The best way to introduce you to Tod Bolsinger’s new book is through a couple of quotations that wowed me:
A teachable learning mindset leads to a greater capacity for staying in a difficult position, taking on a particularly difficult task or standing up to resistance, because there is an inherent assurance that if all else fails this trial will—if nothing else—lead to further growth.
This sobering word, too:
A major difficulty in sustaining one’s mission is that others who start out with the same enthusiasm will come to lose their nerve. Mutiny and sabotage came not from enemies who opposed the initial idea, but rather from colleagues whose will was sapped by unexpected hardships along the way.
And this, which I shared with our church’s leadership and several other pastors I know:
One of the genuine crises of Christian leadership today is how inward focused it is. A movement founded on the salvation and transformation of the world often becomes consumed with helping a congregation, an organization, or educational institution survive, stay together, or deal with rampant anxiety (often all at the same time). It’s not enough to turn around a declining church, resolve conflict, restore a sense of community, regain a business’s market share, return an organization to sustainability, or even “save the company.” The question before any leader of an organization is “save the company for what?”
Bolsinger’s guiding metaphor is from blacksmithing: “To temper describes the process of heating, holding, hammering, cooling, and reheating that adds stress to raw iron until it becomes a glistening knife blade or chisel tip.” Others may find his drawing on the blacksmithing process more compelling than I did. I would have gladly taken Bolsinger’s wisdom straight up, sans analogy. (As in the quotes above.)
If you thought being sabatoged was unique to you? Par for the course, apparently. Bolsinger doesn’t deny the reality of church dysfunction; he seems to assume it. But then he equips the reader with how to lead resiliently in the face of adversity–even adversity coming from within. (“The call is coming from inside the house.”)
Bolsinger describes a “six-step process”:
1. Working: Leaders are formed in leading.
2. Heating; Strength is forged in self-reflection.
3. Holding: Vulnerable leadership requires relational security.
4. Hammering: Stress makes a leader.
5. Hewing: Resilience takes practice.
6. Tempering: Resilience comes through a rhythm of leading and not leading.
Tempered Resilience is available here (IVP) and here (Amazon/affiliate link).
Thanks to the good folks at IVP for the review copy, via NetGalley, sent without expectations of the content of my review.
