Out at Sea: Congregational Leadership in an Age Without Maps

By: Rev. Cameron Trimble

Advent is a season of waiting in the dark. Of listening beneath the noise. Of learning to trust the wind when the path ahead disappears. That makes it the perfect season for congregational leaders to name what many already know: we are out at sea.

The familiar landmarks of church life are fading. Attendance patterns are unstable. Giving habits are unpredictable. The cultural assumptions that shaped mainline congregations for the past century no longer hold. You may not know exactly where you are—but you do know this: the old maps don’t work anymore.

This is not failure. This is now the context of leadership.

In times like these, leaders often default to one of two instincts: doubling down on what used to work, or waiting passively for conditions to improve. But neither will serve us in the long run. The real invitation is to learn to navigate. To orient ourselves with new tools. To listen more deeply to our context. And to ask a better question—not how do we save our church? but what does the future need from a congregation like ours?

At Convergence, we’ve found that this is the turning point for most congregations we serve. Once a congregation gives itself permission to let go of the map, it can begin to recover its imagination. That’s the work of our Futures Labs—a process of communal discernment that helps congregations reorient in a time of complexity, disruption, and possibility.

Futures Labs are grounded in the emerging field of Futures Literacy, defined by our partners at UNESCO as the ability to imagine and understand different futures in order to make better decisions today. This is not a speculative exercise. It’s a discipline that integrates social research, scenario building, spiritual reflection, and strategic design to help leaders develop what some call anticipatory competence.

But for congregations, it’s not just strategic. It’s spiritual.

The people of faith have always been a people who listened to the stars, followed signs, watched the waves. We are a people shaped by stories of wilderness and exile, pilgrimage and return. What’s needed now is not nostalgia—but presence.

Sociologist Hartmut Rosa offers a compelling lens for this moment. In his work on modernity, Rosa argues that our institutions are trapped in the “logic of escalation,” constantly seeking speed, growth, and relevance. That includes congregations. For decades, we’ve been told that to survive, congregations must appeal more, offer more, attract more.

But Rosa offers another framework: resonance.

Resonance, he says, is not about more; it’s about deeper. It’s the capacity to be in meaningful relationship with the world—relational, responsive, and transformed through encounter. In his words, “resonance is not a subjective feeling, but a mode of relation to the world.”

This is what congregations can offer when they stop trying to be spiritual service providers and begin to function as relational fields—places where people are seen, stretched, challenged, healed. In short, places of spiritual resonance.

But cultivating that kind of depth doesn’t happen by accident. It takes intention. It takes structure. It takes leadership. And it takes processes that invite the whole community into reflection, reorientation, and renewed imagination.

This is the gift of Futures Labs.

We help congregations surface the hidden assumptions guiding their current choices. We explore scenarios of disruption and change across climate, politics, economics, AI, and religion. We invite people to notice what stirs in them—not just fear, but longing. We guide them in naming a future-oriented vision rooted in who they are and why they matter, not to preserve the past, but to serve the future.

That vision then forms the basis of a strategic plan that is coherent, compelling, and spiritually grounded—not in frantic reaction, but in thoughtful alignment.

Advent invites us into the same kind of work: reflection, readiness, and the bold trust that something is already being born among us—something we cannot yet see, but must prepare to receive.

If you feel out at sea as a congregational leader, you are not alone. You are not failing. You are simply facing what is. And if you’re ready to stop waiting for the wind to change and start learning how to sail—we at Convergence are ready to help.

Let’s trade our broken maps for a deeper kind of navigation.Let’s create congregations that resonate with life, respond to the Spirit, and reflect the justice and joy our world so desperately needs.