Leadership as Physical Therapy

preaching at the rate of change

Slàinte mhath, friends! I’m in Scotland this week, on pilgrimage with folks from my congregation and a neighboring one.

This week I bring you a piece of writing by coach, pastor and dear friend LeAnn Hodges, originally posted last year on the NEXT Church website and shared with permission. I’ve been doing a deep dive into Edwin Friedman’s classic, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, and LeAnn’s words dovetail beautifully with the tough truths in that book. You may not be a preacher—you may not even be a church person—but I bet this meditation will have something to offer you about leadership and how we make change. And if you *are* a church leader of the Presbyterian or Presbyterian-adjacent flavor, I highly recommend this fall’s NEXT Church National Gathering, November 11-14 in Grand Rapids.

Enjoy, and I’ll see you again next week!

Photo by kike vega on Unsplash

by LeAnn Hodges

The church is at a crossroads, and I don’t want to be a chaplain for a dying institution. Instead, I want to be a physical therapist for a movement of liberation that opens up the possibility for us to co-create a new world in the shell of the old, where through God’s radical and transforming love all are made whole. Yet week after week too many people walk in and out of the doors of the church and remain unchanged, and we miss vital opportunities.

Last fall my teenage son injured his hamstring in a high stakes soccer game that put him on the bench for 6 weeks. He was desperate to get back on the field, and was committed to the challenging work of physical therapy.

At the beginning of every session, the physical therapist would ask him to point out where he was feeling pain, and that is where they focused their work. They began by gently moving the injured leg and massaging around the edges of the pain, and then gradually increased the range of motion, strategically targeting different places on the strained muscles. While the goal was to move his body toward health, it was painful in the process.

Watching my child’s healing journey, I realized that the church needs a model like that of a physical therapist, where preachers help identify the places where the body is struggling or lacks necessary mobility and strength, and then equips the congregation with the resources to increase the capacity to do the hard, oftentimes painful work to heal the injured places, not just numb the pain.

Preachers cannot force people to do the work of change any more than a physical therapist can force patients to do their exercises between sessions. And yet the physical therapist still has a responsibility to work with who shows up, willing to push the patient at a rate that the body can tolerate, able to tell the difference between harmful pain and pain that is a necessary part of healing. So it is with preachers.

The biblical prophets at their best delivered difficult truths that resulted in a change in behavior and reoriented the listener back toward God. How is our preaching prophetic, not just blasting judgment, but rather delivering difficult truths in measured ways that result in a changed behavior that reorients us back toward God? I pray that our preaching might be a catalyst to push our congregations at a rate that they can tolerate, without ignoring or masking the discomfort that is necessary for change, expanding our capacity to stay awake to the pain of our lives and of the world for the purpose of participating in the healing of creation.

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Link Love

Again, for a great infusion of just that kind of leadership training, check out this fall’s NEXT Church National Gathering.

Steady on, friends!