Balcony time and the art of faithful leadership

This summer, I joined the Forum for Congregational Life as director of Reflective Leadership Support. That title invites a natural question: What does it mean to direct reflection? My answer begins with a metaphor I’ve carried through philanthropy, community ministry and small business, one I hope will shape how the Forum accompanies congregations, seminaries, denominations and ministry nonprofits in the years ahead.

Leadership in Christian organizations often unfolds amid competing demands, urgent needs and complex challenges. The temptation is to stay on what Ronald Heifetz calls the “dance floor” — immersed in activity, responding to immediate needs, solving problems as they arise. Yet faithful leadership also requires the ability to step back, gain perspective and discern what’s happening beneath the surface.

Heifetz calls this practice “getting on the balcony.” From there, leaders can observe patterns, diagnose adaptive challenges (situations where existing expertise or habits no longer fit emerging realities), and distinguish symptoms from root causes.

Theologically, though, balcony time is more than a leadership technique. It is a practice of discernment: withdrawing from the demands of organizational life to perceive God’s activity, and then returning with renewed clarity, courage and faithfulness. This is the theology I bring to the Forum’s work. Reflection is not a luxury we get to once the real work is done; it is a part of the real work itself.

I felt this need in my previous work with the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, where my portfolio included philanthropy and initiatives to expand access and opportunity. On the dance floor, there were funds to steward, partnerships to cultivate and immediate needs deserving a response.

Stepping back opened different questions. What patterns were emerging across the requests we received? Were our grantmaking structures simply responding to individual needs, or helping us understand the systems producing them? The balcony didn’t make the practical work less important; it placed that work within a larger field of vision.

I learned a related lesson in a very different context, as co-curator of an independent bookstore. Tending a small business means managing decidedly practical matters — inventory, events, staffing, keeping the doors open. But the most important questions can’t be answered in a sales report: What kind of space does this community need? What does it mean for a bookstore to become not simply a place of commerce but of gathering, imagination and belonging? Balcony time lets me step beyond how the store is performing to ask who we’re becoming in relationship with our community.

Scripture offers models of this kind of reflection. In Mark 1, after a full day of healing and teaching, Jesus rises early and retreats to pray (Mark 1:35-39). When the disciples report that everyone is searching for him, he returns not simply to meet the crowd’s demand but with clarity about his mission to go to neighboring towns and proclaim the gospel there also. Prayer gives him the distance to distinguish public demand from divine calling.

Nehemiah offers another model. Arriving in Jerusalem, he does not immediately announce a strategy or mobilize the community. He quietly surveys the broken walls at night before speaking publicly (Nehemiah 2:11-16). His example embodies a fundamental leadership discipline of being willing to see reality before attempting to change it.

And Elijah, exhausted after an intense season of ministry, shows us yet another dimension. Before God commissions him for what is next, God first gives him rest, food and silence (1 Kings 19). Discernment, it turns out, often arrives not through activity but through stillness.

In Jesus we see discernment of mission; in Nehemiah, careful diagnosis of communal challenge; in Elijah, restoration of vocation. Each reminds us that faithful leadership is not self-generated. It is receptive, dependent and grounded in attentiveness to what God is already doing.

That conviction became personal for me during a demanding season when professional responsibilities collided with entrepreneurship, parenting two young children and sustaining ministry commitments. I remember one week with three overlapping deadlines, a sick child and a board meeting I’d prepared for at midnight. I realized then that the problem wasn’t really about scheduling. I had learned to measure my effectiveness by how much I could carry and how quickly I could respond. The accumulation revealed the limits of living exclusively on the dance floor.

When I made time to be away from the daily demands of meetings and decisions, I found space to ask what busyness had been obscuring: What parts of my work were meaningful to me? Where was God inviting a truer vocational alignment?

Some questions, I learned, cannot be solved with a better calendar. They require discernment about what should be carried, what should be released, and what God may be making possible next.

This is one of the most important gifts that balcony time offers those who lead institutions in service to congregations. Organizations built to support others can easily build an identity around responsiveness. Pastors need resources. Congregations need accompaniment. Boards need information. Communities need funding. Those needs are real. But Christian leadership also requires the wisdom to recognize when responsiveness has become reactivity.

Balcony time creates space for humility, reminding us that we are not solely responsible for God’s work. It makes room to hear what lies beneath presenting problems — and voices our institutional habits sometimes drown out. And it nurtures imagination for possibilities beyond current constraints.

None of this makes the balcony a permanent residence. Jesus leaves the solitary place for the neighboring towns. Nehemiah eventually rebuilds. Elijah returns to prophetic ministry. Organizational discernment, too, must eventually become budgets, programs, partnerships, decisions, experiments — and sometimes endings. The point of reflection is not distance for its own sake. It is more faithful participation.

This is the work I hope to do with the leaders and organizations the Forum walks alongside: to help create the permission, practices and companionship for leaders to climb the stairs, however briefly, and come back able to see what they couldn’t see before.

If you lead an organization in service to congregations and have felt the exhaustion of a life lived entirely on the dance floor, I would love to hear from you. Balcony time is not a departure from leadership. It is one of its most faithful expressions, and I hope we can practice it together.