I’ve been struck recently – recently as in the last 10 years or so! – by how frequently I hear people (and especially people in the church) name the challenges in front of us “problems.” We have a problem in church attendance. Biblical illiteracy is the problem. The problem is that people have a poor understanding of stewardship. Etc. I understand this urge. Faced with a challenge – and even more a challenge that has at its heart a threat – we tend to turn to our problem solving skills. That makes sense: we are, I believe, by evolutionary disposition and experience very capable problem-solvers. (Evolution definitely favors the...

I saw a friend recently to catch up…on family, work, mutual friends, and the like. When we’re together, we also often brainstorm, especially about the kind of churches we’d like to be a part of (occupational hazard!). After filling me in on some of the latest and greatest ideas she’s had about the church she leads, she stopped and said, “You know, you’re about the only person I know who doesn’t think I’m crazy when I talk this way.” “Actually,” I replied with a smile, “I think you’re crazy too. But the church needs crazy right now.” Do you know what I mean? We’ve been doing things the same way for years and...

Leadership is about the future. It’s that simple…and that difficult. Max DePree began his influential and elegant little book, Leadership Is an Art, by saying that “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality” (11). I would suggest that the most important element of the reality to be defined is the future. What future do you imagine? What future are you hoping for, working toward, dreaming of? The future matters so much simply because it defines the present. A friend of mine – who is a remarkably capable pastoral leader – shares the same story each time she meets with a new group of people in her congregation. There...

4. Look for Signs of Growth Another trait of adaptive leaders: they see the signs of renewal and invest there, in the people and endeavors that are working, even if they are unusual or unlikely. Here’s the thing: challenges, disappointments, and setbacks abound right now in the church. From declining attendance and giving to the recent Pew report about the rise of the “nones,” it’s not hard to find signs of our demise. But if you know where to look – or, actually, if you just keep your eyes open – you’ll also see signs of renewal. Sometimes they come in the most unlikely of people and places. A high school kid who’s a whiz...

3. The Risks and Rewards of Adaptive Change One of my definitions of good leadership is the ability to take advantage of crises. What do I mean by that? Simply that a good leader is always tending a vision of the future. A vision that is always a little larger than the present, always moving just a little beyond where we are now. The challenge however, is that as a species we tend to put a very high value on homeostasis. We greatly prefer, that is, stability to change. And for good reason: stability promotes growth. But that means we are often far more reactive than proactive, changing only when we have to. And that makes advancing a...

2. Challenging Cherished Practices Harvard Leadership Guru Ron Heifetz makes a critical distinction between technical and adaptive problems. In the former, we need to revise our way of doing something in a particular context; in the latter, we need to revise (or reinvent) our whole way of thinking about the context in which we are doing things. Again, Moneyball provides an excellent example. (If you haven’t seen the film or read the book, it may be helpful to refer to my earlier post to recap the story.) If the problem is that the A’s don’t have enough money to buy the best players they really only have one option if they want to win:...

Part 1. Think Differently Moneyball, in case you haven’t seen it, is about baseball. But it’s also not about baseball. It’s about culture change. About how hard it is to change a culture, and about how it important it is to do just that, when the world around you has already changed. And it’s just that mixture of hardboiled pragmatism about a changed world – in this case the world of baseball – and creative ingenuity to defy tradition in order to change that makes me think that the secret to the church’s future may lie in this very good movie based on an even better book. In brief, here’s the setup: Oakland A’s general...