Transforming Pastoral Leadership

Reimagining Congregational Relationships for Changing Contexts

Kinnison

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781532600289
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

For many congregations, change creates discomfort. Pastoral leaders are often expected to be experts who manage and control realities beyond their expertise, experience, and ability. That expectation, a product of modern approaches to leadership, views the pastor as responsible for maintaining the status quo. Transforming Pastoral Leadership responds to this context by challenging readers to rediscover key biblical themes around the shepherding metaphor as well as key theological themes steeped in our historical faith narratives. Readers are challenged to consider the origins of our dominant leadership practices and to reconsider how Christ's preeminence as the leader of his church requires us to reconstruct leadership practices that are faithful to his preeminence. To assist congregations, Transforming Pastoral Leadership suggests two processes that might help congregations discern God's missional promptings as they move forward into God's future and experience conflict as opportunities for transformation.

Part One

Naming and Reflecting on Forces that Shape Us

Chapter 1

“Change is Nature”

One of the “joys” of living with young children is their unique ability and desire to watch the same movie over and over again. When our daughter was a preschooler, one of her favorites was the Pixar classic Ratatouille, a film about Remy, a rat living in Paris who has a gift for cooking. For me, the most poignant scene of the movie comes during an interaction between Remy and his father, Django.

When Remy reveals that he has been working with a human, Django takes Remy to see the window of the famed French exterminator Aurouze, which features dead rats hanging in traps. Django shows Remy the traps explaining them as the consequence of being too comfortable with humans and pronounces, “This is the way things are. You can’t change nature.” Shaken but undaunted, Remy boldly proclaims: “No . . . No, Dad. Change is nature.”1

“Change is nature.” All around us the ground seems to be shifting. For instance, the instantaneous high-speed transmission of information made possible by the Internet and handheld devices, the economic impact of globalization, and the socio-political changes occurring as a result of these influences all have challenged what have been generally accepted foundations in Western, US culture. One place where this disorientation has been acutely experienced has been in churches and denominational structures. While change can create contexts for disorientation, it is the perception and experience of loss that creates resistance to change. To further aggravate things, the practices and methodologies historically employed to lead people through change exacerbates this disorientation. I suggest that there are important questions we need to be asking that will inform how we live in and through disorientation.

Are we condemned only to endure this disorientation? Is our best option to try and recapture the past and relive glory days gone-by? How might our current practices of top-down, expertise-driven leadership make matters worse? What would it mean for congregations to encounter God and be shaped by the encounter in ways that are beyond our control? What would it mean for pastoral leaders to likewise be shaped as part of the congregation? What would happen for us and to us if we recognized God at work in our disorientation, seeing it as God’s means for shaping us?

Captured and Colonized

Reading the Bible should sometimes make readers wonder, “How could they believe that?” There are certain stories and passages in Scripture that are particularly befuddling. This is certainly the case with many parts of the exodus story, but especially the beginning of Numbers 14. Prior to Numbers 14, the people that God rescued from Egypt complain openly on several occasions about being in the wilderness. As they complain, they longingly wish for those “good ole days” back in Egypt, where they remember meat pots, and free fish, and melons, cucumbers, leeks, onion, and garlic.2 Thus by the time we get to Numbers 14, the people are in full rebellion.

Having made it through the wilderness to the borders of the promised land, God’s people are now confronted with the reality that the land is occupied—and the occupants are giants. Rather than trusting God to lead them to their inheritance, they choose rebellion instead. As Numbers 14:1–4 states:

That night all the people of the community raised their voices and wept aloud. All the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and the whole assembly said to them, “If only we had died in Egypt! Or in this desert! Why is the LORD bringing us to this land only to let us fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be taken as plunder. Wouldn’t it be better for us to go back to Egypt?” And they said to each other, “We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt.”3

It is hard to fathom. The people who groaned under slavery’s burden and who cried out for help prompting God to respond now wanted to return to that slavery!4 God’s people were talking about killing God’s representative, Moses, and choosing a new leader to take them back to Egypt. How could they?

And yet we could ask the question differently. Why should they not want to go back? After all in light of their context, slavery offered a kind of comfort, a predictability and clarity, which was easy to understand and recognize. The wilderness was unpredictable, uncontrollable, and uncomfortable. Compared to their situation in the wilderness, slavery worked—except that it didn’t. It was never God’s intention that the plans for the redemption of humanity and all of creation would be lost in Egypt. God remembered accurately their true situation in slavery, looked past their discomfort in the wilderness, and envisioned a future that was being shaped in the process. And so he does for us as well.

History is filled with seasons of turmoil and tumult that from human perspective seem like tragedy. Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk describe this upheaval as “discontinuous change” where change is “disruptive and unanticipated . . . challenging our assumptions” and where the skills we have learned are unhelpful.5 This kind of change results in such upheaval and turmoil that there is “no getting back normal;” discontinuous change “transform a culture forever, tipping it into something new.”6 But while they may seem like tragedy, in God’s work these might actually be seasons of shaping and reorientation toward a new future in keeping with God’s preferred future for us.

Roxburgh identifies this process of transformation as “liminal transition.”7 Using the socio-anthropological framework of Victor Turner, Roxburgh identifies three stages of societal transition that describe the tumultuous situation of the Israelites leaving Egypt and perhaps describe the Western church’s current situation. This process, which is described by the terms “separation,” “liminal,” and “reaggregation,” helps to “describe how a group is transformed in its outward relationships to other groups and institutions, and, equally important, in its own inner life.”8 I find the terms “orientation,” “liminality,” and “reorientation” helpful.

“Orientation” is the way things are in a socio-cultural context. It is the process of living with certain social norms and rules through which a people engage in relatively fixed rituals and roles and by which they engage established and accepted institutions. These norms and rules may be codified (made law) or may be simply understood by the members of the context. Often these norms and rules are so engrained that most people never realize their existence. In sociological terms, not following these social norms (whether codified or not) is understood as “deviance.”

At the outset of “liminality,” socio-cultural contexts begin to shift. The beginning of this shift is what Roxburgh refers to as “separation.” He notes that “separation” is the removal of those socio-cultural norms and rules with their roles and relationships to institutions that leads to a “fundamental change in social location.”9 Separation in this sense leads to a marginalization and disestablishment. Roxburgh describes this marginalization and disestablishment as leaving us with frameworks that “seem disconnected from the emerging cultural context” where “our words are often received as a strange, foreign language.”10 This liminality is described by such words as “vulnerable,” “anxious,” “confusion,” and “potential.” 11

The danger with liminality is that people have this ...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Naming and Reflecting on Forces that Shape Us
• Part Two: Remembering a New Way
• Part Three: Beyond Expertise—Back into the Flock We Go
• Bibliography
• Appendix A: Thomas Groome’s Concepts of Shared Christian Praxis
• Appendix B: Basic Assumptions of Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space Technology
• Appendix C: Shared Christian Praxis, AI, OST, and Adaptive Change Theory: A Dialogue