The Canoe Got Us Here. It Won’t Get Us There.

I just finished Canoeing the Mountains by Tod Bolsinger for a second time in as many years, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about one image from it. Picture a canoe, strapped to the backs of exhausted men, being carried over a mountain range.

Lewis and Clark set out expecting a river. Jefferson’s maps, built on the best knowledge available at the time, showed a water route clear to the Pacific. Paddle west, portage briefly where needed, arrive. What they found instead, when they crested what they thought was the last ridge before the coast, was range after range of the Rocky Mountains stretching to the horizon. No river. No shortcut. Just stone, and a boat that had gotten them everything they needed until the exact moment it couldn’t get them anything at all.

Bolsinger’s point isn’t really about exploration. It’s about leadership when the map runs out. When the skills, tools, and assumptions that got you successfully to this point are not the skills, tools, and assumptions that will get you to what’s next. He calls it the difference between technical problems and adaptive challenges. A technical problem has a known solution. You apply expertise, and it’s fixed. An adaptive challenge requires you to actually become something different, to learn new capacity, not just deploy old competence more efficiently.

The canoe isn’t the problem. Clinging to it is.

Here’s what struck me hardest. Nobody in that story is stupid for building a canoe, or for trusting it, or for being good at using it. The canoe was exactly right for the terrain it was built for. The failure, if there is one, isn’t in the tool. It’s in the moment after the terrain changes, when the instinct is to hold the canoe tighter instead of asking whether the map itself needs to be redrawn.

That instinct is deeply human, and it isn’t cowardice. A canoe that’s kept you alive for two thousand miles earns your trust. Letting go of it, even when the water’s gone, feels like betrayal of everything that got you this far. I think that’s true of methods, of institutions, of the specific shape ministry has taken for a generation. The temptation isn’t to be lazy or unfaithful. It’s to mistake loyalty to the tool for loyalty to the mission the tool was always supposed to serve.

What doesn’t change when the method has to

The part of the book I keep returning to is Bolsinger’s insistence that adaptive leadership isn’t the same as abandoning your values to chase relevance. Lewis and Clark didn’t stop being an expedition with a purpose when the river disappeared. The purpose held. The destination held. What had to change was everything about how they were going to get there. On foot, on horses traded from the Shoshone, carrying what they could and leaving the rest behind.

I find that distinction clarifying every time I apply it to ministry, even loosely. The Gospel doesn’t change. The mission doesn’t change. What Christ has called His church to be and do is not up for renegotiation just because the terrain around us looks different than it did fifty years ago. But the specific shape of how we’ve historically trained leaders, structured formation, organized a congregation’s life together? Those are canoes. Good ones, built by wise people, for terrain that made sense at the time – and admittedly still make sense in some applications. That, however, doesn’t make them permanent by default.

I’ve been sitting with a version of this question in a few different corners of ministry life lately. How we form pastors, how small congregations sustain themselves, what happens when a proven system meets terrain it wasn’t built for. I don’t think I have it fully worked out by any means. But I keep noticing the same shape in each of those questions. A good tool, built with real wisdom, now being asked to do something the mountain won’t allow.

The map problem is usually a looking problem

One more thing from the book stuck with me. Bolsinger points out that Lewis and Clark’s original map wasn’t just wrong. It was confidently wrong, drawn by people who had never seen the terrain, extrapolated from partial information and hope. That’s not a knock on Jefferson. It’s just what maps are, before someone actually walks the ground and reports back what’s really there.

I think a lot of our institutional maps work the same way. They were drawn in good faith, often by capable people, based on the best information available at the time. The mistake isn’t in having drawn them. The mistake is refusing to redraw them once someone’s actually walked the new terrain and come back with a different report. This is especially true when redrawing the map costs something, or means admitting the confident version wasn’t the only one.

Where I’ve landed, at least for now

I don’t think every canoe needs to be abandoned. Plenty of what’s carried us this far is still exactly the right tool for plenty of the terrain still ahead. Wisdom isn’t reflexively distrusting everything old. But I do think the posture Bolsinger’s asking for is right. Hold the tools loosely enough that when the mountains show up, you’re capable of noticing them, instead of paddling harder against dry ground and calling it faithfulness.

The mission doesn’t change. The Gospel doesn’t change. But I suspect more of our canoes than we’d like to admit are currently being dragged across rock, and the sound that makes is not the sound of progress. If you haven’t read Canoeing the Mountains yet, I’d commend it. Not for easy answers, because it doesn’t offer many, but for the right questions, asked with more humility than most books manage on this subject.