“Congratulations, President Taylor. You now have a third-class ticket.”

So announced George O. Wood, general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, before the closing benediction of his address at my inauguration as the ninth president of Vanguard University in Costa Mesa, Calif. He was referring to the story he had just told of the adventure of stagecoach travel in the 1800s.

For those willing to risk the dangers, the Concord stagecoach offered three classes of tickets. First-class passengers received service while comfortably seated inside the coach. They could avoid labor and the sight of it. Second-class ticket holders disembarked and either walked or stood along the roadside to observe while others pushed the coach. Third-class passengers were supposed to disembark, roll up their sleeves and push the stagecoach out of the mud or uphill if necessary — without complaint.

The Omaha Herald in 1877 published rules of stagecoach etiquette, including, “Don’t imagine for a moment you are going on a picnic. Expect annoyance, discomfort, and some hardships.”

At my inauguration, I publicly accepted a third-class ticket.

In January 2009, I agreed to step in as acting president at a time of crisis that threatened the life of Vanguard University. We had gone from being a fully accredited institution to one facing the possibility of termination of accreditation. By June 2009, we had improved enough to avoid loss of accreditation, but we received a public sanction of probation.

By July 2009, a new board of trustees asked me to serve as president, and I asked to defer my inauguration to remain focused on working through the issues that resulted in our probation. Fifteen months later, with the public sanction of probation removed, we used the occasion of the inauguration to celebrate the commission’s declaration of “phenomenal progress” and “a significant institutional turnaround.”

Leading change, especially when the stakes are high and the pressure is on, is a perilous journey. For those holding a third-class ticket, it can be a paradox of joy, hope and triumph in the midst of struggles. When the pressure is on, a few rules of the road can help keep you moving in the right direction.

Demonstrate Grit
The first decision a leader makes is whether to commit to the journey. There are at least three options when the pressure mounts: flee, step forward while maintaining an emergency exit strategy or commit fully without looking back.

I was serving as provost and vice president for academic affairs when things started unraveling at Vanguard. Friends and colleagues outside the university began calling and advising me to exit. The president resigned the morning the accreditation team arrived on campus for our site visit. I remember walking across the campus to greet the visit team and thinking, It’s going to be an interesting week.

That was only the beginning. Four months later, the interim president resigned. In an emergency meeting, the executive committee of the board and the executive presbyters of the Southern California District asked me to become acting president. After a scathing visit team report, we had one month to prepare to face the entire accrediting commission with a request to delay a decision until their next meeting in June.

I remember glancing at the red exit sign over the door and hearing the voices of friends encouraging me to take option one: flee. In the midst of the chaos, there was also a quiet voice that asked, “What if this is why you came to VU?”

In that moment, I chose option three. Survive or die, I would fully commit to this journey with Vanguard. I was about to discover whether I and an entire university, board and presbyters would have the perseverance to make the journey.

Angela Duckworth in Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance studied high achievers and concluded they had what she called grit — that blend of passion and perseverance, a kind of ferocious determination to work hard with focus and direction. Scripture calls it endurance and perseverance.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great a cloud of witnesses, let us also throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:1-2).

There are times in a perilous journey when sheer grit and determination are insufficient to produce the will to persevere against all odds. Sometimes in such moments, hope arises unbidden. I used my morning commute to pray. Most mornings, my prayer was “God, when we come through this, it will be miraculous and for Your glory.”

Most mornings, my prayer was “God, when we come through this, it will be miraculous and for Your glory.”

A few mornings, my “when” became an “if”: “God, if we come through this …”

And on three occasions, my prayer became a question: “God, have You called me to give hospice care to Vanguard?”

One of the darkest moments was the Friday afternoon in late February when the commission letter arrived. They granted our request to defer a decision until June, but they issued eight seemingly impossible demands and mandated a second site visit in May. That evening, for the first time, I said out loud, “We might not make it.”

While hope is not a strategy, it is essential in a perilous journey. It came in the wee hours of the next morning as I recalled two stories.

The first was that of Elijah, who climbed Mount Carmel to pray for rain and sent his servant out six times to look toward the sea. On the seventh time, his servant reported, “A cloud as small as a man’s hand is rising from the sea” (1 Kings 18:44).

The answer to a prophet’s prayer was one miniscule cloud. But from that tiny cloud, a storm arose that ended the drought. It occurred to me that a small window of time to make huge changes was our equivalent of a tiny cloud, and a tiny cloud on the far horizon is enough when God is in it.

The second story was more immediate and personal. The previous spring I sat with a friend as her husband, David, endured more than nine hours of surgery to repair an aortic dissection. Doctors estimated his chance of survival was three percent. Yet five months after surgery, David returned to work. My friends later wrote that the only explanation was “but God.” Their tiny cloud of hope was a three percent chance of survival, surrounded by exceptional care and faithful prayers.

A three percent chance of survival and a tiny cloud is enough in God’s hands. I shared this the following Monday when I met with campus leaders to outline the work we would have to accomplish in just a few months if Vanguard would survive.

Both stories reminded me of J.R.R. Tolkien’s eucatastrophe, a term he coined in The Tolkien Reader to refer to the sudden turn of events at the end of a story that resulted in the leading character’s good fortune. By affixing the Greek eu, meaning “good,” to catastrophe, Tolkien captured the essence of the best cliff­hangers — an impossible situation suddenly turning to good. This is repeated throughout Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series until finally, against all odds, two unlikely hobbits achieve the ultimate quest. Scripture is filled with eucatastrophe moments that inspire us today: Noah surviving the flood, Joseph surviving his brothers’ betrayal and false imprisonment, David defeating a giant, young Hebrews stepping into a fiery furnace, Israelites crossing the Red Sea and the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, which Tolkien called the greatest eucatastrophe in history.

Confront Reality with Hope
In times of change, leaders must courageously face the full reality of the situation while sustaining hope. The challenge is maintaining honesty and transparency, while providing a vision for a way forward with a well-founded hope.

While hope is not a strategy, it is essential in a perilous journey.

In his preface to Transparency, Warren Bennis says, “organizations need candor the way the heart needs oxygen.” The temptation is to minimize the bleakness of the situation, soften the language of the challenge, ignore reality, hope the situation will get better on its own or make modest changes around the fringes while avoiding the magnitude of issues that contributed to the present situation and the magnitude of changes required to move forward.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins found that leaders of great companies “maintained unwavering faith that they would not just survive, but prevail as a great company. And yet, at the same time, they became relentlessly disciplined at confronting the most brutal facts of their current reality.”

Over the years, I have collected and continue to build a library and portfolio of resources on leadership and strategic planning. But only one book contains words that give life. Scripture is replete with stories of those who faced reality and persevered against all odds. These Bible stories inspired me long before the adventure of leading Vanguard and continue to inspire and sustain me today.

Embrace Change
Among a collection of small motivational books on my shelf is one by Mac Anderson and Tom Feltenstein titled Change Is Good... You Go First: 21 Ways to Inspire Change.^. Leading change is hard. A favorite African proverb says, “When you pray, move your feet.” We did both.

Leadership is about mobilizing people for change. In Women and Leadership: The State of Play and Strategies for Change Harvard professor Ronald Heifetz believes the most successful change does three things: preserves the best of an institution’s history, discards what is no longer relevant and innovates in ways that allow the institution to thrive in the face of new challenges. That sounds simple, but doing it successfully is anything but simple. Heifetz says change attracts conflict. He makes the point that “the tough issues are tough because they often involve losses when roles need redefinition, areas of incompetence need exposure, and loyalties require refashioning.”

That was certainly the case at Vanguard. Some read the accreditation and financial reports and recognized that the university was in a crisis that threatened its life and that things would have to change. Others doubted the situation’s seriousness, believing I and a few others exaggerated the crisis to force unnecessary and damaging changes.

Many think leading change looks like this — a nice linear progression.

In reality, leading change includes periods of confusion and chaos, steps forward, steps backward and more confusion. I texted this image to a vice president during one of those periods of confusion and resistance, with the message that the goal is not to stop in periods of chaos, but to keep moving forward.

During one of those times of resistance and chaos, I printed the number 24 and placed it in a small picture frame that I would see whenever I looked up from my computer. The number 24 reminded me that on the night of His betrayal, Christ washed 24 feet, not 22, or two, or none. Christlike leaders serve and care for all in their community, including those who disagree with needed change and even those who launch personal attacks.

Grieve the Losses
On one particularly exhausting day, I thought of the Israelites after their exodus from Egypt. They were tired of manna, tired of the journey, tired of their leader and longing to return to the familiarity of Egypt. A bit later, they actually debated killing Moses.

I also thought of the group of Israelites that returned from Babylonian exile to Jerusalem to restore the temple. At the laying of the new foundation, some shouted for joy, while others wept loudly.

These stories remind me that embracing change means accepting and grieving losses. It may be the loss of resources, a colleague, a program, a way of doing business, privileges once held, the familiarity of traditions or a sense of security. The challenge for a leader is to live with the paradox of a community’s legitimate and concurrent expressions of joy and sorrow while moving forward.

Love the Community
As I prepared my inaugural address at Vanguard University in the fall of 2010, a recurring question intruded into my thoughts and prayers: Do you love Vanguard?

I talked with a friend, who shared her own story of serving 15 years with Wycliffe Bible Translators in Malaysia among the Tagal people. In her fifth year of service, she joined a remembrance ceremony for a village chief who had died. On the third day of the ceremony, her heart broke as she wept with her friends. At that moment, she realized God had given her a deep love for the Tagal people. She had gone to the mission field because she loved Jesus.

She then said, “My prayer is that you will realize what we see clearly: how much you already love Vanguard.”

A few weeks later, as I looked out at the Vanguard community, I indeed felt an overwhelming sense of love for the people who had sacrificed and endured so much.

In their latest book, The Truth About Leadership, James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner present 10 truths of leadership. Their final truth is that love is the soul of leadership. Loving the community is not a cloak to don like academic regalia and then return to its storage bag until the next official event. It is a daily choice. It is costly. It motivates and inspires us to work hard, persevere, sacrifice, weep, laugh and make hard decisions. When we open our hearts to loving our communities deeply, leading change takes on a more profound significance, motivation and joy. It is the Jesus way of leading. 

Closing Reflection
Today, Vanguard University continues its mission and is thriving under the leadership of President Mike Beals. I am living the new adventure of serving my alma maters, Evangel University and the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary. On my wall hangs an authentic third-class stagecoach ticket, and on my desk is the framed 24. Both remind me of how I want to serve, especially under pressure.

Dr. CAROL TAYLOR, Ph.D., is president of Evangel University and is an ordained Assemblies of God minister. In 2011, she received the Orange County Business Journal Women in Business Award, and in 2014 she was named to the 24th class of Most Influential Women in Springfield. This article was adapted from her chapter in Thriving in Leadership: Strategies for Making a Difference in Christian Higher Education, Karen A. Longman, ed., published by Abilene Christian University Press, acupressbooks.com. Used with permission.

This article originally appeared in the October/November issue of Influence. For more print content, subscribe.