Small Mindset Shifts May Lead To your Greatest Season of Growth

I have been following the data trail of our national pandemic shut-down and re-open very closely. I am hearing a lot of leaders and volunteers that are declaring they feel STUCK!

Additionally, spiritual leaders are still feeling that ministry feels like it is in a holding pattern. I would argue something very different. This season that we all are experiencing is not a time to feel stuck! This is the wrong way to view this moment.

What’s the shift? It’s seeing this as a season of openness and possibility rather than gridlock and inability. It’s believing that you’re uniquely positioned to lead change in your ministry, precisely because the world has just changed.

I’ll admit that can sound like a bit of motivational hype. Perhaps, like me, you find yourself more skeptical of good news after two months on lockdown. Let me assure you this is not just wishful thinking. Research on organizational (and congregational) change reveals that leading change is indeed difficult. However, several leading scholars claim that the most difficult aspect of leading significant change in individuals or ministries is getting people out of their existing rut and opening their heart and mind to a new way of doing things.^[1]

If you’ve been around church for any length of time, you know getting people out of a mental or behavioral rut is not easy. Change experts would agree each of these ways of thinking or acting is frozen. Further, the experts would tell you that the first and most difficult step of bringing about change is what’s known as unfreezing.^[2] Unfreezing means getting a person or group of people to be open and consider a new way of thinking or acting. This concept of unfreezing is absolutely essential for any ministry leader who has wanted to lead some sort of change but so far has been unable to do so. The pandemic means that much of our deeply held thinking about the “right way” to do church or youth ministry are currently unfrozen. Viewing your leadership and ministry in the current season through this lens means the pandemic isn’t simply a barrier—it can in fact be an opportunity.^[3]

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^[1] This theme runs through the work of several influential scholars in organizational development and organizational psychology, including Kurt Lewin, Edgard Schein, and Karl Weick. For further reading, see Lewin and Schein’s articles in Warner Burke, Dale G. Lake, and Jill Waymire Paine, eds., Organization Change: A Comprehensive Reader (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009).

^[2] The term unfreezing comes from Kurt Lewin, “Quasi-Stationary Social Equilibria and the Problem of Permanent Change,” in Organizational Change: A Comprehensive Reader, eds. Burke et al. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009).

^[3] The genesis of this article came from writer Jake Mulder on behalf of the Fuller Youth Institute.