GUEST POST BY LAURA SLEZAK WITH JOSEPH HANDLEY
The challenges of our time—whether in the church, mission organizations, or the marketplace—are complex. In the unpredictable, global world we’re in, traditional ways of viewing leadership just don’t reflect the reality organizations face in navigating constant change and unpredictable global forces.
Increasingly, leadership must be understood as a collective process, emerging from the dynamic interactions of people, systems, and networks.
This is the conviction at the heart of my study on leadership for organizational adaptability in a church network movement. It resonates with the work of scholars like Michael Arena, Mary Uhl-Bien, Joseph Handley, and other scholars of collective leadership models who advocate for a vision of leadership that is less about one person at the top and more about a web of relationships that adapt and respond to the complex challenges we face.
Collective Leadership: Beyond the Heroic Leader
Collective leadership refers to models where leadership emerges through relationships and shared responsibility, rather than being concentrated in a single individual. This includes approaches like shared, distributed, and network leadership, which prioritize collaboration and adaptability.
Collective leadership moves beyond hierarchical models to focus on the processes by which leadership emerges through social networks. Formal leadership roles are still needed, but the most important work of senior-level leaders is no longer top-down command and control. Instead, the most important work of leaders becomes building a relational network that can adapt to the shifting needs that arise in a complex environment.
This reflects the lived reality in some church movements. While a number of decentralized church movements are active today, my research focused on the Tampa Underground, a church network that at one point included more than 500 microchurches. In the Underground, leadership is not primarily the role of a single, charismatic figure. Rather, leadership emerges from the interplay of elders, staff, and grassroots leaders discerning together how to live out worship, community, and mission in small, distributed communities. Leadership here is less about a single, unified vision and more about empowering others to live as the church in ways God’s uniquely called them to.
In the case of Tampa Underground, microchurches are distinct and creative. For example:
- Belmont Heights: Exists to provide a place of belonging for the residents in the Belmont Heights Estates housing community and East Tampa. We hope for each person to meet Jesus and encounter his love.
- Showered & Empowered: A mobile shower program for the homeless. Our hope is to offer a space for the homeless of Tampa Bay to get resources, education, and have their personal hygiene needs met. We long to see the most marginalized in our city restored through practical service and spiritual care.
- Neustro Salon: Helps students realize their highest potential by inspiring them to follow Jesus, graduate high school, and consider higher education. We want to transform our Ruskin and Wimauma neighborhoods and encourage a walk with Jesus.
Senior leaders of Tampa Underground don’t create these microchurches. Rather, they emerge from the vision of network participants who feel called to make it happen. “We’re not really going out and recruiting. We’re trying to create spaces,” said one senior leader. As another put it, “The organization’s just saying, how do we serve these people, and how do we partner with what God is doing? …How do we create environments where these things can happen? …We cannot bring about conviction, we can[not] bring about calling…we can’t even make somebody persevere…But we can create environments.”
Collaborative Leadership: Innovation through Relationships
Adaptive space is a concept developed by Arena and Uhl-Bien that describes the dynamic zone where operational stability and entrepreneurial innovation interact. It’s in this space that new ideas can emerge and be integrated into the organization.
Organizations adapt best in spaces where creativity and structure work together. It’s in this adaptive space that leadership action and forward movement emerge. Arena and proponents of networked organizations (like the Network-First Manifesto) advocate for the priority of human connection, trust, and collaboration in a world increasingly powered by AI and technology.
My research showed that the Underground often thrived because of its collaborative, network-based dynamics:
- Organizational leaders ensured continuity and accountability.
- Entrepreneurial microchurch leaders experimented with new expressions of mission.
When a group holds the tension of these two dynamics together (in that adaptive space), it enables movement dynamics to emerge without collapsing into bureaucracy or chaos. This balance allowed new microchurches to emerge organically while keeping the larger network healthy.
For example, Tampa Underground emphasizes alignment by asking microchurches to agree to its 18-point Manifesto of shared values. As one leader described, “Regardless of what you [are] called to, what you’re doing, the Manifesto is the thing that you look at and say, that’s my heart. My heart beats faster when I read that.”
At the same time, leaders encouraged microchurches to experiment and adapt by normalizing the ongoing need for adjustments, the inevitability of conflict, and the reality that failure is part of experimentation. “People are pivoting all the time with microchurches,” said one leader. The Underground viewed slumps as an opportunity to adapt: “Now we could think of fresh things. Now we hear something different from the Lord or try a new method.”
Network Leadership: Leading in a Web, Not a Pyramid
Network leadership is at the heart of organizational adaptability. Instead of leadership being lodged in a person or office, it resides in the network of relationships that form and adapt as challenges arise.
Collective leadership models emphasize the role of community dynamics over individuals. This resonates with what Handley has described as polycentric leadership—leadership that is shared across multiple centers of influence, characterized by collaboration, community, and Christ-centeredness.
In a polycentric world, authority is no longer unipolar. It flows across networks, cultures, and contexts. Church networks like Tampa Underground show us how this works in practice: leadership is distributed, collective discernment is prioritized, and mission emerges from the edges, not the center.
Toward a Polycentric Future
Taken together, these insights from collective leadership theories, organizational adaptability, and polycentric leadership point to a new paradigm for leadership in our time.
For churches, mission movements, and organizations alike, this is more than theory—it is a way to thrive into the future. In an era of disruption and decline for traditional institutions, leadership that is collective, collaborative, and networked is essential. The Early Church grew and multiplied as a distributed, relational network amid a hostile environment. As Handley often reminds us, polycentric leadership reflects the very nature of the Trinity—diverse persons in unity, leading together for God’s mission in the world.
What might it look like for your church or organization to lead together in a polycentric way?
By Laura G. Slezak with Joseph Handley
More Information
Laura G. Slezak is assistant professor and program director at Crown College, MN
Adapted from:
* This blog draws from Laura G. Slezak’s 2024 dissertation on complexity leadership in church network movements.
You can also see some of this work here: Slezak, L. (2025). Rethinking structure: Understanding the Church as a movement. Journal of Applied Christian Leadership, 19(1), 84–98.
Image credits
- Cover photo by Redd Francisco on Unsplash
