By Paul L. Escamilla

My wife Liz and I once traveled to pay a visit to our daughter, Sarah, while she was in training to become a physical therapist. As Sarah took us around to some of her learning environments, the gait lab captured my attention. The gait lab houses a special treadmill with two adjacent belts running in parallel but at different speeds. A rehabilitating patient walks this treadmill, one foot tracking on the slower belt, the other on the belt running slightly faster. The variation in speeds accentuates certain tendencies in the patient’s gait, allowing the therapist to better diagnose mobility issues and recommend follow-up treatment.

I find the parallels (if you’ll pardon the pun) between the gait lab and leadership in our time to be rather striking. Going fast and going slow. Honoring tradition while seeking relevance. Holding to rhythms and rituals that are trustable and life-giving while probing fresh expressions of life together. Two speeds, two modes, two approaches at once—this seems to be our new normal.

We know by now that we can’t afford the luxury of choosing between the two—hopping on one narrow belt of the treadmill and avoiding the other. My style is fast; someone else can go slow. My preference is to stick with tradition; others can focus on relevance. A faithful leader must have the agility and adaptability to traverse at one and the same time both the slow and the fast belts. Nadia Bolz-Weber has written that “you have to be deeply rooted in tradition in order to innovate with integrity.” John Wimmer, who works with the Lilly Endowment, echoed her perspective: “Leading change is only half the task. The real challenge is to lead both continuity and change.” Or as Gil Rendle would put it, leadership is attempting to do the same thing while doing something different.

In ways we have not always noticed or understood, Jesus embodied the gait lab orientation in his ministry. In the Sermon on the Mount, he both reinforced tradition (“not one stroke of a letter will pass from the law . . .”) and subverted it for more relevant teachings (“you have heard . . . but I say . . .”). In one particular treasure of a parable, found later in Matthew, he captures the essence of a leader’s capacity to move along both belts of the treadmill at once with an eye toward valuing and engaging both the institutional and the innovative. To paraphrase Matthew 13:52, Every scribe who has become a disciple of the realm of God is like the head of a household who brings out of their treasure what is new and what is old.

The role is not one of multi-tasking, per se, but more like taking up a multi-dimensional task, in which elements of the old integrate with elements of the new; the slow with the fleet; the cautious with the enterprising, the sturdy and stodgy (and trustable) with the nimble and agile (and unknown); as if together they form a whole that, if sometimes precarious, is more genuine and life-giving than a narrower path would allow.  

When we come across the words, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Phil 4:13), we often focus on the divinely given stamina or confidence required by the gospel work. No question about that! But the verse is also a call to versatility and integration—I can do all things . . .. As disciples of Christ, and through the strength Christ affords us, ours is the work of cultivating agility in the gait lab that is otherwise known as leadership in the 21st century.