Christian Leadership in Transition

Transitions reveal what we collectively believe about the church. My role of late has involved navigating transitions on many fronts, which has led me to reflect on what Christian Leadership in Transition is.

When life is stable, leadership can feel like maintaining and growing a stable rhythm: worship planned, rosters filled, budgets tracked, pastoral needs met, property maintained, ministry and mission resourced. Often this has been affirmed as an expression of discipleship, offering gifts in service. But in seasons of structural change, cultural volatility, and declining participation, leadership becomes a more theological craft in a strange environment. Not simply what do we do next? but who are we, and whose are we, as we walk into God’s future?

This is why Christian leadership in transition is rarely about starting from scratch (de-colonisation theology has caused us to value the old into the new, not to hold the new as a vacant space). It is about honouring what is past and passing as a gift while midwifing a new creation, which shares the “DNA” of the past expression, as the next movement in God’s creation.

The death and resurrection of Christ reflect something of the mystery of the Gospel here in Christ’s resurrected body, which we share in. In our contexts, inherited stories, prayers, patterns, buildings, communities, and ways of worship, witness, and service are shaped by those who came before are held and valued in the memory of God.

The task is not to preserve everything unchanged, nor to reinvent everything as if history were a problem to solve, or there was no past. The task is to discern what the Spirit is doing with the whole people of God, building on accumulated wisdom while adapting faithfully to changed conditions.

The paradox of vitality: people matter—and systems matter

The most vibrant congregations and faith-based organisations often share a paradox. Their strength flows not only from the gifts of individual leaders, but from the cultures, practices, and systems those leaders foster—structures that can outlast them.

From a faith-based perspective, transition language: change can become an occasion to slow down, listen deeply to God, to one another, to the community, and discern next steps rather than reaching for quick fixes. Therefore, congregational and other councils of the church transition similarly frame change as more than a staffing or structural adjustment: transitions surface identity, trust, mission, vocation and capacity—often all at once.

In other words: transitions are not simply operational. They are spiritual, relational, and institutional—because the church is all three.

A Uniting Church frame: a pilgrim people, continually re-formed

In the Basis of Union, the Uniting Church understands itself as a pilgrim people—continually re-formed by Word and Spirit for faithful worship, witness, and service in changing contexts. If that is true, then education, formation, property and financial stewardship, mission and leadership development are not peripheral activities. They are integral to the church’s vocation: to discern, nurture, and authorise ministry for the sake of the Gospel and the life of the whole body.

This matters because transition tempts us toward two shadow options:

• An anxious preservationism that confuses faithfulness with maintaining yesterday’s forms.
• An anxious innovationism that confuses faithfulness with novelty, speed, or “whatever works” or “banking on the silver bullet that will solve everything”

The Uniting Church’s deeper posture is neither panic nor nostalgia: it is discernment in motion—a pilgrim people walking, listening, repenting, learning, and responding.

The cultural shift underneath the church’s transition

1) The decline of the “voluntary association” church

For much of the post-war era, congregations operated within a broader social ecosystem of voluntary associations: clubs, unions, sporting organisations, service groups—and churches. Membership carried a sense of civic responsibility and social belonging.

Over recent decades, that ecosystem has weakened. Robert Putnam’s work on “social capital” documented a broader decline in civic participation and the habits of communal life (in the US, but with resonances across comparable societies). Neoliberal Capitalism has highly valued the mobility of capital, including people and their skills, devaluing community and the ability of communities to form due to mobility demands.

In Australia, the demographic trajectory is also clear. The ABS reports a long decline in the proportion of Australians affiliating with Christianity over the past 50 years, alongside rising “No religion” and increasing religious diversity. The NCLS similarly documents long-run declines in weekly church attendance, with a particularly steep drop in the 1991–2001 decade and a slowing in the rate of decline, though the decline continued after 2001.

The point is not to catastrophise. It is to be discerning about the context we find ourselves in.

A number of cultural currents converge here:

• Affiliation with the church becomes a personal choice rather than an inherited social duty.
• Individualism intensifies, framing meaning-making as self-authored rather than received.
• Consumer logics shape how people relate to communities: sampling, comparing, reviewing, leaving.
• Institutional trust thins, shaped by scandal, polarisation, and suspicion of authority.

Christian Smith’s recent work argues that for many (in the US context), traditional religion has become culturally “obsolete”—less plausible, less trusted, less compelling within the “deep culture” that shapes everyday imagination. While Australia’s context is not identical, the pattern feels familiar: the social conditions that once supported default participation have changed; in some ways, we have known this a little longer.

This is a crucial leadership insight: we are not simply facing a staffing issue, a right-fitting resources issue, or a motivation issue. We are leading through an ecosystem of social and environmental change.

2) The temptation to become “attractive”

In the face of decline, many churches default to an “attractional” reflex: improved branding, better experiences, tighter programs, consolidating resources, sharper messaging. Our Synod affirmed that the Uniting Church to be a contemporary courageous and growing church (2021). This vision, direction and retooling of Synod is useful and helpful (Church Planting is one example of this as a

major support project of the Synod). But the caution we all need to be aware of is that “attraction” also quietly trains the church to organise around preferences rather than faith and Christian formation in discipleship, ministry, and mission.

When “church” becomes a product and “belonging” becomes a customer experience, leaders can end up exhausted and communities become fragile—because customers leave when their preferences shift, or the “show” or “product” cannot be sustained.

A Uniting Church instinct pushes in a different direction: the church is not a vendor of spiritual goods. It is a community called by God, gathered by Word and Sacrament, and sent in witness and service. The question is not only “what will draw people?” but what will form disciples? What will build resilient communities capable of worship, witness, and service even when numbers are smaller, resources are tighter, and cultural support is thinner?

The institutional shift within the Uniting Church

3) Act2 and the call to reorder our life in response to God

At a national level, Act2 has been a significant process of consultation and discernment, explicitly framed as reordering our life in response to God’s call. That framing matters: it refuses purely corporate logic and insists that structure is always theological—because it shapes how ministry is supported, how decisions are made, and how mission is pursued.

4) NSW & ACT: from 12 Presbyteries to 3

In the Synod of NSW & ACT, the move from 12 Presbyteries to 3 is not a minor administrative change. It reshapes oversight, support, resourcing, and the practical ecology of ministry and mission across the Synod.

This introduces real pressures and real opportunities:

• Clustering and collaboration for vitality becomes more possible—hopefully wise, often emotionally complex.
• New expectations around innovation, fresh expressions and planting can rise precisely when capacity is constrained.
• Innovation competes with grief: trying new things while honouring what has been faithful can feel like walking a tightrope, having a wider peer community helps us all discern the way together.
• Formation and leadership development need rebuilding in a new system— cannot enforce a heroic individual effort paradigm, but a “I” sharing in the body, ministry and mission of Christ together ethos.

Transitions are often misdiagnosed as “technical problems” (change the structure and it will work). In reality, they are adaptive and spiritual challenges: they require new learning, re-formed practices, and renewed identity.

The leadership challenge: holding tradition as gift, not a museum

5) Faithfulness is not nostalgia—and innovation is not faithlessness

Many leaders feel caught between two pressures:

• “We must try new things or we will die.”
• “We must preserve what we’ve always done or we will lose ourselves.”

But the church’s deepest tradition is not a set of frozen preferences. Tradition is the living transmission of the Gospel through tested practices—Scripture, prayer, sacraments, communal discernment, justice-seeking, reconciliation, pastoral care, and teaching.

The question is not whether we will have tradition, but which tradition will form us: the tradition of the church, or the tradition of consumer modernity, or the traditions of individual self-expression, or the tradition of ethnic cultural practices. How do we operate in an intercultural way, aware of all the traditions that intersect in our lives and communities, while being open to the call and movement of the Spirit?

The inner craft: leading beyond self-expression

6) Why self-expression leadership is harder to sustain now (except if you rally all the resources around you in subordination)

There is a leadership style that has become increasingly common in late modern culture: leadership as self-expression. Identity is achieved through authenticity, self-actualisation, and personal alignment; leadership becomes “my vision, my platform, my tribe.”

But in this cultural moment—of high personal offence, quick polarisation, and intense demands for alignment—self-expression leadership is becoming harder to sustain. The problem is not that leaders should have no personality, conviction, or creativity. The problem is when leadership loses the church as God’s gift and becomes primarily a vehicle for the leader’s meaning-making.

When leadership becomes mainly self-expression:

• disagreement feels like invalidation,
• conflict becomes intolerable,
• accountability becomes threatening,
• burnout becomes more likely.

By contrast, leadership grounded in gift and vocation can bear more weight. It can hold tensions longer. It can stay patient when change is slow. It can remain resilient even in a relatively comfortable society where many of us—broadly speaking—have enough basics, and yet still struggle to live with frustration, limits, and delay.

This is the inner craft of Christian leadership: to locate the self within the Body of Christ, and to lead as one baptised into a people—not as one curating an audience.

Trinitarian theology also helps us see that leadership is sharing in the life, movement, ministry and mission of our triune God.

What resilient leadership looks like in transition

Pulling these treads together, several postures emerge for Christian leadership in transition:

1. Slow, prayerful discernment (not panic-driven activism). Transition can become an occasion to slow down, listen deeply, and discern.

2. Building systems that outlast personalities. Healthy communities develop transferable practices: shared leadership, transparent decisions, training pathways, and rhythms of review and learning.

3. Formation before strategy. Strategy matters, but strategies collapse without discipleship depth—prayer, Scripture, worship, generosity, courage, compassion, justice and nurturing Christian community.

4. Truth-telling with tenderness. Decline and change involve grief. Leaders who name reality without cynicism or judgment, but with grace, make room for hope without denial.

5. Shared ministry (the whole people of God). If the voluntary association model is fading, we cannot simply recruit harder, sell assets to fund this recruitment. We must cultivate callings, charisms, and shared responsibility in covenantal communities.

6. Reframe some Traditions as a living resource. The practices that sustained worship, witness, and service are not obstacles to mission; they are often the wells that make mission possible.

7. Tirelessly invitational to a Way in and with Christ. Foster a community facing Come and see, explore, and experience Christian community while partnering in wider mission for the common good, with an eye to each generation and to people's mobility and cultural diversity.

Questions to ponder (and keep open)

• What are we grieving in this transition—and what are we refusing to grieve?
• Where have we confused vitality with preference, performance, or consumer satisfaction?
• What practices would still sustain discipleship if our numbers halved again?
• What systems are we building that could outlast us—and what still depends on heroic individuals?
• How are we receiving the church as a gift of God rather than an arena for self-expression?
• What would “faithfulness” look like here if growth were slow, uneven, or even hidden to the gathered community in worship, but active beyond?
• In Act2’s call to reorder our life in response to God, what might we need to release—so we can receive anew?
• In the move to three Presbyteries, what must be protected and what must be reimagined so that oversight genuinely supports mission?
• In our Congregations, exploring hubs and merging of governance like Church Council responsibilities, how do we treasure the gift of God in each other, work as colleagues and partners in ministry and mission, not as competitors or defend identity against those “not like us”?

If you are able, please join me in this closing prayer, we are all, in different ways, in Christian Leadership in transition together.

Gracious God, pilgrim God of the Church on the way, we thank you that you gather us by your Word and Spirit—calling us into worship, shaping us for witness, and sending us in service. In this season of change, steady our hearts: where we are anxious, give peace; where we are weary, give strength; where we are grieving, give comfort; where we are uncertain, give trust in your leading.

Save us from panic and from nostalgia. Give us humility to learn from those who have gone before, courage to release what no longer serves your mission, and wisdom to build practices that endure. Form us as your people—one body in Christ—so that ministers and lay leaders alike may lead with integrity, patience, and hope, keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the head of the Church.

Amen.

In our contexts, inherited stories, prayers, patterns, buildings, communities, and ways of worship, witness, and service are shaped by those who came before are held and valued in the memory of God.