Hello, and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create, and the impact we can make. I'm your host, Joshua Johnson, go to shifting culture podcast.com To interact or donate, and it would help us out if you left a rating or review on your favorite podcast app, and share this podcast with your friends and network. Previous guests on the show have included Scott Rodin, David garrison and
Emma Cotterell. You can go back and listen to those episodes and more. But today's guest is Tod bolsinger. Todd is the co founder and principal of AES Sloan leadership, and the executive director of the church leadership institute at Fuller Seminary. He is the author of many books, two of which inform
some of our conversation. Today in this podcast, canoeing, the mountains and tempered resilience, we have a great conversation around what it takes to lead through the unknown towards adaptive change. Enjoy the episode. This episode is brought to you by all nations Kansas City. Have you ever felt holy discontent that 1/3 of the world doesn't know Jesus that the church has we know it won't reach all peoples on earth? And that is hard to find ways to use your gifts for the kingdom of
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yourself. And context. 100 m publishing publishes books by authors and thought leaders with new insight about movement, DNA, discipleship, leadership and movement dynamics. To learn more about these books, and to check out the resources and training available, visit the m x platform.com. Todd, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming.
It is nice to be with you.
Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on to talk through what does it actually look like to really have some leadership that'll take us through parts of the unknown, into places where we need to, we need to adapt. And we need to think differently than what we have thought before. And what it's going to take, you know, one of the things you wrote canoeing the mountains a few years before COVID hits. And, you know, once COVID had people were like, oh, we need something
different. And what we've had in the past doesn't work. And you were tooting that horn a little bit before before COVID. Tell us a little bit about what you were seeing. And what type of this new leadership is Christian leadership is going to take to get us through these these times that we're living in.
Yeah, so I wrote coming in the mountains, because in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, in the arts, as they call it, I was already beginning to recognize that in many places in the life of the church, including places where I was serving, I'm a Presbyterian pastor. The, the church was already experiencing some disruption numbers were going down. We were at the beginning of a curve that now we've seen was the beginning of the entire the millennial generation walking away from the
church. People were beginning to ask questions about the church from the past. And really what we had was a number of folks saying, Look, I don't think seminary prepared me for this world live in like it's changing
too rapidly. And what they meant by that was after a several 100 year run of Christendom, where Christianity was supported by Western culture, the easiest way to think about that, in one generation, we went to the place where in many places in the culture, Christianity was no longer not supported, but was actually becoming a more
marginalized experience. And that notion of Christianity of trying to lead churches when you're not supported by culture, like not having a home court advantage, if you think of it that way. Not having the world so Import EU was really new for people. And that was happening rapidly one generation. And then COVID hit was, in one day, everything got disrupted. And I said that from when I wrote the book in 2013, where I'd already been speaking about it for about six years at that point to where
it was published in 2015. It changed dramatically. But from 2015 to 2020, I used to have people who used to argue with me about whether or not we were actually going through change, starting in March 3 1320 20. From that day on, no one ever argued with me about the changing world, and we needed to lead differently.
Yeah. And, you know, I've seen that, you know, part of my job is I lead a missions agency is we're going to people in places where Jesus is not yet known. And so we're actually trying to figure out what does it look like to raise up indigenous leaders to lead into a place where it's going to take a lot of adaptation, it's going to take thinking differently it's going to take
working in the unknown. You know, bringing the Western Church along for that ride was really was really challenging and really difficult for a long time. And it's getting a lot easier. Because people were realizing, Oh, we're actually starting to live in that. But there was a few things that, you know, we learned is one is we had to be very adaptable to, to ever present changes that there, we don't know what we're going
to encounter. And so we have to set up structures and places and things in a way that it can change and adapt to what we will experience. What type of leadership is it gonna take for us to get to that place where we have structures in places and things that can adapt to changing environments.
So this notion of adaptation is a really critical concept. it the way I talk about it is it comes from Ronald Hart Heifetz and Marty Lewinsky's work on adaptive leadership, that was basically asking the question, if you can no longer rely on best practices, then how do you lead? Right? How do you how do you lead when you're not an expert? In other words, it's one thing to be a person who walks into someplace and is the expert. I know what exactly what
to do. And so I often use this example think about church planting. A generation ago, Eugene Peterson was a church planter. Now I love Eugene Peterson. I love his work. He you know, I left the message is spiritual and pastoral theology was stunning. But we you wouldn't probably think church planter Eugene Peterson, because what then a church planter meant was in an area where the Methodist Duluth friends and the Presbyterians were all putting
up new churches. It meant that there was enough Presbyterians, people who check the box Presbyterian in the real estate agents boxes, to say, hey, we probably could buy some land, put up a church and invite people there. And what would happen is, is you announce that we're going to have a new Presbyterian Church and all the people who are over down the street at the Methodist Lutheran Church, we'd go, Hey, thank you guys, for having us. We're going
to now go join our church. And that was church planting, right, because everybody was going to church, a generation later church planting even in the West means you're trying to reach people, many of which are and are, have deep hostilities against the church or paying with the church or the church is irrelevant. It's closer to the mission world. It's closer to what our missionaries, and others have been doing for a
long time. The problem is, is that most of us have mental models for what church is like, that is really different than the mental models of what a missionary going into an unchurched world is like, and now this is all coming together. And we're having to learn together in new ways. And so, you know, working at a seminary, we, you know, I work at a seminary that for years had two different schools. One was a school of World Mission, and the other was a School of Theology.
And now we've recognized that that divide is anachronistic and is just not even relevant to the world anymore, which means everything is getting re shifted, even right now in front of us.
Yeah. And so I you know, as you're, you're seeing that, and you're actually probably and your seminary now, as you have a lot of online courses and people from probably all over the world that are able to access that and to start to walk alongside what how does that actually shift and change perspectives in western the Western Church and Western Christian leadership when you start to hear a diversity of voices coming in? Walking along?
Yes. So, so what's interesting is the diversity of voices is a really important part of adaptive thinking. So the way the first way to think about adaptive thinking is, you know, obviously when I'm I work at a seminary, everybody who comes to a seminary traditionally has been someone who's someone said to them, you're the best Christian, I know, you should go pro, you should go off to professional Christian school, you should do this for a living, you're called to do this, you should run a
church. And what that meant was we give them lots of reading, they write lots of papers, and by the time they're done, they have a master of divinity, which means they have mastered a set of theological concepts and academic concepts. And then they go back in and lead churches based on their expertise to you're the expert, right? The hard part now is that almost every church in every context, we were trained to be the expert in that old world, that world where people would just show up,
they don't anymore. So now we're in a place where we're having to lead differently. And this adaptive leadership starts with the notion of I don't know, I don't, I don't know what to do. I know that we have a set of core convictions, and core values that are central to who I am, who we are, this is what animates us and sends us into the world. But now we have to figure out what that looks like
in this particular context. And your point about the diverse voices is what's happening is now the diverse voices are not clear across seawater, they're in our conversations every day. And that, if you will listen to that is a great advantage. Because now it means that you no longer have to go around the world, to see what the Holy Spirit is doing. You just need to go across the sidewalk. That means, however, that you have to go across the sidewalk with a different posture than you would
have gotten in the past. In church world, that means you don't go as a person who goes with expertise, I'm going to offer you programs that we've thought out that we think are perfect, and that we'd like to offer you to take advantage of, you actually have to go in as listeners and learners. Yeah. And you're beginning to respond to those folks. And that, and that's a skill set that many places in the church have had to
do forever. It just not ever had to be the skill set that came out of the dominant western church.
That's true. And you know, if you look at Jesus, as he's leading, and he's he's listening to others, he knows people's contexts, where they're at. And he's, he asked a lot of questions to help them discover what does it actually look like? You know, if you're looking, you know, in your book, canoeing, the mountains, you're talking about Lewis and Clark, and they're Corps of Discovery right
there. They're out trying to discover what does it look like to have these water passages all the way into the, to the Pacific. For for Jesus, he's helping people discover what does that actually look like to live in the kingdom? By asking questions is Is your watch and you look at Jesus as far as what he has done. And people in place? What are a couple of lessons to learn of how we could posture ourselves as good listeners, as you said, and ones that come alongside?
Yeah, so that's interesting the way you put that. So I don't think Lewis and Clark are a good type of Jesus.
Oh, no, no, I didn't,
I didn't. I think that was actually a good type of the Pharisee. They were the folks who believe they were the expert, who got disrupted. So if you think the best way to think about Lewis and Clark is they are like Nicodemus, who was a Pharisee, who didn't counters Jesus, and now is asking that question they can't even imagine asking, right? They're hearing things like you must be born
again. And they ask, Well, how do you crawl back up in your mother's womb, right, and they're, like, holy not getting it. But as soon as they see that the world in front of them is nothing like the world behind them. They now are open to perspectives they wouldn't be open to. And so what you literally have, I think, is a moment in their lives. I mean, remember, Meriwether Lewis was
tutored by Thomas Jefferson. Now talking about a group of people who had all the power, all the privilege, all of the, you know, the support of this American government, a 300 year old mental model that went clear back to Europe, about the way the world works. That is all disrupted at one moment. When they look over the limb highpass and realize there is no water route, we cannot canoe our way
into the future. We're gonna have to drop these canoes, and we're gonna have to navigate a terrain that is completely different than any of us have ever imagined before. I think that's what's happening to people when Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God. Now, when they hear kingdom, they think kingdom of David. They think power rule, authority, victory, defeat Goliath, right? David had
Goliath, we have Rome. So let's Use Pat, let's figure out how to when Jesus walks in and demonstrates the kingdom of God is not like the kingdoms of this world. And so therefore we're gonna have to leave to live into it and a totally different way.
And I think what happens in that moment is when Jesus takes a little child and puts them in his mix, or when Jesus reaches out and invites people like tax collectors or braces a woman and adultery or heals a leper, it is the equivalent of what Meriwether Lewis and William Clark experienced when they turned around and realized, Oh, the only person who knows where she is going, is a teenage Native American American nursing mother, Sacagawea, we learned her name and love the great
history classes second Juliet, but her name and the journals was caca. We so want to give her back her name. Yeah. And we need to learn to listen to her the way they needed to learn to listen to her so they could keep going. And I think we're in that kind of moment in the church today.
Yeah. So So what are the types of of voices? And the types of leaders that will actually get us through that?
Well, so in my most recent book, which is a book on resilience, it's called temperate resilience. I, one of these I talk about is that leading into the middle of the unknown when you need to develop the resilience, because your own people will resist you like, yeah, the hard part about this is that, you know, we are like Lewis and Clark, leading the court discovery, and the whole court discovery says, We're not going yeah, this is almost every church I know is the leaders
face that reality. If they say they want to go, they just don't want to change. Yeah, that resilience needs, it starts with a couple of qualities are really important. And when the first one is the quality of, of being a learner, it starts with humility. And and here's the interesting part that I live my life in the intersection between spiritual formation literature and leadership, literature, I'm literally a professor of
leadership formation. And what they both have in common, both the leadership literature out of places like Harvard and Stanford, yeah. And the spiritual formation literature out of places like Augustine and Aquinas and Henry now and others, right? is humility. The capacity to learn, to not be the expert, but to be the learner, and to lead the learning to be open to being wrong, to be open to experiencing what you that you are blind and cannot see.
Yeah. And that humility is the first thing that has to happen as the first quality,
but if he feels like you know, and, and are Christendom worlds, it actually looks, leadership looks a lot like a, you know, I'm going to be the visionary. And we're going to just follow my lead, and let's go. And in this leadership in the unknown, looks a little bit more like humility, learning and leading together and shepherding a place of, of learning and moving forward. So what are the so for those that are those really, I don't know, hyper visionary leaders that said, you know, I'm going to
take the charge. How can we all posture ourselves differently to be those types of humble learners? And to shepherd other people in that process? What is our posture that we have to take?
Yeah, so one of the things is just a shifting of the idea of vision, right. So I believe that leaders do need to have vision, but the vision they need to have is a clear vision of reality. For starters, they need to be able to be the people who stand in front of group of folks and say, here's the truth. In the West, we're losing a million Millennials a year. We are in decline. Yeah, I know, there's mega churches out there.
But every mega church, and it's every area has not moved the needle one bit on the call on cultures becoming more and more Christ, like we're more, we're more divided than ever, like, it needs to have the courage to say the calm, kind truth about reality. Max Dupree, who's I worked at the Dupree center, so we code them all the time says the first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. And so that's the kind of vision the other kind of vision is the vision says, and in our reality,
we will look to God. I one of my favorite passages of Scripture is Second Chronicles 20. Lord, we do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you. And so teaching the church, it's not having a great vision of a great compelling future. It's having a vision of have God in our midst, like a pillar of clubs like a pillar of fire, that takes us one step along the way in the
dark. And we are going to take each faithful step one at a time to be faithful to what God wants us to have, we're going to learn as we go, we're going to go as light hearted as we need to light handed as we need to, I'd say we're gonna, we're gonna have to drop a lot of canoes and let go of stuff that got us this
far. And that kind of leadership is not only bringing people together to discern a future, but it's calling people toward a sense of mission that, that has a vision that participates in what God is doing in the world, but probably is open to it being done differently than you expected.
Now, I love as we're actually discovering that and we're learning God in our minutes, and then we're bringing people along on that journey. How can we make decisions to move forward in a way that honors other voices and brings other other people in, but doesn't get stalled out in the discussion of what we need to do, but actually propels us forward?
Yeah. So this is actually that's a great question. Because one of the things I say is I don't think we go forward, we go forward with collaboration, non conversation, collaboration, co laboring. So I say to people, what we need to learn how to do is experiment our way forward. It means we have a conversation, and then we try something. And what we know it's an experiment, because we're not trying to ask the question, Will this work? What we're asking is, what are we
going to learn? So we learn one step at a time, we do what they call in the startup world, I spend a lot of my time with some tech people in startup. We call that prototyping to a safe, modest experiment. There's a great statement that says, you know, fail fast and learn fast. And I was in a room with a venture capitalist once who said, yeah, and fail cheap. It's
my money. Right? Right. So So part of what we need to do is collaborate our way forward, laborer, together, work together out of a type experiment
together. And that's what keeps us from sitting around thinking that if we just get all the conversation, right, and the and we get all the concepts, right, we're going to be fine, because what we really need to be doing is having conversations while we are learning together and saying, this worked, this didn't, I learned this, this didn't, I thought it was going to turn out this way, it turned out this way. And that's the way in which we learn our way
forward. And most of the work we do in consulting, is trying to teach churches and told denominations and big mission agencies, how to learn to hold on to the thing that is the most important to them, adapt those values in such a way that you can then experiment your way forward to new learnings, new discoveries.
So would you say should you have like an r&d department research and development department that they're actually the experimenters and trying to do the work? Or are we trying to do that from more of the the center that's trying to lead the whole organization or church? And what are some pros and cons to those different ways of doing it?
So it's a great question, it depends upon the organization or the church itself. So in, you know, in many small that what we always said, say this, we say, there needs to be both a core of discovery, and a Congress that sends them. Right. That needs to be I always say, I've used the exact same example of like, say, how, how did we get to the moon, there was both Congress that funded it and took it to the country
going. And there was NASA, who was building rocket ships, I think you get a small group of people and and you could call them like the r&d department, we call them the transformation team. They are literally the folks whose job is to learn as you go. But take that bring that learning back into the congregation, the organization so that that learning becomes
part of our new DNA. And so whenever we consult, one of the things we always say is, you know, you, we're not interested in just having you know, the pastor, we will coach a senior pastor if they want to, or the
coach the CEO. But what we always say to them is if you really want to bring transformation, you got to get a small group of people who are going to learn together, how to make the transformation team and then bring you the rest of your leadership along, that then brings the rest of the organization to congregational.
Yeah, and one of the things that you mentioned a little bit earlier is having some some core values that can actually be adapted to different contexts in different areas. And I think what we have seen is we have some values and some principles where where we teach, this is what it looks like to be a really good cross cultural missionary. This is what it looks like to church plant among people. For that don't yet know Jesus. But it needs to be
adaptable. But these values and these principles remain the same. How can we we take core values and principles and adapt them? Well, in another area?
Yeah. So it starts with this, it starts with actually looking at your values and asking this question. Are they actual values? Or are they aspirational values? aspirations are really important. And I'm not against them, actually, we'll talk there's a we can talk about the role of aspirations. But your values you're actually adapting are your actual values. So when I work with an Oregon, they come in and say, Oh, we can skip that whole value stuff, we've got a core set of values,
I'll go great. Tell me about them. And they'll go, well, a group of us got together, and we read a bunch of Bible passages. And we did a lot of study, we read some good books, and I began to retreat. And we came up with five values, and they spell out the word grace. They're amazing generosity, reconciliation, accountability, compassion, empathy, and we put them on a board and we give them, we put them on everything we do, we print it, we all know, we're a church of grace, and I
go, that's amazing. You just told me your aspirational values, you just told me everything you want to be, which I think is amazing picture. Now, tell me a story about the best moments in the life of your organization. Tell me a story about the thing you're most proud of. Tell me a story about. And what I do is I make them
tell stories. Yeah. And what happens is, then I tell leaders now go tell store, go have everybody else in your organization, tell stories, take those, bring those stories back. And you'll tell me what your real values are. And some of them may be in that list of GA gr AC, they may be. But many times what you have is the values we have, there is a mix. And what you're trying to say is
our actual value. So so the way to think about this is anybody who gets married knows that you, you have a tendency to want to put your best foot forward when you're dating. And you tend to marry your projection of your, of your spouse as this perfect person, which is what makes marriage early on so painful. Because you have to actually bring your real selves to the
marriage. And the sooner you get to this is who I really am with all my goodness and brokenness, pain and beauty, all the etc. And here's who you really are not who I wish you were, you can actually build a healthy marriage. And adaptation is healthy adaptations of your actual DNA. And we spend, it's one of the most when when people hire us to be consulting and our team to do that. They're consultants, they literally are almost always disappointed at
the beginning. Because they think, man, we're doing this so slow. And I'm like, No, if we don't get this part, right, the rest of it doesn't go. Right. Yeah. And what happens is very quickly, you get that part, right. And then a bunch of stuff falls into place.
Hmm. Yeah. And you're looking at, you know, when, you know, Drucker says that, that culture eats strategy for breakfast, like, you know, and I think a values determine your culture. And so values that are lived out, lived out values, right out. Yeah. You know, one of the ways I teach I was like, you know, as values determine your behavior and behavior determines your culture. So it's the lived out values, right. So if you're living out those values, you're correct. You're
absolutely right. And I think, you know, so what does it actually look? How can we take some culture and then start to bring it to a new place? Because you have culture like a, an adaptation strategy is going to get us not very far. But to shift our culture in a way to move it towards adaptation, adaptation and change, and to be effective in this new space that we find ourselves in? What's it going to take to be able to do that? Well,
the first thing it takes is getting really, really clear on what our actual values. Yeah, I mean, so. So like you said, you know, values determined behavior, I actually think behavior reveals actually, that's good. I like that. Right? So if you spend time actually looking at what we actually do, you get to your actual values. And, and so then when you start from there, now you ask the question, okay, what are those the values and the behaviors we need in the new world in this
changing world? So you're asking now, once you're clear on what should never change, what can never change? I was just with a group. That is a big nonprofit that works all over the world, mostly with people who are filled with addictions. And they are they've really been about proclaiming the gospel to people who have experienced addiction in their life. really remarkable work they've done for a generation, but they have a model that's built on like that. residential communities deep
discipleship, beautiful. Which of course, they could not do at all during COVID. Yeah. So now they had to ask ourselves, are we about residential communities? Or we are about helping people with addictions? And the question here has to be, this is what happens in adaptive change, adaptive change, you have to learn. Yeah, you have to face loss, what are we going to let go of? And then what are we not going to let go of? Because
we have competing values. And competing values are always decided, by deciding what are you going to keep? And what are you going to discard? Or what are you going to make first priority and second priority? Yeah, and that's a painful thing, because it's a loss experience loss, learning
competing values. I say if you came on the trip with Lewis and Clark, because they were told it was a river trip, and you're an expert to newer, and you're so good, you invented your own boat, they invented their own boat. It's a bad day, when you find out there's no water, because now you're not a guy who's the expert canoe or you're just a dude carrying luggage. And it's not the same thing. And people now have to decide, are we river rafters? Or are we can Newars? Which one? Are we
explorers? Or are we river rafters? Are we explorers? Are we canoes? Which one are we, for explorers, we're going to drop the canoes. If we're canoes, we're gonna go back into charted territory and do trips about how great canoeing is the pass on the great gift of canoeing, but which one are we? And that's the painful work. That's why you develop a set of values. And that's how you figure out how you adapt them. You adapt them based on your mission and your calling.
That's really good. You know, I'd love to move into this place of you being somebody that's working in leadership formation and having the the spiritual formation and, and leadership melds together. What does that look like? How do we how do we do that? And why is it so important to move forward in a way where spiritual formation and leadership are going together, instead of in two separate tracks.
So when we think about the gospel, and that the gospel, not only offers a salvation, but it offers a sanctification we, we become humans who are who have been made in the image of God who are restored to God, to be like Jesus, like Jesus, we are to be the body of Christ, and we are to be the embodiment of Jesus. One of the things to remember about Jesus is Jesus didn't just show up and be Jesus, Jesus actually came with a mission, to proclaim the kingdom of God has
come near. So we're always being shaped into the likeness of Jesus for the sake of the mission of God. So I define leadership as energizing a community of people toward their own transformation in order to accomplish a shared mission. And what that requires, then is this as the question, so what do we need to be formed for that? And in most of our lives, if you think about, just say, your
spiritual practices, yeah. You know, I remember when I, I grew up in a Catholic family, we went to Mass every Sunday, we went to my grandmother's house, we had we say, grace before meals. When I was a teenager, someone introduced me to Jesus in a different way that I could have, that wouldn't just be religion, it would be about a relationship with Jesus, and I would be a disciple and follower of Jesus. And they literally said stuff to me, like, you need to read your
Bible every day. I didn't have a Bible. So I had to get a Bible and read it every day. You need to pray every day. I said, I got a couple prayers, the Lord's Prayer, they all married. No, you need to pray a different way to like prayer, give you a request to God, you know, putting your heart to God, those practices shaped me. And they were great. And I became a follower of Jesus, a disciple of
Jesus. But when I needed to become a pastor and a preacher, I couldn't just read the Bible every day, I had to study the Bible hours every week. And I couldn't just pray every day, I needed to pray differently for my congregation. So my practices changed to shape me for the calling I got. I said, Well, today, I'm now a seminary professor, I'm not a pastor. I get asked to preach about four or five times a year, and I got three really good sermons. They're really good. I do them
over and over again. Right? Like I have a different calling. So how do I need to be shaped for this calling for this day? So I think that one of the things we need to be asking ourselves is, what are the practices that we need in our lives to shape us for the call we have in front of us today? And believing that that call is that calling in that calling? Jesus wants us to be like Jesus in that calling.
Yeah. But there's a different tack, whatever the thing is in front of us, it's going to require something different of us, and that if we don't keep adapting our formation practices, then we're going to find ourselves unable to Have you been called to do?
I think, you know, in my experience, leadership is often lonely. And there's, we have to figure out how do we find people to be able to talk to and help in that formation process. So what are some good steps to be able to figure out how we should be formed for the task and the mission in front of us.
So, one of the things that we're doing that we talk a lot about in the book, temperate resilience, we talk a lot about the fact that not only is it lonely to be a leader, but to be a lonely leader is dangerous. That leadership is not meant to be alone, Jesus
wasn't alone. So when we recognize that how dangerous it is, I always say to people that if I was a bishop, and I'm a Presbyterian, and I don't have bishops, but if I was a bishop, I would be telling people all the time, that if you're leading anything, and you're doing so, without partners, mentors, and friends, all three people who are partners, their people, obviously, my partners are people who care more about the mission than they care about me.
They might love me and care for me, and we might be really close to me. But if push comes to shove, they're gonna keep doing the mission. If I left, they keep going. That's a partner. My friends are people who care more about me than they do about the mission. That my friends are the ones who say, Hey, Todd, congratulations, I heard that you got a new book out, I go, I do you want to read it? And they go, no, no, no, I'm not really that interested in all that leadership stuff. Talk to
somebody else, right. But I'm your friend. And I'm happy for it. And Mentors are people who care about me, for the sake of my mission. So that's where I put the category of spiritual directors or therapists or coaches, or just people in your life who you ask to be in your life as mentors, so that you can continue to be the healthiest, best person you can. Yeah, for the sake of something bigger
than you. Yeah. And what I would say is, if I was a bishop, and you tried to lead without partners, mentors or friends, I would consider that leadership malpractice. To me that is as deadly as someone saying they want to be a preacher without reading the Bible. Yeah. And we see this in places. I mean, there's all these stories about mega churches with pastors who said stuff like, you know, unless I have someone who's a pastor who's got a church bigger than mine, I'm not sure I can
learn anything from them. Right. That's arrogance. Yeah. And that lead leads to crumbling ministries.
Yeah, that's really good partners, mentors and friends. And we all need those. That's really, really good. I love that a lot. That's really great. You know, as we're looking about, you talk a little bit about transformational leadership. What does it look like to transform some people? There's all sorts of different leadership thoughts and thinking of servant leadership, or there's all like all sorts of
stuff. I mean, I like this transformational leadership, what does it actually look like to transform to be transformed and to transform? What Where do you think as Christian leaders, what are we should walk in? How can we walk in things that really reflect Christ in our leadership?
Well, for me, the notion of transformation comes right out of that notion, right? You follow the footsteps of Jesus, you become like Jesus, that's the point. Right? And and what's hard about that is people walked with him for three years and still didn't get the point. And so so we start realizing this really is the work of the Holy Spirit that happens over a
long period of time. And then what needs to happen in our lives more and more and more is that you walk in the manner worthy of the Lord, Right you are, you grow in the knowledge of God so that you might be able to bear fruit the remains. So for me, the notion of adaptive leadership is built on to other things. It's built on technical competence. That's the tech that's the term for being faithful with the stuff you've been called to be faithful with.
technical competence is where you're supposed to be an expert. You need to be right. So if I don't handle the scriptures, well, if if I was your if I'm your teacher, your pastor and you look at me and go, I don't think the Bible says that you're not going to trust me any further. technical competence is what builds trust and builds
credibility. You also need to have relational congruence and what relational congruence is really a way of saying, you're the same person who shows up in every relationship in your life. Whether that's a transactional relationship, you know, I should, I should be I live I pastored for 17 years in a small town. And one of the best parts about being a small town is everybody knows who you are.
Yeah, they might have known me as Brooks and Al He's dad, they might have known me as the pastor of the church, they might have known me as the neighbor who lives close to a favorite beach spot. They might have known a lot, but they better know me as the same person in all of those things. Because if not, they're not going to trust me either. Yeah. So trust is what's needed to lead other people through a process of transformation. Now, the hard part for this is, if there's no trust, there's no
transformation. Bottom line, no trust, you're not going forward. Obviously, nobody trusts you off the map. If they don't trust you first on the map, right, if they don't trust you, in all the known terrain, they're not going to trust you, when you tell them you got to drop the canoes and go into the uncharted territory. But so there's no transformation without trust. But trust is not transformation. It's not enough just to be well trust to be
trustworthy. Yeah, this is where too many of us, we become those kinds of people who never want to disappoint our congregants who want them to know that we love them, we want to please them in everything we do. We always want to show up, they trust us, they love us, we have job security here. That's not our goal. Our goal is for them to trust us. So we can call them into the learning, the loss, the discovery, the discipleship that is going to require them to you have to invest their trust, in
transformation. And so the work of a leader is always getting, raising the level of trust and then calling people to invest that, that to lay that down to move toward transformation in such a way that over time, you then rebuild the trust and trust leads to transformation. And that process continues again,
in this, this time, where we're moving into this, this place in the church, where it's really about self care, and about making sure that you know, we're not burnt out and we're healed. And we're whole, you know, because everybody's, especially after a big shift of what's happening. There's all sorts of reasons why we're in this self care moment.
How can we, like, acknowledge that, but continue to lead forward into the unknown, and brave that, that wilderness and not be stuck in a, hey, let's just spend the next 10 years in this one spot to make sure that we're healthier? Yeah. Well, if
you think about this, the same for me this, this is really simple. Health is as simple as breathing. I mean, you you if you hold your breath, to preserve it, you pass out if you run out of breath, because you're trying too hard. Yep, pass out. You need to both inhale and exhale all the time, repetitively, you need to so self care needs to be built into the way you live. And the your living has to be more than your self care. It just has to be
built in. I always say, you know, I work with pastors all the time. And they'll say they struggle with having Sabbath's you know, I can't get one day off. And then they will they'll say but at least I have a sabbatical coming. I'm good. Good. Oh, so every seven years, you're going to take care of yourself. That's good. My guess as you're doing? I'm guessing from years three on you weren't very helpful. You don't you need a rhythm of work and rest that happens every day. Every day.
That's good. It's like breathing. Yeah, it's beautiful. I have a couple questions here at the answer. One is, if you could go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give
my 21 year old self I would say be patient and marry that girl. When my wife and I were 21 we were not doing well dating very well, at that moment. I wasn't sure we were gonna make it. And the very, very best thing on my life is that by the time we were 25, and 24, we were married and and that has been the happiest, most joyful, beautiful part of my life.
That's great. Yeah, anything that you've been reading or watching lately that you could recommend.
Just I read a book this last year that I keep coming back to over and over again. It's by Adam Grant, and it's called Think again. Yeah, and part of the reason why I like it so much is that he talks about this notion of humility and learning. He says the greatest thinkers in in our world were not great thinkers, they were great rethink errs. And he believes that the key to moving forward is to be open to being wrong and being corrected.
He said not trying to prove you're right, but to keep working till you get it right. Which means you're often wrong. And that book has been really shaping to me. It's been really hot. I use it with all my students. I have 60 doctoral students at different parts of the process including some graduates out there and they hear me talk a lot about this notion. That's been the book that I've spent the most amount of time thinking about in the last year
wow, to relearn to, to say that we can be wrong. I mean, that's that's really the the posture that you're talking about earlier. It's about being learners and being humble. And to really say, Hey, we're in this together and we're trying to relearn and learn again and be wrong and to, to move forward. That's such a humble position to be in. If you could leave, leave one thing that our listeners what would you leave them with?
Breathe, breathe, exhale. Yeah.
That's good. Well, Todd, it was a pleasure to speak with you and to have you on, and there's so many good nuggets in there that I'll be chewing on. So thank you so much.
My pleasure. Nice to be with you too.