Ray Selden’s Reviews > Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory > Status Update

If you want to keep your church from dying: focus on your own transformation together, not on your church dying. Focus on the mountains ahead, not the rivers behind. Focus on continually learning, not what you have already mastered.

New alternatives cannot be imagined, much less accepted or heard, until the emotional processes that fix the orientation have changed.

Both symptom and cause of a locked-in perspective: an unending treadmill of trying harder, looking for answers rather than reframing questions and either/or thinking that creates false dichotomies.

The key point here is that for lasting cultural change to occur those in the center and those outside of the center must be truly engaged in valued in decision-making processes.

Clearly we are now in a disorienting world, in the midst of situations where cause and effect often do not seem connected. Because most of our churches were framed in a different era, they often seem unable to even understand, much less respond, to what is happening.

How do you regulate the heat (of change)? This is the delicate work of adaptive leadership. We need our people feeling the urgency and healthy anxiety enough to overcome complacency and move.

Red zone leadership we operate out of: survival, acceptance, competence, or control.
Blue zone leadership operates in consistency and effectiveness ... the mission trumps

Transformational leadership is built on leaders making good, wise, discerning decisions for the sake of both the health and the mission of the community — decisions that reinforce the missional conviction — and this requires leaders who are able to stay calm.

Leadership is disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb.

Start with conviction,
Stay calm,
Stay connected,
And stay the course.