Leading the Church in a Divergent Age
The Episcopal Church, like the wider world, faces challenges that can’t be solved by technical fixes on their own. They require what Gil Rendle calls “adaptive work”—changes in our habits, assumptions, and practices that allow us to meet a new reality with faith and courage. In this essay, I explore what adaptive challenges mean for our Church, how cultural shifts shape our leadership, and why we must learn to navigate a time that is divergent and liminal.
The following post has been adapted from an essay for my DMin Leadership class, a PDF of which can be found here.
Adaptive Challenges, Not Problems
The most intractable issues facing the Church in the West, including the Episcopal Church, are adaptive challenges rather than problems. An adaptive challenge does not have a solution; instead, it requires adaptation, or change that allows a person or organization to encounter an altered reality in a new way.
As Gil Rendle states in Quietly Courageous: “If technical work is the application of solutions to problems, then adaptive work is needed when one is faced with a situation that is not a problem, but is instead a changed environment.”1
Both the Church and society exist within a changing environment. Individuals or organizations faced with an adaptive reality must change in response, or they will be unable to meet the needs of the moment. The strategies and behaviors of the past may be maladaptive and unsuited to current realities. While some success may be achieved, fully engaging with the present will be impossible without change and adaptation.
Convergence and Divergence
The peculiarities of the changing context can be considered in many ways. As a culture, we have moved out of a peculiarly convergent time in the post-war period when Americans were largely bonded “into a cohesive national group with a shared national and global agenda.”2
This period of convergence strengthened many societal and governmental institutions. Mainline Protestantism benefited, and like many institutions, denominations developed and strengthened their organizational life during this period. In a convergence culture, the commonalities between people are emphasized.
By contrast, ours is a time of divergence, where individuality is emphasized, and individual experience and values are highly prized. In such a context, “In a convergence culture you lead with your sameness. In a divergent culture you lead with your difference.”3
For the Church, this means leadership cannot simply rely on shared assumptions. We must recognize individual and group uniqueness while also building communities capacious enough to hold difference faithfully.
Transition as a Universal Experience
The increased speed and breadth of cultural change highlight the already present reality that communities and individuals are always in transition. In church life, we often use the phrase “in transition” to describe a clergy change. Yet transition, as William and Susan Bridges remind us, is a universal pattern that applies to society, organizations, and individuals alike: an ending, a neutral zone, and a new beginning.4
Susan Beaumont builds on this in How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, describing the phases of separation, the liminal period, and reorientation. The liminal period, like Bridges’ neutral zone, can be summarized as a time of heightened emotion: anxiety and fear coupled with anticipation. (NB: Congregations with whom I have worked in transition will recognize this language).
The old ways of doing things are passing away, and the new ways have not yet emerged. It can be a period of imagination and excitement as new ideas are explored, but also of disaffection, weariness, and anger. The task of leadership in such a time is to ensure that amid exploration and conflict, there remains an engine of encouragement. By addressing simple problems and celebrating well-chosen projects, leaders can help communities move from generalized anxiety to specific urgency.
Leading in Liminal Time
Moving from the firmer footing of modernity, we have now entered a period of “liquid” time in which, as Rendle observes, even massively complex corporations must redo strategic work within eighteen to twenty-four months.5 Plans that extend beyond two or three years can quickly become detached from reality if they lack feedback mechanisms for adjustment.
This reality challenges church leaders accustomed to long-term planning. In a liminal time, strategy must be held lightly. Flexibility and responsiveness matter more than five-year projections.
For our congregations, this means a shift away from thinking that ministry can be scripted in advance. Instead, faithful leadership in this season emphasizes discernment, responsiveness, and experimentation, all grounded in prayer and mission.
Naming the “What Now?”
The difficulty of leadership in such a fluid season lies in articulating the present realities to clergy and lay leaders. Some facts are clear—for example, the rise of religious disaffiliation, especially among younger generations. But the “why” is elusive. There is no single explanation.
The temptation is to fixate on finding the answer to “why,” when in fact the more faithful move is to name “what” is happening and then ask “what now?” This requires interpretation and courage.
In my ministry, I have seen how essential this is during clergy transitions. Many lay leaders are unaware of the wider landscape of the Church: the shortage of clergy, the missing Generation X cohort, the challenges facing pastoral-sized congregations, and the competition for younger clergy among larger parishes.
To ask “what now?” in this environment is to face limitations honestly without despair. It is to resist nostalgia and instead move toward imagination.
In the next essay, I will explore how the Church can resist the temptation of nostalgia and embrace the change necessary for adaptive leadership, rooted in the faithful memory of God’s people.
Notes
Gilbert R. Rendle, Quietly Courageous: Leading the Church in a Changing World (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 36.
Rendle, 44.
Rendle, 45.
William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes (Da Capo Press, 2004). See also Susan Beaumont, How to Lead When You Don’t Know Where You’re Going: Leading in a Liminal Season (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
Rendle, 76.