I don’t know about you, but I hold my breath each day as I open my news app: what fresh changes has our government announced? What else has shifted in global politics while I slept? Change is hard, regardless of whether we see it as positive or negative! So far this year I’ve navigated a change in my role at work, and my daughter’s wedding. Dear friends have been blindsided by news that’s changed the landscape of their daily lives in significant ways. Change is definitely hard – but transition – the adjustments we must make because of the change – can be infinitely more challenging. I’m still figuring out the demands of my new role, and the implications of being someone’s mother-in-law! My friends are learning moment by moment how to navigate this stark new terrain they find themselves in. Yes – transitions are hard – they’re common to all of us – but their demands are not unsurmountable.
Our life stages are bookmarked by the transitions we go through - shifts which challenge our vocation and calling, our competency, and our self-identity.
The communities we serve as leaders are made up of people facing their own life transitions. On a macro level, we are of course a people living in the Great Transition – that here-but-not-yet-fully tension of a Kingdom progressively advancing. Add to that - both Church and society are in the midst of a major transition – sociologists and theologians[1] agree we’re in the middle of an epochal shift in how people see themselves and the world: tried and tested ways of doing things no longer work, accepted boundary markers are moving, and many ask, ‘who are we and where are we going?’ and crucially, ‘how should we live and lead in this changing landscape?’ ‘What does it mean to be faithful and fruitful in these times?’
My own life experience tells me that we don’t always choose change – it often overtakes us, or we’re thrust into it by circumstances beyond our control.
Regardless of whether we chose the change, or it overtook us, the difference between change and transition is that transition is the psychological adjustment we must make to the change that has happened.
Big changes demand deep and often painful paradigm shifts and can be profoundly disorientating – old ways of thinking, seeing, and acting no longer serve us well but we can’t necessarily see an alternative.
The truth is, how we navigate the transition determines how well we step into the new season before us. In fact, how we navigate the transition will determine how well and how long the change actually ‘holds’.
There’s so much going on in a transition. Remember Moses and that great transition - the Exodus story? This is the story of a people who transitioned out of slavery into nationhood. The people of Israel spent 40 years in the desert before finally entering the promised land – they’d physically left Egypt – that was the change. But they needed the transition of the desert years to get Egypt and a slavery mindset out of their system. As their reluctant leader, Moses faced all the challenges, temptations and invitations that go with transition – he needed to unlearn some stuff before he could embrace the new. In Moses we see the good, the bad, and the ugly of leading through transition.
According to William Bridges,[2] transition involves three stages – each with their own challenges and opportunities: endings, the neutral zone, and finally, new beginnings. First, transitions are painful because they always involve loss of some kind. It might be the loss of place, of relationship, or perhaps the loss of a dream. Second, transitions always involve a time where what’s gone is clearer than what is yet to be. As Moses found, it can be a time of confusion, conflict, and disorientation. A time when relationships are tested, faith is stretched, and uncomfortable truths confronted. A place where we must give ourselves to the deep work of tempering that produces the faith and resilience needed to step into a new season.
Old Testament scholar-pastor Walter Brueggemann echoes the language of transition when he notes that the Psalms typically map a shift from the settledness of orientation to the restlessness of disorientation – where the Psalmist waits on the Lord, before experiencing the re-orientation to a new reality. The thing is most of us rush from the ending to a new beginning without embracing either the pain or the invitations of the neutral zone!
I once read a book about extreme survival stories: people caught in avalanches, plane crashes, or lost in remote mountains. The book was written by a research psychologist who’s an ex-marine and the title sums it up: ‘deep survival: who lives, who dies, and why’. He concludes that the key to survival when the unexpected happens is not necessarily experience, or physical stamina (in fact these things often proved unhelpful) but simply to ‘be here now’. Those who didn’t make it were those who insisted on seeing only what they expected to see – and failed to see where they actually were. Others allowed themselves to be distracted by a sense of their own abilities and pushed themselves over their limits – they didn’t survive either. When the chips were down, they failed to grasp who they really were, where they really were, who they were with, and what was actually needed. In other words, they reacted to the change in conditions without making the needed adjustments to come out well on the other side.
Of course, most changes we face are not life and death, but the need to resist either a quick fix or simply waiting for the next thing still holds true: our individual and corporate growth and transformation ultimately depend on being attentive in the transitions. So, as leaders we need to locate ourselves in the reality of the here and now and engage with the learning and unlearning needed so we can be ready to move when the time comes. We need to be attentive to ending well and bookmark any lessons learned, while doing what we need to be fully present and open to future developments.
We at the Centre for Church Leadership are excited to offer a six-hour interactive course in how to navigate transitions in life and ministry.
Our hope is that - wherever you find yourself in life and ministry - this course will bring greater clarity and understanding of transitions, along with both the tools and the courage to navigate them well in the place of your calling. To be notified when the course releases, register here.
Finally, if you or a leader you know is going through a transition, do consider signing up with one of our experienced coaches. CfCL coaches are trained to accompany leaders in the heat of the tempering that goes with any transition. Find out more about coaching here.
Bridges, William, and Susan Bridges. Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes. New York, NY: Hachette Books, 2019.
