Managing the StuffDay 5

Six Critical Issues for Missional Leadership

1. Missional leadership is the key—but how do we do it?

2. Most models repackage old paradigms.

3. Discontinuous change is the new norm. Continuous change develops out

of what has gone before and therefore can be expected, anticipated, and managed.

Discontinuous change is disruptive and unanticipated; it creates situations that challenge our assumptions.

In discontinuous change: Working harder with one’s habitual skills

and ways of working does not address the challenges being faced

An unpredictable environment means new skills are needed.

There is no getting back to normal.

Discontinuous change is dominant in periods of history that transforms a culture forever, tipping it over into something new.

4. Congregations still matter God chooses to create new futures in

the most inauspicious of places.

5. Leaders need new capacities and frameworks

Operating Models of Leadership

Pastoral Missional

Expectation that an ordained pastor must be present at every meeting and event or else it is not validated or important

Ministry staff operate as coaches and mentors within a system that is not dependent on them to validate the importance of every group by being present.

Ordained ministry staff functions to give attention to and take care of people in the church by being present for people as they are needed (if care and attention are given by people other than ordained clergy, it may be more appropriate and effective but is deemed “second class).

Ordained clergy equip and release the multiple ministries of the people of God throughout the church.

Operating Models of Leadership

Pastoral Missional

Time, energy, and focus shaped by people’s “need” and “pain” agendas.

Pastor provides solutions Pastor asks questions that cultivate an environment that engages the imagination, creativity, and gifts of God’s people in order to discern solutions.

“Professional” Christians “Pastoring” must be part of the mix, but not the sum total.

Operating Models of Leadership

Pastoral Missional

Preaching and teach offer answers and tell people what is right and wrong:• Telling• Didactic• Reinforcing assumptions• Principles for living

Preaching and teaching invite the people of God to engage Scripture as a living word that confronts them with questions and draws them into a distinctive world.• Metaphor and stories• Asks new questions

Celebrity (must be a “home run hitter”)

“Peacemaker” Make tension OK.

Operating Models of Leadership

Pastoral Missional

Conflict suppressor or “fixer” Conflict facilitator

Keep playing the whole game as though we are still the major league team and the major league players. Continue the mythology that “this staff is the New York Yankees of the Church world!”

Indwell the local and contextual; cultivate the capacity for the congregation to ask imaginative questions about its present and its next stages.

“Recovery” experts (“make it like it used to be”)

Cultivator of imagination and creativity

Operating Models of Leadership

Pastoral Missional

Function as the manager, maintainer, or resource agent of a series of centralized ministries focused in and around the building that everyone must support. Always seen as the champion and primary support agent for everyone’s specific ministry.

Create and environment that releases and nourishes the missional imagination of all people through diverse ministries and missional teams that affect their various communities, the city, nation, and world with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

6. A congregation is a unique organization

The habits and activities of many congregations and leaders seem disconnected from the purposes to which God calls the church in North America today.

A leader must be able to help a congregation:

◦Understand the extent to which strategic planning and other such models misdirect the church from faithful witness in our culture

◦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.

The Basic TensionThe first is the more basic one: the very

early dilution and reduction of the gospel of the kingdom of God to a manageable religion whose adherents’ concern was their survival as a distinct religious group.

The second “failure” addresses the theme of this gospel reductionism as it relates to the institutional church: the transition of the early Christian movement into an institution.

Modality means the comprehensive, cross-generational, cradle-to-grave Christian community that embraces all followers of Christ, however one distinguishes between the visible and the invisible church.

The intentional, decisional grouping of like-minded Christians who focus their energies upon a particular task with the larker mission of the church, which links us all to each other.

“Its white-hot convictions, poured into the hearts of the first adherents, cooled down and became crystallized codes, solidified institutions, and petrified dogmas. The prophet became a priest of the establishment, charisma became office, and love became routine. The horizon was no longer the world but the boundaries of the local parish. The impetuous missionary torrent of earlier years was tamed into a still-flowing rivulet and eventually into a stationary pond.”

Bosch, Transforming Mission, 53.

If evangelization is becoming truly the heart of ministry, and the church is being continuously converted to greater faithfulness to its missional vocation, then it will look like this:◦Its fundamental commitment is to incarnational

witness.

◦It demonstrates congruence between the gospel it proclaims and the way it goes about its work.

◦It intentionally confronts its conformities.

◦It will be open to its continuing conversion.

Rethinking Revival

Cultural Dynamics(Local factor—What are the essential elements

that make up a local revival?)

People factor—(indigenization): transfer of power to new leadership

Eschatological vision—shift from fatalism to radical hope

Radical community—shift from alienated victims to charismatic family

Evangelical activism—shift from survival mode to transforming mission

Life in the Spirit—”Divine and supernatural light” who produces the four shifts and orchestrates all dynamics

Negative Spiritual Dynamics—new light extremism, old light reaction, spiritual warfare, generational conflict

Spiritual Dynamics (Content Factor—What makes a revival Christian?)

Personal liberation—(indigenization): transfer of power to new leadership

Faith factor—(enculturation): translation of Christian truth into worldview

Justice factor—(contextualization): transformation of status, structures, or systems

Historical Dynamics (Time Factor—How do revivals develop over time?)

Problem stage—volatility that destabilizes systems

Paradigm stage—New light, new leaders, new movements

Power stage—conflict and conquest

Global Dynamics (International Factor—How do global trends

influence local revivals?)

Globalization—winds from the West; Global shrinkage and sameness

Relativization—Crisis of the local: will we survive the West?

Localization—The reassertion of the value of the local

Glocalization—Revival, resurgence and global expansion of the local

Group Dynamics (Variety Factor—Why are Christian revivals so different in

content and character?)

Lukan variable—reviving the evangelical impulse

Galatian variable—returning to the old ways

Corinthian variable—radical break with past

Group conflict—the fight for supremacy