Impact vs. Equilibrium

nest_thermostat_and_airwave“These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also…” (Acts 17:6)

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Equilibrium (def.): A condition…resulting in a stable, balanced, unchanging system.

It’s common for church leaders to work very hard to maintain constant equilibrium in their congregations. They try not to upset anyone, especially anyone with a voice or a checkbook that might negatively affect the status quo if they’re not happy. And sometimes to make one group (or person) with more power happy, pastors need to do something that makes the group (or person) with less power unhappy— and next time they might switch sides to keep the equilibrium.

In this scenario it might seem everyone is happy, but they aren’t. The culture created by a church that worships equilibrium will generate what John P. Kotter in his book A Sense of Urgency calls a “false sense of urgency” that keeps everyone in the body busy with unproductive and anxious activity.

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Impact (def.): The striking of one body against another; the force or impetus transmitted by a collision; the effect or impression of one thing on another.

Pastors who want to lead a church that has impact have to be prepared to shepherd a community that is consistently stretching. Though it’s not always comfortable to live this way, operating as an impacting church will lovingly challenge the status quo in lives and in ministries for the purpose of positive and radical Kingdom transformation.

Oddly, many of those who really say they want to create an atmosphere for making an impact are the ones working hard behind the scenes at maintaining a culture of constant equilibrium. I say oddly because these are two opposite concepts: Impact will always disturb equilibrium in some way.

We can’t have a stable, balanced and unchanging church at the same time that collisions and impressions are happening to it. Collision will always upset balance.

In other words, when I am truly impacted, it always changes me and messes up something about my status quo.

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I’m not suggesting that we should constantly seek to upset equilibrium with impact. In fact, I think it is vital to wisely discern the right time and place to encourage stability and balance. Often, when one part of the church or our life is experiencing impact, another part desperately needs stability. Too much impact all at once can make us (or our church) feel like a car-crash!

One of the best things I have read on this subject came from a book by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky called Leadership on the Line. These authors write that leaders are like thermostats, sometimes turning up the heat and sometimes turning it down. As a younger leader, I usually leaned towards heating situations up to influence change. But in the last decade, I’ve learned the great value of strategic stability as I engage in turning the world upside down for Christ! More importantly, I’ve accepted that God is the One who makes an impact through me and that I must function in discernment to match the leadership temperature that I’m setting with the temperature the Holy Spirit has determined to select.

Good leadership requires organizational awareness; we have to know what’s needed, and when it’s needed. Here’s a leadership nugget from Heifetz and Linsky’s book (page 108):

“To stimulate deep change within an organization, you have to control the temperature. There are really two tasks here. The first is to raise the heat enough that people sit up, pay attention, and deal with the real threats and challenges facing them. Without some distress, there is no incentive for them to change anything. The second is to lower the temperature when necessary to reduce a counterproductive level of tension. Any community can take only so much pressure before it becomes either immobilized or spins out of control. The heat must stay within a tolerable range—not so high that people demand it be turned off completely, and not so low that they are lulled into inaction.”