March 20, 2025
Earlier this month, I was in Cannon Beach, Oregon for the third of four in-person classes for my Doctor of Ministry program. For this week and next week’s blog post, I’d like to tell you about what I learned and experienced during my time away.
The scope of my doctoral work is on the intersections of leadership and spiritual formation. To guide a congregation during this time requires a pastor to hold both of these together. It is not enough to simply lead (what would make us distinct from any other civic organization then?) and it is not enough to simply focus on formation (how do systems become guided into this focus?). You must hold them together.
For the leadership focus of this course, we spent time examining the steps of adaptive leadership as found in the work of Ronald Heifetz and his book Leadership Without Easy Answers. Heifetz writes about how we seem to be in a time in which peoples’ hope about leadership is very low. Often that is because we do not seek genuine leadership; instead we turn to false leaders who simply tell us what we want to hear. Heifetz says, “In a crisis, we tend to look for the wrong kind of leadership. We call for someone with answers, decision, strength, and a map of the future, someone who knows where we ought to be going – in short, someone who can make hard problems simple” (2).
Such leaders may temporarily fill us with euphoria, but they do not create any lasting, transformational change in communities. To truly equip a people to adapt to a changing world requires leaders to do six things:
- Get on the Balcony
Adaptive leaders cannot lead from the ground-floor perspective of each and every person; it’s just not possible. Instead, leaders need to climb up onto the balcony to get a broader, bigger vision of what is happening within a system. This birds-eye-view can help leaders to identify systemic issues that need addressing. For example, within a church context, each and every one of us have things that are important to us and ministries that we’d like to see. And all of those values we each hold matter a great deal. But the truth is that we simply cannot do everything. Adaptive leaders try to keep the bigger picture in mind rather than getting distracted by other, competing values.
- Identify the Adaptive Challenge
Once an adaptive leader has gained this big-picture perspective, she can then begin to look for the adaptive challenges facing a community. Heifetz identifies two different kinds of challenges: technical and adaptive. A technical challenge are the things we already know how to do, but just need to do them. Things like organizing visits to see people in the hospital, planning regularly scheduled worship services, and maintaining our financial commitments are technical problems that we can (and do) address. But we also face adaptive challenges; these are challenges in which our behavior does not necessarily match our stated ideals. If a church preached about environmental stewardship yet never recycled, that is an adaptive challenge. If a church desired for young families from their neighborhood to become part of the church, but did not actually know what those young families were seeking in their lives, that is an adaptive challenge. Pointing these out can be painful, which is why the next step is so necessary.
- Regulate Distress
Identifying adaptive challenges will (not might) raise the anxiety within a system. But anxiety is not in and of itself a failure. Often it is the sign that genuine change is possible and that a community’s values are being examined. Leaders must learn how to manage their own anxiety, while also helping the people to regulate what they are feeling. Leaders can do this through active listening rather than ignoring. Leaders cannot avoid conflict (Heifetz says that no genuine change is possible without sabotage!). But if a leader and a community can maintain commitment to one another through the challenge, then genuine change is possible.
- Maintain Disciplined Action
If a leader feels that their job is to make everyone happy, they will never truly bring genuine transformation to a community. Instead, a leader has to be willing to maintain a dogged commitment to a greater vision. It doesn’t mean that leaders are not care about the emotional wellbeing of people; of course, a leader needs to be caring and loving. But caring and loving are not the same things as placating. And the leader must prevent any temporary, emotionally-heightened responses from dominating the agenda of any organization.
- Give the Work Back to the People
Heifetz says that one of the roles of a leader should essentially be to work themselves out of a job. Whenever a leader makes themselves the only provider and maintainer of organizational change, that is setting up a system for failure. One of the members of my doctoral cohort serves as associate pastor at a church in Colorado. She has told us that the senior pastor she works with feels like it is his job to lead and do everything. He has a hard time trusting other and feels like all major decisions need to run through him. Well, she told us that he recently suffered a heart attack and was recovering for two months. She said those two months were miserable because the system had relied on his presence in order to get anything done. A good, adaptive leader is very involved in the community, but never sees their presence as essential for the community to flourish. Instead, the leader seeks to empower the people to do what they may not have thought was possible.
- Protect Leadership Voices from Below
Finally, a leader is always aware of the voices from “below” that are often ignored. Wisdom is often found in the perspective of those who usually are sidelined. This means that the leader needs to be aware of the biases that tend to exist in a community. For example, in many churches male voices tend to be heard more than female ones. Or perhaps the issue is ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, etc. Whatever the issue, an adaptive leader seeks to be aware of those implicit communal biases and try to bring them into the conversation so that a true, full picture of the community’s perspective can be known by all.
One of my professors, Dr. Ken Van Vliet, told us there is a seventh step that all Christian leaders need to follow: Trust in the work of the Holy Spirit. As an adaptive leader, you may not always see results in each immediate moment, but if you foster trust in the slow work of God beneath the soil, you will maintain hope.
Next week, I will tell you about the three pillars of community spiritual formation that our professor, Dr. MaryKate Morse, presented to us.
