Begin Here

Most congregations and organizations don’t experience transition as a clean break between chapters. They experience it as a stretch of time where familiar patterns no longer hold, the next form of life hasn’t yet emerged, and everyone feels the pressure to move faster than clarity allows.

That stretch of time is not an interruption.

It is not a failure of leadership.

It is not something to endure on the way to something more important.

It is the work.

This newsletter is written for leaders tending communities through change—leaders who know that transition is not a problem to solve, but a condition to inhabit faithfully. It assumes that congregations and organizations are living systems, shaped by memory, relationship, power, hope, and loss, and that meaningful change rarely happens on demand.

Tending is active work. It requires attention and judgment. It means discerning what needs nourishment and what needs restraint, what must be protected and what must be released. It calls for patience with processes that cannot be forced, and courage to intervene when anxiety begins to do the leading instead.

One of the common temptations in times of transition is to confuse movement with progress. New leadership, new structures, new strategies can matter—but without careful attention, they can also become ways of avoiding the harder work of discernment. In living systems, lasting change begins not with speed, but with seeing clearly.

What is actually happening here?

What grief is present but unspoken?

What hopes are being pushed into the future because they feel too risky to name now?

When those questions are ignored, communities still respond. Anxiety looks for shortcuts. Urgency starts to masquerade as vision. Resistance hardens. None of this happens because people are unfaithful or difficult. It happens because the system is trying to take care of itself without enough containment.

This is where leadership matters.

Leadership in between the times is neither heroic nor passive. It is the steady work of attending to what is alive, naming patterns honestly, setting boundaries that protect the whole, and resisting the false choices that anxious systems so often present. It is less about producing answers and more about creating the conditions in which faithful answers can emerge.

Between settled chapters, it can be difficult to trust that this kind of work counts. It doesn’t always show up in metrics. It doesn’t resolve neatly. And it cannot be rushed without cost. But communities that are well-tended in transition often emerge with something rare: the ability to remain present to complexity without losing themselves.

That capacity is not accidental.

It is cultivated over time.

If you are leading in a season of change—as an interim, an executive, or a long-tenured leader facing new realities—this space is meant to offer reflection and perspective, not prescriptions. These essays will return, again and again, to questions of attention, power, conflict, time, loss, hope, and authority, always from inside the lived realities of congregational and organizational life.

You don’t need to read everything in order.

You don’t need to agree with everything you find here.

The invitation is simpler, and harder: to stay present, to resist the rush to resolution, and to tend what is alive in the community you serve.

More will emerge.

For now, this is enough.