How Church Leaders Can Lead Through Change and Transformation

What is the goal of leadership in the church, and how can we become better leaders?

 

Tod Bolsinger has spent his career seeking answers to these questions. He is a leadership coach, author, and senior congregational strategist and affiliate professor of leadership formation at Fuller Theological Seminary. A former pastor of 27 years, Tod now serves as co-owner and principal of AE Sloan Leadership, where he helps church, nonprofit, and marketplace leaders navigate change and lead with resilience. 

 

He is also a main stage speaker at the upcoming Amplify Conference, October 20–21 at Wheaton College, in partnership with Outreach magazine.

 

In the following conversation, Bolsinger discusses what it takes for pastors to lead their congregations through change, why leadership often requires disappointing people as you help them embrace transformation, and what it looks like for a church to demonstrate the gospel.

 

What challenges do you think leaders face today and how do they compare to the challenges of leaders of the past?

 

I think the single biggest thing is the rate and reality of constant change and disruption. Almost all of us were taught to be leaders more like managers. How do you rightly administrate? How do you take care of the things that have been entrusted to our care, as my [Fuller Theological Seminary] colleague Scott Cormode says? How do we make sure that the programs get done, that the budgets are finished, that the churches do the things we say we’re gonna do. 

 

Those things are really important, but all of that gets disrupted. And when it gets disrupted, what we tend to do is go back and do what we’ve always done harder until we’re more exhausted. And what we actually need to do is figure out how to lead differently when the world around us changes.

 

So what does that look like for leaders who are trying to lead through change?

 

You start by getting really clear. I was trained to believe that the primary task of a leader was to cast a vision that will inspire people. I actually now believe that vision is overrated, that way more important is that leaders are people who protect values. What are the things that are the most important about us that will never change? We would like to make a lot of things never change, but it’s usually a small set. Once we get really clear on those central things that are never going to change about us, then how do we become able to hold loosely and begin to wisely adapt the rest of the things? 

 

So it’s a switch, and it starts by getting really clear on what are our actual values, what is our DNA, what’s our identity that is really important about us that we’re gonna preserve? What are we willing to discard or let go so that we can live into those things that are essential?

 

How do you help leaders think through that shift in leadership?

 

We often say to churches, almost everybody wants the leader to come in and make the church better for those people in the pews. The assumption is your job is to make our church better for us. Where instead, your job is to actually transform us, to make the world better for other people.

 

Leadership is energizing a community of people toward their own transformation for the sake of a mission. What most of us don’t realize is when we’re called to be pastors, what they really want is, will you please make sure the church gets better for me? And that could mean, we’ll make it younger so that there’s more people to give money so my programs continue. Or we’ll make it a place that my kids and my grandkids will want to come. Or we’ll make it into a place that I can bring my neighbors to. Like, if you can keep making it better for me, I would like it.