Tod Bolsinger is the Executive Director for the DePree Center Church Leadership Institute, and the author of Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory, and the newly released, Tempered Resilience: How Leaders are Formed in the Crucible of Change. Click here to view Tod's profile.
Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory
Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory If you’re going to scale the mountains of ministry, you need to leave behind canoes and…
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Tempered Resilience: How Leaders are Formed in the Crucible of Change
Tempered Resilience: How Leaders are Formed in the Crucible of Change What type of leadership is needed in a moment that demands adaptive change?…
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Online Course:
Leadership In a Changing World
An Online Course on Fuller Formation The world is changing. How will it affect your leadership in the Church? This resource, which works as…
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Online Course:
Guiding Your Church Through the Pandemic
An Online Course on Fuller Formation What do you do when you can’t bring people together to worship, learn, and care for each other?…
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How Not to Waste a Crisis–Even When You are Exhausted
“If I could retire today, I would,” a pastor told his executive coach recently. But he can’t retire and he wonders how he is…
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Deep Change for a Disrupted Church: A Review of Scott Cormode’s “The Innovative Church”
This article is a Review of The Innovative Church by Scott Cormode. When most church members use the word “innovation” they are usually referring…
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Webinar: Resilience in a (Permanent) Crisis: Practices for Christian Leaders
Webinar by Tod Bolsinger and Mark Roberts.
This webinar will help enable us to be resilient leaders in a time of great challenges and opportunities.
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Leadership Exhaustion and a Spirit of Adventure
“You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?” “The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest,” I repeated woodenly, as if…
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Webinar: Christian Innovation in Uncharted Territory
Webinar by Tod Bolsinger and Michaela O’Donnell Long.
Hear about our collective need to learn the skills for courageous and wise innovation in a season of massive disruption.
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Leading in Uncharted Territory
In under a month, literally everything about what we assume about what a church DOES changed. Sunday morning services? Small groups? Committee Meetings? Programs on our church campus? All cancelled… Even our Easter Sunday Services for many. So, now what does ministry look like in this changing world? How do we clarify what should never change and at the same time prepare to let go of many things that are dear to us? What does it mean to be adaptive leaders who are able to go into uncharted territory when everybody has been thrust into it at the same time?
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Everybody Will Be Changed (Especially the Leader)
The internal and psychological stress of leading, exploring, learning and keeping an organization “on mission” is demanding. The fear of failure weighs heavy. We who started so eagerly to lead something significant for God into uncharted territory start to pine for security and stability. We long to be seen as the “expert” and experience the deference that people in our society offer to those of us who have “made it.”
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The Problem with the People You Lead
Did you see that word? Sabotage.
That’s not a word you expected to see in a post on Christian leadership, did you? But, it’s very real. Even for Christians (maybe, especially for Christians)
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In Uncharted Territory, Adaptation is Everything
According to historical geographer John Logan Allen, the moment Meriwether Lewis and his scouting party from the Corps of Discovery crested the Lemhi Pass looking for the Columbia River and found only miles and miles of snow capped peaks, was when his “geography of hope” gave way to the “geography of reality.” And a disappointing reality it must have been.
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Leading into Uncharted Territory
This story of Lewis and Clark illustrates the moment that the Christian Church finds itself in today… and frankly, not unlike the moment that the disciples found themselves in on another mountain in Galilee.
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Haunted by the Glory Days
It was different “back then.” Some of us have heard about it. Others can remember it. Sociologists and theologians refer to this recently passed period as Christendom, the 1700-year-long era with Christianity at the privileged center of western cultural life. (I have a copy of the Los Angeles Times from December 1963 that list Daily Bible Readings for the upcoming week. Can you even imagine a major newspaper exhorting people to read their Bibles today?)
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