The Missional Leader | Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk

Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk. The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World. Jossey-Bass, 2006. 240 pp.

Introduction

The question is familiar: “What do you mean by missional church?” Even though the term is now used everywhere, there is still confusion about it. As we begin this book, here is a brief description of what we mean by the phrase.

God is about a big purpose in and for the whole of creation. The church has been called into life to be both the means of this mission and a foretaste of where God is inviting all creation to go. Just as its Lord is a mission-shaped God, so the community of God’s people exists, not for themselves but for the sake of the work. Mission is therefore not a program or project some people in the church do from time to time (as in “mission trip,” “mission budget,” and so on); the church’s very nature is to be God’s missionary people. We use the word missional to mark this big difference. Mission is not about a project or a budget, or a one-off event somewhere; it’s not even about sending missionaries. A missional church is a community of God’s people who live into the imagination that they are, by their very nature, God’s missionary people living as a demonstration of what God plans to do in and for all of creation in Jesus Christ.

Six Critical Issues for Missional Leadership

This book is written out of the conviction that we need a new approach to leadership for missional communities. We come away from countless encounters with pastoral teams and denominational executives with the pressing sense that the tools and resources they are using will not address the critical issue of forming missional communities of the Kingdom in a time of rapid, discontinuous change. We believe there are six critical issues in developing a missional leadership in our day.

Issue One: Missional Leadership is the Key–But How Do You Do It?

There’s a lot of good theological and biblical conversation going on about creating missional churches and communities, but little sense of or assistance for how such leadership can actually be developed. Alan was sitting in the office of a denominational executive talking about the church’s need for change. This executive had read the book Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America. He turned to Alan and said, “I love this missional theology. I believe in what you folks are saying. The critique of culture, the evaluation of the church and the theology are wonderful. But what do I do with it? Pastors come into my office asking me for help. And I know that just giving them ‘how-to’ programs isn’t going to help them.

“But neither is this book. It’s too academic. Most of my pastors will read it and have no idea what to do with it at the end (if they understand it at all). You see, when a pastor walks into my office and asks for help with other kinds of issues or problems, I can reach onto my shelf and pull off any number of programs that will help them know what to do. But this missional conversation is just that: it’s a conversation, but there’s nothing to help us know how to do it in the real life of our congregation.” . . .

Leaders are eager to engage in the missional/emergent conversation, but their most pressing questions suggest they’re struggling to make sense of how to actually lead in this new way after they go back home.

Issue Two: Most Models Repackage Old Paradigms

In response to demand, numerous books are being published with missional language in the title. What is disappointing about most of these books is that they use missional language to repackage the familiar language of church effectiveness, church growth, and church health. In other words, the writers have not engaged the nature of the change a missional paradigm requires and are simply offering a few more good tactics for doing the same thing more effectively. Leadership models are borrowed from psychology (counselor, therapist), medicine (health and healer), the business world (strategist, coach, manager), and the educational world (teacher). A lot of congregations and leaders have been socialized to view these models as the only viable ones. . . .

In their own context and setting—medicine, the business world, counseling—these images of leadership are appropriate, but when the church borrows and applies such models to the community of God’s people it misses an opportunity to shape leadership around the biblical sense, in which leadership is about cultivating an environment that innovates and releases the missional imagination present among a community of God’s people. What do we mean by the language of “environment”? We use the word in much the same way as we would say we want to create an environment that enables our children to thrive. In other words, what are the skills, capacities, and habits that we as parents would want to cultivate that give our children all the things they need to thrive? When we talk about the water quality of a lake, we seek to describe those elements in the water that contribute to the fish in the lake thriving, or making sure that what we put into the lake as human beings helps to maintain high-quality water for drinking and swimming. In other words, we cannot make our children into what they will become, just as we cannot make water in that sense. But in both cases we can, as parents or responsible citizens, set the context for the child or the lake to thrive as it should. In the same way, missional leadership is about creating an environment within which the people of God in a particular location may thrive.

Issue Three: Discontinuous Change is the New Norm

Almost every book one picks up these days and most conferences on leadership begin with the same theme: our culture is in the midst of rapid, extensive transformation at every level. We are moving through a period of volatile, discontinuous change. Change is always happening; that’s not the issue. There are two kinds of change we want to consider in this book: continuous and discontinuous. Let us illustrate the difference between these two types of change.

Continuous change develops out of what has gone before and therefore can be expected, anticipated, and managed. The maturation of our children is an example. Generations have experienced this process of raising children and watching them develop into adults. We can anticipate the stages and learn from those who have gone before us how to navigate the changes. We have a stock of experience and resources to address this development change; it is continuous with the experience of many others. This kind of change involves such things as improvement on what is already taking place and whether the change can be managed with existing skills and expertise.

Discontinuous change is disruptive and unanticipated; it creates situations that challenge our assumptions. The skills we have learned aren’t helpful in this kind of change. . . .

In a period of discontinuous change, leaders suddenly find that the skills and capacities in which they were trained are of little use in addressing a new situation and environment. What do congregational leaders do when the skills that have been effective in drawing people in and building it up no longer get the same results because the growing numbers of emerging generations are no longer interested in being attracted into a church building or joining the church programs?

Issue Four: Congregations Still Matter

Despite the claim that congregations are so hopelessly compromised they cannot make the adjustments required to missionally engage our new context, a congregation can become a center of missional life.

We are not naïve about the challenges. Many congregations are in significant decline. For a lot of people, the congregation is little more than a haven in a heartless world, a dispenser of religious goods and services to individuals. Nevertheless, it is still populated by the people of God. God chooses to create new futures in the most inauspicious of places. Through the Incarnation, we discover that God’s future is at work not where we tend to look but among the people we write off as dead or powerless to make things different. If the Spirit has been poured out in the church—the church as it is, not some ideal type-then we are compelled to believe that the Spirit of God is at work and alive among the congregations of America. Congregations matter. But they need leaders with the skills to cultivate an environment in which the Spirit-given presence of God’s future may emerge among the people of God.

Issue Five: Leaders Need New Capacities and Frameworks

The important point to remember is that we are all in this situation together. We are all learners on this journey. This is not a matter of judging or accusing or dismissing the past efforts of leaders of great skill, passion, and integrity. All of us in leadership, young and old, experienced veterans and raw recruits, must discover together the new shape of leadership.

The classic skills of pastoral leadership in which most pastors were trained were not wrong, but the level of discontinuous change renders many of them insufficient and often unhelpful at this point. It is as if we are prepared to play baseball and suddenly discover that everyone else is playing basketball. The game has changed and the rules are different.

The situation requires cultivation of new leadership capacities. Alongside the standard skills of pastoral ministry, leaders need resources and tools to help them cultivate an environment for missional transformation. . . .

You may choose your own description and categories, but the principle is the same: in a situation of rapid discontinuous change, leaders must understand and develop skills and competencies to lead congregations and denominational systems in a context that is missional rather than pastoral.

Issue Six: A Congregation is a Unique Organization

A congregation is not a business enterprise and cannot be treated as such. But this is precisely what most books and programs for innovating missional life in congregations are doing. They tend to borrow their ideas and strategies from the latest processes in the business world and merely use so-called missional language to describe what is being proposed. The denominational systems that came into their own in the twentieth century were modeled after and came to look like North American corporate organizations. But a congregation is not a business organization, nor is it meant to be run like a minicorporation through strategic planning and alignment of people and resources around some big plan. The congregation comprises the people of God, called to be formed into a unique social community whose life together is the sign, witness, and foretaste of what God is doing in and for all of creation. Just as early Christian communities chose nonreligious language to express this unique new life (using the overtly political word ecclesia), so the church today must understand again its calling as the missional people of God. The calling does not require borrowing language and structures from secular organizations but rather formation of a unique imagination as a social community of the Kingdom. . . .

Even though the regular operational or administrative functions of a congregation continue to require attention, they must now support other leadership skills: cultivating the missional imagination of the people of God in the midst of massive change. This book introduces those skills and presents a framework for understanding why they are important and how they can be applied.

Taken from The Missional Leader by Alan J. Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk, copyright © 2006 by Alan J. Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk. Used by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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