Waking up to a New World
It was a Wednesday night. I preached at our young adults’ service at church. I felt encouraged by the response, but I was tired and eager to get home. I was feeling under the weather. But I wanted to push through and deliver the sermon I had worked hard on. Driving home at 9:15 PM I wondered to myself, “Should I take a sick day tomorrow? It would be great to stay home.” Laura and I bought our townhome a few weeks prior. I wouldn’t mind an extra day or two at home with Laura and our dog. I crawled into bed. Before falling asleep, we received a notification: Stay home. It was March 11, 2020.
It was like I woke up the next day to a new world. Ministry would need to look different for the foreseeable future. The name of the game was “Pivot,” “Adapt,” “Innovate.” As the days became weeks, the name of the game regressed to “Zoom,” “Hello Fresh,” “Netflix.” Though these months of 2020 were stretching, the lessons gleaned are invaluable and applicable for leading in our world today. For that, I am grateful.
It was during this time that Annabel Beerel, an author and leadership consultant, put together her book Rethinking Leadership.[1] Forged in the crucible of 2020 with an interdisciplinary approach to leadership, Beerel’s book is a critical tool for leaders engaged in a VUCA world.[2]
My approach to this post is unique to how I normally write. I will write more narratively and connect the lessons I extracted with Beerel’s work. There are three leadership perspectives in particular I am learning in practice that Beerel writes about. They are Leadership and Management, Systems Leadership, and Adaptive Leadership. I will write about all three with Adaptive Leadership receiving the most attention.
Leadership and Management
Personally, the most obvious and practical chapter Beerel writes is on leadership and management – what each one means and requires. A couple of years ago, my leadership at the church I serve at was limited to volunteers of the junior high ministry. I loved serving with these volunteers. Many of us were together through the turbulent year of 2020. This changed, and my leadership had to adapt when due to a promotion I began managing five staff members in addition to volunteers. This changed again six months when we merged two departments together with myself overseeing the new team. This resulted in a “sink or swim” reality of management. I had to learn, and learn quickly. I often lament “I am not a good manager.” But being management comes with the territory of leadership in my role. Management and leadership, though different, overlap. And both are critical to doing my job well. What is required of me is managing the tension of what my teams need. Do they need more management from me, or leadership? Do they need accountability to short-term goals and a mitigation of risk (management)? Or do they need change, clarity of vision, and encouragement toward a particular direction (leadership)? There may be roles in the future in which I emphasize more of one than the other.
Systemic Leadership
Management is one thing. But what happens when the burden of leadership is on you, but one is not leading staff or volunteers but peers? Recently, I stepped into a volunteer role of bringing together young adult pastors in the Greater Portland area for the purpose of unity, encouragement, and collaboration in ministry. Beerel’s chapter on Systems Leadership provided me perspective on what I do in this role. According to Beerel, “A system is a regularly interacting and interdependent group of parts, items, or people that form a unified whole with the purpose of establishing a goal.”[3] This network of ministry relationships is, in essence, a system. It is complex, ambiguous, and slow-moving. It requires me, as the volunteer group leader, to be “collaborative, take a stakeholder perspective, and encourage distributed leadership.”[4] These are lessons I am putting into practice right now.
Adaptive Leadership
It is unsurprising that the great leadership lesson learned at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic was Adaptive Leadership. Developing the capacity to adapt in the team and/or organization is the key task of the leader. But this begins with the leader. The leader must be willing to step out of the “imaginative gridlock” to use Dr. Edwin Friedman’s language.[5] But as the leader leads by example, a posture of learning amongst the team is imparted. In our rapidly changing, VUCA world this is a skill leaders ought not overlook. Dr. Tod Bolsinger writes extensively about this in his book for pastors leading in the new world of post-Christendom, Canoeing the Mountains.[6] He writes, “Leadership in the past meant coming up with solutions.
Today it is learning how to ask new questions that we have been too scared, too busy or too proud to ask.”[7] This requires leading the people one is entrusted with through a learning process.[8] But people do not like change. Therefore, they may “go after the leader rather than do the work.”[9] This harsh reality of sabotage is what Friedman warns is “part and parcel of the leadership process.”[10] With that being said, an essential part of adaptive leadership is self-care.[11]
Awaiting the Next Change
That morning I woke up to the new reality the COVID-19 pandemic will not be the last time I realize my work and leadership requires re-imagining and re-tooling. Therefore, I ought to get used to change, but remain curious and calm, heeding Bolsinger’s exhortation that “leadership requires a calm, confident presence in the middle of a highly anxious, instinctively reactive situation that threatens to burn everyone, because calm, like anxiety, is contagious.”[12]
[1] Annabel C. Beerel, Rethinking Leadership: A Critique of Contemporary Theories, 1 Edition (New York: Routledge, 2021).
[2] VUCA stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. Jacobus Kok, Leading in a VUCA World Integrating Leadership, Discernment and Spirituality, 1st ed. 2019., Contributions to Management Science (Cham: Springer Nature, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98884-9, 5.
[3] Ibid., 195.
[4] Ibid., 215.
[5] Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (10th Anniversary, Revised Edition) (Church Publishing, Inc., 2017), 33-57.
[6] Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory (InterVarsity Press, 2018).
[7] Ibid., 113.
[8] Ibid., 111.
[9] Beerel, Rethinking Leadership, 227.
[10] Friedman, A Failure of Nerve, 262.
[11] Beerel, Rethinking Leadership, 227.
[12] Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains, 147.
About the Author
David Beavis
David is Australian by birth, was raised in Southern California, and is the Youth and Young Adults Pastor at B4 Church in Beaverton, Oregon. David and his wife, Laura, live in Hillsboro with their dog, Coava (named after their favorite coffee shop). M.A. Theology - Talbot School of Theology B.A. Psychology - Vanguard University of Southern California11 responses to “Waking up to a New World”
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Amazing blog, as always. Thank you for the clear and level Christian head you always present in your blogs. I lament that our group is coming to a close and now I have to wait for your book to read your stuff. Maybe there will be other opportunities. Great insight and weaving our books together “syntopically.” I appreciate you bringing in “Canoeing the Mountains” I also enjoyed that book – Kristy Newport recommended it to me last year.
Well done Dr. Beavis.
Ah thank you for your encouraging words Dr. O’Neill! And Canoeing the Mountain is a book that shaped me deeply during this program, even though it wasn’t assigned reading. I look forward to our paths crossing in the future!
David, great post. I love that last quote, “leadership requires a calm, confident presence in the middle of a highly anxious, instinctively reactive situation that threatens to burn everyone, because calm, like anxiety, is contagious.” How can we be the calming influence on an overly anxious society? COVID was certainly a time of learning to adapt and of being that presence in a frightened world. I wonder what God will say to the church about how we have responded to it. What will He say to me? Did I lead well during that season? Am I changed for the better? As we get closer to graduation, I feel like our work is just beginning. We have completed the introduction to our work. Now it is time for the real work to begin. May we all go from here and be world changers!
The questions you pose are crucial for us to reflect on. Again, self-differentiation (via Friedman and later Simon Walker’s second book) is vital for us. I cannot “need” my leadership position. If I do, then I will lead in an anxious, self-protective way. But I need to me much more rooted and grounded in my identity apart from my position – rooted and built up in Christ (Col. 2:7) – and all that to be where I find secure footing in an insecure world.
David – I will miss your thoughful blogs. You have a wonderful analytical mind and always bring up concepts and insights that are important to consider. I’m curious if you find great differences in leading volunteers versus paid staff and what those differences might be?
David, What a great post! I really like your narrative approach and the ways in which you brought Beerel’s ideas together through your experiences and upcoming challenges. Nice job. You are such an effective writer, in all of your varied approaches.
This is so exciting: “Recently, I stepped into a volunteer role of bringing together young adult pastors in the Greater Portland area for the purpose of unity, encouragement, and collaboration in ministry.” How are you applying the idea of distributed leadership? Does your project on mentoring intersect with this particular group in any way?
I’ll miss your posts, insights, and questions, David. Thanks for spurring us all on to some deep thinking and new learnings over the past few years.
Good post my friend,
I love how you brought in your leadership experience, especially during this critical time. I also appreciated what you said about heeding Bolsinger’s exhortation: “Therefore, I ought to get used to change, but remain curious and calm.” Being still amid the challenges of life and ministry can make a difference. I will miss your weekly wisdom, my friend.
Dr. Beavis,
I enjoy how you reflect on your own transition from leading volunteers to managing staff members and the challenges of balancing management tasks with visionary leadership.
Ah, thank you my friend. Our paths will continue to cross Dr. George.
David,
I love how you reflect. You live in the tension that your role creates. I admire this. It shows that you are want to be wise in how you lead/manage…
“What is required of me is managing the tension of what my teams need. Do they need more management from me, or leadership? Do they need accountability to short-term goals and a mitigation of risk (management)? Or do they need change, clarity of vision, and encouragement toward a particular direction (leadership)? There may be roles in the future in which I emphasize more of one than the other.”
Dr. Beavis….please let me know when you get your mentoring manual/guide out. Please
see you May2
Dr. Beavis – Terrific last post. You have a gift for writing. Definitely keep it up! The narrative at the beginning drew me in – we will always remember where we were when we got the message to stay home.
I look forward to hearing about all the great things you do next! You have navigated the challenges of church leadership and management that have shaped you into a leader with a voice. Thank you for speaking into the lives of other leaders.