Missional Geography

Alan Roxburgh gives us a Missional Geography lesson:

As I listen to how suburban church leaders speak, I am more and more aware that in their programs for growth and multi-site digitally-fed main speakers they have little sense that geography matters.

The local, the neighborhood, is the place of God's presence and where the Spirit is at work among people.

I am convinced that for Christians to understand how the Biblical narrative enters and participates in the transformation of culture they must grasp that geography is everything! Once we live into the Incarnation we are committed to place, to particularity; space and time are not containers but the reality within which God's transformative grace is worked out.

We are seeking to reclaim the suburbs for the kingdom, not curse them as so many do.

Forget the stars and the gurus; stop hungering after the trendies of the moment; enter the local and the ordinary, listen to what is happening on the ground in your own place and context because this is where God's future is bubbling up. Pay attention to those who actually work on the ground rather then the gurus who try to think great thoughts in heads that are so disconnected from the ordinary places and times where most of us live.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Foolproof Scientific Church Management

Here is a schematic of the mental model most church leaders have for operating a church.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Missional “in quotes”

We are in a period that makes it impossible to have much clarity about the future and how it is going to be shaped. Therefore those leaders who believe they can address the kind of change we are facing by simply defining a future that people want, and then setting plans to achieve it, are not innovating a missional congregation. They are only finding new ways of preventing a congregation from facing the discontinuous change it confronts.
Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader, p. 159

The Church in North America is experiencing a period that sociologists call liminality. The future cannot be predicted by extrapolating from the past. If there ever was a time when leaders could create their own future by sheer willpower, it no longer exists.

Leadership requires more flexibility and more skill.

True leaders will need to be able to handle uncertainly. They will need to be able to adjust to change. They will need to be able to adapt to unforeseeable opportunities.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Missional “in quotes”

Rather than the leader having plans and strategies that the congregation will affirm and follow, cultivation describes the leader as the one who works the soil of the congregation so as to invite and constitute the environment for the people of God to discern what the Spirit is doing in, with, and among them as a community.
Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader, p. 28

Missional leadership is real leadership. But it has little to do with what most people think of when they hear the word "leadership."

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Missional “in quotes”

A congregation must become a place where members learn to function like cross-cultural missionaries rather than a gathering place where people come to receive religious goods and services.
Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader, p. 13

Missional does not mean being hip and trendy. It means that we are on God's mission. It means that we are here to serve, not to be served.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Person God Created You to Be"

Missional Leadership III

So far I’ve focused on what missional leadership is not. Let’s consider what it does look like.

Missional leaders lead from earned authority. The words “because I’m a pastor” should never be used to solicit compliance from church people. True authority is always earned.

If the words that come from one’s mouth are full of God’s wisdom and insight, people notice and follow, regardless of the speaker’s position, title or diploma.
Neil Cole, Organic Church

Missional leaders lead by serving. The primary way we earn authority is by serving. Jesus called us to serve one another. He said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all (Mark 10:42–44).

Our theology says that we should lead from below, but all our models say we should look and act successful.
Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader

Missional leaders are more like shepherds than CEOs. Missional leaders are true leaders, but they lead a community. And this community must be engaged in the work of the Kingdom as it senses God’s calling and identifies the ways in which God is already working.

An important role of a missional leader is cultivating an environment within which God’s people discern God’s directions and activities in them and for the communities in which they find themselves.
Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader

Rather than the leader having plans and strategies
that the congregation will affirm and follow, cultivation describes the leader as the one who works the soil of the congregation so as to invite and constitute the environment for the people of God to discern what the Spirit is doing in, with, and among them as a community.
Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader

Missional leaders are driven by theology rather than pragmatism. There is an idea that pastors don’t have the luxury of doing serious study. That is to be left for those living in ivory towers. In the real world we just need to get busy and find out what works. But pragmatism leads to theological error. Pragmatism leads to moral failure. Pragmatism leads to a human agenda.

More than ever, pastors need to be theologians.

Their beginning point is grounded in a theological understanding and conviction of what the church should be and do. It is not simply about building a reputation, a ministry, a following, or a great church, but it is about a deep conviction that is grounded in the Word of God.
Ed Stetzer & David Putman, Breaking the Missional Code

The work of theological reflection in a profoundly changing culture must be reintroduced into the daily practices of pastoral life.
Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader

The Christian leaders of the future have to be theologians, persons who know the heart of God.
Henri J. M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership

Missional leaders prepare for the future rather than plan for the future. The future is uncertain. We cannot predict it with any certainty. We need to be prepared for the future. But we cannot force the future to take the shape we think it should take.

The better (and biblical) approach to the future involves prayer and preparation, not prediction and planning.
Reggie McNeal, The Present Future

[A leader must be able to] thrive in the midst of ambiguity and discontinuity.
Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader

We are in a period that makes it impossible to have much clarity about the future and how it is going to be shaped. Therefore those leaders who believe they can address the kind of change we are facing by simply defining a future that people want, and then setting plans to achieve it, are not innovating a missional congregation. They are only finding new ways of preventing a congregation from facing the discontinuous change it confronts.
Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader

Missional leaders take the long view. One of the problems with American business is that its leaders often live for today. They try to make the quarterly numbers look as good as possible. In doing so, they often sellout the long-term prospects.

This is no different in the church. Pastors are encouraged to find quick answers. They feel pressure to submit good statistics. This year needs to have better numbers than last year.

But missional leaders buck the trend. They make their decisions with a view to the long-term impact on the Kingdom.

Missional change is not a short-term problem solved by pragmatic programs. Instead, it entails forming an alternative imagination over time.
Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader

Missional leaders focus on people. Most leaders focus on programs. But missional leaders focus on people. They focus on the people already in the congregation. They focus on the people in the community. Jesus never let his plans prevent him from addressing the needs of people.

The key to innovating new life and mission in a congregation is not so much a strategy for growth as it is cultivation of people themselves.
Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader

Again, I’ve only had time to give a brief sketch of these ideas. Let me know what you think. What would you add to the list? Do you disagree with anything that I’ve included?

Pastor Rod

“Helping you become the person God created you to be”

Part One, Part Two

Missional Leadership II

I have a new candidate for what to put on my gravestone:
The church is not a business and the pastor is not a CEO.

These two ideas have done untold damage to local churches, to individual Christians and to pastors.

Congregations have been split apart as a result of attempts to emulate the strategy of a celebrity pastor. Long-time church members have been vilified because they did not fit with the pastor’s “vision.” Pastors have ruined their health and their family life trying to be charismatic leaders.

The church has borrowed business models from the world and applied them wholesale to the affairs of the kingdom. How many businesses do you know that give their product away without demanding money? (See Luke 6:30.) How many banks make loans without expecting repayment? (See Luke 6:34.) How many CEOs get their jobs by moving down the corporate ladder? (See Mark 10:43.)

Yet we act as if strategic planning, statistical analysis and hard work are the primary ingredients to “success” in ministry.

Modernist thinking has reduced the “I Am” of the Exodus to the “God of the gaps.” But the church has done something much worse. We’ve relegated God to a “genie in a bottle” who we call on when we need a little extra boost to meet our goals.

Here are some prophetic quotations for today’s church:

Not only do we not need God to explain the universe, we don’t need God to operate the church. Many operate like giant machines, with church leaders serving as mechanics. God doesn’t have to show up to get done what’s being done.
Reggie McNeal, The Present Future

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.
Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader

We need to lead in ways that are different from those of a CEO, an entrepreneur, a super leader with a wonderful plan for the congregation’s life.
Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader

There is a lack of theological depth in much of the contemporary church planting and church growth movements because these are movements of techniques, paradigms, and methodologies without genuine biblical and missiological convictions.
Ed Stetzer & David Putman, Breaking the Missional Code

To accomplish spiritual results we do not create the future by visioning it or by mobilizing people to create our picture of what the future will be. I am directly criticizing a predominant teaching among Christian writing and leadership seminars that promote the importance of vision. My criticism of them is they do not use “vision” the way the Bible does, and their teaching tends to promote flesh acts, not Spirit-led leadership.
Brian J. Dodd, Empowered Church Leadership

How many of us have experienced the drivenness of a leader having been caught up in his or her vision? I speak with some remorse and regret for times that my “visionary dreaming” has left me “proud and pretentious,” judgmental and disapproving of the believers God has called me to shepherd and to care for. I have spoken with too many pastors who seem content to drive people out of their church because they do not fit with vision. This is not the heart of the Good Shepherd.
Brian J. Dodd, Empowered Church Leadership

Our theology says that we should lead from below, but
all our models say we should look and act successful.
Alan Roxburgh & Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader

In this post I have focused on the negative, what leadership is not. I will address what I believe leadership should look like in the church, but it is necessary first to eliminate these assumptions that have polluted our thinking about leadership within the kingdom.

Tell me what you think.

Pastor Rod

“Helping you become the person God created you to be”

Part One, Part Three