Leading Change in the Church - Lesson 9

And so, the step now is to ask the question, so what kind of leadership is really important when it comes to change in the church? And as I have observed this issue over the years, observed myself and some of my shortcomings in this, watched other pastors and leaders over the years, and read about this issue from others, there are basically about three or four things that leaders that are effective at change within the church eventually we find. 

Number one is that leaders who practice humility, and when I talk about humility, there's someone in this group -- no, it wasn't this group; it was another person at Fuller Seminary -- recommended to me a book called Humilitas recently, a great book, I’d recommend it to you, written by an Australian named John Dickson, but he describes humility as the intentional capacity to reach out to those that you don't have to reach out to, and working and assisting and serving those who cannot necessarily serve you, and so it's a very active role. So it's a practicing of humility, it's a practicing of patience, it's a practicing of sacrifice, of self-control, and of courage. Those are the characteristics of effective change agents in the church today, from a character point of view. 

The second thing we look for is churches go through a process of repentance and forgiveness. That is key, and that is core to effective change. There are a lot of definitions for revival, and revival is about disruption and about change, however you define it, renewal. The core components of renewal are repentance and forgiveness. As we are open to what God is doing in our lives, individually and collectively, we find that churches that go through a process of true repentance and forgiveness are the ones that are most effective at change, because change always brings that sense of pain, and a lot of the time it requires that kind of humility among both the leaders and the people. 

And then thirdly, the church employs good organizational development practices; just as simply is to say that we can have the good character, we can collectively seek repentance and forgiveness, but it sure helps to know some solid, reliable organizational development realities as we go through this process. 

So what have you seen in churches that are critical for effective change to take place? Maybe you have some additional thoughts on this. 

STUDENT: I just think that we have currently a pastor who has modeled this that you're talking about because he didn't come in and say, do away with this or away with that. He said that we'll just refine these things in the gospel. And somebody pointed out to me the other day, they said, oh, look, you don't have this reach, teach, connect thing; you’ve got the gospel mission, got gospel community; you've got weekly gospel communities in our program, which I hadn't even noticed, but it was somebody who hadn’t been here in a while, and he said, you know, kind of redefining things, so I feel like I am seeing this happen currently, whereas when some people come in, they see the need for change, but they want to do it when they come in rather than kind of allowing the things that are present to be redefined, in a more full or more complete way. 

It's interesting, I was in a church and had left the church for some time and found out later that the new pastor had a real desire to begin a small group ministry, and so he came along and he said, there's going to be no more Sunday school, we're going to have small groups. There's going to be no Sunday night service; we're going to do small groups, etc., etc., etc. Somebody brought it to him aside and said, do you understand that Sunday school is small groups? And so it was this redefining issue, and that goes back to creating the meaning and to understand what it is that we're doing right, rather than deconstructing from the very beginning. 

STUDENT: And I think communication is probably key and not just changing the products and the practices, but getting to understand the assumptions and what's happening behind it so that you can bring effective change. 

That's true.

STUDENT: Because that's what people respond to the most strongly, is when you do change those practices, like no more of this class… We tried to change the time of a class, and you just can't do that; these people that have been coming to that class for so long, and suddenly you're going to try to change the time they meet, you get all kind of response to that. 

One thing I'll say at this point, just to put it in the hopper to think about, resources are flexible; processes are not. Resources tend to be flexible. Processes are much less flexible. And so, as we're working through change, those are two dynamics that are very important to keep in mind. We'll go further into that later. But what are some other things that you've seen in the church that really lend to good, healthy change? Thoughts? 

STUDENT: When you build on history, and you don't just discard it, but you build on the history, and you build on what the church did well. That doesn’t mean you continue to do what it didn't do well, but you build on its history, and you build on what it did.

So, it demonstrated respect for the past. That's a good point. 

STUDENT: A demonstrated love for the greater good and for the gospel and that the people are loved. It's not just – 

It's not just an idea. 

STUDENT: Right. People can do a lot of things out of the box if they know that you really care about them. 

Yeah, well, that's so important. I think that's very, very critical, what you just said. Others? 

So, to integrate faith and organizational development, as we've been implying here, we have to make space for grace within the context of the church. We have to trust God's Spirit to transform minds and hearts. That's a critical issue as shepherds of the flock. And we need a prayer strategy; we can talk all we want about organizational development and even organizational transformation and all these great things that that are part of this, but listening to God and responding to his initiatives are critical. 

Oftentimes, I have been guilty of managing by objective, you know, the MBO model, where you're taught to come out with your vision and then establish your objectives and then start going after those, and by the way, at some point along the line, ask God's blessing upon those. And that's kind of our initiative and asking God to respond. Seems to me in John chapter five, when Jesus said, I only do what I see my Father doing, that was kind of the opposite of that MBO thing. He said, I'm seeing God, the Father, initiate, my responsibility is to respond to God's initiative. So as leaders, this whole idea of listening to God in a prayerful attitude and listening to his people in the process is critical to developing that responding to God's initiative sort of motif within the church. We could spend a whole lot of time on that, but that's really important in this issue of change. Thoughts, responses to that? You're quiet tonight. Maybe I’ll throw a couple of bombs in the middle of the room in a little bit and see what happens. Make space for grace and time for it, right?

Well, we're going to talk, then, about eight steps for leading effective change, and these come from a variety of sources, and one of the sources is a researcher by the name of John Kotter, who's written a lot on change and on effective change in general, and so we're borrowing some of these ideas, but putting them through the sifter, if you will, of looking at them through a Christ-centered lens, and hopefully this will be helpful to you. 

When we think about change, remember, there's the unfreezing phase of change, and there will be three of the eight steps that we’ll look at in the unfreezing stage; we'll look at these first. The first is what we call establishing a sense of urgency, and I'm just going to give you these real quick and then come back to them. The second one is what we call creating a guiding coalition. Thirdly is identifying the desired future state. Now that's the unfreezing stage. Then we've got the change stage, which are steps four through six: Communicate the desired change, empower broad-based action, generate short-term wins. And then in the refreezing stage there are two: consolidate the gains and anchor the new approaches in the culture. 

So, as we work through those -- we're going to work through these eight so that we understand them very clearly -- these are going to really help from an organizational development side of things for the church to work through change effectively and in a healthy way. We'll come back to these, we'll spend quite a bit of time, so if you haven't caught them, if you haven't written them all down, well, we'll get there, all right? 

Let me start by saying as a disclaimer here that there is no straight road. It's not as simple as eight simple steps, and there you have it. Any of us that have worked in the real life of the real church knows that the road ahead is full of landmines, and there's peaks and there's valleys, and there's difficulties and there's possibilities of stepping in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this is the reality that we face. It's a lot messier than eight steps, and so I don't want to at all suggest to you that when you’ve got these eight steps, you’ve got it made. But this is sort of a helpful guide, if you will, and I think you're going to see some things come up that hopefully will be some ‘aha’ moments as we work through this, okay? So that's just a cute little thing to help us. 

So, the first one, establish a sense of urgency. It is important when we're working in change, if you remember, to begin with the unfreezing of the system, unfreezing of the church, unfreezing of the status quo. In fact, there has to be at some point a palpable dissatisfaction with the way things are, and unless there is a significant dissatisfaction with the status quo, then it's unlikely that the change has a chance of being successful, of being effective. Does that make sense? It's just a real simple principle, but again, remember that in churches there's a bias toward not changing, and if there's not a significant dissatisfaction, if there hasn't been established this bias for change, this decided weightiness toward changing, then the bias will naturally be toward not changing. That's Lewin's theory again. Does that make sense? Very important principle. Some people think, well, let's just do change and see how it goes. 

I had spoken at church on Sunday and a guy came up to me, and he says, I really want this; how do I how do I seek this? And I said to him, I said, well, growth requires disruption. How much are you're willing to be disrupted? And I'm not sure how much I can answer that for him, but unless, because as I said, as human beings and as churches, we have this natural tendency to perpetuate ourselves, don't we? We have this natural tendency just to accumulate and to add and to protect, provide this buffer around ourselves, and don't change me because it's going to be painful, it's going to hurt, and so I’d just as soon stay the way I am. That is natural for us as human beings, and it's natural for the church as well, so if there's going to be any change, there has to be started this sense of urgency that there's this tangible, palpable sense of dissatisfaction with the way things are. 

So, the question is, how do you do that? How do you go about that? Well, first to say is that it's really critical for it to be authentic. If it's not authentic, people will pick up on that pretty quickly. So, here's a way to go about this. Most of you are probably familiar with SWOT analysis; most of you have probably heard of SWOT analysis. Let me just go through it quickly. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Now, when we talk about strengths, the strengths are what are we doing well within the church, within the system? All right? So, we want to look at those things first as a positive starting point. And then we want to look at our weaknesses. What are we not doing so well? What do we need to improve upon? And that's the starting point. 

Now, the top of this is about internal. What's going on internal to the church? What are our strengths? What are our weaknesses? And as we turn to the bottom part, what are our opportunities? We're looking now outside the church. We're looking at our environment. The question is, is there anything going on that may benefit us from our environment, from our culture, from our society? And that would be a positive sort of question. And then there's also threats. What out there is going on that may harm us, may threaten our existence? 

That kind of study is very important, and it's critical for the leadership before anything is said about desired state, preferred future, before anything is said about these things, it's critical to do collective intelligence. You know what I mean by collective intelligence? Again, because of our bounded rationality as leaders, we depend upon the intelligence of others, and so the process of leadership is to collect intelligence, is to collect the wisdom that exists within the body to do this kind of SWOT analysis. We can't do it by ourselves, but there can be a process by which we bring the people together to establish this sense of urgency, and out of that sense of urgency, we assume there will become a dissatisfaction. If the SWOT analysis does not does not yield any significant dissatisfaction, then the chances of establishing that sense of unfrozen-ness is low. Do you follow that? And so that's why something authentic and real, that we're dealing with the realities, is put before us so that we really understand what is the real reason that we should change. Questions about that? 

And so once we have understood this SWOT analysis, it's important to talk publicly about the findings. Now, again, this happens before -- follow this now -- this happens before we begin talking about the preferred future state. This sense of dissatisfaction, we can frame it positively, we can frame it negatively, but it's about talking about this dissatisfaction, needs to be done based upon realities. It may be necessary to pull all kinds of people in. Remember, we talked in the course on leading a healthy organizational culture that sometimes when we've been inside a culture so long, it's hard to see the culture anymore, and so sometimes it's helpful to bring in outsiders to help you see, particularly as you're looking at opportunities and threats, to bring in those people from outside to help us see what maybe we’ve become blind to seeing, that helps us to identify. 

I remember one time when I was pastoring back in New York, I went to this church and after I'd been there about a year, I noticed when I first walked in the church that when you walked in the lobby area, it was an older church that had been built in the fifties, maybe the late forties, and as you walked in the lobby area, it was just incredibly dark. There were no windows. Only artificial light was used, and it was just, you know, dark red carpet on the floor. There were these huge doors that were just massive doors, and the other thing is that it felt shut off from the outside. So instead of saying anything to the board, I decided one board meeting that we would do a little experiment, and I said to the board, let's go up into the lobby of the church and let's just walk through the lobby in the sanctuary, and I'd like us not to say anything to anyone, but I'd just like you to take a notepad, and I'd like you to just write down what it is that you see, and so I took them outside and we walked through, and it's amazing. Even though these people had been there for quite a long time, what they saw in that experiment… Within three weeks, they were renovating the lobby of the church. In fact, I didn't say it to them, but they tore down these huge, almost sacred, big white, huge front doors and put in glass so that people could literally see from the street into the sanctuary from the street. They put in all these bright colors and light carpet, and it was just an amazing thing. 

When we do these kinds of, I mean, there's creative ways that we can do SWOT analysis, but when we begin to look and say, what are our opportunities, what are our threats, what are our strengths, what are our weaknesses, and do those based on reality, those kinds of things can create a dissatisfaction with the way things are. And then we talk publicly about those issues.