lifeasmission
exploring the mystery of life and mission as one and the same
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Archive of "leadership" Category
2010 Ecclesia National Gathering Reflections
UPDATE: Be sure to check out what other bloggers are saying about their experience at this gathering.
Dave Fitch here and here, Ben Sternke, J.R. Briggs, Todd Hiestand, Drew Hart, and Geoff Holsclaw (not quite real). I’ll add more as I become aware of them.
John Chandler is in.
Here’s Geoff Holsclaw’s real one.
Bob Hyatt provides his reflections here.
Jason Salamun, new to Eclclesia, reviews his time here.
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The missional community Amy and I are a part of, Life on the Vine, is a part of Ecclesia,
a relational network of churches, leaders and movements that seek to equip, partner and multiply missional churches and movements.
Before I offer some reflections on the national gathering that just concluded, I wanted to mention a few of the unique features of Ecclesia that compel me to appreciate this network more than others.
The Kingdom of God. As opposed to one particular understanding of the gospel, Eccelsia finds unity in Jesus’ message of the Kingdom thus making room for those who articulate the good news in different ways.
Relationships/Partnerships. Through and through, Ecclesia is relationally driven. They exhibit no desire for the network to be central, but rather labor to facilitate relationships and partnerships between leaders and churches.
Affirmation of Women. We still have work to do in this area, but especially at this years gathering which featured a husband wife team as keynote presenters, we put on display what I hope continues to emerge as as a stated value for the importance of men and women partnering in ministry.
I could probably add more, but on to the reflections I go.
Dallas Willard and Bob & Mary Hopkins were the speakers for the main sessions. Todd Hunter was supposed to be there as well, but needed to cancel for personal and understandable reasons.
Dallas was brilliant. Wisdom seemed to pour out of this man as he spoke. His main theme through the week was “knowledge.” He wasn’t speaking of the intellectual/factual sort of knowledge, but the relational/experiential sort. His aim seemed to be that we would be known not just for what we do, but what we deeply, personally, and powerfully know to be true about God and life in God’s Kingdom.One of the topics Dallas took up in a break out session was that of religious pluralism. Central to that conversation was the issue of homosexuality. As he so often does Dallas reframed the trajectory of the conversation by commenting,
I think homosexuality is a disastrous lifestyle, but heterosexuality ain’t doing so good either. And if it weren’t for the failings of heterosexuality, homosexuality may not be such a huge issue.
This is what Dallas does best. He brings a frame of reference that just isn’t on the radar for so many people. For Dallas, the main issue is always is our nuanced journey into Christlike character as opposed to simple doctrinal statements or moral judgments.
Bob & Mary Hopkins were equally excellent. Mainly they talked about the functioning of teams and incarnational/contextual issues of church planting and ministry.They shared from their years of experience with church planting and equipping church leaders and teams in the UK.
Everything that Willard and the Hopkins’ had to say was insightful and helpful, but I don’t think it was my favorite part of the week. My favorite part of the week was the consistency and pervasiveness of voices from within the network. A big part of this was the size of the gathering – capped at 200. But more than that, the structure of the gathering featured panel sessions, extended Q&A sessions, and specific opportunities for us to hear, both as a large group and via breakout sessions, from those who are leading local churches within the network.
I may have some more thoughts that surface later, but for now, here’s the twitter stream (#eng2010) from the conference as well as the live blog we used. The audio from the conference should be available soon and I’ll be sure to let you know when it is.
Transitioning Traditional Churches into Missional Ones
A little over a week ago, my cousin-in-law Josh, asked how one might go about transitioning traditional churches into “something more missional at its core.” Since I have banged my head against this wall for years in several different churches, my response will be a mixture of, “here’s where I failed,” and “here’s what I think is most helpful.” For anyone who might have missed them, my posts on, “The Move: The Journey from Attractional to Missional,” and “What is Missional?” would be really helpful in understanding where I am coming from.
I should say a few things at the beginning to help frame my thoughts.
1) This is a wine skins issue (Mt. 9:17). Anyone considering this topic who thinks (whether they realize it or not) that this is basically about getting new wine into old wine skins is destined for frustration and failure – I speak from experience! Missional churches represent brand new wine skins, not just new wine.
2) This takes a long time. The most experienced people will tell you 8-10 years minimum. When we are talking about changing the core identity of, not just a person, but a community, we have to expect a long hard road. An apt analogy – God got Israel out of Egypt in pretty short order, but it took another 40 years to get Egypt out of Israel.
3) No one person is capable of maneuvering this transition. Solo pastors are dead in the water in this regard. And this isn’t to say that the better way is having a team of top-down leaders – this will end up being damaging as well. One of the keys to instilling missional DNA in a church community is inspiring and encouraging new imagination from the bottom.
Those things being said, what does it take? What might the process look like?
My short answer is,
A Spirit-guided intermingling of communal practices, teaching, and prayerful reflection.
Here’s my slightly-longer expansion on those three things.
I take for granted that fundamental to the distinctions of “traditional” and “missional” is a vision of what it means to be the church in Post-Christendom vs. Christendom. My personal opinion (others may disagree) is that there is no point in talking about what it means to be a missional church until Christendom has been rejected as a cultural value. Thus, transitioning traditional churches to missional ones is a non-linear process of deconstruction and reconstruction. Communal practices, teaching, and reflection are the tools which assist in this ongoing task. It would be a (classically modern) mistake to think of this as a mainly intellectual enterprise. Instead, in the integration of these things, deconstruction and reconstruction happen alongside one another.
Since there is no universal model to apply to this topic, we are better served by asking general questions that need to be answered in specific contexts. Here are some questions which I think would serve us well in maneuvering this sort of transition.
– In both small numbers as well as large, what are the practices we can engage in as a community that will shape us into people and “a people” who think and act like Jesus?
– As we try to be honest with ourselves, what things are we doing as a community that don’t seem to be contributing to our spiritual formation?
– How do we incorporate space in our times together (in homes, in meetings, in gatherings) to intentionally reflect on and respond to what we sense God is speaking and doing in our community?
– Who are those in our community who seem most gifted to teach (identified by the fruit of their teaching helping people become more like Jesus)? How can we encourage these people to engage with authors and speakers who are dealing with the subject of missional ecclesiology on our behalf?
– How do we make incremental yet strategic changes in the percentage of money that goes to those things which ensure our security as opposed to those things which necessitate faith in the midst of great risk?
Over and above questions like these, I would also suggest these sort of biblical principles for those who shoulder the responsibility for a transition like this:
– Find people of peace who can be trusted and are willing to commit to the journey. Ask for their help.
– Demonstrate servant leadership by being open, transparent, and broken.
– Commit to structures of biblical conflict resolution. Entrust to God’s care those who choose to leave (there will be many and this is not necessarily a sign of poor leadership).
OK, there’s some initial thoughts. I’m sure I’ll have more so I hope to continue the discussion by way of comments.
What do Missional Leaders Think About the Future of Theological Education?
While I really enjoyed writing out my own thoughts on a missional vision of theological education at the end of last year, I was really wanting to get around a bunch of missional leaders to get their opinions on some key questions. Being at the Missional Learning Commons two weekends ago was a great opportunity to do just that.
Here were the questions we wresteled with…
1) What are the skills necessary for missional leadership which differ from those needed for pastoral roles within Christendom?
2) Currently, what are the most important resources that seminaries have to offer for the equipping of missional leaders/communities?
3) What resources for the formation of missional leaders/communities are offered through other avenues?
4) To whatever extent I feel prepared to live or lead missionally, the thing which has equipped me most in that regard is…
You can see how people responded to those questions here.
I also invited everyone who attended to do a brief online survey answering some different questions on the same topic. If you’d like to participate, you can find the survey here.
And of course, for the sake of discussion, feel free to offer any responses here in the comment section.
Cultivating Missional Communities (& the Rozko’s)
In a new book, Fresh + Re:Fresh: Church Planting and Urban Mission in Canada Post-Christendom, Dave Fitch offers an introductory chapter entitled, “Fifty Years of Church Planting: the Story as I See it…” in which he summarizes the dominant approaches to church planting over the last few decades and discusses some of the major differences within Post-Christendom.
In speaking of the differences in the multiplication of church communities in Christendom vs. Post-Christendom, Fitch says,
Among the new missional leaders, church is the name we give to a way of life, not a set of services. We do not plant an organized set of services; we inhabit a neighborhood as the living embodied presence of Christ.
In agreement, I’d say that “cultivating missional communities” might be a better way to describe what we have more often known as “church planting.” In that vein, Fitch goes on to talk about the sorts of leaders necessary to cultivate missional communities suggesting that…
– they will be survivors
…the new missional community leaders must have patience, steady faithfulness and the ability to live simply. They must be able to get jobs and not see the ministry as a privileged full time vocation. They must have a mental image of how they are going to sustain their lives financially, relationally, spiritually and personally.
– they will be communal shepherds
They are not starting and managing an organization. They may not even be good at organization. Instead they are cultivating a communal sense of mission identity among a gathering people ‘for this time and place.’
– they will be interpretive leaders
Interpretive leaders do not dictate from the pulpit a list of do’s and don’ts and solutions from God for every problem. They interpret the Scriptures to open our eyes to what God is doing and where He is taking us. In other words, they cultivate other interpreters/listeners.
– they will be directors of spiritual formation
We must ever navigate against putting on a show that will attract; rather we must develop a liturgy that is simple, accessible and Scriptural and that guides our lives into Christ and guards us from the distractions that would take us away from Mission. …there will be no missional community of people formed and shaped for mission if we just preach Mission as a legalistic requirement. Mission requires patience, a sense of vision and a level of self-denial that can only be formed inwardly in living bodies, trained in the simple organic disciplines/liturgies of the historic church.
– they will be leaders who give away power
Hierarchy is the product of Christendom. It hails to a day when Christianity still held power in society… It is my belief therefore that missional leadership needs always to be multiple. Most missional pastors/leaders need to be bi-vocational (bi-ministerial) for their own survival. Such leaders must learn to mutually submit to the other leaders as they guide the journey of the community. They must mutually learn to mentor leaders and give away power.
A final insight from the chapter is this little gem,
This kind of leader often does not come from our (all too often) modernist seminaries. They are grown in a community which gathers to worship the Triune God so as to discern Him at work in our midst. (my thoughts on that here)
Beginning the year with this post is no coincidence. Amy and I have committed to serve alongside others from Life on the Vine to help cultivate a new missional community in 2010. There’s a lot more questions than answers at this point, but we’re excited to see what God might do as we make ourselves available.
While I am sure to offer tid bits on this process on the blog from time to time, if you would like to get the inside scoop on a regular basis as someone who would commit to be praying for us, leave a comment or let us know through the contact page. Peace to you in the New Year and thanks for your prayers & support.
Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Cultural Pioneering
Previous posts in this Series:
Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness | Character Formation | Conviction Shaping | Contextual Training
Christendom bore no real need for leaders who were cultural pioneers. After all, if the culture is already Christian, what do we have to pioneer? It would be logical to conclude then, that as Christendom crumbles, the need for leaders with the skills for cultural pioneering would increase. This would be true and mistaken at the same time. It’s true that we have a greater and greater need for cultural pioneers, but the crumbling of Christendom isn’t the reason. Rather, a missional vision of the church carries with it an inherent need for leaders who serve as cultural pioneers which means we need a vision of theological education capable of equipping men and women for this task.
Allow me to offer just 2 basic points to support my argument for this need.
First, missional churches operate out of the assumption that mission is part of God’s very character and nature. God sends the son, the Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit, the Trinity sends the Church as the Body of Christ. Little wonder then that missional church leaders lament the modern phenomenon of churches playing the role of vendors of religious goods and services that spend the bulk of their time, energy, and money trying to get people to come. Missional churches are not those who focus on offering the best “Christian” stuff (teaching, programs, groups, etc.), but those who focus on engaging with world’s darkest and toughest needs.
Second, missional churches tend to be marked by their attention to Jesus’ announcement of the good news of God’s Kingdom, the new reality inaugurated in Jesus. Just as Jesus stood at odds with the culture of his day on account of his allegiance to God’s Kingdom, so too the missional church of today will find itself at odds with the culture of our day as we seek to embody God’s Kingdom through faith in Jesus. To understand the local church as an expression of a new reality, however, means that we recognize the need for leaders capable of cultural pioneering.
Current models of theological education seem to come up short in terms of their fit to equip male and female leaders on both these counts. How then are we to go about doing so? I offer three ideas for the training of cultural pioneers.
1) Deep involvement in a missional community
There is no better way to learn how to be a cultural pioneer that to participate in a community that is seeking to do this very thing. My hope and expectation would be that to a great degree, the various aspects of this missional vision of theological education that I have been describing would all serve to produce leaders who think and act in terms of cultural pioneering. I have a hard time imagining that someone could give themselves to a process of formation that is rooted in community and centered around character formation through the shaping of Kingdom convictions and contextual training and emerge as someone who would rather manage a program driven group of individuals than lead a community into the world as an expression of God’s alternative reality.
2) Encourage Cultural Creation & Cultivation
I am indebted to Andy Crouch and his book, Culture Making, for my thinking (and language) on this. The power and trajectory of Christendom resulted in a church that, at various times, thought of “culture” as some monolithic thing that it could condemn, critique, copy, or consume. Only now, as we increasingly find ourselves on the margins of society, are we rediscovering the postures of creating and cultivating culture. We create culture through values, practices, and imagination. However, as Crouch says,
We cannot make culture without culture. And this means that creation begins with cultivation – taking care of the good things culture has already handed on to us. The first responsibility of culture makers is not to make something new but to become fluent in the cultural tradition to which we are responsible. Before we can be culture makers, we must be culture keepers.
This leads us directly to the third ingredient in forming cultural pioneers.
3) Practicing Discernment
The need for skilled discernment is going nowhere but up! Never before in human history has so much information and so many opinions been so easily accessible. Add to this the pervasive individualism and relativism of Western culture and you are left with a cultural nightmare for those who believe in such a thing as contextual faithfulness to biblical truth. As Jesus’ disciples were, we must be taught to see, hear, and feel with eyes, ears, and hearts attuned to the reality of the Kingdom of God in our midst. How are we ever to create culture unless we can discern our way through it as followers of Jesus? This takes years of practice within community and remains a lifelong discipline.
Are there other aspects of cultural pioneering that you think I’m missing? How else might we equip others to this end? Anxious for your (end of the year and end of the series!) thoughts.
Toward A Missional Vision of Theological Education: Contextual Training
Previous posts in this Series:
Preliminary Thoughts | The Root of the Problem | The Fruit of the Problem | New Soil | Community Rootedness | Character Formation | Conviction Shaping
I have tried to make a case that a missional vision of theological education is one rooted in community that emphasizes the formation of Christan character marked by Kingdom convictions. I would further suggest that a missional vision of theological education will seek to train leaders contextually.
This is missiology 101. Urban ministry is different than suburban. Ministry amongst the poor is different than ministry amongst the affluent. Ministry with adolescents is different than ministry with senior citizens. Traditional theological education, however, is not equipped to train people with these nuances in mind. The dominant expression of theological education within Christendom has been training at geographically specific institutions. These schools of course bring their own context to bear on the training they are doing, but are necessarily limited by that same feature. Geography isn’t the only problem, the very model of education employed in the seminary environment distances, if not outright separates, theological education from contextual factors. Some schools have begun trying to correct this problem through online education, allowing students to continue serving in their present context while doing intensive biblical & theological study. As I said here, these innovations within the current system of theological education are helpful, but they aren’t aimed at the other aspects of missional theological education that I have already covered. So, the question before us is,Within a missional vision of theological education, how will contextual leadership development take place?
I can think of at least three aspects of a beginning answer to that question.
1) Networks
Church networks are the missional answer to the decay of denominations. For good or for bad, denominations are crumbling. In an era of post’s (post-modernity, post-Christendom, etc.) you can add to the list post-denominationalism. Springing up in their place are inter-denominational networks of churches. In my opinion, the best of these are striving to make a shared vision of missional living more central than individual points of doctrine. Besides always being rooted in a particular context, the realities of globalization and pluralism mean that no one congregation has the capacity to train leaders for the church of the future by itself. It must look outside. If leaders are to be identified by local communities and if these same communities are to take primary responsibility for their holistic formation and contextual training, then meaningful involvement in a healthy network of missional churches through the sharing of resources and common ministry is a big part of how we accomplish the contextual training of leaders.
2) Apprenticeship
The most valuable resources to the spiritual formation & training of leaders are men and women who offer years of faithful service within a given context. Reading, writing, and peer discussion all have a vital place in the formation of missional church leaders, but all of these dimensions gain their final value in terms of their practical implications in a given context. Seasoned leaders are invaluable in helping to achieve this goal. Cultivating missional church leaders who have the skills necessary to help a body of people understand the gospel and its implications in contextually appropriate ways calls for a mentor-apprentice(s) dimension to any process of theological education.
3) Civic Engagement
Civic engagement needs to increasingly become a hallmark of both missional church ministry and leadership formation. Immersion has long been a defining mark of truly cross-cultural ministry. Therefore, those churches who embrace the West as a mission field should immediately resonate with the idea that the best way to become incarnationally faithful is to immerse themselves in their context. The reason for this is at least 2-fold 1) To discover where and how God is already at work. 2) To discern what incarnationally faithful witness to the gospel will mean and look like.
If it’s not already obvious, this aspect of a missional vision of theological education is tied directly to the centrality of the Missio Dei for a missional ecclesiology. A big part of what makes missional churches missional is their abdication of attractional approaches to church and ministry in favor of incarnational ones. All that Jesus said and did was said and done in light of the people he was speaking to and the place he was speaking in. In both ministry and leadership formation, we do well to follow this pattern of contextual wisdom.
What has your experience with contextual leadership training been? Do you see other ways to accomplish this goal in or outside of traditional models of theological education?
In my next post, I hope to round things off with some thoughts on cultural pioneering as a final mark of a missional vision of theological education.
Hi There…
Hey, I'm JR - welcome to the blog.
I'm just an average guy trying to shape his identity around God's dream for the world and his place in it. This blog is a place for me (and you!) to reflect on and discuss all that might mean. Looking for a bit more on me? Check out the about me. Peace.
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