Peter Steinke, congregational systems consultant and ordained Lutheran (ELCA) pastor, and musician Ana Hernandez presented the second set of workshops on family systems, Growing in Faith Together, on June 20-21, 2014, at Trinity Lutheran Church, Fort Worth.
About 40 people gathered on Friday evening and Saturday to learn about the seven indicators for healthy churches that are mission-focused; the six signs of healthy churches based on Acts of the Apostles, the seven habits of health-promoting church leaders, and the adaptive challenges for congregations.
Hernandez opened and closed the sessions with music, creating community and trust with song.
Steinke said, “Adaptive leadership involves motivating people to tackle tough challenges. Adaptive leadership is drawn from evolutionary biology. A successful adaptation preserves what is essential for the organism’s continued survival, removes or rearranges what no longer serves the organism’s current needs, and creates new arrangements giving the organism ways to flourish in challenging environments.”
He said such leadership incorporates several capacities, including leading change, building on the past rather than eliminating it, experimenting, respecting diversity, dealing, with discomfort, moving folks out of their comfort zones, and challenging people.
Some adaptive challenges for congregations include reverse thinking – if fewer people are coming to the church, the church will have to go to the neighborhood; setting an example that engagement with the world will be expected and rewarded; helping lay people to see their involvement with the world as “church work,” and lay training to free up laity to use their gifts for ministry.
Steike said four essential questions are:
- How do people in the neighborhood know we care about it?
- Have we emphasized that we make a difference in other people’s lives?
- Does the congregatioin have a letter of reference from the poor?
- How well do we balance St. Paul’s words to do good to all, especially to the household of faith?
He urged congregations to build a mission environment, to resist seeing the secular and spiritual worlds as opposites instead of a whole, and to be counter-cultural — “the Christian message is not what the world seeks but needs.”
Several times in the sessions he broke the room into groups and had them rate and discuss where they saw their congregations in these various lists. Groups then shared their conclusions with the whole room.
See more photos in our diocesan Flickr album. Judy Cariker of Trinity Episcopal Church invites you to view photos in Trinity’s Flickr album.