"Hey everybody, welcome to the Equipcast. My name is Jim Jansen, and I am your host, and I just sat down with Dr. Todd Bolsinger. Todd is the author of several books that I have loved, Tempered Resilience and Canoeing the Mountains. Todd and I sit down and talk about, like, how do you lead change as a parent, as a ministry leader, as a pastor? We talk about how God loves us through the change because it can be gut-wrenching; it can be so challenging. You're talking about like just the world we live in today. It may not be the hardest, but there is something uniquely complicated. Todd shares a little bit of his own story. Todd teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary. Todd was raised Catholic, shares a little bit about his Catholic roots and his experience with Ignatian spirituality. He talks about how powerful the exam in prayer is, both for leaders who are trying to lead. He talks about the importance for communities, whether it be a parish or a ministry or a religious order, to recognize their deepest values and their deepest identities and to cling to that as a guide and a compass moving forward in a time of change. It is a fantastic conversation. You're going to love Todd Bolsinger and our conversation today. So take a listen. Welcome to the EquipCast for the Archdiocese of Omaha, designed to help leaders transform their cultures, to embody the pastoral vision, to be one church, encountering Jesus, equipping disciples and living mercy. Todd Bolsinger, welcome to the EquipCast. How are you doing today? It's nice to be with you. I'm really glad. Thanks. Yeah. Don, I am very excited. We were, we were chatting a little bit, you know, before, before we, we turned on, on the mics and, and the recorder. Wonderful trail of events that, led me to your work, really your two books, Canoeing the Mountains and Tempered Resilience and, a few others before those, but those are the ones that really I grabbed. I want to give you an opportunity to just introduce yourself a little bit to the audience. Tell us a little bit about your faith journey. What's your story? So my faith story is I grew up Roman Catholic. I start my grandfather's name is Guido evangelistic. I joke that I, I like to think I'm probably related to St. Francis somewhere back in there. He was an Italian immigrant. I met my grandmother who was the last born child of a family of immigrants. He was the. First one born in America. He was the last one, last one of his side of the family born in Italy. And they had an Italian restaurant where I was babysat. When I was a kid, when I was four years old, my grandmother would scream out into the Redwoods where I was playing, you know, time for lunch, do you want the ravioli or the crab? And I would say. Can I have, can I have both? She's my grandmother. So I got both. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. So I was raised Roman Catholic and my parents went through a divorce and my mom stopped going to church. And I ended up kind of stumbling around and ended up in a youth fellowship by Youth for Christ. And they loved me and told me to go back to church and like that I should go back to my Catholic church. And I started going by myself. And eventually I ended up working for Youth for Christ, which does youth evangelism. And I ended up through kind of my own journey becoming, over time, an ordained Presbyterian pastor. Okay. I ended up in Hollywood, California. Where I worked for a church called Hollywood Presbyterian and spent 10 years there on their staff doing mostly college and young adult ministry and then became a senior pastor at 33 of a congregation where I held up my three month old daughter and said, you're all invited to her high school graduation. And, um, God gave us the desire of our hearts and we were there 17 years. And then I went back to Fuller Seminary as a senior administrator. I'd gotten a PhD from Fuller and was on their senior administration staff for six years. Now I run a center for them, a church leadership institute, and I have my own consulting firm that works with churches and I teach in the doctor of ministry program. Every day I wake up and help faith leaders thrive as change leaders, and that's what I do with my whole life. That's awesome. I feel like there's a conversation in every one of those little anecdotes. But I love I mean right growing up in Nebraska. I love that I just a little kind of throw out there with like, oh, yeah playing out in the redwood forest Like that's just not the that was not my childhood. I was playing in cornfields, but right Todd, tell us a little bit, like, again, your, your work helping churches really kind of adapt to the changing times and the world they live in now, um, it seems like the task of pastoring and leading a church. is growing more difficult. Now, I'm sure if, you know, if we could have pastors of every age, they would say, well, actually, there were, there were a few challenges in every age. But for those of us who are living through kind of this change of the, the ages, how are you supposed to respond when everything seems to be changing? And when we find ourselves in circumstances where we have no previous experience? Yeah. Yeah. So I often say to people that, you know, this is, this is not the most difficult time to ever pastor. I would not want to have been a pastor during the black plague, 25 percent of the human race died. I don't think I'd want to be a pastor in Ukraine right now. Yeah. Trying to hold a community together while there's bombing and shelling and all that going on over overhead. But I think it could be the most complicated, especially for those of us in the West. And the reason for that is somebody said, you know, we have been in 1918, 1929, 1968 all at the same time. Wow. Say more about that. What does that mean? Well, 1918, we've had a health crisis, you know, we've been in the middle of a pandemic, just like the pandemic in 1918. That's led to an economic crisis that has been global and enduring and, you know, just, we're recording this just a week or so after two major banks failed in California. Yeah. Yeah. No disrupting economic crisis that endures and that has led to a deeper awareness of social injustice that for a lot of our brothers and sisters of color have said has always been there that people are now just beginning to recognize that the pandemic and the economic crisis has has been exacerbated amongst those who are more marginalized in our culture, but that's the response to that has led to political polarization.
So, yeah, so we're like in 1968 in that way. And so, well, or eight or 1868 too. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. If you want to add, you can't crane in Russia, you could add 1939. Right. And so, holy cow. Um, so, so it's a very complicated time and Um, my work is on, is based on the work of Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky called adaptive leadership, which is basically how do you lead when you are in an area where there are no best practices, right, when you can't look back and go. Okay, this, these are the best practices. Apply them wisely, well, diligently with discipline, and you'll be okay when you actually, when the world in front of you is nothing like the world behind you. And when I read, when I wrote Canoeing the Mountains, I was referring to the passing of Christendom. Yeah. Which is where Christianity in the West has had a home court advantage since Constantine. Yeah. What I realized is that 1700 year pattern had, was being disrupted in one generation. And then March 13, 2020 happened and everything was disrupted. Right. And so the pandemic forced everybody into a different day. So what you basically, what you have is, um, the old best practices, which we would call technical solutions, you know, the solutions experts apply to a problem no longer work and you're gonna have to learn to lead differently. And the biggest challenge for most of us is that what we were really trained to do was just try harder. And today trying harder at the wrong thing, exhausts you, burns you out and doesn't get you very far. It's like paddling a canoe and there's no water. You're just wasting your time and energy. I feel like what you just said, there's, I mean, at least for me, but I think that there's a whole bunch of people listening like, Oh my gosh, he's reading my diary. Like you know, this is like, we're trying harder and harder, uh, at strategies that we saw heroic leaders that were our, our models and mentors do with great effect and it's not working for us. And the temptation, I mean, one, you just get exhausted, but the temptation towards self condemnation, it's like, okay, well, it just, this must be my fault. I've, you know, never quite felt good enough anyway. And all the evidence, you know, seems to be confirming it. Again, we were talking a little bit before the show. I mean, we want to talk, or before we, we kind of turned on the recorders. I want to talk about the, the, the strategies, if you will, of how you respond to that circumstance. But just if we can go right to the heart of it, how do you respond interiorly to that disorientation and the sense of failure, you know, maybe feeling alone? Um, not just from others, but feeling alone from the Lord. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah. So, um, perhaps the most significant movement that happens in the life of a leader when they realize the terrain is completely different, right? So, so the story that I use is the story of Lewis and Clark. Which is a story that is fraught with all kinds of issues, like almost any American story is. Um, but, but it's a story that was built on a worldview based on Europe that assumed the geography was already known. Yeah. So if you could master the oceans because the water routes were the most important thing, um, whoever. Could claim the water route would be the most powerful nation in Europe. So they're all because then you'd have the you'd claim the trade routes and you could tax everybody else. Right. So Columbus stumbles onto this continent. We can't say he discovered people have been here 10, 000 years. Right, right, right. Stumbles onto this nation and everybody in Europe is literally thinking with their old mindset. How do you get through that darn thing? How do you find a water route through that thing? Yeah. For 300 years, that was the project. Like claiming that continent was about getting the water route. That's what Jefferson did when he went to Napoleon and Napoleon thought he had the right to sell that. And so, Yeah. Oh. Right. You start realizing there's this whole mental model, right? That's, that's the point. That's huge. Meriwether Lewis and the Corps of Discovery walk up to Saddle M High Pass and realize there's not a water route. 300 years of assumptions are wrong. There are the Rocky Mountains. I mean, you live in Omaha. I was just in Omaha last week, going up to Sioux City, Iowa. Yeah. You can see the Rocky Mountains from Western Kansas, like, there were three months where they are staring at these mountains and Meriwether Lewis writes in his journals, I refuse to believe this will be anything but a safe and comfortable passage. They are in denial, complete denial. Wow. Well, that's a quote. So he's, he can see them, right? So he's approaching for months. And it's like, Oh, it'll be fine. It'll be fine. And so what we have is a lot of church folks doing the same thing. I'm sure it's going to be fine. I'm sure as long, I'm sure we'll find a water route. I'm sure all we got to do is keep paddling. And all of a sudden you realize you're a canoer and you're facing mountains and there's only thing you can do is acknowledge that you don't know what you're doing. Yeah. Like the world in front of you is not the same as the world behind you. And you're going to have to drop the canoes. So you're going to have to learn from people like Sacagawea, a teenage Native American nursing mother who's on her home turf. You're the one who's not on home turf. They are have to learn from the people of this area humbly. You've got to be a learner. Mm hmm. And you're going to face loss if you came on this trip because it's a canoe trip. And, you know, these are guys who invented a boat for this trip. Yeah, they're good boat people and they have to drop their canoes. Yeah, they have to probably burn them for firewood. I mean, thank you for that. That is so I mean, it's one thing. It's like, oh, shoot. Well, I guess we'll let the canoes go. But like they selected people based off their ability to paddle. They. You know, they built, yeah, they built their own boat for this, and they're like, all right, I guess we're done. Or at least done with the boats. Yeah. So it's an identity change. You're no longer a canoeer, you now have to be a discoverer, and you're not discovering a water route, you're discovering a whole new world, at least new to you. And you're having to decide, what does this mean for us? And so I said, every single church I know is right on the edge of the Lemhi Pass asking the question, okay, the future in front of us is totally different than the world behind us. We were trained for the world behind us. So what are we going to do? What are we going to do? And some are saying, well, we'll just stand up here and we'll have an Airbnb and we'll talk inspiring about the future. And we'll hope young people will go and, you know, um, others are doubling down on going back. We're not about, we're not about exploring. We're about canoeing. We're going to preserve canoeing. We're going to pass on the history of canoeing. We're going to. Make canoeing great again, you know, this, this, this great desire to go back to the past, hold on to a past that, you know, um, or there's some who are saying, okay, we're going to have to learn and we're gonna have to face loss and we're gonna have to go forward humbly and we're gonna have to learn as we go.
And the leadership of the future is gonna have to be that third choice. How do we learn as we go? Todd, I want to dive into that moment because I love in the book, 'Continuing the Mountains,' like you kind of take us into the moment where, you know, Lewis and Clark. They have an identity that is built on, 'Okay, what we are. We're river navigators, you know. We're taking boats here, and we're gonna find a water route to the Pacific.' When they find themselves, you're like, 'Oops. Okay, that's not gonna work.' Their ability to move forward is based off of a deeper identity that preexisted the water route, and that is, we are explorers. Talk a little bit more about that because I think what often is so challenging for us as leaders is that, you know, we're not supposed to betray our identity. But sometimes as we, as we have to adapt, it feels like we are betraying it. Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting, everything we do when we do, I work with churches and universities and nonprofits and I was in Bangkok last week working with an international nonprofit and I'm working on a strategic plan with a university that is aspiring to be, um, the next Protestant Notre Dame. Right. So all of these are. Churches are groups who are thinking about the future. They're just remarkable people. What I always say to them is you, the key to your future is actually found in your past. Not by clinging to your past, but by understanding the identity of your past. Um, what Catholics have always called the charism, right? The charism of the founder. This is the place where my Catholic heritage helps me a lot because I'll say, 'Look, I, um, my friends tease me that I'm a Presbyterian pastor who sounds like a Jesuit. I'm kind of a Presby Jesuit.' That's great. I'm There's the like, you know, St. Ignatius's charism was to be a missionary who would go anywhere in the world for the greater glory of God, right? Yes. So they literally didn't found monasteries. They instead had a set of spiritual practices that you could take with you wherever God sent you, that would keep you connected to each other, right? Right. That's adaptation. That's early, early adaptation, right? Um, it's one of my favorite things is that Pope Francis, who's a Jesuit took Francis's name, right? Yes. Because, because Ignatius was inspired by Francis. Yeah. And so this notion that our identity is both deeper than we have it today and is also fixed in something of the past is our gift. It's our, it's our opportunity. The problem we have is that we let our identity be shaped by either the challenges or the voices around us. And that, that capitulating to the moment keeps us from the deeper identity and the greater transformation that's possible. Right. Well, and at the risk of kind of, you know, mixing. Uh, metaphors and images from different authors, when we let what we do tell us who we are, it's hard to adapt. It's hard. Well, I do this and this and this, but if we, if we let why we do be a little bit more of a defining agent. Then we're, then we're far more able to adapt again. I think Lewis and Clark, well, I mean, I like this canoeing thing, but we're, we're explorers. So we're going to go explore. Yeah. Yeah. So the one of the questions I always ask is, yeah, think about this. They're sent by Congress. We got the document. Your job is to find a water route that will connect basically the Mississippi river to the Pacific ocean, right? Yeah. Your core of discovery is to discover a water route. And I think it's built, it's using the language of the doctrine of discovery that came out of the Catholic Church as a government, we're going to claim that we're going to believe that God gave us that. Right. So we want it. Well, but at their core, what's interesting is why, when they got to the top of the Lemhi Pass between Montana and Idaho. And he looked over and realized there isn't a water route. People went wrong for 300 years. The entire economic policy of the United States was built on the assumption that they're going to get a water route. Why didn't they go back immediately? Tell Jefferson, change your policy because Jefferson had actually a deeper value that he passed on. Yes. Yes. The Meriwether Lewis. And that value wasn't a silly Christian. It was an enlightenment value. The enlightenment value is the belief that the growth of human knowledge leads to the growth of human happiness. And we could have a big theological and philosophical discussion about that one. But that was what they believed. So at that moment, Meriwether Lewis knew that what Thomas Jefferson would want him to do was give up the dream of the water route to discover the world in front of him, because that would be better for the world. So they went to their deepest values. Yeah. Now, again, they're not necessarily my values. No, no. They're embracing it in a deeper way in some ways. Yeah. And they just know they don't need, they don't need to be planting German-speaking or Chinese-speaking churches. Yeah. And that the denominational roots that are part of their legacy are, are going to be in some ways their strength, but also in some ways part of the heritage that we'll need to grapple with.
Which part of these are canoes and which part of these are values? Which part of these do we drop like the giant? Spiritual practice of leadership today is discernment. Yeah, what do we preserve and what do we look to change? Wow. Oh, that's huge. So that's why I said, what makes adaptive leadership and the kind of leadership I do different is it's not mechanistic. It's not about how to grow your church in ten easy steps, you know? It's very deeply discernment-focused. That's huge. What do we preserve? Because if it is who we are, and then what do we change? Because if we don't adapt, who we are won't survive. You know, I just want to, I want to jump off that word 'discernment' because in, I think it's your most recent book, 'Tempered Resilience,' I was listening to an audio and I think I almost dropped my phone because you went on for a significant period of time talking about the power of Ignatian spirituality. Yeah. And of course, you know, for any of our listeners who are familiar with Ignatian spirituality, the discernment of spirits is the center. Yeah, it's a very adaptive style of spirituality. So first off, I love that. That was fantastic. Tell us a little bit about like, What is it that you see in Ignatian spirituality? And I should maybe for the readers, right? St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, his spirituality, you've recognized that's a gift for, for preparing our heart and minds. When we live in a dynamic environment, say more about that. Yeah. So, so the central practice is the prayer of examen, which is basically a belief that God is at work. Everywhere in everything and that our problem is that we get so distracted by our own sin and our flesh and our egos that we miss God's presence. So it tutors us to say, where do you pay attention to the consolations of the spirit? Where you experience the quickening of the spirit, where you experience yourself leaning into the spirit's leading that you found, um, you know, like in the scriptures, 'for the joy set before him, Jesus goes to the cross,' right? Yeah. The consolation of God's presence will take us into all kinds of things. And then where do you experience the desolation of having walked away from it all, having missed it, having, you know, bit into the apple and found it to be ash instead of sweet? And it's spending regular time in that reflection, believing that if God is at the center of your life, and if you seek to live out God's will, I always say, our goal is to be people who fulfill the prayer, 'your kingdom come, your will be done on earth.' If God's at the center of your life, then God will lead you through your consolations that will continue to lead you into the things that give you joy and peace and patience and the fruit of the spirit. Yeah, but that what it's gonna require you then is to let go of the things that many of us have built our life on that really are desolations, that their ego and wealth and fame and significance and dead ends. Dead ends, right? Yeah. So it's this central spiritual practice that in one sense, what adaptive leadership does is it asks the leadership to go on a journey of that central spiritual practice. Yeah, and I love it. I mean, if we can, like, for those who may not be familiar with the examen, I think it's important to contrast it. It's not an examination of conscience, which is often, you know, like, 'Okay, you know, I'm just gonna go through the commandments like oops. Oops. Double. Oops.' This is more like, 'I'm gonna watch the film of my day and express gratitude for what the Lord has done, contrition for where I missed it, and, with the Lord, review that day so that I can follow him ever more closely as he leads me through this, you know, ever dynamic maze of life.' I love that image. I love that image. 'Review the film.' I hadn't heard it quite said that way. I love that. That's great. Yeah. I picked that up when I did college ministry. I used to work with athletes. It's like, 'Hey, you gotta watch film.' It's the film, right? Exactly. This is the film, yeah. Yeah. I love that. Uh, it's like, 'Oops,' yeah, like that guy zigged and I zagged and I got left in the dust. Right. Right. Todd, tell us a little bit. You share a great, very powerful example of how you brought the examen prayer into your family. Because we've been talking about a very kind of church organizational context. Share that because I found that so beautiful. So, you know, 9/11, um, 2001, which is now so far, I mean, 20 years ago. I'm realizing we're talking to people who. Nothing, like a pandemic to make 9/11 feel far away. Yeah. Really far away. And, and I'm often talking to leaders who, you know, do not remember it or we're not, we're barely born at that time. In 9/11, um, I literally had to go to our church and we were, our, the congregation where I was serving was two miles from the Camp Pendleton Marine Base and two miles from San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. So within hours we were warned, look, if there's significant new attacks, one of the potential places is right in your backyard. So, that's really real, yeah, so we were, and everybody had their own 9/11 story of that day. You know, people, we had people showing up to pray that night. This is before there's any social media. People just literally got on phones and called everybody and said, 'Hey, we're going to pray tonight.' And the place was packed. What I realized is my wife said, we cannot live in this constant sense of waiting for fear. So we have got to keep our family connected together and grateful for what we have. So she said, 'We're going to actually reinstate kind of an old family tradition, which is a family supper,' which comes out of my family and hers, both. And my family, my Italian family, family suppers are important. We're going to like reinstate this and we're going to make this happen. So what we did with our kids and they were little at the time is we just said, 'Look, we're all going to gather every Sunday night for dinner. If you got homework, you got to have it done early. Dad's going to wake up from his post-sermon nap. We're going to make dinner together. We're going to have dessert even when we're on a diet because it's a feast day and we are going to say the Lord's prayer together and we're going to talk about our week.' And what we did with our kids is we called it 'holy high low.' Tell us your highs. Tell us your lows. We were teaching them the prayer of examen. They were just kids. Yeah. And for the next 15 years until, like, my 17 years till my son went to college. We did it every week and what we learned was this is how our family learned to pay attention to God's presence in our lives. Every decision we made, which college we're going to go to, what decisions we're going to make, whether I'm going to go speak somewhere. Yeah, all that kind of stuff. We started around that table asking, 'Where do we see God's presence? Where are we missing God's presence? Where's our consolations? Where's our desolations?' That is so cool. I mean, I love that, you know, we, most of the listeners know I, you know, I'm a father of six. I've got one in college and I've got a four-year-old. Uh, and everything in between, and I love that, like, I mean, teaching young people, because obviously in a Catholic context, liturgical worship, personal prayer, uh, devotions that kind of connect those two worlds are foundational, but there is something exceptionally powerful about the examen. In helping us stay with the Lord when everything else seems unstable and being able to, to teach that to my children. I just love that, that story. Any other like tips or like tricks or like how you get squirrely young people or how that adapted as they grew older? Well, partly when they're younger, it's pretty easy, you know? 'What was your high?' You know? Yeah. 'I got picked first at recess to play in the game,' you know? 'What was your low?' 'My friend didn't get picked and didn't play and I felt torn between should I play the game or play with my friend?' Um, so, 'high' wasn't as high as you thought. Huh? Could it be something else? Huh? Like you just started asking questions. Yeah, or 'What's your low?' 'Well, I had to stay in for the reason for recess because I didn't get my homework done.' 'Oh, but you know what? The teacher said I could come in every lunch because I'm a different kind of learner and she said I'm really smart in my own way.' That's awesome. Oh, so pretty soon you start pointing out that what you think are highs or think are lows are sometimes different because there's something else going on and we go, 'That's God at work.'
Like where do you see God at work, right? Beyond the natural, I can see the Lord's movement and work in my life. Yeah. Oh, that's so good. And this is one of the things, this is one of the things we do with churches in our consulting work. We'll say, you know, what we ask them, not only what is your charism, but what is the pain of your community that becomes the call for you?
So, I worked with one church outside of Washington, DC. And they said that coming out of the pandemic, we asked them to go talk to their neighbors, go talk to your neighbors, give them three easy questions, but not about the church, about their life. Yeah. What we come back with is people here moved to this community because it felt like a safe community, but everybody in the pandemic so hunkered down.
Now it feels like a lonely community. Wow. So what could be calling us, Hey, as a church, we need to be the place that starts connecting people together. Okay. What will that require? A change of view. Everybody thinks of us as like a spiritual country club. We're an intimidating church. Oh, okay. So what's it going to require of us?
We got to like figure out how to rekindle our charism of being hospitable and connecting to people because the community needs it. We have a calling here, a purpose here that will then require us to adapt and go through transformation.
Yeah, well, and that's a, that's a communal discernment Todd. Can you speak into that? Because I think it's one thing for us to know how to discern as an individual, yeah, you know, it's like okay like yeah, should I, you know, should I take this job? Should I not, you know? Do I say yes to this speaking engagement? Volunteer here, there, whatever. How do you lead communities, whether it be a small community, like a team at a church or, you know, executive team, whatever. How do you lead, like, a community or a team to discern?
Well, what we do is when we go to work with a group of people, we ask them to give us a little, what we call, transformation team. It's, it's like, give us a core of discovery. Give us a small group of people who are going to go and experiment and learn and bring stuff back. Don't try to do this with everybody. Oh, and don't necessarily try to do this for starters with the leadership. Because the leadership has got their hands full. They got stuff to do.
Yeah, wait, that's brilliant. So I didn't, wait. I just want to pause. You're saying a leadership team. Let's say you're the board of governors or the executive team and organization, like, they've got a day job, yeah, and they may not be suited or free to the task of dreaming and discovering and trying out and discerning a new way forward. So I was, the example I often use is when President Kennedy said we're going to go to the moon, they didn't make a committee of Congress. They made NASA. They made NASA, right? Oh, that's fantastic. There was a group of people that needed to keep the country running. It was the 1960s. There's another group of people who needed to figure out how are we going to get to the moon? What they needed was a deep connection between Congress and NASA. Right. And so what we do is we take a transformation team and we usually ask at least one person from the board or the senior pastor, and somebody will be the pastor will be on that committee. And we basically teach them a process of deep discernment and of listening and of paying attention to both through processes we use in the congregation and in the community, of basically paying attention to what are the gifts that we have for this community that will energize us, and what are the things we have to let go of. So who, who are we, what's our, what's our charism, what is the learning that is needed? What are we going to have to let go of? And one of the parts is we teach people is, you know, don't try to predict the future. Instead, prototype your way into the future. Do experiments, small experiments. So I worked with the church last night, we coached the church in Philadelphia. And the church, what they realized was as soon as they started doing experiments, the staff of the church got mad. Like, why are they messing with our stuff? Why are they doing this stuff? Are they trying to put us out of a job? The pastor literally had to tell the staff. Relax, they're experimenting and we know you have a day job. Wow. The staff got anxious because this is a church where they were hired to be the professional Christians on behalf of the church, right? Yeah. And they're trying to change that culture. If you want to change that culture, you've got to ask the professional Christians to step back a step. Well, the pastor's holding that anxiety at bay while a group of lay leaders are doing some experiments. Yeah. And while the staff are saying, we're getting up anxious about that. That's usually, I mean, that's usually the sign that, you know, you're moving forward is that people are beginning to learn and people are beginning to get anxious and resistant at the same time. I mean, I could ask a thousand kind of questions about that process. Once you've got a group that is experimenting and they've, let's say, you know, there's a couple of the experiments have worked and they've kind of stumbled on what seems to be a way forward. How does that then get mainstreamed into the larger organization or community? Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things actually is that we teach them, try not to say what worked. Oh, okay. Say more. Say instead, what did we learn? Experiments are about learning. So what is the question you want to explore? What do you want to learn? So oftentimes when people say what worked, what they said is, Hey, we stumbled onto something that's kind of cool. That's really interesting that this seems to work. Okay. Tell us what you learned. Well, what we learned was. If we change vacation Bible school to the evenings, we can get working parents really energized about connecting with their kids. Okay. What we also learned is for parents who want vacation Bible school to be a kind of daycare during the summer, they're upset about that. So we have competing values to work out. Okay. Once I can name two competing values. Oh, that's great. Now we're back to the place of discerning. So what does God want us to do? Provide daycare for kids, during the summer months? Or engage parents back with children. They're both really important. Right. But which is our calling and what are we called to do? Okay. One of these is a canoe we're going to drop. The other one is going to be a way forward, which one, and this is what's so hard is competing values cannot be resolved in a win-win. You have to decide. Something is going to take a backseat to something else. You have to make a hard decision. Wow. And that's why you need to. Todd, since we're there at that moment, how do you guide a group through that discernment? Well, the first thing we start with is your charism. And then what we also get them clear on is, so what do you believe is your mission? What is yours to do? And very many, many groups we work with tell us, Oh, well, we have a great mission statement. It's awesome. We got t-shirts printed up. We got mugs. We got everywhere. It's framed. It's in the drawer. Yeah, it's exactly. It's right. Right. And I always say, look, your mission statement is a tool and it's not a t-shirt. It is a tool for decision making. So if your mission statement cannot help, you know, what you're saying no to, just remember the word for decision is related to the word incision. Like your goal for your mission statement is to help you have a sharp tool that helps you with as least pain as possible, cut some stuff out. So what are you not going to do? What are you not going to do? Yeah. So when I'm meeting with, um, you know, a group of Catholic missionaries that I worked with last year who do church planting in rural Appalachia, that's what they do. They started in the early part of the 20th century, working with mostly white rural farmers. Today, it's necessary that everybody speaks Spanish. Rural Appalachia is church planning in the Catholic Church is mostly amongst Spanish language people. So Spanish is important, right? Spanish is really important. But what they can cut out is we know we're not going into the big cities, like, we're rural. And we know if you say, Oh my gosh, we love our work and we'd like you to come join us in Colorado. They'll say, take all of our tools and go do that. We're called to rural Appalachia. Like we know we can. Like we know this is our calling.

Mountains, yes, but not those. Right. Wow. So then you start realizing the mission always wins. The mission always wins. That's the discernment part, like, what is it we're called to do? And how does that, like, it's not the pastor, not the biggest donor in the church, not the group of people who've been here forever who say, this is our church. My grandparents founded it. I mean, there is a church in Washington that my great-grandmother founded. My name is on their door. Wow. Like I, I don't get to go show up there and go, you know, no, the mission always wins. Yeah. That is huge. Again, not unique, but here, you know, in just as you speak, I'm really drawn back to our immediate context because so often here in again, Midwest, Nebraska, Kansas, Wisconsin, Iowa, we built churches for immigrant communities, a wagon ride apart. Yeah. And now, both because of disaffiliation of the faith and population shifts from rural to metropolitan centers. Um, you know, all of these factors, we can't staff those, those little places anymore because the people aren't there. The souls aren't that once we're there are no longer there. And man, that, that process of getting back to like, who are we and what is our mission is. We found it to be really powerful in what I would say, we call it the pastoral planning context. And man, I mean, I love it's, it really does seem to be the call of the church in almost every context today. And what's interesting is that once you have gone through that process of discernment and gotten clear on this is ours to do, kind of like Moses in front of the burning bush. You know, this is yours to do, Moses. Go back to Pharaoh. You know, you don't want to, but this is yours to do. Once you get clear, this is ours to do. Now there's going to be changes. So one church I give example, there's an urban church in urban Southern city. They said our conviction is we've always been a church that cares deeply about being missional. Like our neighborhood is right outside our door. We're going to reach our neighbors. The neighborhood is now changed and it's much more multi-ethnic. So they said, we are going to become a multi-ethnic that the pastor literally said, our mission is to be a multi-ethnic movement of missional disciples. That's what we're about. 2000 of them in worship. They have the most diverse staff I've seen of any group I've been worth except for the seventh day Adventist. They seem to be the most diverse group ever with, um, really, really diverse. It's amazing. They only have one problem, which is that every single week that pastor preaches to 500 empty seats because they used to be 5, 000 members when the community was more homogeneous. And they got church members who said, we built this sanctuary 25 years ago because you said our vision was to be 10, 000 members. And they said, well, back then when the homogeneous demographics pointed toward church growth in that way. It would look like we're just going to keep growing, but our deeper value is that we reach our neighbors and our neighborhood has changed. So we're no longer interested in being 10, 000 members. We want to be a multi-ethnic movement of missional disciples. Which means they're 2, 000 members, which means they have a building that haunts them every day. Wow. Including people who say to him, if you would stop talking about all this ethnic stuff, we could grow again. People would drive in to hear you preach. Now there's your values. Do you reach your neighborhood or 10, 000 members? Pick a value. Right. Well, and what's our calling? What's the calling? Right? Wow. You mentioned Moses there, and I wanted to ask, you reference in Tempered Resilience that when a leader, and this could be a parent, this could be in an educational context, obviously a church context, sets out to lead change, they should expect resistance and even betrayal. Which is a strong word. Can you talk more about that? Yeah. Yeah. Resilience was written because when I started talking about canoeing the mountains and about adaptive change, the stuff we're talking about leaders came to me and said, yeah, but your chapter on sabotage, you have a chapter on sabotage at Friedman, who was a Jewish rabbi who wrote about this stuff, said that every single group that goes through change is going to experience that loss. That loss is going to lead to high anxiety. People are going to be fearful of the future and they're going to then want to stop it just unconsciously. They're going to believe they're doing the will of God to stop the transformation that you believe God wants you to do. And so what I started looking at was how do you develop the resilience to face the internal resistance? That's the most soul-sucking thing that leaders face. It's, it's not the daunting world out there. It is. When you call people to the mission of the world out there and they say yes, and then they turn on you. Yeah. So tempered resilience was built on that. And what I did is one of the parts I based it on was Moses's own experience of taking the Hebrews through the Red Sea. Like the greatest miracle anybody would see until the resurrection. Yeah. Through the Red Sea. You would think it'd be convincing. 650, 000 of them. We're not talking 12 guys in an upper room. Yeah. We're talking 650, 000 of them all get to go through the Red Sea together. And they all watch Pharaoh's chariots end up dead on the beach because they tried to go through, like, God is so protecting them. And six weeks later, it literally says in Exodus 16, six weeks later, I always say to the Baptist, for us, that's Lent, for you, that is the time between Thanksgiving and New Year's, right? Oh my gosh. But six weeks, six weeks later, they're saying, you know, slavery, they killed our children. Yes. But we did have leeks and onions. Maybe we should, maybe we should go back. Yeah. They literally six, the exit is 16, three, all the people complained against Moses six weeks later. Yeah. But I tell people is sabotage is normal. It's natural. It's to be expected. It's not the bad things that evil people do. It is the human things that anxious people do. Thank you for that. Because I think what, I mean, just that last line, they're like, it's not what evil people do. It's what. Scared people do, uh, and it's human. Yeah, when you get really scared, it's really human. Yeah. Well, and it helps because I think those of us who we find ourselves in leadership roles, we're like, I love you. I thought you loved me. What the heck happened? We're like, well, they're scared. They're scared. Oh, all the time. Yeah. Literally like one of the hardest parts is Friedman has an entire statement that I put on every time I speak, I put it on the board where he says, look, it's part and parcel of the leadership process. It's a sabotage. It means that you make a change and then the sabotage happens. You can't feel like you're successful until you've made the change, then survive the sabotage, then you're successful. Wow. So Moses had to get them through the Red Sea, face the sabotage, and keep going all the way to the promised land. That literally they weren't successful until Joshua took them to the promised land. Yeah. That's how long the transformation often takes. Todd, our, our time has just like totally flown by, and I mean, this is, this has been uh, fantastic. Thank you. We'll link in the show notes to both Tempered Resilience and Canoeing the Mountains. I just want to, you know, so just kind of like take a moment here. Again, whether you're a parent, you're a teacher, pastor, or just a lay leader, you know, trying to participate, lead in a ministry, what do you say to someone who's listening, who's like, okay, that's me. I am in uncharted territory. They know they need to grow at leading and changing circumstances. Where do they begin? What's like their one to two, like just. Start here. Do these things. Yeah. I would say the very first thing to do is find other people who know they need to grow. Don't go alone. There's a reason why, you know, Paul wasn't sent alone. The disciples went out in twos, like, like, try not to go alone. Find it. Stay connected to someone like you to the work you guys do to that's what we offer people. We offer coaching and consulting and groups and stuff, or just find somebody else. Don't go alone. Remember Lewis and Clark are like one word. It's Lewis and Clark. They were a partnership. But they were actually two guys. Yeah, they were the last military partnership that was a shared partnership. No chain of command. Classic chain of command. Look how far they went. And they, they knew they needed Sacagawea, so they turned it into three, including a teenage Native American nursing mother, right? Yeah. So don't go alone. Second is explore, pay attention to what you know you need to learn, lead by learning. I would say leadership is not a function, is not a title. It's a task. Yeah. It's not heavy furniture and an office and a title. It's a task. Leading is taking people through transformation, starting with your own. So start the learning, get with some other people, gather them, start learning, and then just start paying attention to what you have to let go. What's the canoe you got to drop and stick and just start seeing how far it will take you. The more you lead with questions and letting stuff go. Gosh, Todd. That is, that's fantastic. Again, I said, we'll connect to the links for the, for the books. Where can people connect with you and, and learn more about your work? Yeah, so my um, consulting company is A. E. Sloan, S. L. O. A. N. Leadership, A. E. Sloan Leadership. It's named after Al and Enid Sloan, who came from Albernette, Iowa. Nice! They mentored my wife and me when we were younger. And when we they've now passed on and when we started our consulting company, we named it after them because we wanted to give to other people what they gave to us when we were young leaders. And so a E. Sloan leadership. aesloneleadership. com and that's our webpage and that's where all the links to all the stuff we offer is there. That's fantastic. Well, and thank you. I mean, you, you know, we were talking a little bit, my heart, I, I believe the Lord has called me to come alongside those here, you know, here in the archdiocese of Omaha to be that Encouragement, that kind of helping hand so they don't have to go alone, whatever context, right? Pastors, youth ministers, DREs. What a gift. What a great gift. Yeah. There's a whole team of us, so like our heart is to serve in this way. So thank you for being just a resource and an encouragement to us. We've really appreciated your work. Thanks for the conversation today. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. All right, everybody, you know, somebody who needs to hear this, if we can be of any encouragement to you, if you know this conversation would be a blessing, please go ahead and share it out. Thanks everybody.