Adaptive Ecclesiology

“For the Lord will comfort Zion; 
he will comfort all her waste places
and will make her wilderness like Eden,
her desert like the garden of the Lord; 
joy and gladness will be found in her, 
thanksgiving and the voice of song.”
Isaiah 51:3

“I feel like I have been prepared for a world that no longer exists!” does that sound familiar to anyone?

At one level, no education or training process could have prepared us for the world today. A global pandemic was not on most of our radars. No matter how church leaders reacted, it was a lose-lose situation. “Why aren’t we having Sunday morning worship? Other churches in the community are.” “Why are we jeopardizing people’s lives to gather when we can worship online?” “This virus is a hoax.” “This virus claimed the life of my family member.” “We didn’t return soon enough.” “We returned too soon.” Does this ring a bell?

We are still living in the aftermath of the decisions we made during the pandemic. Yet, long before the emergence of a global virus there was a spiritual sickness destroying more lives than any plague in human history… the virus of loneliness spreading beneath the surface of a hyperconnected world. A plague for which there is no vaccination, no magical pill, no surgical intervention. A virus that communal life in Jesus can heal.

“Social distancing,” “I can’t breathe,” “PPE,” “quarantine,” “contactless,” “post-truth,” “no justice, no peace,” “the rise and fall of Mars Hill,” “insurrection,” and “from the river to the sea.” These phrases were not on the life syllabus.  

Yet perhaps what has become most clear is the decline of the church’s long-standing position in the center of life and society. We have seen the proliferation of “nones and dones”—nones, those with no religious affiliation; dones, those who have had traumatic encounters with Christians, and say, “I’m done.” Or they simply have grown tired of serving in the church, and just find no compelling reason to stay involved. The new protest-ant movement is pushing against institutional forms of the church. Describing oneself as open to Jesus, while closed to the congregations who claim him, summarizes the “spiritual but not religious” transformation taking place.

We have seen hundreds of churches closing every year. Pastors quitting the ministry in droves. Burnout. Compassion fatigue. Moral failures.

Indeed, our education and training has not prepared us for this world. How could it? For the clergy among us, we at least assumed we would be sent and called to churches where there would be people present. Yet that’s often not the case. The pews are empty. The reserves are running low.

Yes, there are exceptions. Lifeway Research on North American churches has indicated sixty-five percent of churches were either declining or plateaued (fifty-six percent were in absolute decline, and nine percent plateaued), thirty-five percent of churches were experiencing growth in worship attendance primarily through transfer growth,[1] attracting already-Christians playing church musical chairs or relocating. But only about six percent of churches were growing by reaching new Christians.[2] In 2023, those trends continued with roughly eighty-four percent of American churches plateaued or declining.[3] We are all missionaries now. And every Jesus follower must embrace their place in the “priesthood of all believers.”

In our book Gardens in the Desert: How the Adaptive Church Can Lead a Whole New Life, Bishop Ken Carter and I suggest that this is not a technical problem with a technical solution; this is an adaptive challenge. We find ourselves in a wicked environment. We mean “wicked” not in the sense of being evil or morally wrong, but rather to describe a complex environment where “success” as we once conceived it is not the most likely outcome.

Theological schools and lay academies prepare us for “kind learning environments.” In kind learning environments, patterns repeat consistently, and feedback is accurate and rapidly obtainable. If pastors preach well, do home visits, organize the life of the church, run effective meetings, and train the laity, good things will happen. If lay leaders serve on committees, tithe faithfully, fill positions on the hospitality team, do outreach, and help with visitation, our church will be vital. If we hire the best worship leader or youth minister, families will show up. Do the things we were trained to do, and the assumption is the church will grow.

In “wicked learning environments,” there may not be repetitive patterns; the rules of the game are unclear; the status quo changes; and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.^[4] We do what we were trained to do. We work lots of hours. We make the right hires. And still . . . decline, erosion, empty pews, and empty offering plates.

Indeed, wicked learning environments call for adaptive leadership.

It’s as if the church we’ve known was formed in a jungle, but now we find ourselves in a desert. A jungle is a living system, with a multitude of life forms. A desert is also a living system with its own unique life forms and context—but those creatures adapted to living in the jungle will find life challenging and even deadly among the dunes. We now find ourselves in an entirely new ecosystem and we must learn a new way of being for desert life. We will learn to get water from a cactus, and some of us will get splinters in our hands. We will learn to locate the oases of the Spirit. We will plant new kinds of gardens together. The church planted in jungle conditions is now learning how to live in a desert.

Because we believe in a God who turns deserts into gardens (Isaiah 51:3).

Perhaps it’s time for the church to awaken the adaptive ecclesiology embedded in the Scriptures and expressed in diverse ways across church history. 

Adaptive refers to a trait that improves an organism’s fitness for survival and flourishing.

Ecclesiology refers simply to the study of the church, but this can focus on the origins of Christianity, its relationship to Jesus, its role in salvation, its polity, its discipline, its eschatology, its structure, its nature, and its leadership.

In describing adaptive leadership as the “practice of mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges and thrive” Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky draw from evolutionary biology. They propose that successful adaptation has three characteristics:

1. it preserves the DNA essential for the species’ continued survival,

2. it discards (reregulates or rearranges) the DNA that no longer serves the species’ current needs, and

3. it creates DNA arrangements that give the species the ability to flourish in new ways and in more challenging environments.^[5]

Heifetz and Linsky introduced the adaptive leadership model at Harvard University. As business leaders, it was born from their realization that the single-figure, top-down leadership model is ineffective and impractical. Adaptive leadership became an emerging model that embraced disruption, change, experimentation, and innovation. In their work, they sought to help companies handle challenges and adapt to evolving environments.

In Gardens in the Desert, we ground key ideas from adaptive leadership theory in scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Then we suggest practical ways we can apply these inspired ideas to our massively changed landscape in a pandemic age. We do this with active practitioners in local ministry contexts in mind, lay and clergy.

Adaptive Ecclesiology is an approach that emphasizes flexibility, contextual responsiveness, and the ability to adapt to changing cultural and social contexts. It recognizes that the church exists in a dynamic world where societal norms, beliefs, and practices are always evolving. It seeks to understand how the church can effectively engage with contemporary challenges while remaining faithful to its core mission.

We see Fresh Expressions as a form and movement of adaptive ecclesiology, which includes key features like contextual awareness, innovation and experimentation, diagnosis as reading the signs of the times, anchoring radical change in deep values, preserving what is of God: the essential DNA, letting go of what is not of God: the non-essential (and even harmful) DNA, creating new arrangements of the DNA, small experiments and micro adaptations, calibrating our interventions, listening and learning, and shared leadership.

In the next series of posts, I’ll give an inside look at some of the key ideas in the book and explore how people designed for the jungle can learn to flourish in the desert. Thanks for being a part of my Substack community. Stay tuned!

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[1] Rainer, Thom “5 Realities of Evangelism in North American Churches” https://research.lifeway.com/2017/10/04/5-realities-of-churches-in-north-america/

[2] Earls, Aaron “How Many US Churches Are Actually Growing?” https://research.lifeway.com/2019/03/06/how-many-us-churches-are-actually-growing/

[3] Davis, Emma “30 Church Statistics You Need to Know for 2024” https://reachrightstudios.com/church-statistics-2024/

[4] Robin Hogarth, Tomás Lejarraga, and Emre Soyer, “The Two Settings of Kind and Wicked Learning Environments,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 24, no. 5 (2015): 379.

[5] Ronald A. Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Martin Linsky. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009), 14.