11.13.08

spaces between

Posted in ecology, emergence, leadership, pilgrimage, transition at 5:30 am by len

This morning as I was driving to an appointment I listened to Diamond Schmitt on CBC radio, a world-class architect, talking about the difference between architecture as an event and architecture as ethos (my language). He stated that when an expert is parachuted in to do a project his focus is primarily a single building — to the neglect of the spaces between. When the project is complete it may attract a lot of publicity and impress many people. Yet the person located and inhabiting the community, walking the spaces between, sees only an anomaly…  something disconnected from the root life of the community. You can imagine a lot of lights going on in my small brain!

Schmitt was describing not merely a process that infects cities, but a process that infects churches within our cities. Churches and church leadership tend to exist in siloed ministries divorced from the life of the communities they inhabit. This is a result not merely of the pace of life lived within our leadership cultures, or even the transient nature of church leaders, but a result of our leadership paradigms, which tend to gaze inward and which tend to employ specialists with a narrow range of interest and expertise. Inevitably, wider connections and implications are neglected, just as success itself is narrowly defined and usually with institutional measures.

As a result, church leadership becomes abstracted and counter-incarnational and neglects the “spaces between” in our communities. (“Turf wars,” also fueled by secular measures of success around giving and numbers, also pushed leaders into isolation and away from significant connection outside their own location).

As Paul and I sat over coffee we talked about this need for a grasp of the larger picture, and investment in larger networks, as we find our way forward in these times. As we walked in the rural setting in a small town in a new development process, we found ourselves literally walking in spaces between development locations, praying that the church and her leaders would rediscover the hidden work of God in “spaces between.”

This metaphor of “spaces between” seems to me to be pregnant with the Holy Spirit. It connotes an element of mystery and chaos, and more obviously – a liminal place, a location on the margins. And yet, isn’t most of our lives lived in these places? I am riding partly on intuition here, but I believe that the Holy Spirit is intensely interested in these locations, and our neglect of spaces between imperils the work of the kingdom.

In part I am describing the gospel theme of smallness and hiddenness: so much of what God wants to do is not in the large and flashy thing, not in the next fad, and not in the whirlwind. God loves to work on the margins, in weakness, and with unknown people faithfully walking with him. As Newbigin puts it, “By obediently following where the Spirit leads, often in ways neither planned, known, nor understood, the church acts out the hope that it is given by the presence of the Spirit who is the living foretaste of the kingdom” (The Open Secret, 65).

In part I am thinking about the need to create leadership communities. “The potential of communitas is for something innovative to emerge across the differences that have characterized the last several decades… Communitas is the willingness of people to risk entering a new commons where they journey together as God’s pilgrim people in order to discern the future that God’s Spirit might be bringing forward to them. It calls for leaders on both sides of the polarity to recognize the gifts of the other and a readiness to submit themselves as novices to each other.” (Roxburgh, The Sky is Falling, 111)

In April Alan Roxburgh proposed the following definition of leadership: The primary work of leadership is to continually stand in the place (space) where it is compelled to ask the question of what God is about among this group of people who comprise this local church in this specific context at this particular time. Obviously, this definition is thoroughly conditioned by a larger story we describe as Missio Dei.

But what is particularly helpful about this definition is this concept of “space.” Roxburgh writes,

“This descriptor of leadership suggests that one of its primary metaphors is spatial. Leadership functions in a certain kind of space rather than out of a set of definitions, formulae or assumed Biblical types. The understanding of this special metaphor is crucial for the formation and practices of a missional leadership. Without attention to this matter of the space in which leadership dwells, it is impossible to understand or shape a missional leadership in our late modern context. The questions we need to ask about missional, therefore, are not drawn from the world of business or the social sciences, nor are they about how to apply supposed New Testament patterns to the contemporary church. Questions about what God is up to in the world require us to ask what kind of space church leadership must indwell at this moment in late modern societies. If leadership indwells this axis of God’s activities in the world and the local context, then its primary location is in what we will call the “spaces between.” The basic metaphor describing and assessing Christian leadership is spatial – it is about indwelling a space between..”

See my April post on “spaces between..”

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