As a student of change theory and practitioner of leading change in pastoral ministry, I’m often curious about the methods leaders use when it comes to leading a group, be that a congregation, school, community or nation, through change. I debate my own success in that effort over many years and with several institutions. Some might say, those who can’t – teach or write! But I’ll leave it to others to evaluate my record of success as a change agent. What I want to reflect on in this article is how and why a very different approach to leading change, than I ever tried to utilize, seems to be in vogue today, and why it may just be the most dangerous leadership process of all.
First let me share the image of a change leader that I am most comfortable with and have tried to employ over my vocational career. It’s the image of a gardener, one who works in the midst of the garden (congregation, people, community or group) as part of them, faithfully doing the things gardeners do: cultivating, trimming and pruning, weeding, feeding, fertilizing, watering, training and harvesting. If a gardener came into his or her garden one day, mid growing season, and went scorched earth, ripping out plants alongside of weeds (I think Jesus cautioned about that), or taking a weed eater to all the vegetation, or applying weed killer to everything; the gardener wouldn’t have anything left to work with. That may well have been the gardeners intent, but the entire garden would become in the matter of a short timeframe, a do-over. Years and seasons of growth, cultivation, produce and discovery would be wiped out all at once. The biosphere of the garden would be in shock. The clear-cut approach would be as if a bomb (sticks of dynamite) had been set off, rendering what had once been, no more.
Some people lead change in this way. They fancy themselves “disrupters” and set about using the only tool they carry in their toolbelt – the tool of disruption – overturning, uprooting, clear-cutting whatever lies in the way. The rationale is often that things have become corrupt or broken beyond tweaking. Maybe, they say, the organization is too far down the lifecycle of decline and it’s better to start fresh, do away with, and go scorched earth. Never mind that this is a garden, and the earth (soil) matters. Never mind that some plants have been very productive, some growth extremely lush, and others at least faithful in their rootage if not always the most abundant.
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