Restoring The Church

Change Your Mind

March 2010, Number 51

The biology of transformation

How to lead change

by Jim Van Yperen

Jesus called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 18:2-4

Jesus said, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.” Mark 4:30-32

What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.     1 Corinthians 15: 37-38

When speaking of His Kingdom, Jesus describes a biology of change. The kingdom of God, like all living things, starts small and is in a constant state of change. Participation in this Kingdom requires us to move through cycles of birth, growth, decay, death, and rebirth. “Unless you change,” Jesus says, “and become like little children” you cannot enter. All life insists upon starting small – as a seed or a child. Christian transformation requires change by going backwards before we can move ahead. To live we must first die. To become mature we must become children. Greatness comes through service.

The nature of God is to insist upon change. The nature of humanity is to resist it. Herein lies the primary challenge of leadership: how to invite people into transformation, knowing that conflict and resistance are certain.

The Creator, God, has ordered a world governed by organic, not mechanistic, principles. Thus, to lead, one must understand and address the biology of transformation. Four rules apply:

1. The Church is a living organism. Whenever the church is mentioned in Scripture it is
described as “living” – a Body, a Bride, a building comprised of “living” stones. The church is not a program to be sold or machine to be fixed. It cannot be controlled. It is living; it must be healed and redeemed.

2. The Church, as a living system, is in a state of constant change. There is no status quo in nature, or in the church. Every living being is in a state of growth or decay. The question is not "if" your church is changing but "how fast?” and "in what direction?"

3. All living systems grow and change in relationship to limiting and reinforcing processes.  Limiting processes are the barriers, obstacles or difficulties that restrict and hinder growth. When seeds fall on a footpath, among thorns or on rocky soil, the plants are trampled on, wither, or choked. Reinforcing processes are the forces that encourage or heighten growth, such as good soil, sun, moisture and nutrients that can yield a crop a hundred fold.

4. Leading change requires recognizing, discerning and addressing underlying resistance to change. Making a river flow in the opposite direction is impossible without changing the underlying riverbed, and not without a lot of excavation. It is the same in the church. The older and more established the structure, the longer and harder it will be to change. The power to transform lies in changing the dynamics of resistance. “You can’t enter the Kingdom through human will and power. You must enter as a child.”

Transformation is an act of nature, not human will.  One must submit to its work, inviting God to change our mind, and to re-order our underlying structures. Change in the church that does not address the fundamental assumptions and practices of a congregation will always be rejected.

Change in Scripture
Scripture unfolds the story of God prompting humanity towards organic change, and His
people stubbornly resisting. Stephen summarizes this history before the Sanhedrin. Israel has repeatedly ignored leaders and the Lord. Stephen reminds them, then points his finger saying, “You stiff-necked people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are just like your fathers: You always resist the Holy Spirit! Was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him — you who have received the law that was put into effect through angels but have not obeyed it.” 1

As leaders, we are tempted to see ourselves as Stephen. “If people would just listen to me . . .” We are more likely aligned with the stiff-necked and stubborn, trapped in the bias of our own desires; tainted by the prize of power and success. Jesus offers a different way, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave — just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."2

Transformation, like salvation and sanctification, is the work of God through the Holy Spirit alone. A leader cannot change anyone. Rather, the leader’s task is to present a pathway for obeying God’s will. Without communication there is no relationship; without relationship there is no trust; and without trust, all change is inevitably manipulative and coercive. Presentation and invitation are the essential keys to leading redemptive change.

Presentation and invitation
By “presentation” we mean the process for hearing, discerning and communicating a change that God is prompting. This assumes, of course, that we are able to discern between divine prompting and human hubris.

Presentation is about Who and why. The greatest mistake leaders make in leading change is to make themselves the object and subject of the change. “God told me that we need to . . .” Or, “I know what we need to do . . “ A leader taking this approach is itching for a fight. Why? Because this immediately places the leader at odds with others. The subject of conversation is now about the leader, not God; about the leader’s desire, not God’s will. Following God’s will is never about being right, but always about being faithful. A good question to ask is this, “Who is the subject of this change?” If your answer is anyone or anything but God, you have a problem. And the problem is you. Whoever is the subject of change will be challenged and resisted. Don’t make it about you. Point to God and get out of the way.

By “invitation” we mean a process of inviting the Holy Spirit and the community into the
change process. John Howard Yoder called this, “the hermeneutic of peoplehood.”3 “God
speaks,” Yoder writes, “when His people gather and are free (not coerced) to be led.”4 This requires an open and shared discernment process of listening and inquiry where the context of the conversation is forgiveness and reconciliation. Here, every congregant is invited into the conversation while deferring to people with recognized authority and gifts to facilitate the conversation. The choice for leading change is not between “authoritarianism and anarchy”5 but for inviting voluntary participation in spiritual discernment.

Many years ago, I served as an Intentional Interim Pastor in a church where the dominating spirit of the people was autonomy. Everyone was doing what was right in their own eyes, to meet their own needs. Of course, this led to competition, division and conflict. While some ministries were strong, such as the women’s ministry, most were weak, and none supported the others. After interviewing nearly every member in this church of 500, I met with the elders to diagnose the problem and discern what to do. We discussed how autonomy was the problem and how God called us to be a community. Yet, all our programs were forming us to think and to act selfishly.

One night, an idea occurred to me. What if we closed the church for two months? What if we simply stopped all the programs? What if, instead, we gathered for worship on Sunday morning, came back again on Sunday night for informal prayer, singing and testimony, and then held a common meal for the whole church on Wednesday night? No one will be too busy to attend because we won’t do anything else! The leaders prayed about this and felt God was prompting us to do it. But I knew there would be resistance. So we held a series of forums to discuss the proposal, ask for feedback and prayer.

When the leaders of the women’s ministry heard about the idea they were not pleased. We met after church one Sunday, twelve ladies and me. They asked about how I came up with the idea. They told me how their ministry would be impacted, how 150 women had paid dues to meet every week for crafts and Bible study and what a nightmare it would be to stop meeting for eight weeks. I listened and told them I understood their concerns more.

Then one lady asked me, “Jim how do you know that closing the church is going to work”

“I don’t know that it is going to work,” I replied, honestly.

“Well, when you have done this before,” she continued, “what happened.”

“I don’t know,” I responded, “I have never done this before.”

“Well then why should we do this?” she asked somewhat bewildered.

I responded by rehearsing what the elders and I had been discovering through prayer and
conversation and that, while I knew the recommendation was unusual, we believed it was what God was leading us to do. “I don’t know,” I said. “I believe. I’m asking you to walk with us in faith.”

They were not convinced. One by one they began to tell me all the negative things that would happen if we were to do this.

I listened, acknowledged the hardship our proposal would place on them and then said this, “You could be right. You could be seeing something that we have missed. I hear your concern.  What I would like to ask you, however, is to spend time asking God what His will is.” I asked each woman to pray for the next week and we would talk again. All that next week I got messages back from the leaders of the women’s ministry saying things like, “Jim I hate this idea. I think it is going to ruin our ministry . . . but I think God wants us to do it!”

When God and His will is the subject of change, transformation becomes an act of obedience and worship, not human persuasion, manipulation or coercion. If you believe the Holy Spirit is leading you to some change, why not ask Him to speak to others as He has spoken to you? God does not say one thing to one person and another thing to others.

When I recommend this to leaders, I usually get two complaints.

First, leaders question whether people will really pray. The unspoken inference, of course, is that most people are not serious or “spiritual” enough to hear God speak. Much of this, I fear, springs from the spiritual arrogance of leaders. But on some level the concern may have merit. After all, discernment is not a democratic process where every view counts the same. The point is that if you need to vote on something to determine God’s will, then you are not ready to vote. To lead without violence is to do the work of spiritual testing, using spiritual criteria. So, we have developed seven questions that help guide a congregation to test God’s prompting. The responsibility of leadership is to suggest a pathway to follow and invite the congregation into spiritual discernment answering these questions: 6

We have used these questions to discern many contentious issues in church discernment. Our experience is that when believers engage in conversation about God’s will together, God speaks. Yes, there will always be people who disagree with the end conclusion, but most will submit to and support the final decision because they know the process was a spiritual practice characterized by open listening. (For those who will not submit, their willful rebellion will be clear to all.)

Second, leaders resist allowing God’s Spirit to speak to the community because the fear
it will “open a can of worms,” or wonder “what do we do if people reach a different conclusion?”  Here, the unspoken concern is either doubt of God’s sovereignty or impatience with the time it might take to lead change. Most leaders, I find, have a need to control and are secretly in love with their own ideas. But it is God’s mind we want, not ours. When leaders allow God to be God, the result is always greater than the sum of individual opinion. More importantly, when God moves hearts, He gets the glory, not you.

The Apostle Paul writes, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer
your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God — this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is — his good, pleasing and perfect will.”

Transformation is, in the final analysis, a renewing of hearts and minds through corporate worship. Transformation is the work of the Creator speaking to and through His creation.

-- Jim Van Yperen

 

ENDNOTES:

  1. Acts 7:51-53
  2. Matthew 20:25-28
  3. John Howard Yoder, The Priestly Kingdom, Social Ethics as Gospel, University of Notre Dame Press, 1984  pages 15-45
  4. IBID page 22
  5. IBID page 25
  6. I am indebted to my friend John Ryser who developed many of these questions.

  • For a pdf file of this article you can download, print and share, click here.
  • If you enjoy these articles on interpretive leadership, please encourage others to log-on to our website and sign-up. Thank you!

Meta•noia Ministries | Restoring The Church | (603) 495-0035 |