Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory (Westmont, IL: IVP Books, 2018), 19, 232. How might the death of Christendom in the West mean there are more and more brothers and sisters on the margins? How might the death lead to new life? Ancient records of canoes are found from the Pacific Northwest to the coast of Maine, in Minnesota and Mexico, in the Southeast and across the Caribbean. And if a native of those distant times might encounter a canoe of our day—whether birch bark or dugout or a modern marvel made of carbon fiber—its silhouette would be instantly recognizable. This is the story of that singular American artifact, so little changed over time: of canoes, old and new, the people who made them, and the labors and adventures they shared. With features of technology, industry, art, and survival, the canoe carries us deep into the natural and cultural history of North America. A number of pastors are ready to throw in the towel. Studies show that if given a chance to do something else, most pastors would jump at it. Reportedly, upwards of fifteen hundred pastors leave the ministry every month. This seems to me to be a critically important book for leadership teams and pastors. So often our approach when things are not working is simply to double down and try harder, which, as someone has pointed out, is a definition of insanity. The willingness to leave the canoes behind, and learn new skills, to get up on the balcony, and then try new interventions rooted in careful observation and interpretation and not reaction, and to stay relentlessly focused on mission separated Lewis and Clark from other explorers.

Drawing from his extensive experience as a pastor and consultant, Tod Bolsinger brings decades of expertise in guiding churches and organizations through uncharted territory. He offers a combination of illuminating insights and practical tools to help you reimagine what effective leadership looks like in our rapidly changing world. They arise when the world around us has changed but we continue to live on the successes of the past. They are challenges that cannot be solved through compromise or win-win scenarios, or by adding another ministry or staff person to the team. They demand that leaders make hard choices about what to preserve and to let go. They are challenges that require people to learn and to change, that require leaders to experience and navigate profound loss. [6] In this coming-of-middle-age memoir, Kim Heacox, writing in the tradition of Abbey, McPhee, and Thoreau, discovers an Alaska reborn from beneath a massive glacier, where flowers emerge from boulders, moose swim fjords, and bears cross crevasses with Homeric resolve. In such a place Heacox finds that people are reborn too, and their lives begin anew with incredible journeys, epiphanies, and successes. All in an America free of crass commercialism and overdevelopment. The hire company provides a waterproof barrel to store things you don’t want to get wet. If you fancy a wild swim (and you should) don’t forget your swimming trunks and a towel. If you expect one of your party is likely to splash about and get you wet, bring a change of clothes. Finally, if you are heading out for a full day or multi-day plan your food stops. There are many pubs along the way that provide food and drink, but most paddlers choose to bring a picnic and have a lazy meal on the riverbanks.What does pastoral leadership look like in a dramatically changing (and largely unknown) cultural context? This is the question that Tod Bolsinger set out to answer in his 2018 book Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory. Bolsinger is currently Fuller Seminary’s vice president for vocation and formation—and assistant professor of practical theology—and was a pastor for nearly thirty years in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Using an analogy from the famous eighteenth-century expedition of the vast Louisiana territory by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Bolsinger urges Christian leaders to get off the beaten path and set out on uncharted territory as the Church faces considerable new realities. Tod Bolsinger (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is the vice president for vocation and formation and assistant professor of practical theology at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the author of It Takes a Church to Raise a Christian and Show Time. A frequent speaker, consultant and blogger, he serves as an executive coach for corporate, nonprofit, educational and church organisations in transformational leadership. For seventeen years, he was the senior pastor of San Clemente Presbyterian Church in San Clemente, California, after serving for ten years at First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood.

Over the last ten years, I have had one church leader after another whisper to me the same frustrated confession: “Seminary didn’t train me for this. I don’t know if I can do it. I just don’t know . . .”No matter how much power and authority you perceive resides in your title or position, no matter how eloquently you articulate the call of God and the needs of the world, no matter how well you strategize, plan and pray, the actual behaviors of the congregation—the default functioning, the organizational DNA—dominate in times of stress and change.” What DNA can be discarded? What can we stop doing so we can free resources and energy for new forms of ministry that are connected to our essential DNA? Leadership is disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb . . . [This] is a skill that requires nuance: Disappoint people too much and they give up on you, stop following you and may even turn on you. Don't disappoint them enough and you'll never lead them anywhere." (123-124)

My review of the book is brief and purely anecdotal, rather than a diagnosis of a book from an objective standpoint. I start off my review by saying that because I was given this book to read as an assignment from work. As my church staff and I have been reading through the book, some of my time was spent mulling over the chapters, all another parts I spent through it. Bolsinger’s approach to leadership, I would argue, is timeless, and in many ways, very practical in the context of vocational ministry. So, in that regard, I really enjoyed the book. This is a guidebook for learning to lead in a world we weren’t prepared for. Our guides will be none other than the first American adventurers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Seminary didn't train me for this." "Our church is dying and I have no clue what to do." Over and over, Tod Bolsinger encountered these statements in his consulting work. Pastors are trained in teaching, liturgics, and pastoral care, and often, those tools just don't seem enough in our changing world. Bolsinger likens this to the moment Lewis and Clark climbed the Lemhi Pass, having canoed up the Missouri River, and instead of expecting to find a river on the other side of the mountain that would carry them to the Pacific, they found...mountains. The needed to exchange canoes for horses, and adapt to an "off the map" situation. In this book, Bolsinger considers the adaptive leadership of Lewis and Clark, and applies it to Christian leaders often tempted to try to "canoe the mountains," because they don't know any other way to lead. Often, they may be the greatest obstacle to transformative change in their churches or organizations. The choice they face is between adventure and organizational death. All of this is part of understanding the "uncharted territory" that calls for a new kind of leadership. Written in a clear and comprehensive manner by outdoor educator and whitewater veteran Molly Absolon, The Ultimate Guide to Whitewater Rafting and River Camping is a great tool for novices and an excellent resource for experienced rafters.

Our Headquarters is at Upavon in Wiltshire and we have many training centres around the UK (England, Scotland, Wales and N Ireland), Germany and Cyprus. Our servicemen and women also train independently of our training centres across the globe from the Arctic to the Himalayas.

Leading off the Map" is the focus of Part Three and critical to this is the adaptive capacity of the leader. Leaders must be able to look at systems rather than react to symptoms, to calmly face loss and the challenge of the unknown, leading a learning process expressed in asking questions rather than giving answers. Sometimes rather than doing something, it first means standing still...and then doing something through a process of observation, interpretation, and intervention. In the process, understanding the DNA of the church and not violating that is critical. Interventions should start out modesty and playfully--lots of experiments, and resistance can be expected. In facing resistance, leaders must be absolutely clear and convicted about the mission, which for Bolsinger, "trumps all" and ready to press into mission even when no one else is.Two illustrations: 1) We regularly use three words to talk about the people with whom we want to serve--character, chemistry and competency. Bolsinger uses the word capacity instead of competency. That subtle change is huge. It's the power of the right word. We use competency but that implies a set of skills. In our explanation we always say that we can teach what we want. Capacity captures that. 2) We're all familiar with Covey's "win-win" scenario. Bolsinger realistically and convincingly argues that win-win almost always causes us to maintain the status quo. If we are truly going to move people at a pace they can tolerate (paraphrase of his definition of leadership) then someone is going to lose something. In this changing world, we need to add a new set of leadership tools. And this applies equally well to Christians serving in leadership beyond the parish. The challenges of a changing world come even more rapidly in business, education and nonprofit leadership. And while this book’s primary audience is congregational leaders, I have added some material specifically for Christian leaders in other contexts.