Transforming Church

The best of technical leadership can usually point to the results generated by such highly effective leadership. “Look! Our worship attendance is up 7% over last year, and overall giving is up 5%. Our Sunday School enrollment is also up 2%. We additionally fed 700 needy families at Thanksgiving.” In a church body such as the ELCA, where we are losing 1,500 members a year, we would celebrate such results in any congregation, would we not?

This is not to discount the need for highly effective technical leadership (I recently had surgery, and am thankful for the technical skill of my surgeon!), but the leadership demanded of us today is a different kind, a kind if authentically exercised that is highly perilous to the leader. It might be better for us to rename what Heifetz calls “Adaptive” to “Converting.” I make this clarification here because in many circles I have heard people speak about adaptive leadership in the wrong vein. People mistakenly describe adaptive leadership as the kind of leadership that can adapt, adjust and move forward through changing situations. This is a great skill set to have, but this is not Heifetz-coined adaptive leadership.

Adaptive, or converting leadership, is leadership that seeks to bring about adaptation or conversion to a new reality among those being led. It is perilous because for it to work, people have to abandon and give up tightly held world views, attitudes, and behavior in order to be grasped by and inculcate a new way of seeing, thinking, and living.

History bears witness to the perilous nature of leadership that seeks conversion. Galileo asked persons to abandon one world view about the earth’s nature and place in the universe and adopt another. We all know how thrilled the powers at be were to hear this! Martin Luther King, Jr. exercised an adaptive leadership by calling people to be converted to his dream of the equal opportunity, inclusivity, and dignity for all people. Preaching such an adaptive challenge significantly reduced his life expectancy.

The first words out of Jesus’ mouth as he begins his ministry are not a technical call. It is a converting call. “The time is at hand. The kingdom has drawn near. Repent and believe in the gospel!” Repentance is a converting activity. It is to abandon a path in life, a set of values, allegiances, and belief system and to enter wholesale into a radically different way.

One could argue that Jesus got himself into hot water with the religious authorities because he challenged and deconstructed their technical religiosity – their set patterns of rules, cultic rituals, religiously grounded prejudices and arrogance, and their mechanistic (technical) relationship with God and understanding of God – and proclaimed a kingdom where God suffers, does what is taboo, and embraces those who have been judged. For us who live in 21st Century affluent North America, it should not be lost on us that Jesus’ days really became numbered when his converting form of messiahship took on the religious elite and their idolatrous and entitlement attitudes towards wealth, materialism, and their social status.

Let’s face it; we live in an unconverted world. Even those who sit in church pews week end and week out live unconverted lives. Though we sing the hymns and attend the meetings, we generally function as atheists. We have not been convicted and found guilty of our lifestyles and idols being counter to the gospel and kingdom living. We are blind to our deep loyalties to counter-kingdom allegiances. We do not really believe the claims and promises of the gospel. We generally operate out of fear rather than faith and hope. We resist true calls to model our lives under the authority of the kingdom of God. We have resisted taking the bold steps to take Jesus at his word and live under his lordship. We, who are pastors, have colluded in maintaining an unconverted culture because we ourselves are generally not converted.

If anyone reading this article is offended by this paragraph, pay close attention to what happens in the anxiety level of your congregation and in your being during the next time to speak boldly about our wealth and the need to give generously. A collective church body, such as the ELCA, who, on the one hand sings songs about giving our all and who, on the other hand sports mean giving patterns of 2.2% of household incomes needs to really ask the question, “Are we playing church or actually being the church?” Imagine if the refrain of the Twyla Lynch song had these words: Lord, I offer my 2.2 percent to you, my 2.2 percent to you. Use it for your glory!

Paying close attention to the nature of today’s church leadership and attempts to move the church beyond the current perceived crisis of decay and malaise will reveal that we are indeed in bondage to technical approaches and cannot free ourselves. Examination of just about every major church conference, new initiative, and books on church leadership or administration will discover that they are almost all technical. Mission is perceived as what the church does or one of the things the church does rather than what the church is. The church is God’s mission in the world. The church is to be a sign or prototype of everything that God seeks.

Leaders who seek to guide congregations into authentic discipleship in following Jesus as his body in and for the world will need to examine their own form of leadership. It is my strong belief in presiding over the story of Abiding Hope Lutheran Church since its infancy and the congregation I served in Florida beforehand, as well as working with leaders of congregations of differing tribal identities and teaching with our seminaries, that this is an age in which converting leadership needs to be taught, shaped, and unleashed. Despite the cries of despair around church bodies, I believe that we are living in the best time ever in North America to be the church. Old forms are being deconstructed and new forms are in bud.

Our way to an alternative future of following Jesus and creating resurrection-based communities of faith will not be about tactics, strategies, church growth movement techniques or any aspect of the technical. It will be through adaptive, converting leadership that takes the gospel seriously and is about the hard work of transforming congregations by paying attention to and being constantly immersed in the story that belongs to the church. It will not be about numbers but about changing lives. It will not be about “results” per se but about actualization of discipling communities who believe that the tomb is empty and act accordingly. It will not be easy.

A summary reading of the Gospels will discover that Jesus was always being challenged by needy disciples, entitlement-centered leaders, and people who could hear his words as fresh air and new life but who lacked the personal courage to act on them.

People who commit themselves to the art and peril of adaptive leadership will discover a change in their field of vision. Much of the technical is about changing the church. The converting approach is about changing the world for the sake of Christ, who gave himself fully for it. Adaptive leaders who want to change the world can expect conflict, but it is the kind of conflict worth engaging, and it is, of course, perilous. Ask Jesus. But, the tomb is empty.

You have just read the first of a five part article by Rick Barger to help us better understand adaptive leadership. We encourage you to read the other portions, including: "Finding Home in a New Story," "Conversion and Transformation,"