Leading Change in the Church - Lesson 3

So, we've talked about some of the dynamics of change and what the church is about in those contexts. Let's talk about the effects of change on people. Even in the best cases, change has a dramatic effect on individuals. Before we talk too much about change strategies and the like, it's essential that we become sensitized to what happens within people when change takes place within them or within their world, within their context. So let me just start with this little exercise, and I'd like you to think for a few moments. What is the most significant change that you have experienced in the past ten years? And how did you feel when you were going through that change? Can you pull that back in your memory? The most significant change? We all experience a lot of change. I mean, I changed my clothes before I came over here tonight. So there's all kinds of little changes in our lives, but a significant one, the most significant change that you've experienced in the past ten years, and how did that impact you? How did you feel about that change? Do you have that cornered in your mind what the change was? So how did you feel about that change? Anybody willing to share? Was it a positive experience? Negative experience? 

STUDENT:  For me, it was from a self-focused thing within the church, now; it was intentional. It was an emphasis on things like Bible study, which was basically a me-centric thing, from what I got from it, to a worship orientation, and that affected me a lot, giving me a more positive outlook on everybody's future. 

So, was that something that the church instituted, or was that just a personal change that you made yourself, or what? 

STUDENT:  I'm sure that there was that wave, you know, going through, but it may have been going on for a long time; I just didn't catch it until – 

But that was a very positive change in you. Okay. Others? Will you share? 

STUDENT:  For me, it was just the experience of, you know, leaving home and going to college. There was a physical move and change and whole new experiences and, obviously, for me it was a very exciting and enjoyable change, you know, new things, new ventures, and it changed me a great deal. It was definitely a positive change. 

Good. Someone else? 

STUDENT:  I think graduating college, getting my first job, getting married, and completely being on my own. That was a big change, and parts of it were really scary, I mean, we bought our first house, and there were these bills and all this, you know, part of being grown up, I guess, but it was positive too, because, you know, we were able to be on our own and be independent, so definitely a transition process. 

So, there were both negative or scary parts of it, at least, and positive parts. Oftentimes when we're going through it, it's scarier, and then you get on the other side of it and say, well, there wasn't much to that, you know, so that's kind of way it works. Matt, what about you? 

STUDENT:  I’ve had lot of change in life. The most significant was when my brother-in-law died, probably -- that was ‘03 – so that was a change that was certainly unwanted and very difficult, changed me personally, changed our family, the way we relate to each other. Looking at it now, eight years later or wherever it is, nine years later, a lot of good things came out of that, a lot of positive came down the road. I started into missions work, long story short, just because of that in many ways, so I can look back and see positives that came from it, but certainly would not have wanted to have them come that way, but that's just the way it happens. 

The process of change has impact on us, and probably going through any change has both positive and negative impact is the truth of the matter. Several years ago, I was involved with Trans World Radio in a major change that was going on in our offices in Asia. We went through a major transition in bringing three major regions of the world -- at that time there was Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia -- and we brought it into one mega-region called Asia, and I remember traveling with the president and the COO to talk about this with the staff and with the many, many people that were gathered there in Singapore. I think that was in 2005, and the great plans were laid out and how wonderful this was going to be, this is exciting, this is necessary, you know, all that stuff that you say during these change initiatives, and how important it was, and indeed it was important. My job, I was involved in leadership development, but I was also doing some work with the staff during that time, and my assignment was to process with the staff some of their new roles and so forth, and so I had the opportunity to sit down with staff one by one over a period of days and just ask the question, what are you thinking? How are you processing this? And what do you suppose the one question that kept coming up invariably was? How is this change affecting me? See, they weren't really interested in South Asia and Northeast Asia and the millions of people that we could reach and, you know, all that stuff, and I'm not saying that's not important, it is important, but the real question that the people that were most impacted by this change were asking is how does this change affect me and my future? Nobody really loves being on the receiving end of change for change’s sake, even leaders like myself who pride ourselves in liking change and enjoying change. 

Not all change is good, and so we really need to look at this question: Is the change that we're about for change’s sake? Some change in the church glorifies God and builds up the church, but as you and I both know, there are also a whole lot of bad ideas. Much of church life involves areas of preference, don't they? and where we always have the option not to move ahead with change. In Proverbs we read, “Like one who seizes a dog by the ears is a passerby who meddles in a quarrel not his own.” I love that verse. And so later we’ll determine how to decide and how to discern whether the change is necessary, but just for now, we want to say that sometimes change is for change’s sake, and none of us particularly appreciates when that is happening to us. Questions? Thoughts? 

So, let's talk about the impact of change on people from a clinical perspective. What do you and I experience during the process of change, the dynamic of change? I want to throw a little graph on the page here. Can you see that? An engineer once saw this graph and said, well, that's not exactly how it works quantifiably. That's not the point here. The whole point is that the greater the significance of the change that you're involved with, the greater the experience of loss that you're going to experience. That's just the way that tends to work. 

For change to take place, something has to be lost in order for something else to be gained. That's always the case, and so in a very real sense, death precedes resurrection, for all of us in times of change. Except a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed, but if it dies, it produces many seeds. Of course, Jesus said that. Therefore, when people experience change, even good change, they experience a kind of death to what was before; disruption, death to what was before, so that we can be reborn to what is to come, and that happens on a physical level, it happens on a psychological level, a mental level, on a collective level. 

One of the things that's always struck me, there's a popular reality show, I guess you could call it, here in the United States, that’s called Extreme Home Makeover, and my wife and I like to sit down -- it used to come on Sunday nights; I don't know when it comes on now -- but we used to like to watch the show, and it was always quite emotional watching people get their new homes, you know, and go on vacation. But what always struck me was, uh, these old houses that were often quite poorly built, and they were troublesome and sometimes dilapidated and weren't worth living in, but I always wondered how those children, when they watched these videos, when their house was being demolished by this huge machine, what emotion they must have been going through at that moment, because it's all they ever knew; it’s the only experience of life that they'd ever had, and I just cannot imagine that these children would not have gone through some kind of an emotional experience of watching everything that they had known their whole lives being wiped out in front of their eyes on this video camera. 

So, the point here is that even positive change requires loss. It requires a death to that which was so that we can experience that which will be. Does that make sense? So, when we look at the process of change, we’ve really got to look at the process of death and dying. This is the whole point, and oftentimes I think leaders are not sensitive to this, and therefore we rush into change without understanding really what goes on within human beings when this happens. As change is necessary, it may be, it's important for leaders to be sensitized to this process that people go through. 

A few weeks ago, I was in India and I was speaking with a CEO who has been experiencing some resistance to change by some of his long-time people on staff. This CEO's a friend of mine, and we were just talking, and his father I knew had passed away just a couple of months before we were talking, and I asked him to describe the process he went through with his father's death, and he began to talk about this cycle of experiencing his father's death and what he went through in terms of the changes that took place in his life as a result of that, and I wanted to share with him, and I did, take that experience now, and understand that as these long-time staff people that are on staff with you here, that's a lot of what they're going through now as they experience this change that is being initiated within the organization. It doesn't mean it's bad, but it just means this is what they're going through, and it's important for us to be sensitized to that.

So, let's talk about the cycle of change, and this is not original; you've probably seen this before, many of you, but there are about five different stages in the cycle of death and dying as we go through this change. The first is denial, particularly if there's significant change for people; their first response is this can't be happening to me, this can't be happening to us; I just don't believe that this is possible. There's refusal, there's shock, there's sometimes shut down, there's numbness, and there's self-protection built in. Then we tend to go into the step of fear; once we realize this really is happening, there's not much way I can get away from this. We begin to have all kinds of fears. What will the future look like? How is this going to change me? Is my security going to be in place? Am I still going to have a place of significance? And so on and so forth. We get anxious, we get worried, we feel a bit helpless and out of control, very vulnerable to the circumstances we're in. We feel very uneasy. And then we switch into this anger mode; fear slips into anger, and we may be processing this anger internally, we may be processing it externally, but we get short tempered, we get frustrated, we get restless, we get irritable. Finally, we land into this deep, deep valley of sadness. We feel lost, we feel sensitive, we feel isolated. This is what happens to people when they go through this cycle of change in their lives. And then finally we end up in acceptance; hopefully we end up in acceptance, assuming the change is worthwhile, we're happy, we're excited, we're energetic, we're content again.

So this cycle of change happens over and over and over to people, but the key point here to remember is that as people are going through change, to recognize that this is really akin to death and dying, because whenever change happens, something has to die in order for something else to be reborn. Is that meaningful to you? Is that helpful? Just curious what your thoughts are. Questions?

STUDENT:  I think the statement you made before talking about the cycle is a very good one. The leaders are not sensitive to the impact of change, and oftentimes that’s because leaders have been thinking about it in a different way, whether explicitly or just realizing there's something needing to be done, and so when change does start to unfold with others, leaders can be steps ahead emotionally or processing-wise, and that can really catch leaders off guard and leaders can, unfortunately, just say, come on, this is not that big of a deal; are you with me? That changes everything. It's making it about the leader, in that respect, oftentimes not what the leader meant to do, but being so far ahead, it's very hard to pause… 

Very, very important statement. It goes back to that question, where speed is king, that can become a difficult situation.

STUDENT:  If the decision's already been made, and sometimes those decisions are hard to kind of make in a public way because, you know, they can be damaging and that sort of thing, and when you announce it, it's already kind of a done deal and people are caught off guard. 

Yeah, for sure. But a simpler model is a model that was introduced by a guy named Janssen, a very simple model. We all begin with this area of comfort, you know, our lives are stable; we're experiencing homeostasis, everything's cool, everything's calm, everything's comfortable, and then the change happens, and we move quickly into the denial stage, and then we end up in the confusion stage, and then finally in the renewal stage, but no sooner are we in the renewal stage, then we're back in the comfort stage, and the cycle begins again. That's what life is about.