November 14, 2005

Pastoral Leadership as Adaptive Work

When Mark Twain was learning how to be a pilot on the Mississippi,
his tough, experienced teacher told him that he must master "the shape of
the river," the river that is constantly changing, the river that looks
so different in the daylight than in the dark:

.in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than any one man
ought to be allowed to know, and the other was that he must learn it all
over again in a different way every twenty-four hours.[i]

Ronald A. Heifetz might confirm Twain's vision of leadership when
Heifetz calls leadership a matter of "adaptive work."[ii] Good
leadership requires a leader who is willing to learn the specifics of the
leadership context, willing to address the conflicts between the values
people say they hold and the reality they face. Then the adaptive leader
must be courageous enough to orchestrate conflict so that people might
learn new ways of thinking and acting. Curiosity, the willingness to
learn, to grow, to be surprised, to adapt, are therefore essential
attributes for effective leaders. This suggests that pastors who
received one image of pastoral leadership from their seminary education a
decade ago must be prepared to adapt to new leadership needs of the
church today. A style of leadership that worked well in one
congregational context may not work well in another. Then the leader
must work to recapitulate, among followers, some of the same adaptive
moves that were made in the leader's own life in order to mobilize the
entire congregation for adaptive work.

Acts 15:1-35 shows a dispute within the early church over the status
of Gentile Christians where there was "no small dissension and debate."
Peter urges an openness to the Gentiles, citing his own experience (in
Acts 10:1-11:18) of the way in which God "makes no distinction" between
Jew and Gentile (15:9). James, on the other hand, quotes scriptural
precedent in Amos 9:11-12. Finally, after much debate, a sort of
compromise is reached and the church officially moves to a new,
transformed situation once James' proposal met with the approval of "the
apostles and the elders, with the whole church" (Acts 15:22). I take
this "Jerusalem Conference" as an example of biblical adaptive and
transformative leadership, even though it served later as a proof-text
for fossilized conciliarism in the church.

Adaptation means movement, transformation, change and, from my
observation, far too many pastors are too willing to settle in to present
arrangements, to manage the church as it is rather than to stretch
themselves and risk envisioning the church as God intends it to be. The
prophetic critique of the temple priesthood in the Old Testament was
based upon the prophets' belief that the priests were merely content to
keep house, to manage the status quo, rather than to be open and
receptive to the movements of a living God. Because church leadership is
leadership in service to a dynamic, synergistic God named Trinity,
leadership in the name of Christ is called to risk being at the center of
transformation.[iii]

The counter cultural quality of the gospel requires leadership that
is willing to be a means of constant conversion, constantly willing to
stand in that tension between the end of an old world and the beginning
of a new, always reformed and reforming.

William H. Willimon


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[i] Mark Twain, Old Times on the Mississippi as quoted in Mark
Schwehn, ed., Everyone a Teacher (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame,
2000), p. 61.

[ii] Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard, 1994).

[iii] Heifetz notes the essential role of the leader as intentional
trouble-maker within any organization that wants to grow and change. The
adaptive leader, "Rather than fulfilling the expectation for
answers,.provides questions; rather than protecting people from outside
threat,.lets people feel the threat in order to stimulate adaptation;
instead of orienting people to their current roles,.disorients people so
that new role relationships develop; rather than quelling
conflict,.generates it; instead of maintaining norms,.challenges them."
Leadership Without Easy Answers, p. 126.




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Bishop Willimon invites you to visit the Bishop's Message Discussion
Board to continue the conversation whenever something that appears in
these messages grabs your attention and calls for response.



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