Pastors are well trained. We have lots of education and experience, and have had generations of success. Indeed, most of our congregations are filled with people who were blessed by what once worked. And so, when confronted with change, we default back to those things. That’s why we need to talk about canoeing.

When COVID confronted us with uncharted territory, we pivoted online and brought our Sunday-centric practises that we used onsite. So, we started with a welcome, a prayer, a 25-minute song service, announcements, offering time, a children’s portion, a 30-minute message, and a closing prayer. Over the next three months we tweaked away at our Sunday services as online attendance dwindled. We clearly needed to talk about canoeing. 

Increasingly we find ourselves in the twilight zone of a multi-faith, secular, and materialistic society in which committed Christians are on the margins. The socially confusing times we live in are at least partly due to an overlap between Christendom and post-Christendom realities. And canoeing is the most important topic of conversation.

3 Reasons Pastors Need A Conversation About Canoeing 

1. The world in front of you is nothing like the world behind you.  

Pastor Tod Bolsinger started the conversation in 2015 with, Canoeing The Mountains.  He observes, “Pastors are experienced river rafters who must learn to be mountaineers. And all of us face ‘the most terrible mountain we have ever beheld.’”

“In times of change,” agrees philosopher, Eric Hoffer, “learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

2. In uncharted territory, adaptation is everything.  

Adaptive challenges go beyond the technical solutions of resident experts or best practices, or even a congregation’s current knowledge. They arise when the world around us has changed but we continue to live on the successes of the past.   

They are challenges that cannot be solved through compromise or win-win scenarios, or by adding another ministry or staff person to the team.

Adaptive challenges demand that leaders make hard choices about what to preserve and what to let go. They are challenges that require people to learn and to change, and require a leader to experience and navigate profound loss. We’ll talk about this.

3. Everybody will be changed - especially the leader.

A central conviction of Canoeing The Mountains is that God is taking the church into uncharted territory to change us. 

WARNING: The people in our churches who have led the longest and have informal influence/power need to surrender power and lose. We’ll talk about that.

When better to learn adaptive leadership than during a pandemic, in a virtual cross-country conversation with pastors who passionately want to see the Church thrive in her mission.

FULL DISCLOSURE: Bob Jones and Hailey Armoogan are not canoeists. They are adaptive leaders. Canoeing the Mountains is not a lecture; it is a conversation because we are adventuring together.

During the first session on Wednesday August 12th, we’ll use these questions to begin traversing our mountains:

What is the leadership adventure before your community, church, organization or company?  

What learning will it require of you?  

What losses do you anticipate that you should be prepared to face? 

What has shaped your leadership practice?

What aspects of your leadership behavior do you need to consider changing in order to lead in uncharted territory? 

The Canoeing the Mountains leadership conversation is free to join. Reading the book is highly recommended but if you haven’t, you’re still invited into the conversation.

Please register online here.

NOTE: Lewis and Clark’s expedition in 1804 to find a Northwest Passage linking America, East to West, is an apt metaphor to characterize the challenge churches face in 2020. Members of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery designed their own keelboats and learned to make canoes in the wild. They excelled at what they did. Then, the river they travelled led them to the Rocky Mountains. Imagine what it’s like to be told, “Drop the canoe.”  Men whose hands had been shaped by the use of oars were told to ride horses. 

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