From Nostalgia to Deep Change: Adaptive Leadership for The Church
Followup to Leading the Church in a Divergent Age
When congregations feel the ground shifting beneath them, the first impulse is often to look backward. We reach for what once worked. But this is often filtered and comes to us as a selective memory rather than a truthful narration of past experiences. Nostalgia—though understandable—can prevent us from facing God’s call to deep change and renewed mission in the present. In this essay, I want to examine the temptations of nostalgia, the difference between technical and adaptive leadership, and how our sacred memory can ground us for transformation.
The Temptations of Nostalgia
When society is in flux and resources are stretched thin, it is easy to slip into nostalgia. Gil Rendle describes nostalgia as three temptations woven together: “living a one-sided story, relying on past diagnoses, and avoiding necessary but difficult questions.”1
I often hear these temptations in parochial ministry. When older members lament the absence of young people, the grief is not abstract. It is usually about particular children or grandchildren not being present in their congregation, or in any church at all. That pain is real. But nostalgia can turn it into paralysis, as if repeating the programs of thirty years ago or imitating another congregation’s methods will somehow resolve the loss.
Technical vs. Adaptive Leadership
Ronald Heifetz has shown that leadership often defaults to the technical: applying “known solutions to known problems.”2 When anxious, people seek relief from leaders who will “save us from adjustment.”3
Adaptive leadership, by contrast, insists that the community itself must change. It means shifting away from one-sided stories and taking up the conflictual and systemic work of rethinking habits and assumptions. This is harder because it requires not only action but transformation of values and attitudes. Yet it is also the only faithful way forward in a changed environment.
Sacred Memory and Our Fear of Losing It
Susan Beaumont names another anxiety at the root of our nostalgia: fear that we are the weak link in the memory chain. “One of our agonies related to the current decline in organized religion,” she writes, “is our fear that we are the generation that may fail to pass the sacred stories forward.”4
Citing Miroslav Volf, she reminds us that memory is a key force in constituting community, to the point that the two are inseparable: “Take the community away and sacred memory disappears; take the sacred memory away and the community disintegrates.”5
The fear of losing the past drives some congregations to cling more tightly to the familiar forms. Yet ironically, without adaptation, the memory and the community are both at risk. What is needed is not abandonment of memory but faithful reinterpretation of it.
From Process to Adaptation
In my own ministry, I have often leaned on processes—structured conversations, discernment frameworks, and conflict mediation. These tools can comfort communities because they provide a clear path. But even the best process cannot remove the need for adaptive change.
The next phase of my work, I believe, is to help congregations and our diocese face the deeper questions of identity and mission: not merely how to resolve conflict, but how to reimagine our life together in a divergent and transitional society. This involves saying “no” to some ministries so that our “yes” to others can be stronger, more committed, and more strategic.
Deep Change and Discontinuity
Rendle distinguishes between incremental change and deep change. Deep change is discontinuous with the past, major in scope, and often irreversible.6 Heifetz adds that adaptive work requires changes in “values, attitudes, or habits of behavior.”7
This is daunting. Yet it is also hopeful, because the Church’s deep change is never completely untethered from its past, from our story. The adaptive work before us can align with the values most essential to our identity as the Body of Christ, even as it asks us to relinquish secondary habits that no longer serve our mission.
Here, the past becomes an ally. Reinterpreted rightly, our memories can anchor us while we take the risks needed to grow into the future God desires for us.
Reinterpreting Memory for the Future
Moving forward may feel disrutive, but rupture is not the goal. While Rendle is right that deep change may be expoerienced as discontinuity, at least with the recent past, David Thomas and John Gabarro, writing about corporate transformation, argue that organizations succeed when they align change with their most fundamental ethos.8 In the Church, this means linking adaptation to the core of our story: the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the power of the Holy Spirit, and the mission to proclaim the gospel to all people.
As Beaumont observes, leaders serve by helping communities retell their stories: shaping the telling of memory in ways that elevate core values while augmenting by introducing new ones as needed.9 Effective retelling helps an organization discern what its next steps should be, not as a rupture with the past, but in continuity with specificly highlighted elements of it, as an evolution.
For our congregations, this means drawing courage not from nostalgia for the 1950s but from the deeper memory of God’s faithfulness across a much broader sweep of time.
Conclusion: Reflections for Faithful Decision-Making
I have come to see my call as offering challenging reflections to our congregations about their context, and informed insights in diocesan discussions of ministry priorities. The work is not easy. Yet in articulating our present realities, we open the way for adaptive work that can yield strategies both new and renewed—rooted in memory, but not bound by nostalgia.
“Although people may balk at your interpretation,” Heifetz reminds us, “having one on the table to discuss, revise, and amend is profoundly useful.”10 This is the vocation of leadership in a liminal and divergent age: to put honest interpretations on the table, grounded in faith, so that God’s people can discern the way forward together.
Notes
Gilbert R. Rendle, Quietly Courageous: Leading the Church in a Changing World (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 208.
Rendle, 78.
Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994), 76, quoted in Rendle, 84.
Susan Beaumont, How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going: Leading in a Liminal Season (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 97.
Beaumont, 97, citing Miroslav Volf.
Rendle, 12.
Ronald A. Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Martin Linsky, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World (Harvard Business Press, 2009), 149.
David A. Thomas and John J. Gabarro, Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America (Harvard Business School Press, 1999), 33.
Beaumont, 98.
Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, 149.