Leadership: Life Stages of Organizations
Organizations, like all living things, pass through a life cycle. They are born, grow, mature, and decline. Some renew. Most die. Ichak Adizes
Gregg’s Reflection:
When my brother and I entered the family business, we had been on a plateau for a decade. For the next fifteen years, we worked with our father, learning the business, gaining influence and incrementally introducing helpful change. When our father died, we had a strong sense of how we would bring our own understanding of organizations and leadership into growing the business. While he was around, our father stymied our attempts to implement these ideas.
This image captures the classic organizational life cycle: an initial rise marked by vision, energy, and growth; followed by a plateau — often a season of comfort, routine, and institutionalization — and then a slow or sharp decline if no intervention occurs.
90% of ELCA Lutheran Churches are currently on the plateau or in decline, suggesting that many churches and institutions are experiencing this late-stage stagnation. The curve illustrates the natural entropy that occurs when structures outlive their original mission, or when adaptation and renewal fail to keep pace with cultural and spiritual shifts. It is a sobering but honest reflection of how even sacred organizations can lose their vitality without intentional discernment.
Charles Handy tells us:
The S-curve is the shape of all natural growth. When the curve flattens, we must initiate a second curve—before the first one ends.
The second image adds a crucial layer of hope and insight. Instead of accepting inevitable decline, it introduces the concept of “Rebirth and Transformation” — where a new vision, rooted in deep listening and courageous leadership, can give rise to an entirely new growth curve.
This transformational curve does not ignore the decline but transcends it. It recognizes that organizations, like people, must die to certain forms in order to be reborn. The visual metaphor suggests that organizations can “drop down” into a season of reflection, reorientation, and even grief — but from that descent, a new path of ascent can emerge.
“A new vision can give new life to an organization, creating a new growth curve,” speaks directly to the spiritual principle of resurrection: that renewal is not about returning to the past, but about being made new through faithful surrender and creative re-imagining. We must learn to die to the old well, to find new life.
When our father died, we were free to create the future we felt was possible. We created a strategy and cast a vision for change, and ignited a new cycle of growth. We started a rental business, created a separate forklift business, and bought a competitor. In five years, we had doubled the size of the business. Within a decade, we had grown the business by a factor of five.
Like individuals, organizations have a soul. They grow, mature, get tired, lose their way — and long for renewal. These curves remind us that decline is not failure if it leads to deeper listening, surrender, and the courage to be made new. The work of leadership is not to resist this cycle, but to discern when it’s time to release the old so that something more alive can emerge.
This is especially difficult for churches, which tend to cling to what worked in the past. The financial crisis of 2008-2009 showed me that no business is more than three years from failing. So Churches, on the other hand, take decades to die. This longer time frame tends to make it more difficult to see reality clearly. This is a good example of the boiling frog. If you toss a frog into hot water it will immediately jump out. If you put a frog in cold water, and raise the temperature slowly, the frog will cook rather than jump out.
Wade in with me as we explore the implications for our churches and our own spiritual life of this cycle of death and rebirth. Blessings.
Journaling Prompts
In what ways have you reached a plateau in your spiritual life? What would it look like to ignite a new season of personal growth? Where is your church or organization on this life cycle curve? In what ways is your church or organization clinging to a past that is no longer relevant?
Scripture
Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
Isaiah 43:18–19. This is your new growth curve — the divine invitation to release what no longer serves and open space for a fresh movement of Spirit.
Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live…’
Ezekiel 37:4–6 A powerful vision of spiritual revival — God’s breath reviving what seems lifeless. Organizations, like bones, may seem too far gone, but the Spirit can breathe new purpose into them.
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…
Ecclesiastes 3:1. A reminder that every stage — including decline and renewal — belongs within the sacred rhythm of time. Wise leadership requires awareness of the season an organization is in.
Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
John 12:24. Jesus’ words here reflect the truth that transformation often requires a form of death — of ego, structure, or identity — before new life can arise. This verse speaks to the transition between decline and rebirth.
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God…
Romans 12:2. This is a charge not to settle for institutional conformity or plateaued patterns, but to seek transformation that comes through spiritual renewal and discernment.
I know your works; you have a name of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is on the point of death, for I have not found your works perfect in the sight of my God.
Revelation 3:1–2. This is a direct call to churches that are coasting on past vitality — organizations that appear alive but have entered spiritual inertia. It’s a sharp image of the plateau leading to decline.
Ancient Writing
The soul is not made perfect by what it begins but by what it brings to completion.
Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 27.13
The highest and most fruitful work is not to build but to renew — not to begin, but to begin again.
Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon on the Song of Songs 26.5
There must be a falling away of the old self if the new is to be born; the path to resurrection always leads through descent.
Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection
God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction.
Meister Eckhart, Sermon 52, DW 5
The visible Church may decline, but the inner Church — the gathering of those awakened in love — is reborn again and again.
Isaac of Nineveh, Ascetical Homilies I.5
He who has seen the end has seen the beginning, and he who knows the beginning will know the end.
Clement of Alexandria, Stromata II.11
There is a time when the soul is called to leave behind what once gave it life, to enter the darkness of unknowing, so that a truer light might rise.
Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, ch. 4
Every renewal in the Church has been born not of structure but of fire — not strategy but Spirit.
John Chrysostom, paraphrased from Homily on Acts 2
Modern Writing
The S-curve is the shape of all natural growth. When the curve flattens, we must initiate a second curve—before the first one ends.
Charles Handy, The Age of Paradox, p. 50.
Organizations, like all living things, pass through a life cycle. They are born, grow, mature, and decline. Some renew. Most die.
Ichak Adizes, Corporate Lifecycles: How and Why Corporations Grow and Die and What to Do About It, p. 1.
At the very moment of its greatest success, an organization is most vulnerable to complacency and decline.
Jim Collins, How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In, p. 5.
Every organization must prepare for the abandonment of everything it does.
Peter F. Drucker, Managing for Results, p. 143.
Most organizations are over-managed and under-led.
John P. Kotter, A Force for Change: How Leadership Differs from Management, p. 4. Managers are about efficiency, improving what is. Leaders are about effectiveness, doing the right things vs doing things right.
The future arrives before most organizations are ready for it.
Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution, p. 75.
The Church always dies in the form in which it has lived. But the Spirit raises it in new form when the old no longer serves the living Gospel.
Richard Rohr, Richard Rohr, The Future of Christianity (lecture series, ca. 2010)
Nothing new can grow in a place that clings to what is no longer alive. Resurrection only happens after crucifixion.
Barbara Brown Taylor, Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark, p. 149.
We must let go of the life we planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living, by Diane K. Osbon, p. 18.
The greatest obstacle to the future of the Church is the past of the Church.
Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why, p. 162.
The Church is always reforming — not because it is failing, but because it is alive.
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People, p. 183.
Structures that once carried Spirit can become husks if we refuse to release them. What served yesterday can hinder today.
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, p. 118
Institutions stagnate when preservation becomes more important than participation in the new creation God is birthing.
Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, p. 251
Churches don’t die because they are unfaithful to the past, but because they refuse to trust God with the future.
Alan Roxburgh, Joining God in the Neighborhood, p. 72
Letting go is not the end. It is the beginning of something truer.
Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom, p. 23.