Kathy Wiseman offered some provocative thoughts for church leaders in Thursday’s teleconference. Among the gems:
She talked about the “fear-based decision-making environment” we are all living in right now, and asked what does it take for someone to get factual, stay factual and make decisions. This is not easy because there are so many different interpretations of the facts now. And of course, anxiety is very high: “If you could look out at all the people sitting in the church and see that their brains are on fire.” I won’t forget this image of group anxiety.
She suggested that leaders do “whatever it takes to get yourself confident that you can take this on, whether that’s meditation, neurofeedback, exercise, spiritual beliefs, it’s first starting with you as the leader, managing what you’re reacting to so that as the leader you are seeing a way out of it. You don’t know the way out, but you believe there’s a way out, because that’s really the fact – there are ways out of these things, So it starts with the leader being very clear – I don’t know this turn, this turn, this turn, but we can do this.”
Kathy recommended leaders do research in a couple of arenas: first, “looking at the past financial history, when things went well and when things were impacted by the environment, how you got through them, who were the leaders, what kind of thinking got you through – gathering the facts about the multigenerational process when this happened before.” Second, to research what other churches are doing that is working. You are gathering information, gathering facts. “What you are trying to do is give people confidence, saying ‘This is one heck of a challenge, we can do it, we will do it, we are not going to run away from it, and we’re not going to do knee-jerk reactions.'”
The recording of the teleconference is available. E-mail me at Margaret@margaretmarcuson.com, and I’ll send you the link.