01.31.08
seeding missional communities
David Fitch reflects on seeding missional communities.
Among the new missional leaders, church is the name we give to a way of life, not a set of services. We do not plant an organized set of services; we inhabit a neighborhood as the living embodied presence of Christ. Missional leaders now root themselves in a piece of geography for the long term. We survey the land for the poor and the desperate, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually as well. We seek to plant seeds of ministry, kernels of forgiveness, new plantings of the gospel among “the poor (of all kinds)” and then by the Spirit water them, nurture them into the life of God in Christ. We gather on Sunday, but not for evangelistic reasons. We gather to be formed into a missonal people sent out into the neighborhood to minister grace, peace, love and the gospel of forgiveness and salvation..
In his reflections David reminded me of an exchange I had with Michael Toy about five years back. Not long afterward I got thinking about the difference between team leadership and the kind of collaborative process that happens in communities whether labeled “leadership” or not. Here is a short excerpt from the paper I wrote, “Kingdom Leadership in the Postmodern World.”
“Last year Michael Toy mailed me a summary of a discussion with Doug Pagitt. Doug was proposing we ditch the word “leadership” with all its military implications, and find new language for talking about those who tend to communities. His preferred analogy was an organic gardener.
• take crap and use it to nourish things
• it isn’t “dirt,” it is soil, and the preparation and maintenance of the soil is really important
• things that are garbage are used to grow the garden
• vigilance is important
• be willing to take smaller fruit in order for it to be truly healthy
• gardening requires a systems understanding
• gardens die every winter and require replanting
• things can only grow in certain climates
• hybrids don’t reproduce
• if you use miracle grow to start, you have to keep boosting the amount
• what you plant next to what is important
• you have very little to do with the success of the gardern, photosynthesis is still a mystery, you can’t make it grow, it is a miracle
• backs and knees are sore because you are down in the dirt, you don’t stand above the garden
• we need to protect the garden from bunnies. Worms are good, bunnies are bad.
• organic fruit doesn’t all look like the stuff in the market. Quality is over beauty, and there is no uniformity.. you share from the excess.
The evidence is in favor of leadership as an organic and communal enterprise. In a recent paper, Richard Ascough notes that Paul avoided hierarchical, externally imposed models of leadership in favor of promoting self-organizing, self-governing, adaptive groups. He comments that, “Paul’s leadership style could thus be characterized as involving what modern scientists call ‘chaos theory.’” Chaos theory is a biological model that sees an organization as a living, self-organizing web of relationships.
Recently the buzzword has been teamwork. Unfortunately, we tend to understand teams in a secular corporate sense: a team is a group of people coordinated by a competent manager. Larry Crabb argues that we have a choice to make: we can be managers or mystics.
Furthermore, a team is not the same as a community. When five-fold gifting is functioning in a community environment, it can be very difficult to tell who is leading. Leaders may be invisible, encouraging, empowering, and equipping as they work alongside others sharing similar tasks.
There are two types of ministry environment. In one environment a team or teams are formed to assist leaders to develop and implement their vision (purpose). In the second environment a community is formed around a shared sense of passion (belonging). In the team environment success is understood as empowering the group to reach agreed goals. In the community environment success is understood as empowering individuals to belong and to reach their creative potential.
In the team environment roles tend to be set in concrete and leaders are indispensable. In the community environment leaders may be invisible, and leadership roles and functions are often shared. At different times in the life of the community, depending on need and context and the empowerment of the Spirit, various ones take the lead depending on their competencies, deferring to the voice of the Lord. The key qualities in this context are those of Dorothy: humility and discernment.
In his own take on leadership as process Dwight Friesen observed that,
Leadership is about conversation. Leadership has less to do with the clarity of vision, and much more do to with the quality of conversation.
How one fosters conversation is everything. Bringing self to the table, creating open space, speaking, naming, surrendering the need to be right, etc. Hidden agendas, unstated vision, passive aggressive needs to control, and rigid categories are just a few of the many ills ready to subvert [a learning] conversation.
Swinging from the Vine — thoughts on missional communities said,
January 31, 2008 at 9:22 am
[...] For lack of anything better to say – I present to you these nuggets from Len (et al) The evidence is in favor of leadership as an organic and communal enterprise. In a recent paper, Richard Ascough notes that Paul avoided hierarchical, externally imposed models of leadership in favor of promoting self-organizing, self-governing, adaptive groups. He comments that, “Paul’s leadership style could thus be characterized as involving what modern scientists call ‘chaos theory.’†Chaos theory is a biological model that sees an organization as a living, self-organizing web of relationships. [...]