As Christian leaders, we often feel dissatisfied with the status quo or overwhelmed by rapid cultural shifts. We know something needs to change, but the fear of uncertainty, loss, or pain often leaves us stuck in ineffective systems and missing out on kingdom potential. We have God-sized dreams and a kingdom vision that is far great that the reality and results we are currently experiencing.
I have worked with leaders for more than twenty years in multiple contexts and cultures, but over the past five, I have noticed more leaders are being significantly impacted by an increase in disruptive influences in various forms. Far more than simply Covid or Church dynamics, constant cultural change seems to be the new normal. Perhaps you’re feeling the same. You may be experiencing the challenges of lower church attendance or a lack of engagement from your staff and volunteers. It might be that you’re struggling to navigate the thorny terrain of cultural, political, and theological frictions. Maybe you’ve tried several new strategies to adapt to the ever-changing status quo, but others in your organization or denomination haven’t embraced the changes, and you’re back to square one. You might be planting a church or launching a faith-driven venture, and you feel like you’ve started at the worst possible time and on the worst possible terrain.
Whether you are starting something completely new, or you’re trying to replant or initiate something new within your existing organizational context, it’s likely you feel the world you were trained for as a leader has vanished before your eyes, and you’re unprepared for the challenges pressing in on every side. Many leaders are still hoping for a technique, formula, or solution that can be plugged into the church system to fix the problem … some silver bullet or killer program. Or simply hoping the models, playbook and efforts that used to work in the past will suddenly become effective again. We look to the experts, the latest training programs on offer, or the models that have brought success to others. But the solutions we’re offered are the answer to someone else’s problem. Their success may have been won in a hard-fought battle, but they’ve been won in someone else’s battle and someone else’s context. This is why solutions and practices don’t always translate clearly or cleanly to our setting. Even if they are effective in the short term, we rarely understand why they work, and so we struggle to repeat or scale them. This technique draws us away from looking to God for his authentic work in our context. Instead of seeking to hear him and discover where he is at work, we default to human tactics. Instead, we need to learn to depend on God and view life and leadership as an adaptive challenge—an “all-change” reality that affects everything in and around us.
If we are to respond effectively to the adaptive challenges we are currently facing, we need frameworks to help us rather than formulas. That’s why I wrote, All Change. In it, I outline four phases that will inspire and empower leaders to navigate adaptive challenges and initiate practices that will help them embark a communal journey of kingdom transformation. These frameworks and this journey have been tried and tested over many years of coaching and training Christian leaders in multiple contexts, cultures, and countries. The book itself feels like it has been fifteen years in the making!
Drawing on the life and ministry of Jesus, I outline four specific phases of a proven change process that will help leaders and their organizations to unlock kingdom potential within and across their organization:
- Dream: Envision a future guided by kingdom imagination
- Discover: Unearth key insights through experiential learning
- Design: Craft core principles that are contextually applicable
- Deploy: Mobilize everyone to contribute to a kingdom cause
By following these phases, leaders and their organizations can navigate change effectively. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, we can begin to embrace the challenges we face as opportunities for growth and kingdom transformation and begin to see the impact that we dream of in our leadership and through our organizations.
The power of this journey is that it functions like a “skeleton” that sits beneath the surface and undergirds and strategically shapes the process but can have multiple different expressions of “skin” on top – so there is the freedom for leaders and organizations to integrate, translate and contextualize the principles and process into their own context and culture, in their own way, and in partnership with God. We have seen the ideas on the pages of All Change be effect working with leaders of movements, micro-churches, churches, faith-driven ventures, and denominations across the globe in the two main initiatives I co-lead, Movement Leaders Collective (co/founded with Alan Hirsch) and Creo (co/founded with Duncan McFadzean).
To go deeper into the All change journey, you can find the book on Amazon US & UK sites, and bulk order the book at our ministry platform – themxplatform.com. There is also an ecosystem of free resources at allchangejourney.com.
Disruption is real, and change is a constant reality. We have a choice. Will we lean in, find God in it, and partner with God through it to release kingdom potential, or simply seek to deny, survive, or manage. The choice is yours, but the invitation is there to join the All Change journey.
