By Kennetha J. Bigham-Tsai and Eric Martin
Jesus is inviting us as leaders to face squarely this woundedness—to face the grief, anger and pain of our own woundedness, and to face loss. Heifetz has noted, “What people resist is not change per se, but loss” (1). Indeed, many change efforts fail because the leaders trying to bring about change fail to recognize and deal with loss. It is the same with the church. We cannot hold space for divinely inspired resurrection unless we hold space in the church and within ourselves for divinely inspired loss.
A young man, he must have been in his twenties, sat at a table and talked about what it would mean for him if the church split and he had to choose. He said it was not an option for him to leave. His family had been a part of The United Methodist Church for generations. The church was his family. To leave meant the loss of identity and of a history, as well as the loss of loyalty to the generations that preceded him. It meant the loss of that great cloud of witnesses who had nurtured him in the faith. It meant the loss of relationships that were beyond ideologies—those kinds of relationships that were just about “I love you, no matter what!” This young man wanted a more inclusive church too. But he was isolated and facing profound loss with little support. What was he to do?
Indeed, as God is doing something new, we are being called to help each other face the losses inherent in this moment: loss of identity, autonomy, influence and power; loss of our own sense of competence and control; loss of the ability to protect resources, property and staff. We are being called to help each other face the loss of relevance as many of our churches continue to stagnate and decline.
Leading in the face of such loss means helping each other identify what is core, what is legacy and of the past, as well as what is emerging. It means helping each other hold onto the continuity of tradition without becoming trapped by it. It means helping each other understand what is core about our identity that will continue to define us. It means being willing to take the casualties of loss so that God can bring about something new and being willing to shepherd one another through the grief and pain that comes with those casualties. Ultimately, it means facing death and walking with each other through the valley of the shadow of death.
This is the rub: We want to avoid death. Yet, death is a historical as well as corporeal reality. Every empire that was here is gone. Every church recorded in the Bible, from Ephesus to the church at Corinth, is today no more than the stone finds of an archaeological dig. Every institution, every country, passes and changes.
We long to fill the tragic gap between death and life. We want to know “Why does everything end?” Facing death is the hard work of resurrection leadership. Are we willing to face death ourselves and to help others face death? It may indeed be the essence of what it means to be a disciple who knows the resurrected Christ.
The righteousness that I have comes from knowing Christ, the power of his resurrection, and the participation in his sufferings. It includes being conformed to his death so that I may perhaps reach the goal of the resurrection of the dead. (Philippians 3: 10-1, CEB)
To die, as Christ was willing to die, is to go the whole distance, to hit the bottom, go to the full depth, beyond where you can understand or control. It can feel like hell. But we’ve been through hell before—anytime when we have hit bottom—when our own lives have fallen apart. And, we have found grace at the depths of our suffering. We have found grace in the death of ourselves, especially when others have been willing to journey with us. When that has happened, we have moved to a deeper level together, found a deeper source which we call God—Christ incarnate, and his body, the church. From that source we have drawn life.
Kennetha J. Bigham-Tsai is the Chief Connectional Ministries Officer of the Connectional Table.
Eric Martin specializes in leadership development and systems change with Adaptive Change Advisors. His recent work draws on the Adaptive Leadership framework developed by Harvard faculty Drs. Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky.
This article was first published on emergingmethodist.com. This version has been updated.