Joining God in the NeighborhoodA Resource of Transformed by the Spirit
PASTOR JOURNEY GUIDE
For assistance, please contact… JGiN Pastor Liason: Jeff Savage<[email protected]> JGiN Resource Person: Greg Mamula <[email protected]> TbyS Director: Jeff Woods <[email protected]> TbyS Journey Team Chair: Nikita McCalister <[email protected]>
Table of Contents
Introduction 3
Addressing Defaults 5
The 5 Steps to Joining God in the Neighborhood 7
Assumptions Underlying the 5 Step Process 8
Clergy Learning Communities 10
Overview of the Pastor Learning Process 11
Step 1: Listening 12
Step 2: Discerning 15
Step 3: Exploring 16
Step 4: Reflecting 17
Step 5: Deciding 18
Appendix A – Options for the Role of the Pastor 19
Appendix B – 3 Zone Model 21
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Introduction
What is Joining God in the Neighborhood?
The intention of Joining God in the Neighborhood is to engage congregations on a journey of discernment and experimenting in their communities and neighborhoods. TbyS has also worked with national and regional leaders to test how to address adaptive challenges facing ABCUSA and its Regions. The intention is to take this learning into congregations to address the question: How do we learn fresh ways of being God’s missionary people in our neighborhoods?
The design is intentionally simple: Create in each congregation a number of teams who listen, discern and
explore new avenues of joining with God in their neighborhoods. Reflect on what we learn together from these explorations about being God’s
missionary people in our contexts. Share our learning with the other congregations and the region. The pastors of participating congregations join together to reflect on what
they are discerning and discovering about giving leadership in the processes of missional transformation.
One of the goals is to discover how to form a network of learning relationships between ABCUSA, Regions and congregations for addressing questions of how to join with God in our neighborhoods and communities in mission. To do this we are shaping this experiment around the following questions:
1. As congregations how do we go on a shared journey in discerning what the Spirit is doing ahead of us in our neighborhoods and communities in order to join God in those places?
2. As pastors what are the skills and capacities we need to cultivate and support congregations that take this shared journey?
3. How might a Region (and other ABCUSA partners) support and resource its clergy and congregations in sustaining such a journey?
Notice that this networking experiment has three levels.
1. Congregation Clusters: The congregations act as local action-learning communities across a wide geographical area (from the west to the east coast).
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This creates for us a small distributive system of congregation working around the same question.
2. Congregation Clusters networked Together as a Learning Community: Where possible, we connect the congregations so they are sharing their learning through multiple feedback loops (this is the networked side). The conviction is that in the experimenting of multiple local congregations lies the fundamental wisdom to address the challenges of mission in a changing world.
3. Regions as Learning Communities: Partnering with the identified Regions, TbyS brings them into a co-learning relationship in order to assess how they resource the culture change in which congregations need to engage and determine the kinds of skills, capacities, structures and forms Regions need to develop in order to be effective agencies of mission for and with their congregation.
JGiN is planned as a matrix of interconnected Regional-congregational and pastor learning communities sharing what they’re discovering, discerning and learning. In this way we are testing how ABCUSA might become a distributive learning network.
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Addressing Defaults Limiting Missional Engagement
Many programs of change often fail to address the ways in which the existing defaults of congregational life keep turning them back toward habits and practices that limit discernment and exploration in the profoundly new contexts of our churches. Three of these defaults are:
The “Back to Church Sunday” DefaultMost congregations are driven by the internal questions of how to make their church grow or be more attractive to people. Here the primary energy is focused inward on what is happening inside the congregation. Experiments tend to be directed inward (examples: improve church communication, develop a Welcome Center, design better meetings, create a food pantry, develop better ways for people to get to know one another, plan “Back to Church Sunday” to invite people to a service, develop an alternative worship service etc.).
While important, this focus can be a barrier to discerning what God is doing out ahead and in front of the congregation in its neighborhoods. This resource invites the JGiN team to cross a threshold that leads toward engaging neighbors in the community in acts of receiving hospitality, listening, and discerning to where they might see the Spirit already at work. This redirection can shift the default toward new questions about what it means to be a congregation on mission in a community.
The Service and Help Default The missional journey is a move from doing for to being with and listening to the Spirit. Usually, when congregations think about engaging their communities they operate within the defaults of doing something for their communities and giving help to meet needs (outreach programs, food pantry, giving help etc.). JGiN is about learning how to explore the neighborhood in new ways that are shaped by being with people and entering in as listeners.
While helping and serving are important elements of ministry, they can become defaults that leave the basic culture of a congregation as one of being in control by doing things for others. This control default is a barrier to hearing what God is already up to in the neighborhood. In the rapidly changing contexts of congregations learning to listen and to discern the movements of Spirit in our neighborhoods, leaving behind our baggage and sitting at the table of the other, is the key adaptive shift congregations need to make.
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The Pastoral Leader DefaultMissional innovation calls for more than new programs or different kinds of teaching. It’s about a basic re-orientation of practices and habits. This kind of culture change calls for the involvement from a larger group than the early adopters in a congregation. While this group has an important role to play, culture change occurs when a growing number of the ‘broad middle’ take on new habits, practices, attitudes and values. For this to happen we need a process where people increasingly own their own decisions about the actions and learning they need to do. Cultivating these kinds of ‘bottom-up’ practices is more difficult than it might at fist appear. Irrespective of theological convictions about the role of the ‘laity’ or the ‘priesthood’ of all believers, congregations of all theological persuasions have been habituated to defer to the guidance and direction of clergy.
A simple illustration will show this to be the case. No matter what the role or who may be in the chair, it is generally the case that when a clergy person is in the room that the group will default to that person. This is not a ‘blame-the clergy’ statement but a description of the habits, practices, attitudes and values (culture) that has grown up in Protestant churches of all kinds over a very long period of time. In terms of culture change this creates a huge challenge.
To the extent that an initiative is clergy driven, the congregation, or at least, the broad middle, doesn’t own it. This is why a congregation can thrive under a certain pastor and yet, when he/she leaves it seems to revert to prior habits or seek another clergy person to carry on the work of the previous pastor. One of the ways we describe this is by saying: To the extent that clergy lead culture change there will be no culture change. Clergy have a very important role to play but it can’t be leading a process of culture change from the front. This sounds counter-intuitive and even threatening, but it’s a critical reality of missional transformation. It invites clergy into their own processes of adaptive learning. The purpose of a clergy learning community is to engage these questions regarding the role, skills, and capacities clergy require to effectively participate in missional transformation.
At this point in the process, which of the three defaults listed above do you believe will present the greatest challenge to you as a pastoral leader?
a. The “Back to Church Sunday” Defaultb. The “Service and Help” Defaultc. The “Pastoral Leader” Default:
In order to play a significant role with the JGiN team, but one that does not place the pastor out in front of the team, refer to the options listed in Appendix A.
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The 5 Steps to Joining God in the Neighborhood
The series of steps that follow are designed to address the question: How do we go on a shared journey in discerning what the Spirit is doing ahead of us in our neighborhoods and communities in order to join God in those places? The method is designed as simply and concretely as possible around Luke 10:1-12. It involves taking simple, manageable actions in joining with God in the neighborhood. It sounds simple, but for most congregations involves significant and sometimes difficult adaptive change actions. The process we use is the 5 Step Process, involving a series of action-reflection steps designed to help a congregation to discern how it can join God in its neighborhoods beyond the defaults named above. Each step invites the learning of new practices for joining God in your neighborhoods.
Step 1: Listening • Attending to God and one another through Dwelling in the Word.• Focusing in on our neighborhoods through simple exercises in “walking about”
Step 2: Discerning• Continuing to listen to God and one another through Dwelling in the Word.• Discovering where God is present in our own stories and those of our neighbors.• Beginning to name:
“Where might the Spirit be inviting us into our neighborhoods?” “How might we join the work the Spirit is already engaged in?
Step 3: Exploring• Continuing to listen to God and one another through Dwelling in the Word.• Carrying out simple explorations, reflecting, adjusting, and repeating.
Step 4: Reflecting • Evaluating the explorations:
What did we do? What have we learned? What have we sensed God doing? What worked? What would we change?
Step 5: Deciding• What can we recommend to the congregation?• What new explorations might the congregation launch?
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Assumptions Underlying the 5-Step Process
It’s important to have a shared understanding of the assumptions guiding this journey. Over the coming months you will discuss together these assumptions working with them to address questions of the skills, capacities, attitudes and values critical for pastoral leadership in guiding a congregation on a shared journey of discerning what the Spirit is up to ahead of them in their neighborhoods and communities. These assumptions are:
1. God’s abundance: We are not in a space of privation but rather of God’s great abundance. Listening, discerning, and exploring are core practices for congregations to re-affirm God’s reality among them and in their contexts.
2. God is the primary active agent: To a large extent we have built congregations around human agency – programs, strategies, etc. without a sense that God is the primary actor, not just the “blesser” of what we plan. This is why discernment is a critical practice of missional life – it directs us toward asking what God is doing rather than asking God to bless what we have determined.
3. “Missional” is not primarily about the church. It is not just a matter of shifting
from being internally focused to being externally focused. This false dichotomy reduces the work of the Spirit to technique and tactic. Missional is about all the ways a congregation discerns what God is already doing out ahead of us in and among all the people of a congregation and in our neighborhoods.
4. God’s future is already among God’s people: What this means is that all the clues to being God’s missional people and for how to join with God in your communities are already among the people of a local congregation.
5. Leaders cultivate environments and spaces: The role of leadership is not to form strategies, plans and programs for doing mission but rather for cultivating environments and spaces for the people of God to discern, discover, explore, and embrace the missional imagination of the Spirit among them.
6. Changing the Questions: Leaders invite their congregations to change the questions they’re asking from: “How do we fix our church” and ‘How do we make our church grow” (we call these church questions) to “Where are we being called to join with what God is up to in our neighborhoods?”(We call these God questions).
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7. We are story-shaped people: As God’s people filled with the Spirit we are already shaped by a desire to know and to pay attention to the stories of the people in our neighborhood. We are a story-formed people; we thrive and grow in the midst of stories. Stories are what transform our imaginations. We want to cultivate congregations that rediscover their child-like love for their own stories and those of the people in their neighborhoods.
8. Practices: We’re cultivating new practices of local Christian life that give us fresh insights into God’s work in our local contexts.
9. Clergy don’t lead change – they cultivate the environments for the Spirit’s work: To the extent that clergy lead change there will be no change.
10. Go Small: Whole systems change does not result in the system changing.
11. Culture change involves small steps and little experiments that guide people out of their church-centric imaginations into Luke 10 type of interactions and relationships with people in the neighborhood and community.
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Clergy Learning Communities
Wherever possible, pastors from JGiN congregations are invited to form a Pastor Learning Community. Each learning community engages in a focused process paralleling the work of the congregation. The focus of the pastor learning community is on the question: As pastors, what are the skills and capacities we need to cultivate in order to support congregations that take this shared journey?
Pastors are invited to observe and reflect on the frameworks behind the five steps and the actions being taken by people in the congregation. These two elements are the primary work of each Pastor Learning Community. It is recommended that these communities meet face to face where possible or via video conferencing, approximately once per month. TbyS is providing coaching resources for these learning communities. Jeff Savage, a member of the Journey Team, is functioning as your Pastor Learning Community coach.
The coach provides guidance to the group as it works through each of the five stages. The meetings are generally up to 90 minutes in length and will follow a designed agenda to guide your conversations. Again, the focus of these meetings is to provide you with the opportunity to share your learning, ask questions, and reflect with other pastors whose congregations are part of this process. In this way you are involved in a co-learning process with one another. Along with meeting regularly with other pastors from your Region, there may also be times when pastors from other Regions involved in this learning will share with one another in terms of common learning, observations and discernment.
We know that pastors are under heavy pressure with multiple demands and do not want to add one more layer of busy work. Our hope is that these regular meetings with other clergy in your area can provide a helpful way in which you can reflect and learn about some of the key leadership skills and capacities needed in a new context. Your reflections regarding learning, skills, capacities and leadership issues also will be shared with Regional leadership. This is not about any particular member but the learning you want the Region to know about as it considers its role in missional transformation.
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Overview of the Pastor Learning ProcessCongregation Steps Pastor Resource/Events
Step 1: Listening – 3 months Dwelling in the Word: Listening
to God and one another. Listening in on our
neighborhoods.
Review goals of JGiN Review pastor role Review 5-Steps Prepare for pastor steps
o Read: Joining God…o Read 3-Zone overviewo Complete
questionnaire Neighborhood listening.
1. JGiN Overview2. 5-Step Summary3. 3-Zone Summary4. Read Joining (Al Roxburgh)5. Questionnaire
Monthly pastor learning group
Step 2: Discerning -1-2 Months Continue Dwelling in the Word. Discovering where God is
present in our stories and those of our neighbors.
Naming: “Where might the Spirit be inviting us into our neighborhoods?”
Consider possible explorations
Reflect on Step 1. Reflections on Luke
10/Dwelling & Joining book. 3-Zone model – where would
you locate your congregation at this point in time?
Implications for leadership based on 3-Zone discussions.
Reflections on personal neighborhood listening
Monthly pastor learning groupCross Region pastor feedback
Step 3: Exploring – 6 months
Continue Dwelling in the Word. Simple explorations, reflect,
adjust, and repeat.
Reflect on Step 2 Reflections on Luke
10/Dwelling and Joining book.
Skills, capacities for leadership based on 3-Zone?
Reflect on personal neighborhood listening
Monthly pastor learning groupCross Region pastor feedback
Step 4: Reflecting- 1-2 Months
Evaluate explorations:
Reflect congregation team- work to date in terms of Step 3. What is/isn’t happening?
Reflect on Dwelling and Joining book.
Evaluate skills, capacities for leadership based on 3-Zone.
Evaluations on personal neighborhood listening
Monthly pastor learning groupCross Region pastor feedback
Step 5: Living into a New Future – 1 Month What would we recommend to
the congregation? What new explorations might
the congregations begin?
Reflect on congregation team- work to date in terms of Step 4 and observations of what is/isn’t happening.
Pastor leadership next steps based on 3-Zone.
Next on personal neighborhood listening
Monthly pastor learning groupCross Region pastor feedback
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STEP 1: Listening
The primary goals of Step 1 for pastors are:
1. Getting familiar with the overall purpose of JGiN.
2. Begin to assess the current location of your congregation in terms of the 3-
Zone model (3-ZM located in Appendix B) in order to address questions of
leadership skills and capacities for missional transformation.
3. Learning the frameworks informing the 5-Step process.
4. Engage in your own “Neighborhood Listening” in your neighborhood.
5. Complete the Base Line Questionnaire for one another
Over the next several months a small team(s) of people in your congregation will be working with the Listening stage. In this stage they will be:
1. Attending to God and one another through Dwelling in the Word.
2. Focusing in on your neighborhoods through simple exercises in “walking about.”
During this period you as pastors are invited to listen in on this work in order to reflect together on what you see happening, what is working, and what the implications might be for your leadership. For those engaged in a pastor learning community, you will have three videoconference meetings (approximately one per month) with your coach. The general framework for these meetings follows.
Pastor Meeting #1: Getting familiar with JGiN.
The purpose of this first session is to become familiar with the overall purpose and process of JGiN. Prior to the first meeting:
1. Review the information on pages 1-9 as well as Appendix A.
2. Check out the link to these three introductory videos: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/v7k0x5by34prz71/g_gZTzOu5P
3. Take a moment and write down questions that you have and want to discuss during this first meeting of your Pastor Learning Community.
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During this first session the following topics will be addressed:
1. Review Questions around common understanding of purpose and pastor role
2. Discuss together the ways in which each one, as pastors, will listen and reflect on what is happening in the listening process:
a. How might we ‘listen’ well to what the groups are doing in this stage?
b. What kinds of questions might we ask of people without them feeling defensive or interrogated?
c. What might we say to people as to why we’re not leading this process?
d. What are some ways we can tell ‘stories’ about what is happening to the overall congregation?
e. Which part of the “neighborhood” listening exercises should we take on ourselves so we are participating at this level?
3. Set the date for the next videoconference meeting.
Pastor Meeting #2: Reporting on our Listening and the 3-Zone Model of Assessment
1. Share your responses around the listening questions you developed in the last meeting.
2. Tentatively note any other observations and learning.
3. Tentatively reflect on any initial learning regarding leadership skills and capacities.
4. Begin engaging the 3-Zone Model (Appendix B)
5. Read the Discerning section of the Congregation Field Guide
6. Set a date for your next meeting.
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The 3-Zone Model
This tool helps a pastor assess the ‘readiness’ of their congregation to engage in missional change. We invite you to read the 3-Z Model information in Appendix B so your Pastor Learning Community can discuss it over the coming meetings. The basic questions you are invited to consider are:
1. In which zone would you currently locate your congregation?
2. What are several indicators informing your selection?
3. What do think are some potential implications for the congregation’s involvement in this journey?
4. In terms of the various leadership styles noted in the 3-Z model, what are some of the implications for your own leadership in this congregation at this point in time?
Pastor Meeting #3: Reporting on our Listening
1. Share further responses around the listening questions.
2. Formalize a list of comments around what you have observed in the Listening Step.
3. Is there anything you want to note together regarding earning initial learning around leadership skills and capacities?
4. Have someone take notes on your discussions of 2-3 and give these to the coach.
5. Discuss together your reading of the 3-ZM model overview in Appendix 1
6. Discuss together your understanding of the Discerning step in the Congregation Field Guide.
7. How might you listen to what is happing in this stage? Why kinds of questions might you ask people as they engage in this stage?
8. Set a date for your next meeting.
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STEP 2: Discerning
The primary goals of Step 2 for pastors are:
1. Reflect on Step 1.
2. Continue to reflect on Luke 10/Dwelling.
3. Discuss the Joining book.
4. Locate your congregation’s current location in the 3-Z Model.
5. Discuss the implications for leadership based on 3-Zone discussions.
6. Reflect on personal neighborhood listening.
Over the next several months a small team(s) of people in your congregation will be working with the discerning stage. In this stage they will be:
1. Continue listening to God and one another through Dwelling in the Word.
2. Discovering where God is present in our own stories and those of our neighbors.
3. Begin to name: a. “Where might the Spirit be inviting us into our neighborhoods?”b. “How might we join the work in which the Spirit is already engaged?”
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STEP 3: Exploring
The primary goals of Step 3 for pastors are:
1. Reflect on Step 2.
2. Reflect on Luke 10/Dwelling and Joining book.
3. Assess the skills and capacities needed for leadership based on the 3-Zone.
4. Reflect on personal neighborhood listening.
Over the next several months a small team(s) of people in your congregation will be working with the Listening stage. In this stage they will be:
1. Continue listening to God and one another through Dwelling in the Word.
2. Create some new ways of interacting with your neighborhood, reflect on the process, adjust, and repeat.
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STEP 4: Reflecting
The primary goals of Step 4 for pastors are:
1. Reflect on Step 3 and what has happened work to date.
2. Reflect on Luke 10/Dwelling and Joining book.
3. Assess the skills and capacities needed for leadership based on the 3-Zone.
4. Reflect and evaluate the personal neighborhood listening.
Over the next several months a small team(s) of people in your congregation will be working with the reflecting stage. In this stage they will be:
1. Evaluating their activity by asking:a) What did we do?b) What have we learned?c) What have we sensed God doing?d) What worked?e) What would we change?
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STEP 5: Deciding
The primary goals of Step 5 for pastors are:
1. Reflect on the congregation team’s work to date in terms of Step 4 and observations of what is/isn’t happening.
2. Discuss leadership next steps based on 3-Zone.
3. Discuss next steps in personal neighborhood listening.
Over the next several months a small team(s) of people in your congregation will be working with the Listening stage. In this stage they will be:
1. Deciding what to recommend to the congregation.
2. Deciding further ways to join God in our neighborhood.
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Appendix A – Options for the Role of the Pastor
While every team will designate a “journey guide” to guide them through the five steps, the pastor will also play a key role in the development and progress of the Joining God in the Neighborhood team. It is important for pastors to connect with the work of the Team, but not all congregations and certainly not all pastors are alike. Previous groups that have engaged this material have demonstrated that there is a fine line between playing too strong of a role as pastor, which can limit the growth and learnings of the team; and playing too minimal of a role, which can cause the work of the team to suffer from a lack of encouragement and connection to the wider body. In most circumstances, the pastor and journey guide will work in concert to assist the team on its journey. Only in rare circumstances should the pastor serve as the journey guide for the team.
Listed below are four possible roles that a pastor might fulfill in order to work in concert with the journey guide in developing the team. Pastors may select one of the roles below or create a hybrid role from the possibilities detailed below. If you need further assistance discerning and defining this role, contact your region office or a member of the Transformed by the Spirit Journey Team and Staff.
Option One – Team Chaplain
One option is for the pastor to serve as a chaplain for the Joining God in the Neighborhood team. Pastors engaging in this role might lead the Dwelling in the Word exercises for the group, ensure that others are praying for the team, and offer prophetic and pastoral comments to the group as needed.
Option Two – Team Confidant
A second option might be for the pastor to play the role of confidant with the team and especially with the team’s Journey Guide. It can be extremely beneficial for the Journey Guide to have someone to bounce ideas with, explore potential activities, receive candid feedback, and feel the support of another person. Pastors engaging in this role might schedule regular meetings with the Journey Guide to serve as a support person and sounding board.
Option Three – Team Communicator/Connector
Another option might be for the pastor to serve as the link between the team and the congregation. Pastors engaging in this role might provide regular updates of the team’s work and help interpret their purpose and activities to the wider congregation. This role may be especially helpful if multiple groups are working through the listening activities in step one.
Option Four – Team Logistician
A fourth option is for the pastor to provide logistics for the group. Some pastors may wish to exercise their gift of administration or organizing with the team to ensure that the group stays on track and has what they need to progress on their journey. Pastors engaging in this role might ensure that reminders are sent, members are informed, church calendars are highlighted, etc.
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APPENDIX B - The 3-Zone Model
The 3-Zone Life CycleDiagnosing Your Organization and its Leadership Needs
By Al Roxburgh
Three Zone Model (3-ZM)
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3-ZM - Background3-ZM is a tool for understanding and interpreting the challenges facing churches and their leaders. It provides a dynamic process for addressing the complex demands of change in the organizational cultures of churches and the systems that serve them. With 3-ZM you can:
1. Map your churches relative to their readiness for change.2. Diagnose the challenges confronting congregations.3. Identify the leader role and skills currently needed in a congregation.4. Discern the challenges for executive leaders serving these churches5. Determine the actions required from congregations, leaders and executives.
The challenges in front of church systems were hatched in the early part of the last century. They’re the culmination of massive cultural shifts re-shaping Western societies and their relationships to the systems of life embodied in denominations. During the first half of the 20th century, denominational systems in North America grew rapidly through immigration and high birth rates. They developed their current denominational cultures (ex., church styles and leadership roles) during that period which was a relatively stable time. They formed organizational cultures that copied, or paralleled, the normative forms of organizational life in the larger culture. Further, they came to assume these structures were normative rather than contextual expressions of their time. Throughout the last century, right up to the present, denominations developed systems of branding, schooling, credentialing, and organizational structures that produced brand-name leaders with capacities to perform well the expected roles of a pastor or denominational executive within this stable, predictable environment. Beginning in the later part of the 60s and accelerating through the 70s and 80s, North American society entered a destabilizing period of massive culture change. By the beginning of the new millennium that stable, predictable culture that characterized the first half of the 20th century was gone. By and large, while there was a lot of conversation about these changes across the churches, the internal organizational and cultural systems of the congregations, denominational systems and leaders remained largely as they were. The result is that there are now multiple generations of leaders at national, regional and local levels of the church with little experience in, or ability to, understand what happens when organizational cultures are disrupted out of a relatively symbiotic relationship with their surrounding environments (cultures) and thrust into a world of discontinuous change.
3-ZM is a tool for engaging the challenges of discontinuous change.
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To better understand the 3-ZM it’s helpful to summarize the five stages an organization has to move through when confronted with discontinuous change.
The Five Phases of Change
In discontinuous change it’s possible to identify five phases of movement. These phases can occur in a very brief periods of time within a single organization or in longer periods of history that move through an entire culture. The phases are:
1) Stability
2) Discontinuity
3) Disembedding
4) Transition
5) Re-formation
These are illustrated here as a figure-eight cycle:
This irregular rotating cycle shows that the change process is never linear. It’s a continuous cycling in and out of periods of stability and transition. Whether in our personal, organizational, or cultural worlds, we are continually moving in and out of such phases.
1. Stability/Equilibrium
Equilibrium is...
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... in some time frames (i.e., short), equilibrium can be a desirable condition. But over long intervals of time and on very large scales, equilibrium becomes hazardous. Why? Because the environment in which an organism (or organization) lives is always changing. At times, it is turbulent. Prolonged equilibrium dulls an organism’s senses and saps its ability to arouse itself appropriately in the face of danger.1
Organizational systems seek to maintain stability. A normal response to change is the need to control the environment so that everything returns to established patterns and routines (equilibrium). Further, there is a default mechanism in most organizational systems to manage change within established set of patterns and practices. Change is acceptable when it is manageable and within predictable frameworks. Discontinuous change can’t be managed in this way and, by definition, disrupts established frameworks.
In periods of stability and continuity, the organization and its leader’s roles are predictable. Routines communicate continuity within well-tested practices that enable the organization to operate with long established values and habits. Assumed traditions and established rituals guide the organization. These are taken for granted as being the way that the world, in fact, works. We read the world through the lenses of our organizational patterns and traditions. Current practices result in expected outcomes linked to past expectations. Organizations and leadership roles aren’t static in a period of stability. Traditions and performative skills continually reinvent themselves. Generations are trained in the accumulated practices and wisdom of the tradition. The past is assimilated into the present. Change occurs within the tradition because it is continuous and predictable.
This phase is characterized by evolutionary and developmental change. Evolutionary change is gradual and incremental in response to the exterior culture’s own shifts in style and methods. Over a long period such small changes can add up to significant change. For example, Luther brought the organ into the church because it was the instrument university students used in the beer halls to sing their songs. To communicate the Gospel to students he brought their instrument into the church and used their music to write hymns. In response to something that was popular in the outside culture and did not violate the interior values of the church, evolutionary change occurred. Bit by bit, the organ evolved from an instrument of the pubs to one of High-Church culture. This is much like our introduction of the bass guitar and drums into white, middle class congregations in our time or the
1 Richard Pascale, Mark Milleman, and Linda Gioja, Surfing the Edge of Chaos (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000), 21.
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displacement of hymnbooks for Power Points.
Developmental change is about improvements to already existing systems and practices. Things grow and change due to internal, not external demands. To use a family as an example: children grow, bedtimes change, conversation around the table takes on different forms, and children assume new roles with new privileges and responsibilities as they grow older. All this is an assumed part development of a family or organization.
The Role of a Leader in Stability: This phase can last a long time. Heifetz and Linsky write that in times of extended stability the basic skills and capacities of leadership are technical—based upon current know-how passed on by those before them. Leadership is based on things like authority, position, the hierarchy of the organization or degrees and professional credentialing.2 The forms of life in most of our congregations were established in this environment of clear, technical, performative leadership. They were rewarded for performing well their expected roles. For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, little external stress challenged this way of life. Its assumptions formed the basis of denominational recruitment and seminary education.
The basic character of leadership during this time was management of the established organization and performance of well-established roles. High value, reward, and recognition rested on those who understood, represented, and augmented the traditions, values, and symbols of the organization. Those who questioned these values and traditions were pushed to the edges where they couldn’t disrupt the equilibrium. When discontinuous change becomes the norm there is a sense of disorientation and disarray. For leaders this discontinuity is like walking into a room of nuts and bolts with only a screwdriver. The tools no longer fit the environment. Discontinuity is the second phase.
2. Discontinuity
Stability doesn’t last forever. Patterns of change slowly emerge that profoundly alter the established equilibrium. This is like the period in a family when children enter adolescence: they search for their own identity, challenging assumed values and beliefs. Parents feel disoriented; existing habits no longer address the changed realities before them.
2 Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading (Harvard: Harvard Business School Press, 2002), 14.
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Congregations and denominational systems entered this phase in the last quarter of the twentieth century as powerful, amorphous forms of change pushed against accepted traditions and institutional structures. As the churches seemed to be doing well, a growing restlessness was challenging the fixedness of traditional forms and accepted roles. This tension continues. Within congregations and across denominations is huge flux around styles, programs, and values. Through the social media, books, and conferences growing numbers search for alternative forms of church life. The Role of a Leader in the Discontinuity Phase: A large percentage of church leaders are challenged in terms of how to negotiate this context of discontinuity. They continue to struggle with coming to terms with performative practices and values that are less and less helpful in a context of discontinuity. Stress levels increase as some struggle to mediate changing relationships, others fight to maintain traditions, and still others try to pull everything apart to start from scratch. In this phase leadership tends to remain based in management, performance of established roles, and technical skills. There is little understanding of the dynamics of the discontinuous changes rattling the system. Emphasis is on improving or augmenting what has worked before. The focus is largely focused on fixing the internal mechanisms and programs of the systems with little sense that the fundamental questions have to change. Basic assumptions about congregations and how they operate are not questioned. Huge amounts of energy are expended in trying to adjust or reform or fix existing frameworks. While the need for flexibility is recognized, the overriding belief is that current methods of dealing with change and conflict can still work in terms of recalibrating the internal life of the system to make it more effective. The leader’s comfort zone is in performing the expected roles and applying the technical skills in which he/she was trained. As a result, leaders run faster and working harder while falling further behind the curve of change. They grow tired and discouraged, but don’t know what else to do. The basic dilemma is that leaders have come to understand the realities of discontinuous change but don’t have the frameworks or skills to know how to address it, therefore, they work harder at the skills they know.
Unable to imagine a future different from managing developmental changes, the tendency is to negotiate relationships back to stability. The dynamics of change are now moving at such a rate that performative leadership is insufficient. Managing the challenges sweeping over denominations and congregations from the perspective of tradition and stability marginalizes the capacity to lead an organization. Yet, in this phase, the basic leadership orientation remains directed toward the maintenance of
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tradition. The result is that leaders and their organizations experience growing levels of stress and confusion as role-performance and technical forms of management become less and less congruent with the realities.
3. Disembedding
As discontinuity increases the performative leadership so crucial in the stability phase can no longer function as the glue to hold the system together. Internal and external pressures are too great to maintain and manage what-has-been. At this point stress is everywhere—relationships are strained, and the system begins to fracture. Forming new networks, congregations no longer look to the denominational relationships for expertise and advice. Congregations are disembedding themselves from former relationships within denominational systems and the leader of these systems find themselves little time to reflect on what it all might mean in terms of key change issues. At this point, the role of leadership can become reactive in nature.Power struggles emerge as congregations/denominations lose significant amounts of their financial base. Conflict and blame-shifting are common. The process of disembedding involves the uprooting of deeply connected relationships, beliefs, practices, and values. It is very stressful; but necessary. This disembedding is not just about change at the local level, it is deeply cultural. The churches of the Euro-tribal/European reformations traditions have been disembedded from their long-established place of domain at the center of culture. When traditional relationships disconnect, when habits and ways of operating change, when all kinds of new experiments emerge and once cohesive groups tribalize around issues, an entire way of being the church is in an advanced state of erosion.
The Role of a Leader in the Disembedding Phase: In this third phase, leadership—as manager, counselor, or the chaplain of role-performance and technical skills—cannot enable a meaningful engagement with the new context. A different kind of response is required. This presents a huge challenge for leaders caught in change they never anticipated. Leaders require adaptive skills to assist their systems in creating new internal, institutional cultures. In discontinuity and disembedding, changes keep coming like a long series of quakes and aftershocks. The expectation is that they will eventually settle down, or go away, and a stable period will return. Thus, the basic orientation of leaders is to struggle through until the system returns to balance. Yet this will not happen. The shocks and quakes will keep coming—there will be no end to the surprises.
4. Transition
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This is the most difficult phase. Stability, predictability, and control within a former world are gone. Traditional frameworks of church and its leadership are now disembedded from the culture. Perceptions of how things ought to work have less and less correlation with what is, in fact, happening. Contrary to expectation, the churning of change has not led to a new period of stability. There is little clarity about what is happening or what to do.This phase is about the realities of a loss of road signs and mile markers. The natural instincts are still to find places of stability and equilibrium, but they aren’t to be found. The need for control and predictability still assert themselves. Oddly enough, congregations promising a return to stability thrive. People are looking for stability, so when churches promise it, people flock to them like moths to a flame. The promise seems validated because certain types of congregations do thrive (generally homogeneous, middle-class, and suburban). Other leaders see this as a sign of hope and copy their tactics. Doing so pushes them farther from embracing the transition around them and honestly addressing its demands.Like the shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe, the first thing we do is try to build a boat to try to get back to life that was lost. Crusoe used what had worked before the island, but soon learned that he had to discover new skills to function in the radically new place. The church in North America is in this same position. At the beginning of this phase, the stress created by the loss of control over one’s environment is high. In contrast, however, this is a time of opportunity. The potential for something new to emerge is great. This is where most congregations and denominations find themselves today. While stressful, it is also the phase that must be lived in if to discover God’s future.
5. Re-making
Re-making happens the church reinvents itself through the processes of discontinuity, disembedding, and transition. The figure-eight diagram shows that movement isn’t linear, neat or tidy.
In summary we would note these principles of change:
1) Change at a particular moment must be understood as part of the phases, not in isolation.
2) In the stable phase, the primary skills are technical involving the management and performance of received or inherited traditions and frameworks. Classical pastoral training is shaped by this period. In this phase change is evolutionary and developmental.
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3) Beyond the first phase something more than management is required. Adaptive leadership must become primary rather than focusing on technical, role-performance, and management skills.
4) Leadership will require living in the midst of the tension between reentering our stories and traditions and experimenting in ways that discern the emergent forms of God’s activity.
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3-ZM - Overview
The 3-ZM models is a tool for doing this re-making. It assists leaders to a) locate their organizations and congregations in an overall flow of complex change, and b) give a common language to what is happening. This naming of where we are is critical to moving forward on this journey of discerning what God is up to ahead of us in our contexts.
The simplicity of the 3-ZM is its design. First, its figure 8 movement suggests that
there is a process that any group needs to move through in the midst of disruptive
change which can’t be short-circuited. Second, it suggests that in each zone differing
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kinds of leadership skills become primary. Third, it provides a simple, non-technical
way for people to talk about their organization and its location by using three
colored zones:
1. Green Zone
2. Blue Zone
3. Red Zone.
Each color represents a specific type of organizational culture that has a specific set of characteristics and organizational culture. Each zone requires differing forms of leadership. Organizations operate across all three zones at various times in their life. Knowing where your organization is located at the present time is the first step in understanding the kinds of challenges you need to address and the kind of leadership you need to give. It is, however, not a simple, linear process. The first step is to understand the characteristics of each Zone.
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Characteristics of the Zones
1. Green Zone - Innovation & Creativity
GREEN ZONE
Upper Green Zone
Lower Green Zone
The green symbolizes creativity. New forms of life are being imagined and birthed. The Green Zone represents an organizational culture operating with maximum creativity in relation to its environment. There are two sections.
Upper Green Zone – Pioneering Organization: The organization is being formed or creating enough adaptive change for itself that it is learning to apply emergent practices. Emergence is how organisms adapt to changing environments. Rather than using top-down, pre-determined, well planned strategies, Green Zone, emergent organizations develop creativity from the bottom up. Groups of people, who individually don’t know how to address a complex challenge, are learning together how to form action experiments to address these challenges. They discover that the answers to their challenges tend to emerge from the bottom up rather than get planned from the top down. Pascale, Millman and Gioja describe emergence this way:
Self-organization and emergence are two sides of the same coin... Self-organization is the tendency of certain (but not all) systems ... to shift to a new state...assemble themselves into a new order…Simple patterns networked together undergo a metamorphosis…Emergence is the outcome of all this: a new state or condition...3
This is the period of maximum creativity and experimentation in an organization. A majority of actions shaping its culture are emergent. It is a pioneering organization. In this period it is impossible to predict its future or control outcomes. While shaped
3 Pascale, Millman, Gioja Surfing the Edge of Chaos (New York: Random House, 2001), 113-114.
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by engagement with Scripture the actual forms of a group’s life can’t be pre-determined. This is the arena of learning as one goes because a group knows it hasn’t faced these kinds of challenges before.
Emergent leadership creates a permission-giving, experimenting and risk-taking environments. They involve the creative energy and imagination of the people through:
Continual interaction with the dynamic of the biblical narrative Repeated engagement with the lived tradition of the community Continued experiments in connecting in the local context to listen and
discern rather than ‘meet needs’ and ‘help’ people (power over and control of situations).
Leadership is about the cultivation of environments within which the missional imagination of the people of God might emerge.
Lower Section - Experimenting Organization: As people gradually learn, in an environment of trial and error, to risk and experiment, the outlines of its missional life come into focus requiring some form and order. The organization, or group, is still fluid; it is still shaping its identity by focusing on engagements with its context in processes of discernment and experimentation. The primary energy of the group continues to be directed into its context in these forms of experimenting and learning. The group is adapting itself in terms of what it is discerning rather than focusing on getting others to join its established ways of life. As it does this it embeds new learning into its ways of doing things (its organizational culture). The result is a whole new, creative, robust interface with the communities around about, as local people become part of the community.
Experimenting leadership capacities in this period involve developing rhythms and structures that maintain a continual engagement with the context without losing focus on the need to form internal systems that disciple those who are joining. It’s critical for leaders to continue cultivating spaces for discernment and testing while keeping people from the defaults of turning the primary energy back to programs of meeting needs and helping. The critical ethos of a Green Zone organization is its capacity to listen with the other while not turning people into the objects of their goals, programs and sales.
Green Zone Characteristics
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1. They begin as loose coalitions drawn by the pursuit of an elusive dream that seemed out of reach. Leaders have a compelling conviction they had to begin something; something they must pursue. The vision taking form in their imagination is unclear and can’t be put into a clear mission statement.
2. They form a focused sense among people that they’re called together to accomplish something.
3. High levels of social interaction. They’re continually involved in each other’s lives. They have to be together to test new ideas because none of them have been here before. They don’t know the next steps so they need each other to figure out what to do. Communication is face-to-face because they continually face new challenges requiring just-in-time actions, challenges that won’t wait until the regularly scheduled meeting.
4. Organizational life is informal, almost ad hoc at the beginning. There’s no
constitution or handbook. You make up the handbook as you go.
5. People are generalists in terms of the challenges to be addressed learning through trial and error. They don’t put a negative value on failure but create a culture which values and permits risk as they experiment around the edges.
6. Interaction with environment keeps them learning through discernment, experiment, trial and error.
7. Absence of hierarchies.
8. Excel in ambiguous environments with no clear answers.
9. They learn to continually adapt. Challenge/crisis are not perceived as crisis; they embrace them because they are internalizing adaptive skills.
10. Strategy is not linear but emerges as they learn to be opportunistic rather than deliberative.
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2. Blue Zone - Performative Organization
A Blue Zone organizational has identified, internalized and routinized actions, habits, skills and capacities to effectively perform well in a given, stable environment.
BLUE ZONE
Upper Blue Zone
Upper Blue Zone - Performative Organization: Blue symbolizes organizations that have performed with solid, predictable success over a long period of time. IBM used this color to communicate solid, ongoing, dependable success. Banks used it to convey the same set of values. These are institutions that have been around for a long time; they are to be trusted to continue over the long term with the same sets of principles and values. They are predictable and dependable; they function within a clearly understood and accepted set of frameworks.
The organization has successfully developed the systems, ethos, and predictable patterns of skills and actions that enable it to be successful in its context. The primary values of a performative organization are no longer shaped by a continual expectation of innovation. Rather, received, performative skills are reward. The source of growth is not from reaching new people but people switching from other churches.
Performative organizations require predictable, stable environments. They attract people wanting stability not change. They are excellent at the kind of tactical change that improves their performance (better worship or preaching or small group life; outreach programs) but resist significant change away from established habits.
In the last decades of the 20th century the underlying elements of predictability and stability in the wider culture were radically de-stabilized by forces of rapid, discontinuous change. The result is church systems and leaders ill prepared for a world no longer functioning on the basis of established performative skills.
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Summary of Upper Blue Zone characteristics:
1. Organizational culture moved from loose confederacy to structured corporate organization with clear lines of function, roles and expectations.
2. Large-scale planning replaced ‘just-in-time’ learning. Planning and organization moves from center to periphery.
3. Specialization of roles and programs. Professional and credentialed leaders with
specialized training staff and lead. 4. Focus is on ability to perform requisite skills of running the organization to meet
needs of people in the system. The system is defined by set roles; people are chosen for their abilities to perform within these roles.
5. Hierarchies displace loose associations. Constitutions and manuals regulate roles and operations.
6. Knowledge has shifted from what is learned through processes of action learning experiments and practices of discernment to that of experts and positional power.
7. Loss of overall, shared vision. Few can articulate the vision that formed the congregation. People’s focus is on programs and how their needs are met.
8. High social interaction is replaced by formal groups and meetings. Communication has undergone a profound transformation. It is now formalized, taking place mostly through newsletters and information pieces from the top down. It is no longer just-in-time information about critical tasks but one-way information from committees and staff wanting people involved in their programs and events. It is believed the sharing of information in bulletins, newsletters or Sunday announcements is communication.
9. Rationalized replaces emergent planning. Planning is based on the predictability of past results and an assumption that the future will develop in much the same ways things have progressed to this point. Imagination and planning are about how the present is continued into the future.
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Such Blue Zone performative characteristics work well in periods of stability and continuity. They are less and less helpful in contexts of high discontinuity. In the 20th
century congregations and denominations established themselves as upper Blue Zone organizations. Leaders were recruited and trained to perform set skills and activities in this organizational culture. Future actions were based on the immediate past. When these organizations encounter growing levels of discontinuity a certain set of responses follow. Blue Zone organizations that try to address discontinuous change with established performative practices will be confronted with the Red Zone. To understand what happens to performative leaders and organization when their blue zone world is disrupted we need to describe what happens in the Red Zone.
3. Red Zone - Reactive Organization
RED ZONE
Upper Red Zone
Lower Red Zone
Today, many churches and denominational systems find themselves in the Red Zone. They are moving rapidly through massive, discontinuous change so that Blue Zone, performative practices can no longer navigating this environment. The challenge is that most churches continue trying to make Blue Zone, performative practices and leadership skills work. Congregations, denominations and training schools have yet to demonstrate capacity to form leader able to address this adaptive context.
At the interface between the end of a Blue Zone and a Red Zone world, certain things start to happen:• Increasing anxiety around the need to find a way of fixing the organization.• Erosion of the financial base.• Cutbacks in personnel and budgets.• More demands placed on fewer people. • Productivity declines, stress grows.
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• An increasing amount of time, energy and personnel spent dealing with dysfunctions and crisis with little time or energy to attend to creativity.
• Siloing across the organization.• People seek places, people, issues where the blame can be laid.
The first characteristic of Red Zone activity is called Reactive. When congregations, denominations or leaders are confronted by the shift from Blue Zone, performative into Red Zone discontinuity their initial response is reactive. They will work harder, for longer hours, with fewer resources and an endless round of new programs or redevelopment strategies using all the established Blue Zone skills, habits and capacities. There is little imagination of alternatives. But working harder with the same tools, attitudes and values does not address the leadership challenges of the Red Zone.
A critical element of the Red Zone to remember is that it is not only a place where the former Blue Zone practices and ethos are unraveling. It is also one of the most important places where a new imagination and fresh creativity can emerge. In the Biblical imagination desert, exodus, captivity are all places of both disorientation and re-orientation to potential new ways of being God’s people. This means the Red Zone, while difficult and unsettling is also the gift of the Spirit in discerning fresh expressions of life for congregations and denominations. The challenge for leadership is in learning how to navigate the Red Zone in order to effectively enter a time of discernment and experimenting. The Red Zone is a preparatory zone with the potential of disintegration and re-engagement of mission.
The Red Zone has two distinct parts. The upper Red Zone tends to be characterized by churches and denominations confronting the new reality with the reactive behaviors outlined above. This is normal and inevitable. It can last a brief length of time or continue to a longer period in which the church or denomination loses the confidence of its leaders and moves toward disintegration. At some point on this journey a crisis is reached in which it becomes clear that all the reactive steps of trying to fix the church or denomination (restructuring, developing major mission initiatives, introducing new programs, raising new funds to cover operating costs etc.) are seen to have failed and there is an overriding sense that people don’t know what to do next. It is at this juncture that it becomes possible to enter the Lower Red Zone. The crisis doesn’t go away but the ground is set to move in a different direction. This will, naturally, be a time of confusion that requires leaders to learn the skills of bridging from Blue Zone practices to learning the skills of travelling in a place where people are going to learn new, adaptive skills, habits and practices much like God’s people on the journey from Egypt to the new land.
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A: Upper Red Zone: The Reactive Organization/Leadership
Characteristics:
1. React and Return
In the 1970s computers rapidly entered our lives. Newspapers discovered they could set print on a computer by-passing the need for typesetters. We now take this for granted; it has become a common, performative activity. But forty years ago it was revolutionary and disruptive. Printing had been the privileged domain of typesetters, a craft that had existed for hundreds of years. It was an established Blue Zone performative skill and its practitioners assumed it would go on forever. Then, in a moment, what began with Gutenberg was overturned. A vocational was erased. The typesetter’s response was Red Zone reactive. They demand contractual agreements guaranteeing their positions. They staged strikes in an effort to force the newspapers to stop using computers. But the pace of technological change was too rapid. In less than a decade typesetters were extinct. Few saw this disruptive
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change coming! When a Blue Zone organization suddenly faces the Red Zone (it always feels sudden and unexpected) leaders react, seeking to enforce their Blue Zone practices, habits, attitudes and values. The implicit assumption is that such actions will return the system to its previous cultural values within which they had functioned.
2. Keep Applying Blue Zone Tactics to Red Zone Challenges
A Blue Zone organizational culture rewards those best at performing its expected roles. People ascend the leadership ladder because they’re good performative leaders. Usually, they have no other frameworks out of which to operate except high level performative skills. The Red Zone, therefore, is a place of confusion where they have little control. The existent measures of success and their attendant practices are the tools used to try and wrestle the organization back to stability. In one denomination most of its congregations lost faith in its ability address this crisis of disruptive change. When the executive initiated a capital campaign to pay down debt and repair buildings (performative solutions to discontinuous change) a majority of congregations passively refused their support. The executive constructed a letter, which wiser heads advised him not to send, stating that in the future congregations that failed to participate would be refused grant loans or loan guarantees for any building projects. The Red Zone is about the reactive use of regulation to wrestle back control of an organization. It’s the equivalent of Israel demanding return from the frightening desert to Egypt.
At this point in the Red Zone there is little capacity to see what is happening. The forces creating a Red Zone context have been developing for some time out of sight because they’re not expected and, therefore, not looked for. The onset of the Red Zone, therefore, seems be without warning. Leaders don’t know what to do except work harder at Blue Zone, performative skills. That route is no longer an option. The powerful defaults of past habits and frameworks continue to determine current responses to crisis.
B: Crisis
At some point people begin to sense that these performative responses, no matter how well intentioned, aren’t returning the system to success. A dawning recognition that all the performative, regulatory actions that have been taken, all the programs, resources and money spent are making no difference to a deteriorating organizational system and nobody knows what else to do. This recognition is usually precipitated by crises of various kinds but more often than not it's the reality of financial crisis that precipitates this moment.
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A mid-level judicatory invited us to meet with them to evaluate their critical Red Zone state. The executive and board described what they called the proactive steps they’d taken to address a financial crisis. They were classic Blue Zone responses:
• Application of new regulations requiring each congregation to increase its per capita giving.
• A new fund drive asking people to give ‘sacrificially’ to the church or denomination.
• Amalgamation of marginal congregations and selling off excess properties to pay down the debt (this can actually prolong the Upper Red Zone because now there appears to be sufficient funds to carry on with more strategies, programs, vision statements and overarching methods of fixing the system.
• Covering a growing yearly deficit from legacy funds.• Creating a new set of ‘dashboards’ requiring every congregation to report
monthly on such things as attendance and baptism etc.
Three and half years later the financial crisis had returned, churches had not grown and decline was accelerating. These actions had not addressed the deeper issue of transforming the judicatory’s culture amidst rapid discontinuity.
A point of crisis expresses itself in varied ways:
Heightened anxiety in congregations. Anger with and blame of leaders for their inability to change the situation. Staff retreat into silos to protect themselves from dwindling budgets. Subtle power and political struggles emerge as people fight over control of
policy, staff and finances. The system becomes Balkanize around secondary issues that only deepen the
crisis. Battles lines form around issues other than those that are focal to the organization’s life. People take sides, demonizing each other over secondary issues clouding the system’s ability to address the real crisis.
Constitutions, covenants, books of order and operations manuals are used to assert control.
Theological distinctives are emphasized as if getting people to believe in clearer ways will turn the tide.
People emotionally/physically opt out of the organization’s life. Congregational leaders create their own networks and sub-organizations.
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The number of people leaving the denomination increases (usually this is noted in terms of younger generations leaving but the reality is that its people all across the age demographic).
It is at this point that leaders need to develop the skills, habits and practices of forming a new imagination for adaptive change – the beginning of the Lower Red Zone.
C: Lower Section: The Confused OrganizationOne generalized result of applying existing performative skills and defaults to the point of Crisis is a period of confusion. An executive responsible for over 180 congregations described how she had worked hard as a pastor to bring transformation to her congregation. She had been successful in adding people to church rolls but, at the same time, recognized this was not the substantive, needed missional transformation. She could increase membership, organize efficiencies and manage programs but didn’t know how to cultivate the transformations she believed essential to a gospel engagement with the communities around her.
Because of her success as a pastor she was invited into an executive position in the denomination. Five years into the job she was discouraged and confused. Her days were occupied with congregational and pastoral crisis. A fractious church culture in which she was barely treading water was wearing her out. She was confused and no longer knew what to do. Something far more fundamental was required but she’d exhausted her energy addressing the crisis. It was a crisis of leadership she felt deep within herself. Her words, spoken quietly when other executives weren't in the room, were painful: “When I finish with this job in a few years I don’t think I’ll ever go back to a church again!”
Challenges for leaders
1. Recognize that the Red Zone can’t be addressed by Blue Zone methods or assumptions.
How does the leader adapt his/her own roles and expectation? How does he/she create an environment for significant culture change across the churches and their leaders?
2. At the same time it is critical to identify some key elements of stability in order to invite people into learning some initial adaptive actions.
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If people experience the organization as controlled primarily by crisis, or by leaders stating they don’t know what to do and don’t know where they are going, people will not be ready to risk substantive change. Determining the places where performative stability is essential and doing an excellent job in these areas is an essential step to creating a context for testing and experimenting with some initial new actions.
3. Avoid Large Systems Change projects - begin with small experiments:
Avoid addressing the crisis with large-scale change projects and strategies. These will inevitably end in failure and spend down hope.
The work of leadership in the Lower Red Zone is to address these challenges in preparation for entering the Lower Blue Zone
Lower Blue Zone – Transitional Organization:
The Lower Blue Zone is the space of transition where the possibility of discerning new ways of thriving is possible. There are, however, still multiple tensions to be navigated.
As the context in which the church is located moves into an extended period of discontinuous change the existing organizational culture finds itself increasingly unable to operate with the success it once had. It has been shifted into a new kind of environment but is still directed by the memory and habits of their once successful performative culture. The organization senses significant change in the environment but has not yet learned how to the process their new location. They are in a transition zone. People are both grieving their loss and becoming open to something else.
In this transition period leaders need to focus on the traditions, symbols, experiences and narratives that helpfully communicate a place of stability in the reality of God’s story. This is a different form of stability from that of the Upper Blue Zone where stability meant continuing as they always have based on the conviction that the future would be more or less like the past. In the lower Blue Zone that sense of stability is extinguished. In order to create some simple, initial Green Zone type of experiences people must first experience some elements of stability. Creative experimenting requires regularity and stability. The Lower Blue Zone is about cultivating this stability in order to introduce space for experimentation and risk.
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In this part of the journey the leader addresses an organizational culture not yet ready to engage to any extent in the creative, emergent behaviors of the Green Zone. It’s the direction they need to go in but people need to be prepared. The leader’s role is to cultivate the environment in which this journey may take place. At this point people don’t know how to go about this kind of change; they’re still working through their issues of loss, confusion and anger; they time to listen to one another, to God and to their context in order to discern and evaluate their current reality then test some simple, new ways of being the church. This takes time. It involves more than a new tactic or program.
This is the zone in which the 5-Step Process is most effective when introduced but the leader needs to develop for themselves a solid understanding of what we have called The Missional Change Process.
Transitional Leadership:
Has determined the effective places in which to locate their time and energies relative to managing the expected and existing roles the congregation deems as important for its life.
Based on the Missional Change Process and the 5-Step guide is creating some initial learning community experiences in the congregation where the focus of these learning communities is the Joining God in the Neighborhood.
Sees that all such learning community experiences are carried out in an action-reflection context and communicates that there is no plan or intentionality to change existing programs or structures.
Functions as an interpreter of the communities’ tradition so that people can make the links from current practice to the new imagination being tested in the learning communities.
Continuously provides theological framing of this work in ways that particularly focus on seeing God as the primary agent in the congregation’s life along with discernment and experimentation being the major practices.
Knows how to invite the congregation into continuous, non-threatening reflection on what is happening in the learning community experiences and experiments.
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