after I wrote the blog post, I was invited to do something about it.   I had already discerned that my next step in ministry was to invest in leadership development for the mission of Christ.  I had already announced to my congregation that I would be leaving in the near future to respond to this voice.  I had used my sabbatical to work on a book on leadership in “uncharted territory.” I didn’t know where this would lead, but this much was clear:

The world is changing.  Rapidly. 

Businesses, universities, and organizations are being forced to adapt as the old rules and expectations are being cast aside.  And now the Church realizes the same.  For generations, would-be pastors and Christian leaders were all prepared for ministry in the same way, with the same set of expectations.  Seminaries gave you the "tools" and you would quickly find a "calling" in which to use them.  And for decades there were more positions to fill than qualified people to fill them. 

 Not today.  Today churches are closing, ministries are down-sizing, Christian organizations and denominations are looking to the seminary to produce leaders that can integrate their academic learning with wisdom, resilience and deep spiritual maturity.  The Christian leaders of today and tomorrow must be more than theologically educated, but personally, spiritually, academically and globally formed with the leadership creativity and missional savvy to develop ministry in arenas that are increasingly resistant to the Gospel.  Often bi-vocational, increasingly working in churches that are in need of a "turn around," the pastor of today is more like a missionary than a chaplain, more like an entrepreneur than a shopkeeper.  And the mission of God needs equipped leaders that go far beyond pulpits and pastor’s studies into a myriad of places and settings. 

Unfortunately most seminaries are still equipping students for the church of a generation ago. 

But while sitting in the Newark Airport last fall, newly appointed Fuller Theological Seminary President Mark Labberton told me of a significant change taking place at his school.  It’s the kind of change that most people say never happens.

 The Fuller Faculty changed the curriculum. 

Mark told me how the faculty commissioned a team to do an in-depth study, including listening to their students and alumni.  And they heard them loud and clear.  The students told them that they loved the Seminary but feared the future.  The Alumni told the study team that for the church to be relevant in the world, the seminaries must be willing to change the way they prepare Christian leaders for that world. 

This team listened and got to work.  And when their report came back.  The Faculty—that tenured group of highly regarded experts who have everything to lose and little to gain—set aside their well-earned privilege and security to re-tool the entire project of theological education.

In the fall of 2014, Fuller Seminary will inaugurate a new day in theological education. After listening deeply, doing extensive research and conducting their own experiments in the integration of theological education and Christian spiritual formation, they concluded that for the unchanging grace and love of God to be made manifest in this rapidly changing world, then the Church needs leaders capable of serving with wisdom, deep spirituality, and creative, agile leadership. 

 To do that the study team revised the entire curriculum to be—from start to finish—as formational as educational; as committed to the vocational development and spiritual formation of their students as they are to their academic and theological education.  And today, Fuller Seminary is in the midst of a whole-scale reorganization that puts the formation of Kingdom vocations at the center of the entire institutional life. 

And this is where my life got interrupted.  This is where the whisper of my pastor friends and clients became the call of God on my life.

 To support the new curriculum to accomplish all that they envision, President Labberton and the Board of Trustees established a new division within Fuller Theological Seminary, led by a Vice-President for Vocation and Formation.  This division will have the charge for creating one seamlessly integrated organizational culture that forms Kingdom vocations in a changing world.  They are declaring to everyone who is looking to be equipped for this world:  “From the moment you visit our website to the moment you go to glory, you will always be part of learning community forming you to live out your calling for God’s mission in the world. “

 In January, I was appointed to this new position.  Since March I have been working part-time at Fuller while I finish up at my beloved congregation.  In the days ahead I will be learning and writing and collaborating with a team of people to reshape the entire process of theological formation. 

Our goal is nothing less than turning that plaintive whisper into a grateful word of confidence. Someday soon, we want to hear Christian leaders in a changing world declare:

"Yes, the world is changing.  But by God’s grace, I was prepared for such a time as this.” 

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When Size Really Doesn't Matter.... OR... Why a discussion of either "Wee Kirks" or "Tall Steeples" completely misses the moment.

When Size Really Doesn’t Matter…. OR… Why a discussion of either “Wee Kirks” or “Tall Steeples” completely misses the moment.

Two meals, two conversations, the same topic. (Over and over again.) 

One was the pastor of a declining church, the other a growing one.  One was in an urban setting, the other rural.  One of their churches was well -known, even iconic, the other was church that is not really known outside its community. Both pastors are in their late thirties. Both gifted preachers, caring people, have a strong presence and have good track records. They also share a common theological tradition. One of them pastors a church whose membership is in the thousands, the other (the growing church no less!) has a membership of about 150.

And both of them made the same comment to me: “I don’t know what to do next.”

For years, the wise assumption was that there is a significant difference between large and small churches. While both require strong preaching, teaching, Session moderating, and pastoral care skills, the management complexity between the large church and the small one called for different skills and experience. Indeed, for a long time size has been considered the biggest difference in different calls.  It’s one of the reasons why most ‘first calls’ that are not associate pastor positions are in smaller congregations.  It is assumed that as pastors gain experience they can ‘handle’ a bigger job.

But as my two conversation partners reminded me, (and I have now had this conversation with dozens of pastors) there is one critical arena of ministry where size doesn’t really matter: leading change.

When the topic turns from being a good steward of what a church is and has been to leading a congregation to what they are called to be and become, the leadership skills are the same regardless of size: Instilling urgency, capturing the opportunity, stirring hope, raising competing values, working through resistance, dealing with loss, maintaining conviction in the face of resistance, even calmly addressing sabotage.

For the church leaders of the future, the demarcation lines will not be between ‘Mega’ and ‘Wee’ churches (and all those in-between) but between those who are in “management mode” and those who are going through organizational and missional transformation.  Regardless of setting, regardless of size, regardless if the church is in 'redevelopment' or is even a "new church developlent."  More and more, there will be two sets of pastors, both needed, both invaluable--both will require strong pastoral skills, a love for people and a devotion to Christ.--but more and more there will be two two different sets of tasks with two different callings, requiring a different set of pastoral skills: Stewardship or Leadership. 

Because I believe this, I also believe that the key questions for most congregations looking for a new pastor are question of honest congregational self reflection:

1. “What moment are we in?”  
2. "What do we really want to be?" 

Is this a season of settling down or setting off for a new horizon? Are we looking for someone to be a steward of our legacy or to equip us for a changing world?  Do we really want someone to care for the shareholder saints or are we really ready to reach beyond the walls? Is it a season for managing what we have been entrusted with or leading us in the painful work of being transformed for the unknown in front of us? 

If the key issue is about management, then size of the congregation (and the staff, the budget, the debt, the facilities, etc.) and the experience of the pastoral candidates is significant to consider.

But  whether it is a larger church that is addressing decline, or a smaller church that is losing its cozy family feel as they welcome new people; whether it be a dying church looking for a new day or a healthy church looking to bring the gospel to the unreached, disaffected or disinterested, the common pastoral skill set for a changing world is the capacity to lead change amidst the emotional complexity that is part of every church.  

And when leading change-- size really doesn't matter. 

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Clergy Burnout: What's really causing it?

Clergy Burnout: What’s really causing it?

A recent blog post  by Philip Wagner on "The Secret Pain of Pastors" has created some good--and really necessary--conversation about the challenge of pastoral leadership today.  I'll add my two cents with a few re-posts  of blogs I wrote after the NY Times ran a similar article in 2010. These posts were written right at the time that I started coaching pastors and working on a book on leadership development.  Today, after 200 conversations with pastors, I'm more convinced than ever that there is a clergy leadership crisis that is only increasing. 

"The antidote to exhaustion is not rest but wholeheartedness."  David Whyte

A recent article in the New York Times on clergy burnout has been getting lots of attention amongst my pastor friends (and some kind church members who are concerned about me).  The article suggests (I think, accurately) that the cause is in large part the unhealthy professional boundaries between pastors and their congregations.  It also points to the reality that in our highly connected technological world, it is extremely difficult for a pastor to ever truly “vacation” from the congregation (Indeed, recently, I received word of the death of an infant in our congregation while I was at 30,000 feet winging my way to Italy on a family vacation.)  The article wisely encourages pastors to get better and more regular rest and offers some good resources.  And I wholeheartedly agree.

But, all the while affirming the need for regular days off, vacations, and sabbaticals (indeed: I enjoyed a glorious one four years ago), I want to ask my colleagues: Is that really what’s causing the burnout?  

The fact is that clergy and congregations have always had bad boundaries.  In previous generations, being eager to work all-hours and having one’s ego fed by the need to be needed was practically a pre-requisite to a call from God to ordination (not that I am affirming that!)  The truth is that most of us LOVE a good pastoral care crisis. It is the place where we are most competent and add the most value.  We pastors thrive on people being spiritual open to the presence of God in life and love nothing better than walking with searching souls in a journey of genuine authenticity.   Most Pastors will never admit this publicly but most of us would rather being officiating funerals than weddings.  (At a funeral people are far more open to spiritual things; at a wedding everybody wants to get on to the reception as quickly as possible.) 

So is the cause of burnout really too many souls in need of care?

A follow up article by a minister suggested that the cause of burnout is congregational consumerism.  People now demand that their pastors be part shrewd cultural commentator and part comic.  We must entertain, inspire and instruct a little, all the while never really challenging the worldview or tribal instincts that make us Christians seem little different than anyone else.  Mostly, people come to church to be affirmed, encouraged and given some tips to get God on their side in their self-improvement strivings for the good life.  We pastors, as my friend Charlie says, are expected to be Tony Robbins with prayer.

Again, I agree and this unhealthy expectation on the part of church-goers is undeniably part of the problem.   But is that the root cause?   Or are pastors and congregations not only suffering from bad boundaries, but also colluding to alleviate a deeper anxiety that plagues us all?

Here is my hunch:

Poet David Whyte famously wrote, “The antidote to exhaustion is not rest but wholeheartedness.”
We clergy are burning out because we have lost our wholeheartedness about pastoral ministry. 

By this, I DON’T mean our passion for the gospel or our commitment to the Kingdom of heaven (though that may be true for some).  I also DON’T mean our sense of call to serve people, to preach, teach, counsel, or care (though again, that may be true for some).  What I mean is that most of us are now asked to do a job that we didn’t sign up for, in circumstances that are far different than we expected.  The culture is changing and the church is in crisis and most of us were not trained for this.  And so we are less wholehearted than we once were and are unsure if we are up for the task that has been thrust upon us.

A couple of years ago I spoke for a group of Methodist Christian Educators in Maine.  After three lectures on the Kingdom of God and the Community of Faith, I was asked to do a “speaker talk-back” where anyone could come and ask me questions.  Of the 200 attenders of the conference, 60 came to my talk-back session.  I polled the room to ask what kind of questions they came to ask and soon found that one question was being asked by virtually everyone in the room.  It wasn’t a topic I had raised in my lectures.  It wasn’t a subject that the organizers had even planned to address.  But for the pastors, lay leaders and teachers in the room it was the only one they wanted to talk about:  “How can we keep our churches from dying?”   You could practically see the discouragement written on their faces.  We pastors are working harder than ever and not seeing results.  It’s like we are stuck in an aerobics class from hell.  We just keep running in place.

We pastors are exhausted because we are ambivalent.  We are ambivalent because we are sincerely called by God, deeply committed to minister to souls and eager to speak to the spiritual condition of life and, at the same time, we know that we are rapidly becoming irrelevant to many.  

Most of us were unprepared for how rapidly and demonstrably our culture was changing. Most churches (with a few obvious exceptions) are dying.  We pastors wanted to be at the helms of ships that would head bravely into the adventure of an open sea and a beautiful distant land.  Nobody told us that we were training to become captains of ships that are all slowly going down or being abandoned.  We are ambivalent because this isn’t the ministry or the context that we signed up for and we are burning out because we just don’t know what to do. 

Youth club sports is considered by most parents to be more important for forming the character of our children than the church.  Spirituality has become wildly popular but so deeply individualistic that the fastest growing “religious affiliations” amongst college students are “none” and “spiritual-not-religious”.  We pastors who were trained to teach those who show up, to care for those who call for help, to lead those who will volunteer and to administer the resources of those who willingly give are now called upon to minister to a passing parade of people who treat us like we are but one option in their personal salad-bar of spirituality. 

We are in uncharted terrain trying to lead mostly dying churches into a post-Christian culture that now considers the church as an optional, out of touch and irrelevant relic of the past.  Most people think of pastors not as experts of the soul for the big questions of life, but as curators of the flat earth society or pawns for a political action committee.  To make matters worse, we pastors who used to be held in such high-esteem are now just assumed to be charlatans or pedophiles or widow-fleecing fundraisers. When masses of ordinary people want spiritual insight they turn to Oprah, not the church.  And committed church goers and church leaders are panicked about it. 

Burnout comes from not only bad boundaries and trying to meet unhealthy expectations, but also from an ambivalence born of uncertainty about our own competence and relevance. 

Most of us got into this because of the Bible and people.  We wanted to teach the Bible and care for people.  We felt called to nurture the souls of people and communities of faith.  So when we are doing those things (even with some not-so-good boundaries) we are mostly fine.  Most of us also understand and acknowledge that there is a difference between felt needs and real needs and that there is always a degree of work involved in reaching often distracted people with our messages. (Isn’t that why we work so hard on getting good illustrations, jokes, even videos for our sermons?) 

But, most of us weren’t called and don’t feel equipped to be change-leaders in a rapidly changing world.  But that is the reality and that is our call.  Until we wholeheartedly dedicate ourselves to that reality and that call and all the ways that we pastors are going to need to learn, and grow and change ourselves (grieve our own losses along the way) to be relevant in that changing world, we will just continue to live on the verge of burning out and giving up.

Mind the Gap: The Practices of Adaptive Leadership

 

I spent the past week in the beauty of Mount Hermon Christian Conference Center at the West Coast Presbyterian Pastors Conference.   

I am uploading my speaking notes here for the attendees and others who want to follow along. 

Download 1-Canoeing the Mountains_Leading Through Adaptive Change_WCPP

Download 1_Change or Die_understanding adaptive leadership_Leading into uncharted territory #2

  Download Back to the Pass_Core Capacities

"Adaptive Leadership consists of the learning required to address conflicts in the values people hold, or to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they face.”   

Ronald Heifetz

Anybody who has ever been to London has seen the ubiquitous “Mind the Gap” signs in the underground.  They warn train travelers to watch their step because of the small chasm created between the train and the platform.

For leaders of organizational change, we face our own chasms, or our own gaps. Indeed, leadership is exercised in helping our charges “mind the gap” between our aspired values and our actions, between our values and the reality we face. 

So here is a quick list of how leaders Mind the Gap and enter into adaptive work.

1. Get up on the balcony (while listening from the floor).  This is exhausting work, but it is the primary work.  Leaders must be listeners and people who have the vision to see the deeper systemic realities at work in the organization. What is the ‘music’ that keeps our organization, our church, our family ‘dancing’?
    
2. Give the work back to the people most effected by the challenge.  Are you the only one who is losing sleep over the challenges that you face?  What can we do as leaders to ‘escape the expert expectation’?  First thing: transition from being the “great answer giver” to a “great question asker." Raise the issues for others to deal with and get them wrestling with you. 
    
3. Growth focused.  Leading people to grow so THEY can face their biggest challenge.  Leadership is mostly about learning.  Group learning, corporate and collegial learning.  To lead is to learn and lead the learning.  If learning isn’t necessary, then leadership isn’t really necessary.  The task at hand can be really important, even vital, but it’s likely stewardship—protecting and preserving what is most important—not leadership. 
    
4. Go with the energy. Work with the mature and motivated. Let’s face it, most of our work (especially as pastors) is putting out fires, dealing with the resistant, attending to the cranky and trying to appease the complainers. These are part of our work and indeed, the people to whom we are called. But when it is time to lead on, more and more of your energy must be invested in those who are motivated to grow and taking responsibility for themselves. Go with the energetic and you’ll have more energy for the others.
    
5. Grief work: Leading means dealing with loss. “Growing up means giving up.”  Adaptive work is about the helping people raise and make hard decisions about competing values in their lives. Competing values can only be solved through Win-Lose.  (“Win-win is lose-lose.”) This means something must give, something must go, something will be lost.
    
6. Get on with it! Get to work, go into the new uncharted territory. After you make some observations and interpretations, try some PLAYFUL interventions.  Get right into the middle of the muddled mess. Experiment.  (Remember what Thomas Friedman wrote about solving the world’s biggest problems? “We need 100,000 people in 100,000 garages doing 100,000 experiments so that five will work.” ) Don’t wait until you figure out the future, step into and learn along the way.  You’ll make mistakes and take missteps, but lead on! 

 

Learning to Lead All Over Again

I spent the past few days speaking on adaptive leadership to church leaders of Fellowship of Presbyterians.  After being asked a lot of questions, I decided to repost this piece from October 11, 2011, to give some context for my own journey into learning to lead differently. For those who attended my Fellowship Meeting plenary or my workshop (or those who missed it) the slides are here: 

Download Canoeing the Mountains_Leading Through Adaptive Change_Tee up_FOP  

Download Adapt and_or die_Toward adaptive capacity

At the end of our 2006-2007 fiscal year, our church had a $100,000 general fund surplus. In twenty years of church work, I had never seen anything like it.  By all common measures, we were doing as well as a church as we could ever hope.

We were in our tenth consecutive year of growth in worship attendance and membership. We had faced all the obvious and not-so-obvious challenges before us.  We had unified around a vision, we had applied disciplined thinking and acting to most of our ministries, we had even rebuilt our entire campus around our vision to be an intergenerational “Community for the community.”

 And then we noticed something. It was subtle, but there was no mistaking that it was there.  A kind of malaise, a growing sense of discouragement. Leaders were talking about being burned out and others were hesitant to step up.  Even more, we noticed that some families were beginning to slip away.  While the usual "markers" of bucks in the plate and buns in the pew were still pretty good, we began to notice the early signs of disengagement and disconnection.  As the pastor, I was confused.  How could we be doing so well and yet "feel" like "something" was so wrong?

We brought in TAG Consulting to take a good look under the hood.  They led us through their Transforming Church Index process.  It was both easy and comprehensive.  They reported back that our scores were really strong; we were among the healthiest churches in the nation.  But they also told us that there were some disturbing "early warning signs", that could all be traced to an unintended consequence to our “win-win” strategy.

 In another post I wrote about the importance of getting beyond “win-win” thinking when trying to bring a truly adaptive or transformational change.  Indeed, as I found out personally, the definition of an adaptive challenge is one where someone is going to “lose” something.

The reality of loss is the very reason why these truly transformational challenges are so difficult and enduring. Even more complicated, the “problem” you face to today is very often the result of the “solution” from the past. While “win-wins” feel great, the bad news is that a "win-win" strategy often only perpetuates the gridlock of competing values that keeps the organization stuck.

In our case, the success of a unified vision had given birth to an overly centralizedinstitution.  The very unity, discipline and alignment that had been needed to bring the church together to rebuild the campus around our vision were now stifling creativity, passion and energy.  In an entrepreneurial culture like south Orange County, we had become way too "corporate." 

Our lay people reported that while they trusted the leadership and appreciated the ministry, the most common response of most people was “this is a good church, but they don't need me here." Our church members told us, "We love the preaching, worship and programs, but there is no way for ME to make a difference, express my gifts or fulfill my own sense of calling here."

When our consultant Kevin Ford, laid this out before me, I grimaced.  "So what's causing this?  What's at the heart of the problem?  What do we need to change?" I asked in almost rapid-fire questioning.  He looked at me and said.  "You." 

I gulped. 

Kevin continued, "Tod, don't get me wrong.  These people love you.  They respect you.  They appreciate your preaching and they trust you.  In fact, we have never had a church talk more about a senior pastor than this church talks about you.  And that is the problem.  It's not your problem, at least not yet.  Nobody thinks that you are trying to build the church around you, but that is in fact what is happening.  You could continue on for another ten years and the church will remain healthier than most.  But without even trying to, the culture that you have created here under your leadership will continue to disempower, disengage and finally create disconnection for the most creative and passionate members. Unconsciously, the message that is going out is that everybody here thinks it is their job to support the ministry that YOU are having here.   And that is slowly sapping the passion from the church."

Kevin and I talked about the options open to me at that point:

1. Do nothing. The church would continue to revolve around me and it would likely not become a huge problem until someday after I left the church. 
2.  Resign.  If I was out of the way, then the church members and would-be leaders would be forced to reengage and rediscover its ministry without me and my vision at the center.
3. Learn to lead differently. This would be hard, and it would be a risk.  While the danger signs were evident, the church was still relatively healthy.  There was a significant chance that trying to create a less-centralized and more collaborative culture would be both resisted and resented (especially by those who liked the church the way it was.)  And especially it would mean a big "loss" for me.  I would lose the sense of competence that comes from using a leadership style that I clearly was comfortable with and which had had success. 

Because I love my church and being their pastor, I opted pretty quickly for number 3.  I have been re-learning what it means to lead ever since. 

It wasn't easy.  In fact, it was one of the hardest and yet best things I have ever done.  Today, not only are the "markers" even stronger, but even amidst this great recession, we are still solidly growing.  We have faced hard cutbacks with clear values.  We have maintained unity and have more diverse creative, lay-run ministry than ever.  We are seeing more and more people step into leadership and express faith in missional service.  While I am not as central as I one was, I am still firmly part of a more collaborative ministry. 

Today I consult for TAG and help other pastors learn or re-learn how to lead in this changing world.  And it all began with understanding that for our church mission to "win" I had to "lose".

I had to lose power and control, I had to lose "say" over aspects of the mission, and I had to lose my place at the center in order for our mission and vision to be even more central in our church. I had to lose my status as the expert and learn to lead all over again.  

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Changing the Way Pastors are Trained

Taking the Hill with Grandma

This is a repost of an article that first appeared here in May 2010. Recently I have been working with clients who are struggling with congregations who want the pastor to be a 'chaplain' care-taker of the congregatio, while the leadership recognizes the need for a more transformational leader.  In December 2011, I enjoyed a fruitful exchange of posts with the current editor of Christianity Today, Mark Galli on about the chaplains vs. leaders discussion. Those posts can be found here, Mark's response here, and my response to his response here.   

I tend to think of myself as a “Take the Hill” kind of guy.  I like a challenge.  I tend to think of myself as leading “a band of brothers (and sisters)” on an offensive to spread the Kingdom of God.  I get all inspired by “Henry V”-type speeches about charging “once more into the breach.”  I resonate with the idea of a pastor as a “leader of a mission.”  

One of my colleagues is really different than I am. Maybe it’s because he’s had enough of “challenging the troops.”  Maybe he’s seen enough pain in lives and congregations to be skeptical of the kinds of ‘charges’ that pastors like me seem to relish. My colleague has been called to minister to a church that is in the middle of a retirement home.  He tells me with a sigh of great satisfaction that he spends his days, “hugging and kissing, teaching and ministering to some of the greatest saints you’ll ever meet.”  Sometimes I am jealous of him and I get the sense that sometimes he thinks he’s supposed to be more like me. 

I take the hill, he cares for grandma.  And mostly I think that most of us assume that these are two different types of pastoral ministries.  It is common to hear talk about the differences between “missional” ministry and “chaplaincy”; about “leading” vs. “care-taking”; about “church renewal” vs. “church hospice”.  And in some ways, the distinction is really apt.  But in other ways, I think those distinctions reveal both our own projections about ourselves and a convenient way to avoid what is true about all churches.  Here’s the reality as I see it: We all have “hills to take” and all of our churches are filled with ‘grandmas’.

None of us who are in leadership of churches get the luxury of a single-focused call no matter how important we think it is.  No pastor is only a chaplain to a fellowship of saints, a preacher of the gospel, a teacher of the theology, an administrator of a church, or a “leader” of the most fit, trained, and motivated “spiritual warriors”  Pastoral ministry, if done well, is always about a myriad of oftencompeting roles.  Our call is to further the mission of the Kingdom of heaven, to expand the proclamation and demonstration of the Gospel, with the very people whom God has given us.  The church is both a mission AND a family.  It is both something to do and something that has intrinsic value even when nothing is being accomplished.  It is a complex web of paradoxes to manage and competing values to live out.

It’s one thing to imagine being the leader of a mission if you get to personally select, train, and deploy the most able and eager.  It’s another thing to accomplish the same mission with whoever happens to be given you regardless of ability (or even interest) in the task.  It’s one thing to create a church family that loves each person just as they are, and another to try to inspire and equip that people to take on a challenge that will require it to change, grow, and expend resources that it may not even have currently.

We have to love the kindly grandmas and grandpas, cute little children, cranky aunts and uncles, over-committed brothers and sisters, and sometimes-irascible and often-inspiring teenagers with whom God has called us to be “spiritual family” and then we have to try to motivate that group to work, sacrifice, give and take on the responsibilities of furthering the mission of the Kingdom in our local community and beyond.  We are a family that wants to sit cozy by the campfire together that has to get up and charge the hill (at potentially great cost).

To me this is the most demanding aspect of being a pastor: The complexity of it all.  We pastors live in an emotional field filled with competing values.  I often remind my church that in this way, we are like a “family business.”  We love, care, and value each other with a kind of unconditional love and, at the same time, we need to make decisions based on the conditions of what will further the spiritual “bottom line” of furthering our mission as a church. 

This daily dealing in competing values is the tough terrain of pastoral leadership. We are all called to take the hill with grandma.  And we can’t neglect either.  The church is BOTH a mission and a family. And holding that tension and leading a church that is faithful to both mission and family is indeed the challenge for most of us.  

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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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