Adaptive Challenges, Faith and Fundraising
A dialogue between Louise Johnson and Paul Hanson
“Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light to my path.” Psalm 119:105
Rev. Louise Johnson and I have been friends for about 20 years. Louise is a thoughtful, spirit-filled leader with an amazing list of achievements and a long list of friends. She is Executive for Vision at the Churchwide Organization of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). See her full bio below.
Today we are thinking about the complexities of leading organizations and congregations, and the implications of adaptive challenges for ethical fundraising.
PAUL HANSON: Thanks for joining me in this project, Louise!
LOUISE JOHNSON: Thank you for the invitation, Paul! I learn a lot from you, so glad to have the opportunity!
PAUL: We met when I was the director of a national scholarship fund for seminary students, and you were leading admissions at a seminary.
LOUISE: It was a daunting, but exciting time to think we could scholarship every seminary student. I loved the boldness of the goal and what it would mean for future students who wouldn’t have to factor in overwhelming financial burdens to say yes to a call.
PAUL: I loved our bold goal too! Looking back, I wonder if that was a simpler time in the world and in the church, or if solutions looked more clear to me because my understanding was simpler. When I made the switch from parish ministry to raising funds for the church organization, I was determined to fix a big problem, and confident that fundraising was the answer.
The problem we were attacking was this: Young pastors were graduating from seminary with crippling school loans. We believed that if enough funds could be raised for a scholarship endowment, the church denomination would surely enjoy certain outcomes:
More people would answer the call to ministry and enroll in seminary;
Pastors who are debt-free would gladly go wherever they were most needed;
Financial healthy leaders would be better for their churches.
Twenty years later, the church ecosystem has indeed raised a lot of scholarship money! Many students need to borrow little or nothing to attend seminary. Financial coaching programs abound. Mission accomplished…
Though we succeeded in fundraising, did we still fail?
And yet, we have not seen the outcomes that I predicted (and promised donors!). Seminary enrollment has not risen with scholarship support; in fact it is down overall. Pastors aren’t freely going where needed–rural church districts receive almost no new leaders. Rural churches are filling pulpits in other ways.
One wonders, Louise: though we succeeded in fundraising, did we still fail?
LOUISE: Seminary admissions people were on the front lines; even then, we were beginning to see the decline in the number of students who would show up at a campus ministry event or a vocational discernment retreat.
I don’t think we failed. We just didn’t imagine that there were large, cultural forces at work. The problem was fundamentally an adaptive one (a complex problem with no known solution). We thought if we could address the barriers, that more people would come. It is the congregational equivalent to getting a better website or a band. These solutions look attractive because even when they are big, we know what to do - like raise scholarship money. But often they exacerbate the problem. I think the solution made sense at the time but unfortunately, it was and is a far more complex issue than we realized.
PAUL: You’re right, of course. I realize now that some things are difficult to predict, particularly The Future! The term “Adaptive Challenge” wasn’t commonly heard back then. It’s an important concept today.
LOUISE: What became clear over time was that nearly every aspect of church-as-we-know-it was (and still is) in decline - attendance, membership, finances, leadership. Doing a better job of the job we had been doing was not going to help us find our way.
Lots of organizations went to work planning for the future, employing long-range strategic planning, focus groups of stakeholders, and other traditional methods of looking to the future. These practices, which had worked in the past, felt comfortable, familiar. But it was a little like enjoying the music on the Titanic as it sank. We needed to look at why the church as we know it was failing, recall our most basic calling as a church, and experiment with new ways of responding to that calling.
It sounds easy, but this process made a lot of people feel betrayed, irrelevant, and/or ignorant. One professor came to me and said she was distressed. When she heard that we needed to look at things in new ways, for her it sounded like her life’s work was being judged or worse, wiped out. This kind of change makes people very uneasy. It feels chaotic and disorienting. And the job of the leaders is to see people through these periods of discomfort and anxiety.
The work of leading change is an act of faith
PAUL: It seems like we are working - or walking- without enough light. I like how you referenced Psalm 119—”Your Word is a lamp to my feet, a light to my path.” What did you say about that?
LOUISE: For me it is a different version of “give us this day our daily bread,” or the stories of manna in the wilderness. God gives us sight for the next step ahead, but does not shine a light down the path so that we can see the whole thing. Fundamentally, the work of leading change is an act of faith - by definition you do not know how things will unfold. You take the next step, even though you don’t yet know what steps 3-10 are.
I think when Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane, part of his distress was that he knew that the cross was coming. He also knew that God had promised to raise him to new life, but he didn’t know what that looked like. He had to trust and it was really hard for him to let go and trust that God had that next move in hand.
We have to be willing to let go of old ways of doing things and trust that the pain ahead is worth the resurrection on the other side. This work is about dying to old selves - institutions, ways of operating, systems - in order to see what kind of resurrection God will bring. But there is no resurrection without the cross.
This process of letting go of what we knew and experimenting with new ways of being the church is especially tough for fund raisers. I’ve been in my fair share of donor meetings trying to explain that we know that the current ways of operating are not working and that we need some capacity to try new things. And, no, by the way, we don’t know if they will work.
It is a terrible, but necessary conversation. And it is by God’s grace that I have encountered some donors who have faith along with our church to support these kinds of initiatives.
PAUL: So let’s ponder what that kind of faithful leadership means for fundraising. I’ll go first. I’m thinking of our Case for Support – the promises we make to donors.
The case for support for a technical challenge is straightforward; outcomes can be confidently assured.
It is wiser to lead with curiosity than with confidence
But in a time when we are dealing with adaptive challenges, ethical fundraising organizations must take great care with our Case for Support. Organizations need to be humble enough to not overpromise, especially if the vision is transformational. Outcomes are being discovered.
I have come to believe that it’s wiser to lead with curiosity than with confidence: “Help us discover…” rather than “Your gift will result in…”
I’ll get further out on the limb! I’ve worked under an assumption that new donors were probably giving smaller, undesignated annual gifts; my work as a major gift officer was to help them “mature,” with relational cultivation, into making large designated gifts, to solve a cause/effect problem. Serious donors make large designated gifts–that was my assumption.
But now I wonder: in this world of accelerating change and adaptive challenges, is that assumption true? Perhaps, as donors mature in their commitment to an organization’s mission, we might instead steer them in the direction of large undesignated investments, gifts which give a thoughtful Board flexibility to respond nimbly to challenges and opportunities.
That would be a shift to a different type of confidence: not “we guarantee an outcome” but “we will merit your trust.”
LOUISE: This is why I loved doing this work with you, Paul. You have a way of articulating it that helps us lean into resurrection, that smells like possibility. And, yes, there is a whole new field emerging around the “Case for Support” that looks a lot more process oriented. I am so very grateful to have engaged with some donors who are willing and able to do this work with the church, but it is tough. It looks more like venture capital appeal, than a concrete case like “support a student to go to seminary.”
PAUL: Thanks for shining the light back on donors, Louise. Philanthropists are leaders with us–we always listen to them. Some will respond to simple giving opportunities; others are ready to invest in a learning organization.
Thanks for the conversation, Louise! You’ve reminded me of The Prayer of Good Courage:
O God, you have called your servants
to ventures of which we cannot see the ending,
by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown.
Give us faith to go out with good courage,
not knowing where we go,
but only that your hand is leading us
and your love supporting us,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Louise N. Johnson is a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). She serves as the Assistant to the Presiding Bishop/Executive for Vision, ELCA. She leads a team, supported by a generous donor, that is exploring how the church might develop new communities of faith that reach new people. She also served as Executive for Administration for the ELCA, assisting Presiding Bishop Eaton in the day-to-day work of the church.
Prior to her work with the ELCA, Johnson served as Director for Leadership Development for LEAD, teaching and speaking on change leadership.
Johnson also served as the fourteenth president of Wartburg Theological Seminary, Dubuque, IA, where she led the seminary to its largest fundraising and enrollment years in the history of the school.
Johnson is a native of Akron, Ohio. Her father, William, was a Lutheran Church in America pastor, and her mother, Valerie, is a retired higher education administrator, English teacher, and research librarian. At Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, Johnson majored in German. During her college years, she worked in Lutheran Outdoor Ministries, where she developed a strong sense of call to serve the church.
After college, she pursued her love for youth ministry, serving congregations in Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin. In 1995, she began studies at Wartburg Seminary and received her Master of Divinity in 1999. Following seminary, Johnson served at Wartburg, primarily in Admissions. Between 2000 and 2004, Johnson also served as pastor of Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church in Spragueville, Iowa.
Johnson was called to serve the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia (LTSP) in 2004 as Associate Director of Admissions, quickly rising to Director of Admissions in 2006. During her tenure, she worked with others in the development, writing, and execution of Project Connect, securing $4.5 million dollars in grant support from the Lilly Endowment, Inc. to build a network of leaders and institutions to provide theologically sound vocational discernment for young adults. Johnson served LTSP as Vice President for Mission Advancement beginning in fall 2012. Johnson’s responsibilities included strategic planning, accreditation, and alumni relations.
During her years in Philadelphia, Johnson also pursued an interest in organizational leadership, undergoing several courses including the completion of a Certificate in Leadership and Management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Johnson continues to teach, speak and consult in change leadership in church organizations.
In 2017, Johnson received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Wartburg College, Waverly, IA. In 2020, Johnson is receiving the Outstanding Executive Award from the Association of Lutheran Development Executives.
The editor of “To Be a Fundraiser” is Kelly Wendell. Kelly is Coordinator of Communication at South Dakota State University.