Fodder from Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk in The Missional Leader (Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2006)
• "A missional church is a community of God's people who live into the imagination
n that they are, by their very nature, God's missionary people living as a demonstration of what God plans to do in and for all of creation in Christ Jesus." ~ p. xv• "...leadership is about cultivating an environment that innovates and releases the missional imagination present among a community of God's people." ~ p. 5
• "Our point is that the world has changed. Discontinuous change means that many rules and assumptions about leadership now need to be reexamined and rewritten. This does not make those who have led us in the past wrong; it means we are functioning in a different context. Just as a missionary who moves from North America to a different culture must unlearn a lot of habits and skills to learn how to be present and effective in a way that achieves results in the new context, so we pastors and denominational leaders in North America are now in a place where we must all learn new capacities if we are to achieve effective missional results." ~ p. 10
• "The classic skills of pastoral leadership in which most pastors were trained were not wrong, but the level of discontinuous change renders many of them insufficient and often unhelpful at this point. It is as if we are prepared to play baseball and suddenly discover that everyone else is playing basketball. The game has changed and the rules are different." ~ p. 11
• "Simply being skilled at caring for people once they come to the church is not sufficient for engaging the changing context in which a congregation finds itself." ~ pp. 11-13
• "A leader must be able to help a congregation:
+ Understand the extent to which strategic planning and other such models misdirect the church from fiathful witness in our culture.What do you think? How close to reality are these guys? I obviously think they're at least somewhat in the ballpark -- or I wouldn't be giving them the time of day.
+ Create an environment wherein God's people can discern for themselves new forms of life and witness.
+ Thrive in the midst of ambiguity and discontinuity." ~ p. 14
2 comments:
Brad, what exactly is "discontinuous change?" Which would it resemble more:
1) a green leaf turning red
2) An acorn becoming an oak tree
3) an acorn becoming a squirrel
1b) a tree that has always had large green simple leaves starts bearing clusters of smaller compound leaves -- some of which are green, some red, some yellow, some orange... :-)
I think that the "discontinuous change" being discussed needs to be seen in context. There are lots of places where the common assumptions and habits adopted by the masses were not adopted locally. Such places/people have been bucking those pervasive assumptions and trends for a long time -- and some have found the experience painful. These are the people who have been playing basketball while everyone else has been playing baseball. The challenge for such people is getting used to the idea that they will not be going against the flow. Suddenly there are more people playing basketball with them. That's the change they'll have to deal with.
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