We Come to the End, Tuesday, April 26, 2005

What a marvelous semester we've had together. You've worked hard and I've been privileged to learn alongside you. Thank you for bringing the gifts you each bring to class each week. I have the joy of watching such marvelous new things emerge--new insights, old ones reaffirmed and strengthened, community being formed among us, models and vision for future ministry identified. It is truly a treat to be a teacher (and therefore a learner among you).

The blog this week is a place for you to make your final statements and reflections about the course if you wish, and/or to write your final questions about the readings. I hope for some rich summary work on this page this week.

Christ go with you wherever he may send you:
May he guide you through the wilderness,
And guide you through the storm.
May he carry you rejoicing at the wonders he may show you;
May he guide your every step into the marvel of his will.
Amen.

Leaders Help Disciples "Go Out" with God, Our Theme for Tuesday, April 19, 2005

In my first congregation I realized very early on that if I was going to allow myself to get boxed up inside the four walls of the building and spend my time ony with church members I would soon lose every ounce of passion I once felt for the gospel. Early in my sense of call, John 20.21 had spoken powerfully to me, drawing me into the missional life. Being a chaplain to church folk, while important, was not the only thing I was called to do and be. I wanted to make sure that I still could feel the wind on my face.

And so I resolved to create a practice that would keep me balancing my work between the concerns of the congregation and the call of the church to me in the world in mission. I blocked out a time budget for my week. Mondays I labeled "Colleagues"--among other things, on Mondays I focused on staff, elders, and volunteer leaders. Tuesday were "Consituents" days. On Tuesday I scheduled counseling and home or office visitations. I called Wednesday my "Crowds" day--the day I got out into the community, sometimes walking the streets meaninglessly on the hill behind the church, other days connecting with a struggling but daring community center serving the inner city poor (regardless, I disciplined myself to find some way to get out and feel the wind). Thursdays and Fridays were for worship and teaching preparation, reading and writing. Quieter days.

Of course, life rarely fits neatly into boxes like these. But this construction of my week did give me focus and it insured that there in the middle was a day to "go out" with God in mission. It saved my ministry. It gave life to the church as I could authentically say to them, "Come along . . . " And it may well have saved my life.

Al Roxburgh writes: "Programs and activities developed in many congregations are focused on the needs and desires of those already attending and tend to be a barrier between the congregation and its community. Engaging with the community has meant finding wasy of inviting others into the programs of the church. This will not lead to engagement with the community. The leader must help the congregation rethink the focus and direction of its attention and programs."

I think a congregation rarely responds to being told what to do. And a leader who pushes and cajoles a congregation into missional engagement will tire and often times get downright cranky. It's hard to push a donkey from behind. I think we lead the delightful little creature by walking in front, talking her past her fears, inviting her to faith. She might come along. Then again she might not. If she doesn't I've still had a ball being myself and seeing the world.

Leaders Understand the Surrounding Society, Our Theme for Tuesday, April 12, 2005

(Note: Sorry for the delay in this post, I was having trouble logging on to Blogger)

"Leaders Understand the Surrounding Society" . . . This ought to go without saying. Unfortunately, it must be said. Congregations are astonishingly ignorant of the world that surrounds them. At UPC we’re learning that we don’t know much about our real neighbors. For so long we naively believed the mantra “If we build it they will come.” We now realize that that line is really quite silly and runs counter to the ethic of the gospel, but it was so terribly easy to believe—especially when we were both afraid of the world beyond the walls of the church and believed that we didn’t know how to get to know our neighbors. But things are changing. Our reading of the Bible these last six years has challenged our inwardness and called us into our neighborhood. We are now looking to our neighbors not as projects but as partners; we now aim not to bring Jesus to our neighbors but to meet Jesus who has already been among them. As one of our leaders puts it, “We want to learn how to be genuine friends” with our neighbors. Friendship is a prerequisite to true understanding—we understanding our neighbors and our neighbors understanding us. We believe there is gospel in this.

“Leaders shape environments that increase people’s understanding of the social and cultural forces shaping their lives. Such understanding occurs as people learn two kinds of interconnected skills. The one is discovering how to read their context, to see beneath the surface of ‘facts’ and events to deeper levels of meaning. To do this, people will need to learn to ask new questions of their contexts and the church. The other skill is empowering people with ways of letting the biblical narratives ask their own questions of our social context. Understanding contexts a dual process in which you lead people into reading their contexts from new perspectives and give them the tools that allow the Bible to address them in this social context. This kind of leadership will be done at all levels of the congregation’s life. It will not be limited to those more formal times of teaching or preaching. It happens most effectively as the congregation learns skills of listening and informal dialog about their contexts.” —Alan Roxburgh

Leaders Foster Missional Practices, Our Theme for Tuesday, April 5, 2005

Over the course of Western history, Christianity and Western culture because essentially fused. The church became an agent of the state. This domestication of the gospel (by a church long enamored with cultural and political privilege) seduced the church away from its preoccupation with the mission of God and toward a way of life that required it simply to serve as a dispenser of religious goods and services to a largely Christianized culture. Believing that the larger culture would prop up its values, it lost its sense of what it means to practice the way of Jesus as an alterative to the ways (good and evil) of the principalities and powers that dominate society. So identified with the cultures in which it lived, the church forgot how and why it ever needed to take seriously the formation of a peculiar people who live by a peculiar set of outlooks and practices.

“In this post-Christendom period where growing numbers of North Americans have little memory of the Christian story and less sense of how Christian formation occurs, one of the most critical leadership issues for the innovation of a missional church is the capacity to form communities of God’s people around practices of Christian life. This is why the dominant metaphor of leadership needs to change from pastor to abbot. Such practices will vary depending on the tradition that has shaped a specific community of Christians. But it is clear that at the core of missional leadership lies the capacity to form communities around such practices. The leadership challenge at this moment is that most church leaders have not been equipped or trained in this kind of formation. Here is an area where leadership is not about learning new skills but recovering ways of leading that once were at the heart of Christian formation.” —Alan Roxburgh

Leaders Cultivate a Missional Environment, Our Theme for Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Over the next two weeks we will explore the specific kind of congregational culture/ environment that can enable people to practice a way of life that is open to missional innovation.

Alan Roxburgh says, "A culture is an environment in which people are shaped by common habits, values and practices. Culture is about a way of life that is more than any single individual or an aggregate of individuals doing similar things. A missional culture is an interdepedent system formed out of a set of common habits, practices, and values. Developing a missional culture is about the formation of a way of life generally not present in current congregations. A congregation with a missional culture understands mission not in terms of what it does, but who it is as God's people. This requires a radical shift in imagination. In order to make this shift possible, you need capacities to create processes whereby people continually engage in dialog with the gospel narratives, their tradition and the context in which they are located."

You will not make this shift by attending the next Willow Creek conference or by reading missional church books. This shift is the fruit of cultivating an open way of life that is right for "this people" among whom you are planted, and is learned only by being among them. There are no short term solutions, no formulas. You must learn to know this people, to love them, to hurt with them, and to celebrate what they celebrate.

Leaders Encourage a Highly Relational Culture, Our Theme for Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Margaret Wheatley says, “Order is never imposed from the top down or from the outside in. Order emerges as elements of the system work together, discovering each other and together inventing new capacities” (Leadership and the New Science: 111). I wonder how a thorough-going Trinitarian theology might inform this and complete a statement like this. And I wonder why we Trinitarians have too frequently ignored the relational-communal ethics inherent in our theology—especially when it comes to the ministry of congregational leadership.

From subatomic particle and field theory to a theology of the Trinity to how a ruling elder votes at a Council meeting, relationships are everything. The universe is created in such a way that there's no way of predicting how one relationship will affect another; there are invisible yet powerful influences at work no matter the distance between entities. Obviously, a congregation will miss much if it lets a few top leaders or several powerful members do the work of discerning the future.

Says Alan Roxburgh, “In the process of innovating a missional imagination a congregation must rethink how the interactions among members actually occur. Decisions and actions made in one area of the congregation’s life create inventions that cannot be predicted but do need to be managed. Because the congregation functions as a system, you must learn to recognize the interdependent nature of all interactions. The key to congregational integration is the ability to understand how the essence of the congregation lies not in its isolated parts but rather in the relationships of the parts to one another. This kind of relational quality cannot be captured on an organizational chart. You will require capacities that enable you to recognize how the behaviors of each part of the congregation are affecting the whole. You will also learn to understand how and why subgroups naturally from in a congregational process undergoing discontinuous change.”

Students, offer your reflective comments on the reading and this theme below.

Leaders Build Action-Oriented Coalitions, Our Theme for Tuesday, March 15, 2005

We've explored the ways in which old, top-down social engineering approaches to ministry are problematic in the post-modern setting in which the church is renegotiating its life and ministry. Cultivating growth is more like farming than engineering. And fostering lasting, systemic change requires serious attentiveness helping a congregation dig deep into the resources given by grace to enable it to embrace God's future that is emerging among them. Hence . . .

"Leadership is about empowerment, mentoring and equipping coalitions of people. Coalitions are not power groups advocating issues or positions. They are centers of energy coalescing around emerging missional imagination. They are settings where people can dialogue about the changes in culture and interface with the biblical narratives. Coalitions help people work with one another discerning call and gift. Coalitions are gatherings of imagination and energy where poeple experiement and innovate ways of engaging their contexts as God's people. They are places where people learn what it is to live with and for their world out of missional practices. A leader cultivates, mentors, and equips such coalitions. The skills and capacities for leading groups of people are different from those of the classic small groups movement. They require more than gathering people together around a study guide or teaching series. Action-oriented coalitions are the creative womb from which missional actions are birthed."

--Alan Roxburgh