This essay starts with a most troubling question: How do we participate in God’s renewal of the church if we can’t quite see where God is taking the church and how God is renewing it? When the present has been so disrupted that we both deeply long for the familiar past and at the same time sense the necessity of change, what do we do?
“Skate to where the puck is going.” —Wayne Gretzky
The above is an often-shared bit of leadership wisdom by the one who is widely considered the GOAT (greatest of all time) of hockey. The key, Wayne Gretzky’s father taught him, was not to skate to where the puck is but to where the puck is going to be. Anticipate the direction and speed of the puck and get there first. Jump ahead of the competition by learning to see the trajectory of the puck and predict where you need to be for optimal results. That is the key to success in both hockey and, well, everything else too, right? (Gretzky retired with 61 records, 9 MVP trophies, and 4 Stanley Cups.) This little saying has been repeated by Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett about business, and by countless others about leadership and politics.
Gretzky played in the 1980s and 1990s, a time when there were certainly leadership challenges facing leaders in every field. But without question, the speed of change and the disruption of the first two decades of the 21st century could not have been imagined back then. During the most intense days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I often had to remind leaders that while there may have been worse days to be a faith leader, the circumstances of our day were unprecedented in their complexity. As one person reminded me, it was like we were in 1918 (a health crisis), 1929 (a financial crisis), and 1968 (a crisis of social injustice that led to deep political and social division) all at the same time. As I write this, the world is also watching on in horror as a massive superpower has invaded a neighboring country, so we might add 1939 to the table of disturbing dates above.
After two decades of technological acceleration, globalization, health crises, geopolitical turmoil, racial turmoil, and deep cultural division, most leaders would admit that skating to where the puck is going feels pretty impossible—the game now seems to have fourteen pucks going in fourteen different directions.
How do you lead when you cannot understand the present moment, let alone predict the future?
For Christians who pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” believing that God is always at work in both the world and in the church for the world, there is little solace. Many of us have been shaped by teachers who told us that the most important thing was not our own wills but God’s will (and that is good indeed), and further, that the goal of Christian organizational strategic planning was not to make our plans and ask God to bless them but instead to “watch to see where God is working and join Him [sic].”1 So, this present day of disruption and lack of foresight is even more troubling. We begin to wonder, If I can’t see where God is working, is God even here? If I can’t see where God is going, am I lost?
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” —Proverbs 29:18
In her book How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, Susan Beaumont introduces the concept of liminal space on the very first page. Liminal space, according to Beaumont, is a way of understanding the seasons of disruption that make it impossible to truly see the way forward. Liminal space is the “threshold between an ending and a new beginning,” Beaumont writes.2 It is the period of uncertainty when we are caught in such personal, communal, or even global transition that we feel like we are at the moment of sunrise and our eyes haven’t yet adjusted to the light.
Drawing from experiences as wide-ranging in their capacity for emotional disruption as pregnancy, gardening, organizational crisis, and Israel’s exodus experience in the wilderness, Beaumont describes what has become an all too familiar reality for so many faith leaders in this lingering pandemic and in this globalized, digitally connected, politically divided, and deeply confusing world of ambivalent religious identity and waning congregational commitment: disorientation.
In liminal space, a group of people have experienced a disruption that has led to a feeling of deep disconnection from the practices, rituals, traditions, and even identities of the past. Some of these moments of disconnection are celebrated with great rejoicing. But even that celebration is fraught with the uncertainty of unknowing. Whether it is a gender reveal party for a couple that has longed for the news that they are going to become parents, or the people of God who are celebrating with songs the vanquishing of their Egyptian enslavers in the waters of the Red Sea, liminality—that “wilderness” experience of now but not yet—is a time of in-betweenness that defies descriptions of identity. For the nervous couple are now parents, right? Or will they be once the child is born? The formerly enslaved Hebrews are now a new nation, Israel, right? So why will it take a generation of wandering in the wilderness and multiple battles to become a people who can set up as a new nation in a new land?
When we find ourselves on this liminal threshold between past familiar terrain and the new unfamiliar way ahead, how do we lead in this “uncharted territory”?3 How might the best leadership principles help us face the unknown of a rapidly changing world? Even more, how might people of faith—long-believing that our leaders are gifted with vision and discernment to guide us—step ahead faithfully if we are still in the dark?
Or to make an even finer, more anxiety-producing point: What do we do when we don’t really know where God is leading us?
“We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.” —2 Chronicles 20:12
In 2 Chronicles, Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah, gets word that an immense army made up of three enemies is amassing against him. He gathers the families of Judah together in assembly, and they cry out to God for help. The story of God’s miraculous display of power in giving Judah victory is often and rightly told to assure the faithful that the biggest battles of life are “not yours but God’s.” But what is most instructive for us is what Jehoshaphat did before the battle, when the news was so frightening and the future so daunting. What Jehoshaphat does at that moment is breathtaking for its bold vulnerability.
He stands before his people and admits that he doesn’t know what to do.
When the future is unknown and the way is uncharted, leaders are required to use a different kind of leadership. In their book Leadership on the Line, Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky describe this leadership as facing adaptive challenges.4 When there is no known fix to a problem, when “best practices” are irrelevant, when there is no “expertise” at hand, no personal experience to draw on that is relevant to the challenge of the moment, the leader is not the expert but the chief learner—not the experienced commander but the humble, vulnerable collaborator whose leadership begins when she acknowledges that there really is no clear way ahead and so the people must find their way together.
Instead of a single leader offering a stirring vision to inspire people to venture forth, Jehoshaphat demonstrates that the truly visionary leader brings the whole people together to look not to a wishful future but to God who will make us fit for the challenge.
We Come Together and Look to God to Form Us
Standing in front of 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a throng of people who had also gathered in the face of a daunting future that—if past history was any indicator—was to be little different than the despair of the past. They had come in church buses and in their Sunday best to draw attention to the painful reality that even a full century after the passing of the Emancipation Proclamation, promises of civil rights, equality, and justice had gone ignored and unfulfilled.
When the prepared remarks that he had worked on until 4:00 am that morning fell a bit flat, Dr. King went off script. At the urging of gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (“Tell ’em about the dream, Martin. Tell ’em about the dream!” she said from behind him), Dr. King drew on the imagery of Isaiah to remind those who had come from the front lines of the Civil Rights movement that their 400-year-old struggle against injustice was not devoid of the presence of nor beyond the power of God.
“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”
“With this faith,” Dr. King declared—with this faith that the God who has been present to the oppressed down through the ages will someday redeem the earth down to the dirt—“With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.” 5
Notice that Dr. King doesn’t look at the mountain of despair—the long, long struggle for justice—and offer a plan. Instead, he shares a perspective of shared life and witness lived in patient hope of what God will do. As Dr. King would later reinforce at the National Cathedral nearly four years later, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”6
In his speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Dr. King was not only harkening back to the prophets but drawing from the wisdom of the first four centuries of the church’s life. Under the oppression of the Roman Empire, in a world marked with constant plagues and wars and brutality, a tiny community slowly grew into what would become the largest religious movement in the world. When we ask how they did this, it is natural to assume that they focused on church planting, evangelism, and mission work. That is how the church grows, right?
Wrong. At least not then. And not during times of deep uncertainty, disruption, and oppression. According to Alan Kreider, the early church grew into the most substantive religion in the world by the early fifth century because it spent centuries focused on their thinking, their character, and their habits of living. They literally came together (in worship and catechesis) and looked to God in ways that would form them into a people who would attract others to their church because of their remarkable lives.
The churches grew in many places, taking varied forms. They proliferated because the faith that these fishers and hunters embodied was attractive to people who were dissatisfied with their old cultural and religious habits, who felt pushed to explore new possibilities, and who then encountered Christians who embodied a new manner of life that pulled them toward what the Christians called “rebirth” into a new life.7
This focus on forming a demonstrable quality of life was also at the center of the vision of Dr. King and the leaders of the Civil Rights movement. For them, it was not enough to be actively demonstrating, protesting, and marching, but to do so in a manner that appealed to the consciences of oppressors and call them to a moral life of beauty and love that they actually deeply long to live.8 In order to do so, however, those who were protesting needed themselves to be formed into people who could respond to brutal injustices with nonviolence and love. This led Dr. King to insist that each person who participated in the movement sign a commitment card for taking on daily practices that would help shape their internal attitudes and external habits in the ways and manner of love and nonviolence.9
This attention to formation became a way of focusing the energy and developing the capacity for faithful witness even in the liminality of an unknown future.
We Listen to the Pain of Our Neighbors and Ask God to Help Us Love Them Well
While strengthening communal practices and forming their lives to be exemplary and attractive to outsiders were parts of both the early church and the Civil Rights movement in times of great uncertainty, historian Rodney Stark reminds us that Christians did not turn inward in those times, even in their “coming together” and “looking to God.” Their formation was not
a focus on self-care or self-improvement but instead a formation for the sake of loving others.
Indeed, in times of great uncertainty, perhaps more than other times, those
of deepest faith find themselves refocused on that which is most foundational—and that is not our own surviving and thriving. As C. S. Lewis wrote in the throes of World War II, “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”10
In the vulnerability of the earliest centuries of the Christian movement, in times of great global despair, and in the midst of a long struggle for freedom, the most profoundly Christian instinct is to reach out in love, care, and hospitality to others. Their love of God is inextricably tied to Jesus’ co-priority of loving one’s neighbor (Mark 12:28–34)—and right at the point of deepest pain and need.11
When the church had little power, existed only at the margins (and precariously at that), and was intentional “competition” for other social groups or religious institutions, it grew because it developed what Martyn Lloyd-Jones declared as critical to the witness of the church almost 70 years ago, “a type and order of life that is quite exceptional.”12 It did so both by focusing more on formation and on displaying that formation in acts of love, kindness, hospitality, and care toward their neighbor in need, thus reinforcing Jesus’ own instruction that the love of God and love of neighbor be considered the essential practices of the followers of Jesus.
In essence, the uncertainty of our times should take us back to that which we know to be foundational to our faith. The liminality of the moment should lead us forward in simple acts of community, formation, and love. When we are unsure where God is taking the church, we can be confident that God is leading us to see our neighbor and respond to our neighbor in need (James 2:8).
When we don’t know what to do, we can always do what we have been taught to always do. Come together. Be formed for the challenge. Listen for the pain of our neighbors. Love them well.
Tod Bolsinger is senior congregational strategist and associate professor of leadership formation. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 1993, he has served as senior pastor of San Clemente Presbyterian Church and associate pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood. He has extensive experience in church and nonprofit consulting, executive coaching, and writing on church and leadership formation. Dr. Bolsinger is the author of multiple books, including Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory and, most recently, Tempered Resilience: How Leaders are Formed in the Crucible of Change.
This essay starts with a most troubling question: How do we participate in God’s renewal of the church if we can’t quite see where God is taking the church and how God is renewing it? When the present has been so disrupted that we both deeply long for the familiar past and at the same time sense the necessity of change, what do we do?
“Skate to where the puck is going.” —Wayne Gretzky
The above is an often-shared bit of leadership wisdom by the one who is widely considered the GOAT (greatest of all time) of hockey. The key, Wayne Gretzky’s father taught him, was not to skate to where the puck is but to where the puck is going to be. Anticipate the direction and speed of the puck and get there first. Jump ahead of the competition by learning to see the trajectory of the puck and predict where you need to be for optimal results. That is the key to success in both hockey and, well, everything else too, right? (Gretzky retired with 61 records, 9 MVP trophies, and 4 Stanley Cups.) This little saying has been repeated by Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett about business, and by countless others about leadership and politics.
Gretzky played in the 1980s and 1990s, a time when there were certainly leadership challenges facing leaders in every field. But without question, the speed of change and the disruption of the first two decades of the 21st century could not have been imagined back then. During the most intense days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I often had to remind leaders that while there may have been worse days to be a faith leader, the circumstances of our day were unprecedented in their complexity. As one person reminded me, it was like we were in 1918 (a health crisis), 1929 (a financial crisis), and 1968 (a crisis of social injustice that led to deep political and social division) all at the same time. As I write this, the world is also watching on in horror as a massive superpower has invaded a neighboring country, so we might add 1939 to the table of disturbing dates above.
After two decades of technological acceleration, globalization, health crises, geopolitical turmoil, racial turmoil, and deep cultural division, most leaders would admit that skating to where the puck is going feels pretty impossible—the game now seems to have fourteen pucks going in fourteen different directions.
How do you lead when you cannot understand the present moment, let alone predict the future?
For Christians who pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” believing that God is always at work in both the world and in the church for the world, there is little solace. Many of us have been shaped by teachers who told us that the most important thing was not our own wills but God’s will (and that is good indeed), and further, that the goal of Christian organizational strategic planning was not to make our plans and ask God to bless them but instead to “watch to see where God is working and join Him [sic].”1 So, this present day of disruption and lack of foresight is even more troubling. We begin to wonder, If I can’t see where God is working, is God even here? If I can’t see where God is going, am I lost?
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” —Proverbs 29:18
In her book How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, Susan Beaumont introduces the concept of liminal space on the very first page. Liminal space, according to Beaumont, is a way of understanding the seasons of disruption that make it impossible to truly see the way forward. Liminal space is the “threshold between an ending and a new beginning,” Beaumont writes.2 It is the period of uncertainty when we are caught in such personal, communal, or even global transition that we feel like we are at the moment of sunrise and our eyes haven’t yet adjusted to the light.
Drawing from experiences as wide-ranging in their capacity for emotional disruption as pregnancy, gardening, organizational crisis, and Israel’s exodus experience in the wilderness, Beaumont describes what has become an all too familiar reality for so many faith leaders in this lingering pandemic and in this globalized, digitally connected, politically divided, and deeply confusing world of ambivalent religious identity and waning congregational commitment: disorientation.
In liminal space, a group of people have experienced a disruption that has led to a feeling of deep disconnection from the practices, rituals, traditions, and even identities of the past. Some of these moments of disconnection are celebrated with great rejoicing. But even that celebration is fraught with the uncertainty of unknowing. Whether it is a gender reveal party for a couple that has longed for the news that they are going to become parents, or the people of God who are celebrating with songs the vanquishing of their Egyptian enslavers in the waters of the Red Sea, liminality—that “wilderness” experience of now but not yet—is a time of in-betweenness that defies descriptions of identity. For the nervous couple are now parents, right? Or will they be once the child is born? The formerly enslaved Hebrews are now a new nation, Israel, right? So why will it take a generation of wandering in the wilderness and multiple battles to become a people who can set up as a new nation in a new land?
When we find ourselves on this liminal threshold between past familiar terrain and the new unfamiliar way ahead, how do we lead in this “uncharted territory”?3 How might the best leadership principles help us face the unknown of a rapidly changing world? Even more, how might people of faith—long-believing that our leaders are gifted with vision and discernment to guide us—step ahead faithfully if we are still in the dark?
Or to make an even finer, more anxiety-producing point: What do we do when we don’t really know where God is leading us?
“We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.” —2 Chronicles 20:12
In 2 Chronicles, Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah, gets word that an immense army made up of three enemies is amassing against him. He gathers the families of Judah together in assembly, and they cry out to God for help. The story of God’s miraculous display of power in giving Judah victory is often and rightly told to assure the faithful that the biggest battles of life are “not yours but God’s.” But what is most instructive for us is what Jehoshaphat did before the battle, when the news was so frightening and the future so daunting. What Jehoshaphat does at that moment is breathtaking for its bold vulnerability.
He stands before his people and admits that he doesn’t know what to do.
When the future is unknown and the way is uncharted, leaders are required to use a different kind of leadership. In their book Leadership on the Line, Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky describe this leadership as facing adaptive challenges.4 When there is no known fix to a problem, when “best practices” are irrelevant, when there is no “expertise” at hand, no personal experience to draw on that is relevant to the challenge of the moment, the leader is not the expert but the chief learner—not the experienced commander but the humble, vulnerable collaborator whose leadership begins when she acknowledges that there really is no clear way ahead and so the people must find their way together.
Instead of a single leader offering a stirring vision to inspire people to venture forth, Jehoshaphat demonstrates that the truly visionary leader brings the whole people together to look not to a wishful future but to God who will make us fit for the challenge.
We Come Together and Look to God to Form Us
Standing in front of 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a throng of people who had also gathered in the face of a daunting future that—if past history was any indicator—was to be little different than the despair of the past. They had come in church buses and in their Sunday best to draw attention to the painful reality that even a full century after the passing of the Emancipation Proclamation, promises of civil rights, equality, and justice had gone ignored and unfulfilled.
When the prepared remarks that he had worked on until 4:00 am that morning fell a bit flat, Dr. King went off script. At the urging of gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (“Tell ’em about the dream, Martin. Tell ’em about the dream!” she said from behind him), Dr. King drew on the imagery of Isaiah to remind those who had come from the front lines of the Civil Rights movement that their 400-year-old struggle against injustice was not devoid of the presence of nor beyond the power of God.
“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”
“With this faith,” Dr. King declared—with this faith that the God who has been present to the oppressed down through the ages will someday redeem the earth down to the dirt—“With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.” 5
Notice that Dr. King doesn’t look at the mountain of despair—the long, long struggle for justice—and offer a plan. Instead, he shares a perspective of shared life and witness lived in patient hope of what God will do. As Dr. King would later reinforce at the National Cathedral nearly four years later, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”6
In his speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Dr. King was not only harkening back to the prophets but drawing from the wisdom of the first four centuries of the church’s life. Under the oppression of the Roman Empire, in a world marked with constant plagues and wars and brutality, a tiny community slowly grew into what would become the largest religious movement in the world. When we ask how they did this, it is natural to assume that they focused on church planting, evangelism, and mission work. That is how the church grows, right?
Wrong. At least not then. And not during times of deep uncertainty, disruption, and oppression. According to Alan Kreider, the early church grew into the most substantive religion in the world by the early fifth century because it spent centuries focused on their thinking, their character, and their habits of living. They literally came together (in worship and catechesis) and looked to God in ways that would form them into a people who would attract others to their church because of their remarkable lives.
The churches grew in many places, taking varied forms. They proliferated because the faith that these fishers and hunters embodied was attractive to people who were dissatisfied with their old cultural and religious habits, who felt pushed to explore new possibilities, and who then encountered Christians who embodied a new manner of life that pulled them toward what the Christians called “rebirth” into a new life.7
This focus on forming a demonstrable quality of life was also at the center of the vision of Dr. King and the leaders of the Civil Rights movement. For them, it was not enough to be actively demonstrating, protesting, and marching, but to do so in a manner that appealed to the consciences of oppressors and call them to a moral life of beauty and love that they actually deeply long to live.8 In order to do so, however, those who were protesting needed themselves to be formed into people who could respond to brutal injustices with nonviolence and love. This led Dr. King to insist that each person who participated in the movement sign a commitment card for taking on daily practices that would help shape their internal attitudes and external habits in the ways and manner of love and nonviolence.9
This attention to formation became a way of focusing the energy and developing the capacity for faithful witness even in the liminality of an unknown future.
We Listen to the Pain of Our Neighbors and Ask God to Help Us Love Them Well
While strengthening communal practices and forming their lives to be exemplary and attractive to outsiders were parts of both the early church and the Civil Rights movement in times of great uncertainty, historian Rodney Stark reminds us that Christians did not turn inward in those times, even in their “coming together” and “looking to God.” Their formation was not
a focus on self-care or self-improvement but instead a formation for the sake of loving others.
Indeed, in times of great uncertainty, perhaps more than other times, those
of deepest faith find themselves refocused on that which is most foundational—and that is not our own surviving and thriving. As C. S. Lewis wrote in the throes of World War II, “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”10
In the vulnerability of the earliest centuries of the Christian movement, in times of great global despair, and in the midst of a long struggle for freedom, the most profoundly Christian instinct is to reach out in love, care, and hospitality to others. Their love of God is inextricably tied to Jesus’ co-priority of loving one’s neighbor (Mark 12:28–34)—and right at the point of deepest pain and need.11
When the church had little power, existed only at the margins (and precariously at that), and was intentional “competition” for other social groups or religious institutions, it grew because it developed what Martyn Lloyd-Jones declared as critical to the witness of the church almost 70 years ago, “a type and order of life that is quite exceptional.”12 It did so both by focusing more on formation and on displaying that formation in acts of love, kindness, hospitality, and care toward their neighbor in need, thus reinforcing Jesus’ own instruction that the love of God and love of neighbor be considered the essential practices of the followers of Jesus.
In essence, the uncertainty of our times should take us back to that which we know to be foundational to our faith. The liminality of the moment should lead us forward in simple acts of community, formation, and love. When we are unsure where God is taking the church, we can be confident that God is leading us to see our neighbor and respond to our neighbor in need (James 2:8).
When we don’t know what to do, we can always do what we have been taught to always do. Come together. Be formed for the challenge. Listen for the pain of our neighbors. Love them well.
Tod Bolsinger is senior congregational strategist and associate professor of leadership formation. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 1993, he has served as senior pastor of San Clemente Presbyterian Church and associate pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood. He has extensive experience in church and nonprofit consulting, executive coaching, and writing on church and leadership formation. Dr. Bolsinger is the author of multiple books, including Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory and, most recently, Tempered Resilience: How Leaders are Formed in the Crucible of Change.
Cameron Lee, professor of marriage and family studies, writes about walking alongside those who have experienced “church hurt.”
