Churches, like other enterprises, need several kinds of leadership: maintenance (tending the store), financial (keeping the doors open), staff support (serving constituents), marketing (selling the product), quality control (freshening and problem-solving), and training (transmitting skills and values.)

There is one more leadership skill needed, and this is the critical one. Its absence is keenly felt. That skill is looking into the future. Every leadership team needs some person or group whose charge is to look down the road, to see emerging needs, to see opportunities, to read trends and to imagine the new into being.

Future-minded leaders aren’t sufficient by themselves, but their absence leaves the enterprise doing little more than maintenance.

Churches aren’t kind to their future-minded leaders. Since the future always involves change, the downdraft of change-resistance tends to stifle the future-minded leader. Since the future always entails risk and the unknown and spending resources not yet in hand, the normal values of settlers – be realistic, don’t risk anything, don’t change for the sake of change, don’t reinvent the wheel, don’t forget the old folks, don’t get too far ahead – add to the stifling.

I am convinced that the near-collapse of mainline Christianity in America was mainly a refusal to see and adapt to the future. The trends were there to see in the 1960s and 1970s, but there was so much inertia among leaders, so much whining about change, that the future-minded leaders fell away. Church councils – like corporate boards of directors in the same era, interestingly – became populated by stand-patters, maintainers, settlers. (The same inertia was crippling the auto industry, remember, and the steel industry, telecom industries, and public education.)

For a time, clergy took the role of future-thinker. But as they got clobbered in conflicts, many clergy shifted into maintenance mode. At a time when churches needed their clergy to be entrepreneurs, clergy were working on liturgies, in-house communications, and their own continuing education.

Lay leadership teams, meanwhile, tended to value maintenance and keeping the peace more than getting ready for tomorrow. Even “visioning” retreats looked only at incremental changes on a short horizon.

Problem is: with no one actively scanning the future, celebrating it and preparing for it, the future doesn’t happen. Continuation of today happens, but that continuation grows increasingly out of touch with emerging realities. The major course changes that any enterprise must embrace aren’t on the table.

What do churches need to be doing? Two things.

First, they must hire entrepreneurial clergy and then allow them to do entrepreneurial work. Stop burying clergy in maintenance work, and stop attacking them when they do look down the road. Clergy need to let go of the dream of long tenures. They must be change agents, now more than ever, and change agents tend to have short tenures.

Second, lay councils must include some people whose charge is tomorrow. Those future-minded leaders must have more clout than the budget-managers who tend to dominate council meetings. Churches won’t become lively and healthy by paying their bills on time, but by working with God on the new things God is doing.

A future-minded leader is concerned about emerging trends in the larger community, hearing voices outside the walls, imaging new ministries, seeking new constituents, and taking risks. Many longtime constituents will cry “Foul.” Let them. Their self-serving is understandable – and it’s certainly what churches have tended to reward – but it is abuse of the church and its future.
 

About the Author

Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the publisher of Fresh Day online magazine, author of On a Journey and two national newspaper columns. His website is Church Wellness – Morning Walk Media