The Missional Leadery by Roxburgh and Romanuk (Part 1, chs 1-3)

Part 1 (chs 1-3)

Skills necessary for a missional leader (12)
-imagination
-ability to engage conflict and make tension OK
-create an environment that releases and nourishes missional imaginations of all people

*I was introduced to this skill in Stan's class on the Gospel Parables. We were encouraged to engage the various meanings, identify the tensions, and live in the ambiguity of what Jesus meant when describing the Kingdom of Heaven. I also learned the importance of releasing and nourishing the imaginations of others by opening up the meaning of the parables to a diverse group of people and creating a dialogue of responses.

Missional Leaders must thrive in the midst of ambiguity and discontinuity. It is important to give vision that will in turn create hope.

"The narrative imagination of Scripture challenges our assumptions about what God is up to in the world and reminds us that leaders can do great things when they align their expectations with God's" (16)

Must take the Incarnation seriously! God is to be found in the most unexpected places.

"God's future is among the regular, ordinary people of God" (20). This is a great reminder that we are worthy not because of our success, but because God deemed us worthy.

We must discern God in change. Ask questions like "Where is God at work in this particular context?" A cultural change - shifting focus from self to God. (24)

The description of pastor as caregiver is accurate. In my time serving churches (especially with aging members) this is what gives someone the title "pastor" - if they care for the congregational needs.

These authors push pastors to be more. Leaders that work the soil so others can cultivate the environment (29).

3 new kinds of awareness that the missional leader must cultivate:
-awareness of what God is doing among the people of the congregation
-awareness of how a congregation can imagine itself as the center of God's activities
-awareness of what God is already up to in the congregation's context (important to remember that God has not left the current church!) (31-32)

Church must be a place to talk about the realities of life - job stress, family issues, hopes, fears, etc. Again, we as missional leaders are called to listen, not to talk or attempt to fix.

Needed change in our use of scripture (34):
"Scripture has become like a bank safety deposit box holding a depository of information and knowledge that can be collected when needed. But all the uses of Scripture as a tool fail to engage it as the narrative presence of God."
-I like the idea of inviting the church staff to live with a piece of scripture for the year as a means of developing skills to listen to God and to one another.

Getting back to these basic Christian habits and practices is important. I've really appreciated the Company of New Pastors for this very reason. As individuals and as a small group, we read scripture daily and pray. This simple practice changes my posture toward God and others.

Ch. 3 Change and Transition: Navigating the Challenges (diagram on p. 41)

Congregations will experience the zones of this cycle:
-emergent zone
-performative zone
-reactive zone

The upper section of the emergent zone (pioneering emergent) values creativity and the ability to adapt. These congregations thrive in ambiguity. The lower section is the experimenting emergent congregations who learn as they go because they are in situations where they have never been before (44). Leadership is bottom-up (shared). Focus is on cultural change, not organizational change. Change is not crisis, but an opportunity to be embraced.

The upper performative zone: organizational culture that focuses on performing well what has worked in the past. The focus is not on creativity, but on passing along knowledge and skills to the new generation. Functions best in stable environments. (45-46). "They resist change that requires them to shift signficantly away from the habits, skills, and capacitites that have brought success" (46).

Characteristices of the Performative Upper Zone:
-specialization of roles and organizational hierarchy
-well developed structure
-leadership is focused on ability to perform required skills for "running" a congregation
-source of knowledge is from experts, not local community
-formal meetings replace informal social interactive

We have experienced the performative zone in the 20th c. N.A. church.

Reactive Zone Congregations: stick to what they know best (past success). They are unwilling to try something new (48).
I believe the two churches I have worked for are experiencing this zone (Conyers Presbyeterian Church and College Park Presbyterian Church).
This zone is what happens when an upper performative congregation experiences discontinuous change.

"In the reactive zone, leaders work harder, for longer hours, and with fewer resources at what they have been doing all along" (49). This is soooo true in the case of College Park. The fight to survive eats away all of the time and energy for imagining new ways of doing church.

Reactive Zone crisis manifested in "battle lines form[ed] around issues other than those that are critical to the life of the system" (52). I think this is true of the PCUSA as a whole.

Reactive lower congregations are confused congregation - marks a period of maximum confusion and discouragement (53).

Performative Lower Zone (55) - congregations have the potential of inviting people to imagine fresh ways of being God's people. Extreme polarity during this stage (those that want to make radical change and those that want to maintain elements of tradition that have shaped them in the past). In this stage, the missional leader must facilitate discussion among the group to address the transition issues. Often leaders and communities go straight to another change and do not deal with the issues of transition (loss, anger, grief, excitement,etc).

So far, I hear a lot of echoes of the core values of the PCUSA - shared leadership (teaching and ruling elders), time to discern and share values with others in community. However, there are so many organizational issues that I am learning as I study for ordination exams that tend to keep us back from re-entering the emergent zone soon. What type of transformation do we need to take as a denomination to give more local levels voice and discern together the presence and will of God so that we can better participate in God's ministry?