You ARE Leading Adaptive Change!
Mark Tidsworth, Team Leader
You ARE leading adaptive change as we speak. Our churches are adapting right here and right now. No more waiting, hoping, cultivating, praying, encouraging, or even confronting. Our churches are adapting, forming new and innovative ways to be church in the present tense. Pastors, church staff persons, and lay leaders ARE leading and managing adaptive change rather than hoping a miracle will loosen our church systems so that change becomes possible. Boom! Just like that we are wildly adapting, making changes in 2 we thought impossible. Welcome to adaptive change leadership and management!
To support and encourage everyone’s progress in adaptive leadership, I have two recommendations to share. The first is an update for your leadership paradigm while the second is a strategy for advancing transformation in your ministry context.
First, recognize you are functioning like a Faith Change Agent, the new paradigm for transformational church leadership. FCA leaders are immersed in our faith story, speaking the language of Christian faith, helping us access our faith as energy for meeting the challenges transformation brings. FCA leaders believe their primary calling is to help a particular church move from here to there, to make the journey from church-as-we-have-known-it to church-as-it-is-becoming. FCA leaders identify with Biblical characters like Moses, Joshua, and Peter; those who helped people shift and move, becoming new creations in the process. What you have been doing the last 2 weeks is what a FCA does; leading and furthering mission-congruent change.
So now is the opportune time to update your personal leadership paradigm. Since the circumstances of our lives have called you into FCA ministry, consider accepting this role as your primary calling at this point in time. Churches need us to serve as effective leaders during this time of change, helping us be church faithfully and with relevance. Ideally, the needs of our churches determine the kinds of leaders we are, adjusting our roles so that our leadership actually helps meet the needs in our ministry contexts. Every church needs FCA leaders right now. We invite you to consider updating your self-understanding of your role as a church leader. As you know, how we understand our roles directly influences how we function as leaders.
Second, we invite you to go ahead and implement one specific and strategic action of FCA leaders – reinforcing every mission-congruent move. There are so many reasons to start with this particular strategy, but without listing them I can tell you the payoff for starting here is immense. Churches ARE adapting at a rapid pace right now, making this the perfect time to affirm this adaptation in every possible way. When you see any adaptive, mission-congruent move, thank everyone involved. Celebrate these moves, describing them to others in the church. In short, find every way possible to affirm, celebrate, and thereby reinforce adaptation. Like in every area of life, people in churches are tuned into expectations of leaders. When the leadership of a church demonstrably celebrates our adaptive efforts, we learn that our church values mission-congruent risk taking. We then grow far more willing to step out of our comfort zones since the last time we did we were thanked and affirmed by our leadership. FCA congregational leaders are always scouting, scanning the environment for opportunities to reinforce mission-congruent moves.
I’ve heard some church leaders express fears their churches will revert to business-as-usual after the virus is gone. We are designing a process to help you avoid that fate, maximizing the opportunity in these moments. Until then, you can increase the likelihood your church will keep moving ahead by accepting your role as Faith Change Agent Leaders who reinforce every mission-congruent adaptive move.
May we serve as effective stewards of the transformation opportunities before us as God’s Church.
NOTE: Learn more about Faith Change Agent Leadership here https://www.pinnlead.com/presentations