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By Jenny Cannon

“Adaptive leadership is not about managing change; it is about managing loss.” It wasn’t even lunchtime on the first full day of our quadrennial training event in Nashville when our keynote speaker from the Alban Institute shared these words, and then continued on with her presentation. I looked around at a room full of bishops, district superintendents, conference staff people, pastors and lay leaders from all over the connection and wondered if we realized what had just been said. There we were, people whose livelihoods were as invested in The United Methodist Church as you can get, and we were being trained on how to adapt and lead through the loss of the church as we know it. 

The conversation wasn’t only about loss, of course. Our speaker, Susan Beaumont, quickly moved to the point that adaptive leadership is also about preserving the historical DNA of an organization. You exercise adaptive leadership only when you care enough about something to both preserve and adapt. But adaptations also “significantly displace, reregulate and rearrange some old DNA¹” and that sounded a little like a page out of “Brave New World.” Displace, reregulate and rearrange DNA?

As someone who is pretty early into my career as a pastor, I admit my palms get a little sweaty at the notion of genetic upheaval in our denomination. I love The United Methodist Church. It’s always been my spiritual home and both my husband and I have found our vocational identity here. 

But throughout our time of learning while in Nashville, through hard questions, great conversations and the stories of fellow sweaty-palmers who are wrestling and praying and dreaming for our denomination, I began to remember that the church exists for the sake of sharing the good news of Jesus Christ, not the other way around. 

Which means that as we move into the future, even we devoted United Methodists have to be willing to put both our DNA and our beloved traditions on the table – from large denominational structures all the way to “but the choir has always robed for worship” conversations in our local churches. Adaptive leadership challenges us to shift our mindset away from “problem solving” the decline in church membership to asking questions about 

and mission. And last time I checked, our core values as a church didn’t have as much to do with pension plans or choir robes as with transformed lives and changed hearts. the core values and priorities that give us our identity 

It was a privilege to begin to ask these questions with a group from the BWC and I pray that our learnings will spill over into more conversation and questions in our conference and our churches. The title for our training event was called “Even the Wind & The Waves” referring to the Gospel story of Jesus calming the seas in the midst of a storm. I only recently realized that “Brave New World” takes its title from a line in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” but what an apt connection between the idea of preserving DNA and weathering the tempests of our time. Our beloved church will not come through these next few years the same as it has always been. But thanks be to God for that. It’s a brave new world indeed. 

Rev. Jenny Cannon is pastor of Ashton UMC and a leader of the conference Young Adult Council.

For more information, read “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World.” by Ronald Heifitz, Alexander Brashhow, & Marty Linksy, 2009. Boston: Harvard Business Press.