The Pathway to Powerful
Copyright © 2018 Loving on Purpose
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ISBN: 978-1-947165-88-5
eISBN: 978-0-578412-91-7
Printed in the United States.
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
1 | WE HAVE A PROBLEM!
2 | CONFRONTING POWERLESSNESS
3 | HEALING BROKEN PLACES
4 | BECOMING A POWERFUL LEADER
5 | INSTALLING A LENS OF HONOR
6 | EXCHANGING THE TRUTH
7 | CULTIVATING HEALTHY CONFRONTATION
8 | PROTECTING A POWERFUL CULTURE
Epilogue | BUILDING MOMENTUM IN A CULTURE OF HONOR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1
WE HAVE A PROBLEM!
On a winter’s day in 2013, I walked into our senior pastor’s office with some bad news.
“Dennis, we are in serious financial trouble,” I told him. “If the church continues to spend money at its current rate, I predict we will completely run out of money and be forced to close our doors within six months. The clock is ticking.”
I had only been on staff for a couple months, filling the newly created position of finance manager. Until hiring me, the church had a bookkeeper who processed and deposited income, paid bills, and did payroll, but did not run or read financial reports. It had been a long time since anyone had taken a clear measurement of where the church stood financially. Having an accounting background, I immediately started to run reports, compare them to the budget, and assess the financial state of the organization. It didn’t take me long to see that the numbers did not look good. The church had been shrinking in size for several years and income had decreased along with it. However, rather than noticing and addressing this problem, the leaders had continued to create budgets “in faith” that allowed the church to continue to spend at levels it couldn’t afford, while praying for a miraculous turnaround. As a result, we had been losing money at an ever-increasing rate, and were now at the point where bankruptcy was imminent if nothing changed.
Dennis looked at me in total shock, clearly completely blindsided by this news. Finally, he asked, “What are we going to do?”
“I can’t tell you, but you are going to have to do something. We absolutely cannot continue as we have been.” I hesitated, then decided to point out an obvious but uncomfortable fact. “As it currently stands, our largest expense is staff. If you look at current church staffing practices, you will see that we are very overstaffed for a church our size.”
I watched the weight of these words hit him. Dennis loved people, and the suggestion that he may have to let some staff members go, many of whom had worked at the church for a long period of time and felt like family to him, was especially painful. I left his office very doubtful that he would have the strength to make such a difficult leadership decision, even though I knew it was the only way that the church could be saved.
SYMPTOMS OF A DEEPER PROBLEM
When I had taken the position of finance manager, I was well aware that there were problems within the church, specifically among the leaders. My husband Aaron and I had been on staff previously for five years as youth pastors before stepping down in 2010, weary and beat-up after many experiences of dysfunctional communication and poor decision-making with the leadership team, and feeling powerless to fix these dynamics in the leadership culture. Upon returning to the church in 2012, we learned that the church had continued to struggle through major leadership changes, and that the unresolved conflict and division among the leaders and congregation had recently resulted in an unhealthy church plant. We had only agreed to me going back on staff because we thought the finance manager role would keep me mostly removed from those struggles. Instead, the finances had landed me squarely in the middle of broken leadership dynamics.
Before going to Dennis, I had brought the financial reports and analysis to my direct boss, a member of the senior leadership team. I explained the extent of the crisis and what would happen if we did nothing. He listened intently, asked questions, and took notes. However, when I returned a few weeks later to inquire what course of action we were going to take, I discovered he hadn’t made any decisions about the information or passed it on to anyone. It was as if he had completely frozen in fear. It was after the third meeting where I heard he still hadn’t acted that I took the news to Dennis myself, aware that we were losing time.
In contrast to my boss, Dennis didn’t waste much time before bringing the news of the crisis to the entire senior team. However, it was then that the real weight of the disconnection that still existed among the leaders, three years on from when Aaron and I had left, became real to me. Here we were on the verge of losing everything, yet weeks turned into months as the team struggled to come together and build a solution to the problem. They seemed unwilling to look for the deeper issues driving the church’s decline, instead proposing superficial changes while believing for a miraculous breakthrough. It was clear that the finances were only a symptom of the far deeper issues in our relational and leadership culture, which were now being forced into the open.
A TEAM DIVIDED
How did we end up in this state of crisis?
The church was now twenty years old. In its early years, it had grown and thrived, becoming one of the larger churches in the area. We attracted many families who built friendships, championed one another, spent time in and out of one another’s homes, and experienced and grew in God together. We developed a reputation in our small area for being seeker-friendly and loving well, two factors that had contributed to rapid growth.
Yet even as we had grown, certain events in those early years had planted seeds of disconnection and mistrust among the core leadership team, which were never fully confronted and dealt with. The true impact of this oversight was revealed when, as is normal in the life cycle of all organizations, we came face to face with a series of challenges and conflict-producing events.
We went through a season of major change in vision and focus as a church when we got swept into the charismatic renewal/revival stream through exposure to Heidi Baker and Bethel Church in Redding, California. Our church had originally kept to a more conservative position—while we believed in the possibility of prophecy, miracles, and speaking in tongues, we did not actively pursue them as a congregation. As we embraced renewal, we began bringing in guest speakers and hosting conferences where miracles, signs, and wonders were on display. Some in the church were excited by this dramatic shift, while others were merely curious and still others were openly resistant, many leaving the church in quick succession. While the fresh move of God we were experiencing attracted a good number of people to the church, the loss of families that had been part of the church, some from the very beginning, was very painful and put an immense amount of pressure on the leaders. Some wanted to push forward and pursue the path we had chosen no matter the cost, while others wanted to slow down and find a balance that would preserve peace in our established congregation.
Managing the shift in our focus and expression was not the only problem facing the leadership in this season, however. Administrative weakness started to come to light, exposing the fact the church was failing financially. This put a large amount of strain on the elder board and pastors. At the time, we were an elder-led church, but there was confusion around responsibility and accountability between the elders and pastoral team. In response to the financial issues, the elders chose to get much more involved in the decisions of the church while remaining removed from its day-to-day operations, which ended up created frustration among those trying to implement those decisions. We also embarked on a very ambitious building project and fundraising campaign that not everyone was on board with, which drew another sharp line of division across our church. More families left, and the pain deepened for those who remained.
The stress of these problems created a situation where the church, which had felt like family to many, was now being torn apart. Division deepened as people began to assign blame to different parties—the senior pastor, associate pastors, or the elder board—for what was happening. Watching the leaders struggle to come together and pull in the same direction communicated to the staff and congregation a lack of clarity about what our vision truly was or who was leading. A leadership vacuum was established when no one stood up, said, “We have a problem,” and pushed to bring the conflict to successful resolution.
The ability of any organization to successfully navigate a major change in direction is directly tied to the amount of trust that exists in the team leading the change. In fact, the success of any team’s ability to achieve its goals is fundamentally built on trust. Trust is built in a team when, beginning with the leader, team members become unafraid of acknowledging the truth about themselves—their strengths and victories as well as their fears, struggles, and mistakes. A healthy culture of trust is built through the courageous, vulnerable, and safe exchange of truth. Only when the truth comes to light can differences be understood and confronted in a way that lowers fear, strengthens connection, and invites teammates to resolve problems together. Team members who trust one another with the truth will also champion one another in the process of development rather than withdrawing from one another when weakness is revealed, which strengthens the connection of the team. In an environment free of fear, creativity flourishes, ideas flow, problems are identified and resolved, and every person gets to contribute to the success of the organization—yielding strong results.
However, trust in a team gets undermined when people hide from the truth. When the leader refuses to confront their own fears and weaknesses, they will usually struggle with and mishandle weakness and mistakes in others. They will either passively avoid confronting problems that are affecting the connection or productivity of the team, or they will react harshly in punishment, sending the message that is it not safe to make a mistake and causing people to hide. When leaders take the path of avoidance or aggression and leave problems unresolved, fear begins to multiply in the silence, creativity is stifled, and the team loses its ability to be effective in working together to achieve its goals.
On our church’s leadership team, the trust required to embark on new projects and navigate such major change simply didn’t exist. When conflict arose, the team did not have the relational tools necessary to communicate honestly, seek understanding, and bring the conflict to successful resolution. We did not know how to confront our own fears and the differences between us by stepping into the vulnerable exchange of truth. Instead, we chose passivity and allowed the disconnection and division to remain. We were aware that it was there, yet were powerless to resolve it. As a result, people suffered in silence and withdrew from each other in self-protection whenever they got hurt or scared. Hurts turned into offenses, causing fear and accusation to multiply.
A CULTURE OF POWERLESSNESS
The culture of any organization, be it a church, business, or family, is set by the consistent practices and behaviors of the leaders of the organization and reinforced through the managed expectations of the people working around them. When relational disconnection and unresolved conflict become normal, anxiety permeates the atmosphere and shapes the culture.
This was certainly the case for us. In response to this increased anxiety, our leaders tried a series of superficial fixes that ultimately did nothing to resolve the real problems. We changed our staffing and leadership structure multiple times, hoping this would help us move forward. Yet even when we made the switch from an elder-led church to a senior-pastor-led church, technically empowering Dennis to lead, we remained entrenched in the same practices. Structural and personnel changes are not enough to address the foundational issue of powerlessness. Every change caused further disappointment as the root issues lay unaddressed, the hurt got stronger, the disconnection got deeper, the accusations built, and more people left our church wounded. We became locked in a cycle of powerlessness and passivity.
The symptoms of powerless behavior that Danny describes in his book, Keep Your Love On, were normal in our leadership culture when Aaron and I were on staff as youth pastors. Powerless communication styles—passive, aggressive, and passive-aggressive—characterized the conversations on the leadership team. Passive communication was the dominant style. I remember sitting through many meetings feeling like I had something to contribute, yet being too afraid to speak up out of fear of being corrected or creating an uncomfortable situation. I had seen too many examples of people getting upset and completely shutting down in meetings while the rest of us sat uncomfortably by and pretended that everything was okay. We learned by default that anything difficult was simply not spoken about, because we had never successfully navigated through disagreement or hurt. Anytime it was exposed, it only caused more pain and disconnection to be absorbed by the people involved.
There were also incidents of aggressive communication, when certain leaders or staff members got pushed too far and finally exploded with anger and accusation toward someone. Though these occurred less frequently, they happened often enough to enforce the culture of passivity through intimidation. For example, one woman told me about her experience at a planning meeting for a ministry in which she had been involved. The leader shared ideas and asked for input, but as the ministry team began to refine his ideas and propose new ones, they noticed that the leader was becoming increasingly agitated. Scared that the leader was going to explode in anger, which had happened in the past, one by one the team members shut down and eventually just agreed to everything he proposed. After the leader abruptly left the meeting, the team remained and talked about how difficult the meeting was, how much they struggled with the leader, and how some were even considering leaving the ministry. Yet none of them were ready to confront the leader about his aggressive behavior. As a result, the leader remained unaware of the impact he was having on people around him, and the team became even more entrenched in their passivity.
Another powerless behavior Danny describes in Keep Your Love On is triangulation—acting like a victim and blaming problems on a “bad guy” while recruiting support and protection from anyone willing to be a “good guy.” This type of behavior became normal throughout our staff team. When things were difficult, we would turn to one another or to our friends outside the team for support. Office gossip was normal, and we all knew, or had a version of, what was happening behind closed doors. Together we would agree over who the “bad guy” was in the scenario, what was wrong with the church, and what needed to happen for it to be fixed.
However, we didn’t even all agree on who was the bad guy! People would accuse one person while defending another person with whom they agreed. I remember conversations where staff members would share their struggles and put the blame squarely on the shoulders of one leader, saying, “I wouldn’t follow him out of a paper bag.” The next day, a different staff member would be accusing the other leader of taking authority that was not rightfully his and claiming that was the reason that our church could not be blessed. And of course, we had all sorts of spiritual “bad guys”—there were Jezebel spirits, Ahab spirits, Absaloms, and more!
On top of all this, we kept telling ourselves that we had a “culture of honor”! After hearing Danny’s messages on honor and reading Culture of Honor, we had all adopted his language, often publicly saying things like, “In this house, we have a culture of honor.” Yet in practice, almost none of the leadership behaviors Danny describes—creating a safe place for people to grow in freedom, driving the fear of punishment out of the culture, courageously confronting issues and empowering people to clean up messes, etc.—were visible on our team. Instead, we used “honor” as an excuse for continuing to be passive about confronting the hard issues.
BECOMING POWERFUL
After so many years of operating in this powerless culture, our first step towards becoming powerful came about almost by accident, but the timing couldn’t have been more crucial! Dennis invited Tony Stoltzfus, a leadership coach from California, to do a workshop with our team. The timing of the workshop just happened to come after my appointment as finance manager and shortly after I had begun the process of communicating about our financial crisis with Dennis and the other senior leaders.
None of us really knew what to expect from working with Tony—he had simply come highly recommended to us by a couple in the church who were hosting a separate business workshop with him. Little did we know that he was about to lead us into a moment of truth that would shake things up and make way for some dramatic and life-saving changes in our organization.
As it was his first time meeting our team, Tony opened the workshop by asking a series of questions designed to get to know each of us and the experiences that had prepared us for our calling and role as leaders. It didn’t take long for him to discover that the relational dynamics on our team were strained, to say the least. Most of us were avoiding eye contact with each other and offering shallow, evasive answers that made it painfully obvious we were highly uncomfortable being vulnerable with each other. Instead of backing away from our discomfort, however, Tony leaned into it, asking probing question after probing question in a quest to get to the bottom of what was going on. It became clear that he was a master at reading body language and facial expressions, and was more than happy to confront each of us with the messages we were communicating, whether intentional or not.
When it was my turn to respond to a question, Tony immediately pointed out that my body language switched to a defensive posture as I was giving my answer, and invited me to share what was actually going through my mind. I ventured a bit more honesty, hoping that would satisfy him. Instead, he told me that a scared expression had flashed across my face, and urged me go even further in sharing my thoughts and feelings. This time, I was honest to the point of tears. From then on in the meeting, my defenses and filters were down, and I became a lot more vocal and blunt in my responses. This, of course, was exactly what Tony was going for. He repeated the same process with each person in the room, pushing us to own the reality that had been in place for a long time: as a team, we were very disconnected and had no idea how to tell each other the truth of what was going on inside us. Lowering our walls was awkward and scary.
Finally, right before we stopped for lunch, one staff member said in frustration, “I wish we could just be honest with each other!”
Tony looked around the room and asked, “How many other people feel like that?” Most of the team indicated their agreement.
When we came back from lunch, we found Tony standing behind a table spread with cards labeled with different words.
“After this morning, I’ve decided we should wait on going through the material I had prepared for this afternoon. I want to see if I can help you start to get more honest as a team. These are emotion cards,” he said, gesturing at the cards on the table. “I want each of you to choose the card that best describes how you feel in this environment.”
Then Tony picked up one of the cards and turned to me. “Carla, you take this one.” With that, he handed me a card that said, “Angry.”
Obediently, I took the card and watched as the rest of the team made their way forward to choose one for themselves. Everyone hesitated as they sought the card that best represented their feelings. Finally, we all had our cards and stood around the room holding them up for the room to see.
Without exception, every senior leader and staff member was holding a negative emotion card. I was, as instructed, holding “Angry” and feeling very uncomfortable as I realized for the first time how truthful that was. Tony had recognized the frustration that had been leaking out in my comments all morning. Across the table from me, two of our senior leaders were holding “Inadequate” and “Sad,” and one of our administrative staff was holding “Disconnected.”
One by one, Tony invited each person to explain their card. Tears began to flow as team members began to tell each other the truth about their experience on the team, many of them for the first time. The problem was now out in the open, and we had taken the first step toward building trust—engaging in a vulnerable exchange of truth about what was happening inside of us.
Following Tony’s workshop, due to the depth of pain that had been revealed, we invited Will and Leslie VanHook up from Montana to do counseling and Sozo ministry sessions with all the senior leaders and staff. Everyone agreed to this, and many people on the team ended up having powerful personal breakthroughs where they confronted the fears at the root of their powerless behavior. However, others on the team were less eager to engage in any kind of process of self-discovery or inner healing that would help them, and the rest of us, grow in becoming more powerful, connected, and healthy. This exposure of people’s attitudes was even more important, in a way, than the truth that came to light in our workshop with Tony, because it showed us where our most critical area of misalignment lay. This ended up influencing some of the decisions Dennis finally made to avert the financial crisis and address the powerlessness that had brought it about. He knew that any effort to change our leadership culture would depend on having a team where everyone was willing to take ownership of this goal of personal growth.
RADICAL REORGANIZATION
To make these decisions, Dennis had to walk out his own journey to overcome areas of powerlessness in himself. Through the workshop with Tony and the follow-up work with Will and Leslie, he was able to admit that he had felt powerless and miserable within our existing culture for some time. He acknowledged places in his own history with the church where he had been hurt, and recognized that the pain of these experiences had contributed to his fear, confusion, and lack of confidence in his own ability to lead. Acknowledging these truths allowed him to start a journey of healing and self-discovery. What was the problem and what was he going to do about it?