Seeing Hope in a Wide-Angle Lens
I was asked the question twice in one week. The first time on a podcast interview that I did from my home. The second time on a podcast interview that I did on the road.
The first time, I stumbled on the answer. The second time I knew exactly what I wanted to say.
“So, where are you seeing signs of hope in the Church today?”
It is a really fair question. I wrote a book about how leaders can be formed into people who can, in Dr. King’s memorable phrase, “hew stones of hope out of a mountain of despair.” Hewing hope is the work of leaders when their people are facing mountainous obstacles. But so often the discussion of hope turns to empty phrases, impotent platitudes and wishful thinking. So, I like to choose my words carefully.
And the first time I was asked the question, a conversation I had had with a discouraged pastor made it hard for me to answer.
“I have begun to wonder,” one megachurch pastor of an 8000-member church told me, “If I have wasted my life. After 30 years of ministry, when I read my church members Facebook posts, I begin to feel like my ministry has made no difference whatsoever. My own church members were so vile, mean, and vindicative –to each other—that it made me think hard about what I have done with my life.”
The discouragement on that pastor’s face made my own hope waver a bit. But the second time I was asked-- in the middle of a little room in the middle of a little country town after speaking to a small group of leaders who had gathered from around the country, I was able to see with more hopeful eyes. I was in the middle of a week that would take me across the country and to three vastly different contexts. With each stop and each conversation, my perspective changed and my own sense of hopefulness was quickened. I began to think back about a year of so many similar meetings.
Seeing now first-hand the church that I had most often encountered through a few faces on a zoom screen gave me a different perspective. The challenges were not any less hard, but just seeing all of them in my visits in a kind of “wide angle”, clarified my perspective.
“What signs of hope do you see?” the second interviewer asked.
And I knew exactly what I wanted to say.
The clearest sign of hope that I see is the breadth of the church, the wideness of the church, the extension of the presence of God in one community that is as different as the next, but within which there are groups of leaders who eager to lead, to serve, to change and to humbly open themselves to what they need to learn in order to lead the church faithfully in this rapidly changing and disruptive world.
What gives me hope is that I am warmly invited into places, with church leaders from vastly different denominational, theological, social, political, cultural, and ethnic contexts than my own.
In those spaces, whether it be…
an online gathering with leaders around the world,
my doctoral students gathered for a meal in my backyard,
a convention center in Texas,
a classroom in rural Virginia,
a cathedral in Manhattan,
a monastic community in the Appalachians,
or in a basement of a rented office building with a group of church planters in the most diverse
zip code in the country,
I meet with leaders who know the deep challenges of the world that is changing and are meeting those moments with humor, humility…and hope.
I have been asked to work with leaders from three different Baptist denominations, three different types of Presbyterians, two different types Lutherans, and (sadly!) soon-to-be two different types of Methodists. I have spoken leaders from the Salvation Army and Seventh-Day Adventists; charismatic pastors and Catholic church planters; a proudly progressive church in the Midwest and a passionately conservative church in Texas.
I speak to churches who often don’t speak to each other, but who gladly—and warmly—gather to become better leaders.
I am working with leaders who are confronting deep resistance in their congregations as they confront their histories of discrimination and racial segregation, and others who are doggedly determined to bring genuine congregational health into churches that had been traumatized by dysfunctional leaders in the past. I am working with a mainline church bringing warmth and welcome to an often cold and bureaucratic elite community, and an urban Bible church that was willing to lose 1500 members because they were more committed to be a multi-ethnic church that looked like their neighbors than they were to being classified as “mega”.
I have been asked to work with leaders who are at the top of their denominational org charts, and presidents of seminaries and colleges, but I joyfully spend most of my time with pastors of small, beautiful, warm congregations who just want to preserve a vibrant witness of faith for the town they love and to pass on to their children and grandchildren.
What all of these diverse places have in common are humble leaders eager to honestly face the brutal facts of the reality we are facing in a changing world, and are committing themselves to learning as they go, letting go of the past and seeking the God whose Spirit is continually doing a new thing to bring streams of life from barren places. And most often they are learning from each other.
Diversity. Honesty. Humility. Openness. Collaboration.
This is what we do at AE Sloan Leadership. We learn alongside leaders who are trying to faithfully navigate a changing world. We consult. We coach. We speak and write and invite leaders to learn together in a way that will help them and their congregations and communities thrive.
And when we do so, we all become more hopeful.
When I look at the church through a wider lens, I see the signs of the Spirit. I see the signs of hope. Would you like to see them too?
Tod Bolsinger
Principal, AE Sloan Leadership
PS. If you’d like to learn more about any of our opportunities to learn to lead change (including joining one of the diverse cohorts of leaders coming together, both regionally and online) click here.
