11.20.09
Resources for Urban mission
Urban Expressions in the UK, in addition to hosting some forums to talk about mission in the city, also hosts a resources page HERE.
Elsewhere New Church Initiatives hosts a resources page HERE. This latter effort was founded by Glenn Smith some years ago. A collection of articles, many of them by Glenn Smith, can be found HERE. I notice a four part series on church planting from a systemic perspective looking at assimilation, spiritual formation and leadership development. I also noticed a short article on Missional Church by Tim Keller (2001). (You can also find a podcast by Tim on “The City” on iTunes that is well worth hearing).
The Church Planting Canada website is HERE.
Urban Expressions has their daily liturgy online HERE. This includes daily readings, reflective exercises and prayers. UE has not founded a missional order, but with this ethos of shared devotional rhythms they are a kind of informal Order.
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There was a great diversity offered in the workshops through the Congress, and from the conversation following they were largely appreciated. But curiously, there was no single workshop on spiritual formation in mission, or finding a shared rhythm of inward and outward life as a means of sustaining missional engagement. Maybe we’ll see this in a future Congress.
One of the threads I have been listening for while attending, and afterwards in conversation with missional leaders and the various speakers, is perspective on spiritual formation and missional orders.I asked Michael Frost whether FORGE had seriously considered forming a missional order, and he responded that they were trying to grow a movement, and they worried that formalizing an Order would slow them down.
Later I asked Juliet Kilpin the same question with regard to Urban Expressions. Her response was different. She feels that they have the essence of an Order without its formal expression. Juliet described some of the conversation they had around the issue, and the sense that an Order might centralize accountability and work against the network dynamic and the ability to contextualize. She referenced “The Spider and the Starfish” with this thought.
I honestly don’t know whether this is a legitimate concern, but I suspect there are trade-offs to be considered. On one hand, formalizing an Order might slow growth. But growth in itself, we all know, must involve both quantity and quality, and rapid growth often generates more problems than it solves. An Order ups the ante in terms of discipleship even as it roots rhythms in the very lifeblood of a community.
The second issue is more interesting. Might an Order tend to centralize authority and/or accountability and therefore limit the ability to flex and adapt in local contexts? Historically there is probably a mixed report, but in at least one prominent group this doesn’t appear to have been the case. I have previously summarized some of the work of Chris Lowney in this regard. The Jesuits are not only the longest existing corporation but one of the most successful, and they have tended to thrive at the intersection of faith and the City, centered around Ignatian practices.
So it may be that we simply need to realize that, as Dee Hock expressed it, “Purpose and principle, clearly understood and articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. To the degree that you hold purpose and principles in common among you, you can dispense with command and control. People will know how to behave in accordance with them, and they will do it in thousands of unimaginable, creative ways. The organization will become a vital, living set of beliefs.” (Birth of the Chaordic Age)
The question then becomes this: “Can a missional order assist us in setting purpose and principle – as opposed to personality and centralized leadership – at the heart of a dispersed community?”
