The Missional Church

1. The Missional Church

2. Exercise • Choose a partner • Observe your partner for 60 seconds • Stand back to back, now change five things about your appearance • Stand back to back again and change five different things about your appearance

3. Reflection Questions • How did it feel to observe each other for 60 seconds? • “If it isn’t strange, it isn’t change.” • What did you take off? • I have to give up something to make change happen. • Did anybody borrow something? • Normal reaction to change is that I have to do it all by myself. The reality is that God places around us all the resources to make change happen. Change isn’t usually a question of money, but of creativity.

4. Reflection Questions • What was your first gut reaction to having to change five things? • Everyone of us has a certain capacity for change. Some like instant change, others need it more gradually. • After changing, how long did it take you to get back to normal? • It is normal for humans to go quickly “back to Egypt.”

5. Imagining the Kingdom

7. Upper Emergent • Pioneering • Maximum experimentation in engaging community • “Missional leadership cultivates an environment in which the people of God imagine together a new future rather than one already determined by a leader.” • Engagement in Scripture and engaging community context

8. Lower Emergent • Experimenting • Building of appropriate habits and structures • Shared conviction • Social interaction • Informal organizational life in the beginning • Trial and error, risk and failure permitted

9. Emergent Zone Leadership • Free of hierarchy or expert authority • Excels in ambiguity • Focuses on cultural rather than organizational formation of community • Sees challenge as opportunity to be embraced rather than crisis to be managed • Strategy as emergent, not linear

11. Performative Zone • Organizational structures that perform well in a stable environment • Follows normal process of change • Predictability

12. Performative Zone(Upper) • People attracted here want stability rather than change • Improvement vs. change • Works best in a stable culture

13. Performative Zone (Upper) • Characterized by well-developed structure • Leaders are professionals • Large scale vs. emergent planning model • Specialization of roles and programs • Leadership focus on skills for running congregation • Organizational hierarchy vs. loose association • Learning from top down • Focus on current programs and making sure cong. needs are met • Formal groups and committees vs. informal social interaction • Planning based on predictability of past results

15. Reactive Zone • Describes what happens to an upper performative zone congregation when it encounters discontinuous change. • Skills and habits of performative zone are insufficient to navigate new environment • Examples of discontinuous change: Community change, pastoral change, church conflict, financial crisis, etc.

16. Reactive Zone (Upper) • Reacts to change by working harder • Respond to change with more regulation to gain back control of an organization • Confusion leads to an attempt at returning to the performative zone as a default (works to quell anxiety for a short while, but is not an option for moving to the future)

17. Reactive Zone:Crisis • Little capacity to read precisely what is happening • Manifests in a variety of ways: • People become anxious, expressing anger • Staff/ministries retreat into silos • Battle lines form over secondary issues • Books of order used to assert control • People leave or church splits • Leaders resign to relieve stress

18. Reactive Zone(Lower) • The “Confused Congregation” • Leadership challenges: • Become aware that challenges are not routine and can not be fixed by a return to the performative zone • When people are in crisis, they cannot risk substantive change. A measure of stability is needed before change can occur. • Don’t reach for the BHAG. The bold new future will eventually look like the same old present. • Leader’s role: invite dialogue and engagement.

20. Transition: The Performative Lower Zone • A place of choice and polarity (past vs. future) • Leadership must manage polarity without choosing sides • Requires a process that cultivates new imagination • Stability requires spiritual and organizational discipline • Key symbols and elements emphasized with excellence • Understand the difference between change and transition

21. Change vs. Transition • Change is what happens to us from forces outside ourselves over which we have no control • Continuous (gradual) vs. Discontinuous (unexpected, dramatic) • Transition is our inner response to change • Anger, denial, trying harder • Unless an organization learns to address its transition issues, it will never create an effective change process.

22. Principles for Missional Transformation • No performative zone performance lasts forever • We can’t see all the steps along the way • Any performative or reactive zone congregation can adapt. • Adaptive change happens by cultivating emergent zone culture • Cultivating a missional congregation requires new leadership skills and capacities.

24. The S-Curve Model of Change and Growth

25. Questions for Discussion • What zone and lifestyle stage do you believe your church is in at present? • What are the challenges of discontinuous change that you are/may/will be facing? • What are the emergent opportunities in your community?

26. The Missional Church

27. The Character of a Missional Leader • Character: • personal habits, skills, and behaviors that engender confidence and credibility. • Motivation, values, sense of purpose • Clear evidence that Christ is the center of the leader’s life • Character observed in four personal qualities:

28. Personal Maturity • Being present to oneself and others • Authenticity: actions and words are coherent and internally consistent • Self-awareness: awareness of a narrative that gives life a center and direction and awareness of ones gifts and limitations

29. Conflict Management • Conflict is normal in change • No conflict, no movement • Practice makes a difference

30. Personal Courage • Missional leadership is not for the faint-hearted • Sometimes means being willing to discipline oneself to learn new skills and work on other readiness factors before rushing into action.

31. Trustworthiness and Trusting • Trust is the glue that enables a community to move forward in difficult times • Trust is the covenant between leader and people that makes transformation possible

32. A Key Learning • 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. It is from among people that the energy and vision for a missional life emerge.

33. So, do we want to pursue the imaginative exercise of becoming a missional church?

34. If heaven were to come to earth today, what would this community look like?