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Managing the Stuff. Day 5. Six Critical Issues for Missional Leadership. Missional leadership is the key—but how do we do it? Most models repackage old paradigms. Discontinuous change is the new norm.
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Managing the Stuff Day 5
Missional leadership is the key—but how do we do it? • Most models repackage old paradigms.
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.
Congregations still matter • God chooses to create new futures in the most inauspicious of places. • Leaders need new capacities and frameworks
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 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. The Basic Tension
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.
