Michael Beck recently shared the following article on his Substack, Passional Church. It is his summary and reflections on Chapter 12: "Adapting" by Jonny Baker from the book "The Starter's Way: Leading New Contextual Christian Communities." You can read reviews of previous chapters and subscribe to Beck's Substack emails here.

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Rev. Dr. Michael Beck

“I had to unlearn a lot of seminary education to be effective as a pastor.”
“The Lay Servant Academy didn’t teach us how to do this.”

These are common refrains among the clergy and laity I walk alongside. For clergy, the frustration often comes after years of rigorous education and ordination processes. We complete the required courses, submit endless paperwork, endure evaluations, complete a residency, and check every required box, only to arrive in the lived reality of local ministry and discover that the terrain looks nothing like the map we were given.

For lay leaders, the realization often comes when they encounter Fresh Expressions of Church. Many suddenly see that their formation was less about cultivating missional imagination and more about preparing them to be faithful committee members in an inherited system. Both groups experience the same unsettling insight: we were prepared for a world that no longer exists.

“Would You Like to Upsize?”

Sometimes the mismatch feels almost absurd. We were trained as if ministry were a franchise operation. Think McDonald’s. Seminary and denominational systems often function like corporate training centers: teaching us the assembly line, the manuals, the standardized processes. Make the Big Macs the same way. Get the fries just right. Follow the procedures, and you can reproduce a successful franchise on any street corner. If the numbers hit the targets, customers served, timelines met, the system declares success, and you move up the corporate ladder.

Sociologist George Ritzer has famously called this phenomenon McDonaldization, which refers to the process by which the principles of the fast-food industry come to dominate more and more sectors of society, including education, healthcare, and religion.

Even in so-called healthy inherited congregations, you can see just how powerful this logic is with a simple experiment: try changing the menu. Try questioning the assumptions. Try disrupting the familiar offerings. Try naming and challenging the distorted versions of the faith that flourish today, Christian Nationalism, Prosperity Gospel, Consumer Christianity, and so on.

What often happens next is telling. Disgruntled parishioners don’t usually wrestle theologically or stay for the long work of discernment. They simply shuffle down the street to the Burger King on the next block, another congregation offering a more familiar product, a less demanding gospel, and fries cooked exactly the way they like them.

That’s how deeply the franchise logic has shaped us. When faith is treated as a consumable, loyalty lasts only as long as the menu stays the same.

Our denominations say they want innovation, but only within carefully controlled limits. It’s innovation that never really disrupts the system, more like, “Would you like to upsize that for a dollar more?” You can tweak the sides, adjust the packaging, maybe add a seasonal special, but don’t touch the core menu, don’t question the business model, and don’t ask whether fast food is actually nourishing anyone in the first place.

But what happens when we are sent into local communities that don’t want Big Macs? They don’t like the fries. And they aren’t interested in our menu at all.

The Seven Sisters on Life Support

What feels comical is, for many of us serving in historic mainline denominations, painfully real. These traditions inherited the logic, structures, and metrics of the managerial age, yet we now live in a networked, relational, post-institutional world.

The “seven sisters” of American mainline Protestantism: American Baptist Churches USA, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church (USA), United Church of Christ, and United Methodist Church, once sat at the cultural and institutional center of the nation. Together, they shaped American civic life, education, and social reform throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, largely through a shared managerial model of church.

Their continued decline is not because the gospel has lost its power, but because the franchise logic that once supported these institutions has lost its credibility. We are still trying to address twenty-first-century missional realities with twentieth-century organizational assumptions, and the gap keeps widening.

From Franchise Logic to Adaptive Ecclesiology

In Gardens in the Desert, Bishop Ken Carter and I argue that what many leaders experience as personal inadequacy is, in fact, a systemic misalignment. We were trained for stability, repetition, and control, but we are leading in volatility, emergence, and complexity. The problem is not that pastors and lay leaders are failing. The problem is that the ecosystem has changed and we have not.

At the heart of the book and its academic companion Adaptive Ecclesiology is a simple but unsettling claim: we often approach adaptive challenges as technical problems. Technical problems can be solved with expertise, best practices, and established procedures. Adaptive challenges cannot. They require learning, experimentation, loss, and the reconfiguration of deeply held assumptions.

The franchise model assumes:

· a predictable environment

· standardized solutions

· transferable techniques

· success measured by efficiency and scale

But local ministry today looks nothing like that world. Each neighborhood is its own ecosystem, shaped by trauma, distrust of institutions, cultural hybridity, and relational networks rather than organizational loyalty. In such environments, importing a prepackaged model, even a theologically sound one, often does more harm than good.

This is why we insist that adaptation is not innovation for its own sake. It is not chasing trends or baptizing novelty. True adaptation has three movements, borrowed from adaptive leadership theory but grounded deeply in Scripture and tradition:

1. Preserve the essential DNA
Every living organism adapts in order to flourish, but it does not abandon what makes it itself. For the church, this means anchoring radical change in core values like the compassion of Christ, the dignity of every human being, the call to love God and neighbor, the centrality of Jesus. These are not up for revision.

2. Release what no longer serves life
Adaptive work always involves discarding the harmful DNA. Practices, metrics, structures, and habits that once made sense may now actively hinder mission. This is where resistance often shows up, not because people are unfaithful, but because loss feels like death. Yet Scripture consistently reminds us that resurrection only follows letting go.

3. Reconfigure for new environments
Adaptation is creative, contextual, and experimental. Rather than asking, “How do we get people to come back?” adaptive leaders ask, “How do we join God where life is already emerging?” This is why fresh expressions of church are not programs to replicate, but postures to inhabit: listening, learning, and forming community with people who would never enter our buildings.

A key insight from Adaptive Ecclesiology is that diagnosis must guide action. Before launching new initiatives, wise leaders learn to “read the signs of the times.” They pay attention to social location, trauma, power, and patterns of exclusion. They move between the dance floor and the balcony, not to disengage, but to see more clearly.

Perhaps most importantly, adaptive leadership must be anchored in compassion. Without centering in this, adaptation becomes merely another form of managerial control, dressed up in missional language. But when adaptation flows from love, from the passio Dei revealed in Jesus, it becomes a healing practice. The church stops asking how to save itself and starts asking how to serve the well-being of the whole ecosystem, the world that is our parish.

In other words, adaptive ecclesiology reframes the question entirely. The goal is not to fix the franchise. The goal is to cultivate gardens of life in whatever soil we’ve been planted.

Letting Go So Others Can Feel at Home

Jonny Baker reminds us that adaptation is not merely a modern crisis response, it is the church’s default mode across history. What changes is not the gospel, but the cultural “home” in which it takes root. The danger comes when we forget this and begin mistaking our way of doing church for the way.

Beck has been reviewing the chapters of the new book, "The Starter's Way."

At the heart of Baker’s argument is a deceptively simple question: Who gets to feel at home? Too often, adaptation has worked in the wrong direction, reshaping local cultures to fit church preferences rather than allowing the church to be reshaped for the sake of the gospel. Faithful adaptation, Baker argues, requires letting go: of control, of familiarity, of our “religious sweet tooth.”

This kind of adaptation is profoundly incarnational. Like Jesus, we learn to be guests rather than hosts, to travel light, to eat what is set before us, and to trust that God is already present ahead of us. When leaders create space for this kind of letting go, new forms of church emerge, not through dramatic reinvention, but through patient presence, low-level experimentation, and encouragement that allows ideas to take flight.

At the heart of everything we have been naming is a profound realization: our God is an adaptable God.

The incarnation itself is God’s great act of adaptation. The Word does not remain distant, abstract, or standardized. Love takes on flesh (John 1). God learns a language, enters a culture, submits to place and time, and dwells among real people with real wounds. This is not God abandoning divinity, but expressing it most fully. Love adapts, or it is not love at all.

And that kind of adaptation doesn’t begin with better manuals. It begins with Epiphany, learning to see differently.

Following the Light by Another Way

Epiphany names this truth with light. God is revealed not in control, but in vulnerability; not in the center of power, but on the margins; not through domination, but through compassion. The Magi follow the light not because they have a map, but because they are paying attention. And when they encounter Christ, they go home by another way. Revelation does that. It does not leave us unchanged.

As a new year begins, we are tempted to look for resolutions, plans, and quick fixes. Epiphany offers something deeper: reorientation. The question before the church is no longer how to recover what we have lost, but how to follow the light we have been given, here, now, in these particular places and among these particular people.

We were not called to merely run franchises. We were not formed to preserve menus. We were invited to participate in the living, adaptive love of God.

The invitation of this season is to loosen our grip, to listen more deeply, to let go of what no longer serves love. When we do, adaptation becomes a sacrament: a visible sign of God’s ongoing presence in the world.

Adapting to the New Year

I’ve never been much of a fan of New Year’s resolutions. For me, all that usually means is that the gym I’ve gone to for ten years gets more crowded for a couple of months. But a new year does offer something more honest and more humane: an opportunity to recalibrate.

Beck's Substack (blog) includes other articles and resources.

Perhaps a healthier practice to begin the new year is not resolution, but adaptation, asking God a different set of questions, both personally and communally:

· What do we need to preserve?

· What do we need to let go?

· What needs to be reconfigured for the season we are actually in?

These adaptive questions honor continuity without clinging to nostalgia. They make room for change without surrendering our deepest values. And they work just as well in our personal lives as they do in the life of our churches.

Usually, Jill and I mark the year by asking for a word, a guiding phrase that can center and orient us. Currently, in the valley of grief I’m walking through, I haven’t had the energy for the exercise. Big words feel heavy. Long-range plans feel unrealistic.

Jill said to me the other day, “Maybe our word for 2026 is manna.” Not abundance. Not clarity. Not a five-year vision. Just daily bread.

Manna is trust without stockpiling. It’s grace that arrives one day at a time. It’s the quiet hope that a small, golden loaf will fall again tomorrow, enough for today, not all at once, but sufficient. That, too, is adaptation. It is learning to live faithfully in the season we’re actually in, trusting that God’s provision meets us there.

As the year unfolds, perhaps this is the invitation for all of us: not to force transformation, but to follow the light we’re given today, preserving what gives life, releasing what no longer does, and reconfiguring our lives around a God who still provides, one day at a time.