I love the book, but I’m not too fond of the subtitle.

Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within, is profoundly insightful.  Robert Quinn lays out two starkly contrasting possibilities for individuals and organizations: slow death or deep change.  Deep change is in contrast to incremental change, which most people and individuals prefer.

The book captured my attention because I’m getting ready to lead a workshop titled “Replanting is Not a Tweak: Setting Vision and Leading Change,” at “Answering the Call” August 6-8 in Chicago.  The workshop is about revitalizing churches that are late in the process of what Quinn would call “slow death.”  How does a new leader enter that process and lead the congregation toward a different future than the one that seems inevitable in light of its long trajectory of demise?

Quinn’s insights are many, but his best one is simple.  Organizational change and personal change are both complementary and intertwined.  The roadblocks are similar and the strategies are parallel for both groups and individuals. 

More importantly for this book, Quinn suggests that leaders cannot change organizations unless they themselves change.  Deep change in a business (Quinn’s primary frame of reference) will not happen unless leaders themselves undergo deep change in their persons.

Although this book emerges from a “secular” paradigm, Quinn says, “Ultimately, deep change, whether at the personal or the organizational level, is a spiritual process” (78).  “Change is hell,” he says, but so is slow death.  “The difference is that the hell of deep change is the hero’s journey.”  Further, Quinn says, “in experiencing deep change, our selfishness dies” (79).

That kind of deep change, I would argue, is only possible through the transforming power of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  It is exactly what dying churches need – death to self, death to pride, death to what Jesus called “old wineskins” that can never contain the ever-vital, ever-fresh new wine of what the Spirit is doing in a new generation.

Why churches are different from businesses, and why the change dynamic also has to be different, will be a further subject of my workshop.  But Quinn’s book also pointed me to many similarities between his world and the church world, such as –

·         “When we see the need for deep change, we usually see it as something that needs to take place in someone else”  (11).

·         Too many pastors, like executives, think, “If I can hang on just a couple of more years, this problem will belong to someone else”  (19).

·         “When we have a vision, it does not necessarily mean that we have a plan” (83).

·         An effective process is “both top-down and bottom-up” (213).

I didn’t really notice the subtitle, “Discovering the Leader Within,” until I finished the book.  It’s a little misleading, sounding like everybody already has what it takes to bring out “deep change”  it just has to be “discovered.”  The book doesn’t read like that, nor do I believe it is reality.

The capacity for deep change is, indeed, possible for most if not all humans, for most if not all organizations.  But you don’t “discover” it.  You face the reality of the alternative (slow death), stare down denial and resistance, and choose risk over comfort. 

If I didn’t believe in deep change, I wouldn’t be much of a pastor or a Christian.