Pastoral Transition-Lifting the Veil of Secrecy

Organizations in all walks of life openly plan for leadership transition. The Church is unique in the veil of secrecy that we draw around pastoral transition. We don’t want to watch people grow anxious, so we withhold known information about departure. In doing so, we postpone the hard adaptive work of leadership transition into the next chapter. New pastors walk into congregations that haven’t yet had a good ending, and clearly aren’t ready for a new beginning.

Pastors plan their retirements for years, but wait to tell their congregations about their plans until a few short weeks or months before the intended transition date. Or, a pastor discerns that his or her call to this congregation is drawing to a close. She begins feeling a pull towards a different kind of ministry. Rather than discussing this discernment with leaders in the congregation, she holds her decision tightly to her chest until another call is firmly in hand. Then she springs an announcement on church leaders, four short weeks prior to her departure.

Recently, a congregation contacted me to help them with some low level anxiety in the system (i.e., conflict) that was getting in the way of strategic planning. We decided to host listening sessions with leaders, to better understand what was happening.

The consultation began with the senior pastor pulling me aside for a “confidential” conversation. He wanted to talk about his planned retirement. The pastor was in his early seventies and had not yet spoken with a single staff member or lay leader about the end of his ministry. He had been their leader for twenty-three years. The church had experienced remarkable renewal and growth under his leadership. This pastor was certain that any conversation along the lines of retirement would create mayhem in the congregation. In fact, numerous leaders had told him over the years that he couldn’t possibly retire because he was so loved, and no one could replace him. The pastor didn’t believe that line, but he could sense the anxiety in his leaders, whenever he tried to broach the subject.

When I finished my conversation with the pastor I facilitated listening sessions with the board and the staff team. In both listening sessions the primary issue raised was the future leadership of the church. They loved their pastor, but they sensed a waning energy and enthusiasm in his leadership. The believed it was time for the pastor to begin planning for retirement, but they didn’t want to disrespect his leadership by saying so, directly to him.

Leaders were fearful that the lack of a transition plan would result in one of three outcomes. The pastor would experience a significant medical event that would abruptly take him out of leadership and leave the church in chaos. The pastor would stay too long at the fair, and the vitality of the church would wane, inviting malaise and decline that would be hard to reverse once a new leader actually came on board. Or, the pastor would exit from the system poorly, failing to release the leadership reigns gracefully to a new leader.

Why couldn’t the leaders of this congregation have an open and honest dialogue about pastoral transition? They were afraid. They had legitimate reason to be fearful about all of the possible things that could go wrong in such a conversation.

There is fear that too much time in role after the announcement will lead to “lame duck” leadership; pastors feeling sidelined and irrelevant in their own congregations. There is fear that the anxiety in the congregation will prevent good work in the present. Better to wait and let the congregation do their grieving and adaptive work during the official interim season. There is fear that the rest of the staff team will get nervous and bolt if too much time passes between the announced intention to depart and the actual departure. Finally, there is fear that announcing an intended departure will place control in the hands of everyone else, but the pastor.

The problem is, and always has been, that systems know when secrets are being kept. First, when it comes to pending retirements, let’s acknowledge that congregations can do basic math. They know how old their pastors are, they anticipate that retirement is somewhere on the horizon. Second, leaders can sense when a leader is anxious about their own call, or when a leader has begun the process of detachment. In the absence of information, people make up their own stories about what is happening, and the stories that they make up are almost always more dramatic and fatalistic than reality.

We have taught ourselves this culture of secrecy and dread around pastoral transition. And it’s time to teach ourselves a better way.

Over the past several years I have worked with a number of congregations who have courageously entered the pastoral transition conversation, with openness and transparency. This is what I am experiencing. Congregations have remarkable resiliency around pastoral transition. Pastors can effectively discuss their departure plans with leaders, even years in advance, when several good practices are put into place.

• The governing body of the congregation (or its designated sub-committee) has an annual performance conversation with the senior leader, during which an honest picture of the health and vitality of the church and the clergy leadership role is explored. The pastor, in conversation with this body, develops a clear picture of his or her vibrancy in the system.

• When it becomes apparent that leadership transition is on the horizon, a trusted and authorized group of leaders is assigned the task of designing a leadership transition process. (This is often the personnel committee or the executive committee of the board). The departing pastor is an active participant in this design process.

• Depending upon polity, or the stipulation of by-laws, an appropriate group authorizes the transition plan. (In some congregations this is the governing body; in some it is the congregation at large.)

• A communication plan for announcing the departure is thoughtful and deliberate. People receive as much information as they need, when they need it, in order to manage their part of the transition process. Once a critical mass of leaders is aware, the whole congregation is brought into the communication loop.

• A transition team is appointed by the governing board to provide oversight to the overall transition. The transition team is not the search committee; the search committee has its own demanding work to do. The transition team consists of four to six spiritually mature, trusted, strategic thinkers in the life of the congregation. Their job is to monitor the congregations overall transition process; and to help negotiate the effective transfer of leadership authority, responsibility and accountability. The transition team stays in place until well after the new pastor has arrived.

• The pastor stays energetically engaged in the life of the congregation, all of the way up until the last day. The body of work that they do may begin to shift as they prepare for eventual departure. But, they stay engaged, active and vibrant in the pulpit.

• The pastor plans for the next chapter of his or her life and actively communicates his or her excitement about beginning that new chapter to the congregation, so that the congregation is able to envision life after ministry for themselves and the pastor.

The process of pastoral transition doesn’t have to be nearly as frightening as we make it. It is time to lift the veil of secrecy and discover a better way.

Will You Be Joining Us?

(On the need to separate assimilation and membership)

Once upon a time, people understood that the way to assimilate into the life of a congregation was to join that congregation. The typical indoctrination process began when newcomers attended the Sunday morning worship service and registered their presence on a pew pad. The act of registration triggered a series of welcome communications from the congregation, and perhaps a visit from a church or staff member. Within several months of the first visit, the newcomer was invited to attend a “newcomer” class, which connected them with staff and church programs. The class almost always resulted in an invitation (actually, an expectation) to join the church. Upon joining, the newcomer was paraded in front of the congregation. It was a well-orchestrated process that helped the newcomer become known to the congregation. Being known was instrumental to being connected, and being connected was instrumental to being accepted and ultimately assimilated.

We know at a cognitive level that once upon a time is long gone. We understand that many of the newcomers who explore our congregations are suspicious of membership, but they do want to belong in community. More specifically they want to feel that WE belong to them. They are not interested in being assimilated and becoming just like us; but they are interested in acculturating. (They want to belong to a community that will change itself to receive them, as much as they will adapt themselves for that community.) People want to be known and accepted, but they don’t see what any of that has to do with membership.

We say that we understand these things, but our behavior suggests otherwise. Our behavior towards newcomers is very much about assimilation, not acculturation. Our behavior towards newcomers is still deeply rooted in unstated assumptions about membership, and still deeply tied to our membership processes. How does a person who is not interested in membership get acculturated into the life of your congregation?

Let me offer myself as a case study. In the last year I began attending a new congregation. I believe that my experience of assimilation into the life of this congregation is pretty typical of what many people experience in our traditions.

I attended my new congregation for a period of three months before deciding that I really wanted to invest myself in the life of these people and this community of faith. For a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here, becoming a member was not appropriate for me. But, I very much wanted to belong.

So I kept up my semi-regular attendance and I met with the pastor, declaring my intention to be a part of the community. He assured me that I could participate fully in the things I wanted to do without becoming a member, and that membership wouldn’t really matter to people. I signed up to have an official nametag made so that I looked like I fit in. Over time I attended all of the available worship services; volunteered to help with housing the homeless; made several tentative visits to a Sunday school class that didn’t fit me well; stood awkwardly in the fellowship area after church hoping that someone (anyone) would talk to me; and generally hung around the edges of the congregation. Two rounds of newcomer classes came and went, but they were clearly linked into the membership process, so I didn’t sign up.

Each week attendance pads were passed around in worship, inviting me to register my presence. The form prompted me to check off whether I was a visitor or a member (no other option). After the first three months it seemed silly to keep checking off visitor, so I just left that section plank. The act of completing the form each week, and leaving that section blank, is a constant reminder that I’m not one of them.

During worship we greet one another during the passing of the peace. During this ritual people often approached me with, “Where have you come from?” After trying to answer that question in a variety of ways, none of which seemed to satisfy the asker, I came to understand that they wanted me to tell them what church I had previously been a member of. People sometimes asked me if I planned to join the church, and their eyes quickly glazed over when I tried to explain why I wouldn’t be joining (TMI… we didn’t really want to know, we were just making small talk and wanted you to know that we have a usual process for how this all works). I never saw or received a church directory, nor did I receive the electronic newsletter, or information about the church budget, or an invitation to participate in the financial stewardship of the congregation. Several congregational meetings were held for “membership” business. I didn’t feel welcomed and didn’t attend.

At the end of my first year I hadn’t formed a single meaningful relationship with anyone in the congregation. It was frustrating, and it was becoming painful to attend worship. I thought hard about moving on, but decided that the church really was a good fit for me and that I needed to try harder.

So, I finally bit the bullet. I signed up for the newcomer class, announcing my intent to stop just short of the act of joining. I realized that my assimilation was going to depend upon getting to know more of the staff and church leaders who could help me connect, and I knew that meeting other newcomers would introduce me to people who had not yet formed solid relationships in the church and might be open to friendship. And I was right! After three sessions of the newcomer class I met enough people that I actually began to feel a little more known, and a little more at home. I was starting to feel connected. But my progress didn’t come without additional awkward moments, of needing to explain why I wasn’t joining the congregation.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to berate my new congregation. I love this place. My assimilation would have been warm and wonderful if only I could have/would have embraced membership. And I suspect many of your congregations would have offered me the same experience. Our cultures of assimilation are deeply embedded with assumptions of membership.

So, what does that mean for all of the people sitting in our pews that cannot or will not invest in membership? It means that they are regularly sidelined and reminded that they are not really one of us. It means that many of them leave us before we ever get to know them, because it is just too hard to find their way in. I know that this is not what we intend. It’s time to wake up and be more intentional about our behaviors and processes.

We have a lot of adaptive work to do in this area!

The Leader and the Vision

Part of my Lenten discipline this year is a study of the Rule of Benedict. I am seeking to integrate the teachings of this 6th century communal rule book with my understanding of leadership in present day congregational life. Sr. Joan Chittister at Monastery of the Heart is my guide on this Lenten journey.

Here is the marvelous nugget from today’s reflection on Chapter 3 (Summoning the Community for Counsel).

“The Abbott (leader) does not need to know the truth,
but the abbott (leader) needs to be able to recognize the truth,
and enable the community to speak its truth
and foster the integration of truth.”

I think this is the essence of spiritual leadership in all faith communities! I’m going to be reflecting on this one for a long time.

Metrics vs. Evidence

“When we become utterly obsessed with outcomes and results, we keep taking on smaller and smaller tasks, because they are the only ones we can get [measurable] results with.”-Parker Palmer (on Effectiveness vs. Faithfulness)

I worked this week with a group of 75 United Methodist leaders in Kansas. At one point our conversation turned towards goal setting, and particularly to the importance of naming outcomes and metrics. I argued that we must name what we are seeking to do or become, and we must name appropriate metrics to evaluate our progress. Otherwise, we won’t see much change or the right kind of change.

This has always been a tricky conversation to have with clergy leaders, but it is an especially hot button topic these days. So many congregations are experiencing numerical plateaus, or they are in free fall around membership, attendance and giving patterns. Denominational leaders (or congregants) are demanding measurable growth goals in response, and many congregational leaders feel powerless to meet what feel like artificial and misplaced expectations.

The response from clergy leaders is advocacy for other forms of growth that they see as more important than numerical growth. These leaders posture that we ought to be more concerned with goals around faith formation, biblical knowledge, deepening spiritual practices, fostering faith sharing and growing social justice awareness. These agendas, they argue, are not necessarily measurable and they may not result in church growth, but they are more indicative of congregational vitality.

I am rather suspicious about both sides of the debate. I agree that healthy congregations are generally growing congregations, by some measurable objective. Many who appear to resist metrics strike me as change resistant and fearful of accountability. On the other hand, I am among the first to argue that attendance and budgets are not our best indicators of congregational health and vitality. They are much too limited in scope and don’t take into account the cultural shifts we are seeing around how people participate in the life of their congregations. So, where are we to go with this debate?

This week a wise leader in our midst told us that he and his congregation have dropped the language of metrics from their vocabulary all together. Instead, they are investing themselves in naming the evidence that will indicate success in their change efforts. They are working to describe the observable behaviors that will signal success in their “softer” growth initiatives. They are not fearful of accountability, they embrace it, but they are committed to talking about and measuring evidence that matters to their mission.

This week I also ran across a video of Parker Palmer discussing the difference between effectiveness and faithfulness. It seems to be circulating the web in honor of his 75th birthday. Palmer says, “When we become utterly obsessed with outcomes and results, we keep taking on smaller and smaller tasks, because they are the only ones we can get results with.”

We are living in a chapter of Church history that requires bold and audacious leadership. We can’t afford to waste our energy on small and insignificant work that is constrained by a misplaced interest in measuring the wrong results.

Watch the video and then weigh in on this question: How would a shift away from measuring effectiveness, and a shift towards measuring faithfulness, change the current conversation around congregational metrics?

Don’t Worry. Be Happy.

“People are not going to be happy about this,” is the most frequent utterance I hear from congregational leaders preparing to introduce change. What I detect beneath their expressed concern is a deeper worry that people won’t “like me”, if I’m seen as the one imposing this change.

Our worries about being “liked” point to an unstated assumption we hold about leadership. We believe that a fundamental responsibility of an authority figure is to keep congregants “happy”. Ronald Heifetz, Kennedy School of Government, teaches that organizations select people for leadership roles on the basis of their demonstrated ability to define and solve problems, protect the membership from external threats, restore order and maintain organizational norms. All of this is code language for keeping people safe and happy. We reward our leaders when they do these happy-producing tasks on our behalf.

Unfortunately, these are not behaviors that facilitate adaptation. Adaptive work requires authority figures that are willing to expose the membership body to external threats, so that the organization learns from its environment. Adaptive leaders surface and engage conflict, challenge norms and disorient the membership body, so that people adapt their behavior. Truly adaptive leaders will, at some point, fail to keep their congregants happy. They will fail to meet the expectations of safe leadership that got them appointed in the first place. This is dangerous work, the kind of work that sometimes gets people thrown out of churches.

Effective leaders move their congregations into what Heifetz calls, the productive zone of disequilibrium. This is a zone where people feel uncomfortable enough to examine assumptions, learn from their environment and make needed changes. The disequilibrium is carefully tended so that it does not overwhelm. The losses associated with change come at a pace that people can accommodate. The zone is a meaningful place for the congregation to be, but it is not necessarily a happy place. People are uncomfortable in the zone of disequilibrium.

It is becoming increasingly evident to me that keeping people happy and content has become the default mission of our congregations, contributing to our adaptive inability. Why do authority figures value being liked, over and above being effective? Well, being liked is easier.

Why aren’t we more concerned with whether or not our congregations are presenting people with the opportunity to meaningfully engage the Gospel, over and above being happy? A meaningful life that embraces and spreads the Gospel is different from a happy one.

A study in the Journal of Positive Psychology sought to differentiate the concepts of “meaning” and “happiness” by surveying roughly 400 Americans. It found considerable overlap between the two—but also some key distinctions.

• Feeling good, and having one’s needs met, is integral to happiness but unrelated to meaning.
• Happy people dwell in the present moment, not the past or future. Meaningfulness involves linking past, present, and future.
• People derive meaning, but not necessarily happiness, from helping others. People derive happiness, but not necessarily meaning, from being served.
• Social connections are important to both meaning and happiness, but the type of connection matters. Spending time with friends is important to happiness but not meaning. Spending time with loved ones is more important to meaningfulness.

But we already know these things, or we should. The elements of meaningfulness are core principles reinforced in the Gospel message that we proclaim and hold so dear. Ah, if only we led our congregations, as if we actually believed our own message.

Passing the Baton

Lately my phone has been ringing off of the hook with people who want to talk about pastoral succession: denominational leaders who want to prepare for the impending onslaught of baby boomers about to retire; senior pastors wanting to think about exiting their congregations well; and lay leaders wondering how to talk with their pastors about this without making everyone nervous. Most of these callers want to talk about a process for managing a change in pastors. I’ve been trying to re-frame the conversation.

Managing change, and managing the transitions that accompany a change, are not one and the same (Bridges, 1991). Change happens in an instant; the pastor departs, a new pastor arrives, and change has occurred. The transitions associated with change are much more subtle and occur over a broader expanse of time. Transition management addresses the cultural, behavioral, and spiritual adaptive learning that must occur for a congregation to fully prepare for new leadership. During pastoral succession, most congregational leaders are so invested in managing the change elements of succession that they fail to adequately tend the important work of managing the transition. We need to be talking about the transition work.

Congregational leaders invest enormous angst and energy in managing the change mechanics of pastoral succession, because they know what is at stake. They zealously manage and protect the process of search. They maintain control by keeping secrets about progress. They work to preserve the status quo among congregants while the transition is underway. As a result little actually transitions in the congregation during the succession period. It is up to the search committee to identify a candidate who “gets us”. And then it is up to the new clergy leader to figure out how to adapt to an entrenched system as they enter it.

As we seek to better understand failed pastoral succession we often discover that the failure has less to do with the attributes of the specific candidate, and more to do with the candidate’s inability to survive the transition into the congregation. “They just weren’t a good fit for us”. “They just couldn’t seem to adjust to how we do things here.” “Our leaders just weren’t ready to let go of the reigns and let them actually lead.”

One clergy leader described his entry journey in this way. “It was a full five years before I could exert any kind of meaningful leadership. For the first several years I was negotiating my way through fog. There were unexpressed standards of performance that I was being evaluated against, that everyone knew but me, and no one was able to articulate.” This particular candidate was eventually able to claim a leadership voice and went on to have a successful eighteen year pastorate. Others are not so fortunate.

Today’s large congregations are asking new and provocative questions about the real nature of transition in this important leadership season. Are interim pastorates really helpful in negotiating transitions in the large congregation? Can the congregation transition directly from one senior pastor to the next without creating an arbitrary space between leaders? Should internal candidates be considered for the job, to minimize the risks of transition? If so, what process is appropriate for considering internal candidates? If the congregation is kept in the dark about pending pastoral transitions, can they really do their adaptive work? Can retiring senior ministers retain some kind of role in the faith communities which they have shepherded for many years?

Is your congregation in conversation about this? What’s the nature of your dialogue?

Tending the Soul of the Organization

Does an institution have a soul? For many years I assumed not. I work with congregations, denominations and faith based non-profits in the areas of organizational and leadership development. I know these institutions as living and breathing organisms, with active cultures and vibrant spiritualties. However, I admit to regarding institutions as soul free entities, believing that soul tending needed to be done with the leaders of the institutions, not with the institutions themselves. My work at the institutional level has focused on strengthening systems and organizational cultures, and enhancing spirituality-not soul tending.

Recently, I have come into the presence of institutional soul. I have witnessed transcendent experiences, within leadership bodies, that seem to unite the divine with something deep in the bedrock of the institution itself. First there was the planning team that had many ideas about how to craft a next chapter in congregational life, but no consensus about how to proceed. After much debate and angst the group stopped to prayerfully consider what the soul of the congregation needed. A totally new direction emerged that had not been considered to date and consensus immediately centered on that alternative. Then there was the search committee that stood strongly divided over the choice of the best pastoral candidate. Fifteen minutes of prayerful silence, followed by a guided meditation on what the soul of the institution needed, yielded a consensus that felt divinely led. These experiences compel me to rethink my assumptions and to reexamine my approach and methodology. This “something” goes deeper than either organizational culture or spirituality.

For the past two years I have participated in the Spiritual Guidance program at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation. Prompted by this experience I have come to see that the soul of the institution benefits from spiritual companioning and guidance, much as the soul of the leader benefits from spiritual direction. The tending of institutional soul requires something beyond skills traditionally employed in pastoring, consulting, coaching or individual spiritual direction. It begins with contemplative awareness and a stance of not knowing. It requires an attending orientation, and the unbinding of institutional wounds and unfreedoms that prevent leadership connection with soul. It favors a discerning mindset over a decision making mindset and it invites integrating work between the values of the institution and its leaders.

In this era of massive decline in many of our religious institutions, it behooves us to wake up and reconsider the ways in which we are approaching institutional change. The best of our efforts in organizational and leadership development are doing little to stem the tide of decline. Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that the souls of these institutions are deeply wounded and in need of soul tending. Perhaps it is time to shed the mantel of knowing and expertise and assume a new way of being relative to the souls of these institutions that we hold so dear.

During 2014, the growing edge of my practice will focus on Tending the Soul of the Institution. I hope you will join me on the journey and in the dialogue.

Cleaning Out Stuff vs. Preserving the Core

It feels like my house is being overrun with “stuff”.  Our youngest is between apartment leases and had to move his worldly belongings home for a few weeks. At the same time my mom is downsizing into a smaller senior housing living arrangement. As she divests herself of a lifetime of stuff, some of the more sentimental and hard to part with items are finding their way into my home.  All of this is good and difficult and appropriate for this season of life. However, we have been faced this summer with the hard chore of cleaning out, of deciding what is core and what must go.

These past weeks I have become rather masterful at creating piles, sorted according to: things we frequently use and need to keep; stuff that serves no useful purpose and is easy to part with; stuff we have loved but it is no longer functional and at the end of the day must go; and stuff that we really don’t use but for sentimental reasons it needs to stay.

As I do this work I am reminded of the principles of adaptive leadership that I frequently cite to pastors.  Heifetz teaches that successful adaptive change builds upon the past rather than jettisoning it.  This requires:

• Preserving the historical DNA of the congregation
• Removing or modifying that which is no longer necessary or useful
• Creating or innovating new arrangements that enable the congregation to thrive

Distinguishing that which is core from that which is no longer necessary or useful is no easy task.  It’s not as simple as sorting things into the four piles I’ve used this summer in our household purge.  Why is it so complicated?   In our congregations many of the things that we are sentimentally attached to and use frequently are the very things we need to purge or modify in order to thrive. It’s not simply about getting rid of those things we no longer use or care about. What do we do with the Sunday morning meet and greet hour that our members love, but visitors find isolating and impossible to navigate?  What about the children’s sermon that our old-timers find endearing, but newcomers find sappy at best and exploitative of our children at their worst?

How do we determine which of our enduring practices are core and which are just stuff?  At the end of the day, it’s not a decision, it is a discernment. Discernment requires sensitivity to inner wisdom, a way of paying attention to God’s way of guiding. It requires an integral relationship with prayer as we sense an authentic way of being, a way that brings life into focus through a Divine lens.

In this critical season of adaptive work, of distinguishing that which is just stuff from that which is core, we need to strengthen our discernment muscles and skills.  We need to rediscover some of the ancient prayerful practices that are sitting under cover of dust in our attics and crawl spaces.

Adaptive Challenges

Last month, I was invited to be one of the keynote speakers at the United Methodist Quadrennial Training in Nashville. The topic was adaptive leadership. It was invigorating to hear the dialogue among United Methodist leaders about the adaptive challenges they face, and the barriers that stand in their way of addressing those challenges.

Here is a link to an article about the event in the United Methodist Reporter:

Denomination urged to trust, share leadership

 

Spiritual Work in Pastoral Transition

 Recently, I had the opportunity to listen to Frank Ostaseski speak about Being a Compassionate Companion while accompanying the dying. Frank is a leader/teacher in the Zen Hospice Project. As I listened to Frank speak, I was struck by how well his five precepts for walking with the dying apply to congregational life, when a congregation is in the midst of a significant ending.

Pastoral transition is a death, of sorts, in the lifecycle of a congregation. It involves taking stock, defining the boundaries of our own existence, celebrating our success, grieving our losses, and reflecting on what it means to construct a well- lived life as a congregation. In this sense pastoral transition calls forth the same kind of spiritual work that is involved in a good death experience.

Let’s consider Ostaseski’s five precepts for companioning death, and apply them (with some liberties) to leadership in a season of pastoral transition.

1. Welcome Everything: Push Away Nothing: Over years of doing ministry under a singular head of staff, congregations get caught in habitual responses to ministry and the environment. In a season of pastoral transition it behooves leaders to adopt an attitude of “fearless receptivity”; openness to considering that “what comes to us is for us”, to embrace and to learn from everything. All things have the potential to teach us, especially conflict, failed experiences and risk taking.

Of course, this doesn’t suggest that leaders embrace every new request or new idea that presents itself during an interim time period. It does suggest that leaders maintain a spirit of wonderment about what emerges and a willingness to embrace the anxieties that arise in saying goodbye.

2. Bring Your Whole Self to the Experience: I have noticed that congregations approaching a pastoral transition often hunker down and prepare themselves to power through the events of the transition period. They act as if hard work and singularity of focus will help minimize congregational anxieties and conflicts. Leaders put on their super-hero armor and their masks of competency in front of the congregation. They deny whatever level of grief, confusion or anxiety that they may be experiencing for fear of contagion.

If we want our congregations to practice adaptive leadership in a season of pastoral transition, then we need to cultivate openness, receptivity and wonder. We can’t cultivate those attributes in a congregation without revealing our own discomfort and sense of dis-orientation. This is not about revealing our ignorance. It is about demonstrating our authenticity.

3. Don’t Wait: So often, congregations in the midst of pastoral transition put any and all new initiatives on hold, for fear of binding the hands of the new leader. All planning and evaluation efforts are met with a resounding, “We had better not initiate that until after the new pastor arrives.” The congregation moves into maintenance mode and this is deadly, particularly for the large congregation. Once a congregation has programmed itself to function in maintenance mode it is extraordinarily difficult to re-ignite new energies.

Implementation of changes in the strategic direction of the congregation should be postponed until the arrival of new leadership. However, dreaming about those directions and making ongoing course changes in anticipation of those changes, these are necessary for vitality and growth.

4. Find a Place of Rest in the Midst of Things: Pastoral transitions can move at a snail’s pace. It can take months/years to articulate the needs of the congregation, prepare an attractive church profile, search for the ideal candidate and call that candidate. Leaders must take care not to burn out while ensconced in the difficult work of adaptive learning.

The basic human response is to try and find rest by managing the conditions that surround us. We tell ourselves that we will rest once the budget is balanced, the staff team is fully configured, the new board is up and functioning and a search committee is underway. In a season of pastoral transition, conditions will almost never be right for rest, if rest requires everything to be in order.

We need to allow ourselves to take a rest from the hard work of adaptive leadership by bringing our attention fully to the presence of the moment we are in; by resting in the sufficiency of God’s grace and abundance in the now.

5. Cultivate a Don’t Know Mindset: It is not ignorance to admit that you don’t know what to do next, you don’t know how a problem will resolve itself, or if a problem will resolve itself. When we don’t know what to do next, we have to rely on others to pick up their share of the adaptive challenge and to do their part in the hard work of transition. Giving the work back to the people is a hallmark of good adaptive leadership. When we admit that we don’t know, we open ourselves to new learning and create an atmosphere where others can do the same.