How Church Leaders Can Lead Through Change and Transformation

Instead, the point of the church, the purpose of the church, is to say, how might this be a place that transforms me for the pain in the world? That is usually met with deep disappointment. The people didn’t expect you to take on that job. And yet that’s the primary call of leadership.

How do you navigate the pushback that comes from that? People don’t like being transformed. They like being comfortable.

Exactly. This is why the famous definition of leadership that comes from Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky is leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can absorb. We’re taking them through a journey of their own transformation. I have a book called Leading Through Resistance, which [emphasizes] the way you take people through resistance is by actually not challenging them, you know, pushing back on them when they push back on you. It’s actually accompanying them through their own grief of having to let go of their expectations. They expected not to have to be transformed. You have to walk them through the process of their own transformation. Instead of pushing back on people who are pushing back on you, we learn to pull them by accompanying them through a process of their own formation so they can step into that.

A lot of that is very pastoral work. It’s discipleship as pastoral work. It’s training as pastoral work. But it starts not by trying to motivate people or hold them accountable or create metrics. It actually starts by accompanying them through the things they have to be willing to lose. Like, I have to lose my own comfort. I have to lose my own expectation of what I thought a church would be. I have to learn to lose the expectation that this church is going to be for me and people like me. Because when the Holy Spirit starts bringing people to our church, it’s usually the people who are most open, not necessarily the people who are most like me. So it changes things pretty dramatically.

Let’s talk about this specifically in the context of evangelism. If your church is incredibly effective at evangelism, it’s going to bring the people who make you uncomfortable into the church, and they are in a process of change. So how do you help people make that transition where they’re willing to make the sacrifices that evangelism requires?

Well, I think one of the ways that we need to do so is to consider what it will take for every person in our church to believe that their identity is as a messenger. Now, when you tell me that my job is to be a messenger, I wish I could live my life in such a way that I didn’t ever have to share my faith. I could just demonstrate it. But I need my life to demonstrate that there is good news. That the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever. That there is a king who is a good king, who is making the world right. My job is to proclaim and demonstrate that. So what we have to do in terms of leading change is actually ask the question, do we believe that our church is supposed to be a demonstration of that.

Programs don’t transform people because the culture of the church actually is way more formative. The old line is you know culture eats strategy for breakfast. I’m gonna say culture eats formation for lunch. It really does.

If you’re trying to form a culture of evangelism, the way to do it is not by starting a program or shaming somebody. It’s by creating a culture where the central reality is that we are people who are being trained to transform more and more to naturally live out our faith in our lives.

The assumption is when a church gets excited about something they hire an associate pastor of [that thing]. And there’s almost no evidence that the bigger the church went, and the more formation professionals, the more discipleship worked.