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CONVERSING IN CHURCH
In last month’s Update, Dave shared some thoughts prompted by his reading of the first few chapters of The Missional Leader (see review below). In a later chapter, authors Roxburgh and Romanuk outline a process called the Missional Change Model, in which Step One is Awareness.

It is the authors’ observation that “for people in our congregations, the world is spinning. So much is happening but they have little space to process their experience and give it meaning. …They don’t know how to articulate what lies beneath the diffuse anxiety and can’t put words to the confusion. In response, leaders often make the mistake of assuming that they should address such feelings with some strategy, plan, or program.”

In the authors’ estimation, before a congregation can deal with the discontinuous change in the world around them and move down the path of missional transformation, they must learn how to express what they are feeling and experiencing. It is the leader’s responsibility to “create a listening space to allow people to become aware of what is happening within and among them. Such awareness requires cultivating an environment in which people discover the language for talking about what they are experiencing.” To be honest, I (Suzanne) read that and initially thought, “Okay, that’s a little extreme. Is meaningful dialogue really so absent from our churches? And are people today really that ill equipped to express themselves?” But then I went to church…

While vacationing with family earlier this month, I attended a two-year old church planted by a well-known “emergent” church in Los Angeles. I had briefly perused the church’s website before leaving home, but wasn’t sure how the information I’d read there would play out in a Sunday morning service. Although I’ve attended church my whole life and have visited many different kinds of churches, I was surprised to find myself nervous as my aunt, uncle, and I followed the directions that delivered us to an old brick building with a gravel parking lot. Greeters welcomed us at the door and handed us a half sheet of paper with a few paragraphs of welcome and news, some quotes from emergent leaders, and the text of Romans 15:5-9, the passage for the sermon.

Except at this church, they don’t call it a sermon. Here, it is a conversation about living the story. I assumed this was merely semantics until about five minutes into the sermon (or conversation) the pastor said something like, “We believe the church is not a building; it is people who gather together in the name of the Lord. Thus, on Sunday mornings we want to see and interact with one another face to face, rather than only face to back-of-head.”

And so, as instructed, the people gathered in that old brick building turned their chairs and formed clusters of 3-5 to share with one another our experiences and hang-ups when it comes to accepting people who are unlike ourselves (Rom. 15:7). Murmuring filled the room as people engaged with one another, sharing and listening in turn. Meanwhile, my aunt, uncle, and I sat there blinking at one another for a few moments, seemingly tongue-tied. Eventually we did start talking, and a moderately awkward conversation ensued in which we tried to name the things that keep us from accepting others. After seven minutes or so, the pastor called everyone’s attention back to the front, and he continued with the “conversation” at hand.

My experience at church that morning, swift on the heels of reading the assertions quoted above, has gotten me thinking, observing, and asking questions about myself and about how churches (the people) interact with one another inside and outside of church (the building), and what that has to do with life transformation.

I suppose this month’s article is as much vignette as it is update. There are U.S. churches at every point along the spectrum, from the strategic to the more organic, but wherever a church may be there is a place for stories. I share these quotes and this experience with you because as missionaries, you have compelling narratives to share with your churches, stories that are best told in conversation. Are you ready to patiently draw out the ones who at first might simply blink back at you, surprised at being called upon to converse in church?

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THE DIVINE IMMANENCE (excerpted from The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer)

In all Christian teaching certain basic truths are found, hidden at times, and rather assumed than asserted, but necessary to all truth as the primary colors are found in and necessary to the finished painting. Such a truth is the divine immanence.

God dwells in His creation and is everywhere indivisibly present in all His works. This is boldly taught by prophet and apostle, and is accepted by Christian theology generally. That is, it appears in the books, but for some reason it has not sunk into the average Christian’s heart so as to become a part of his believing self. …

What does the divine immanence mean in direct Christian experience? It means simply that God is here. Wherever we are, God is here. There is no place, there can be no place, where He is not. Ten million intelligences standing at as many points in space and separated by incomprehensible distances can each one say with equal truth, God is here. No point is nearer to God than any other point. …These are truths believed by every instructed Christian. It remains for us to think on them and pray over them until they begin to glow within us. …

Adam sinned and, in his panic, frantically tried to do the impossible; he tried to hide from the presence of God. David also must have had wild thoughts of trying to escape from the Presence, for he wrote, “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” (Ps. 139:7). Then he proceeded through one of his most beautiful psalms to celebrate the glory of the divine immanence. “If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.” (139:8-10). And he knew that God’s being and God’s seeing are the same, that the seeing Presence had been with him even before he was born, watching the mystery of unfolding life. Solomon exclaimed, “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have built!” (1 Kings 8:27). Paul assured the Athenians that “he be not far from every one of us; for in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:27-28).

If God is present at every point in space, if we cannot go where He is not, cannot even conceive of a place where He is not, why then has not that Presence become the one universally celebrated fact in the world? The patriarch Jacob, “in the waste howling wilderness” (Deut. 32:10), gave the answer to that question. He saw a vision of God and cried out in wonder, “Sure the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not” (Gen. 28:16). Jacob had never been for one small division of a moment outside of the circle of the all-pervading Presence. But he knew it not. That was his trouble, and it is ours. Men do not know that God is here. What a difference it would make if they knew.

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“When we genuinely believe that inner transformation is God’s work and not ours, we can put to rest our passion to set others straight.” - Richard Foster, in Celebration of Discipline

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The Missional Leader by Alan J. Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk, Josey-Bass 2006
(Reviewed by Suzanne Johnson)

The word “missional” is creating a lot of buzz today. A quick search on Amazon.com brings up over twenty books with “missional” in the title. Part of the difficulty of keeping up with the conversation is that it seems each party’s definition of missional—and their resultant suggestions for how to get your church there—varies. In April of this year, Roxburgh and Romanuk entered the conversation with their book, The Missional Leader. Their definition of a missional church, as stated in the introduction, “is a community of God’s people who live into the imagination that they are, by their very nature, God’s missionary people living as a demonstration of what God plans to do in and for all of creation in Jesus Christ.”

The authors’ starting point is that “discontinuous change is the new norm.” By this they mean that contrary to continuous change, which “develops out of what has gone before and therefore can be expected, anticipated, and managed,” U.S. churches are facing discontinuous change, which is disruptive and unanticipated, creating situations that challenge assumptions and require of leaders a whole new set of skills. The authors argue that familiar entrepreneurial practices—such as vision statements and strategic planning—are not appropriate for the church in a time of discontinuous change. They assert, “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 is confronts.”

What, then, do the authors propose? Something they call the “Missional Change Model” (MCM), a five-step process by which church leaders and members move through Awareness, to Understanding, to Evaluation, to Experimentation, and finally to Commitment. Not all members of a congregation will move through these steps at the same time or pace; according to the authors, it takes approximately four and a half years for an entire congregation to move through the steps and commit.

In order for a congregation to move through the MCM, Roxburgh and Romanuk exhort leaders to abandon top-down thinking and practices in exchange for “leadership as cultivation.” The leader is responsible for cultivating awareness and understanding among the people of the congregation; cultivating networks of people who will experiment and learn together; cultivating fresh ways of engaging the Biblical narrative; and cultivating new practices, habits, and norms.

This book has some strengths as well as considerable weaknesses. The first five chapters are maddeningly repetitive, and the pervasiveness of postmodern phraseology felt—at least to me—almost oppressive. While the book does offer guidance for how to lead a congregation into understanding and engaging their immediate context (community), there is no discussion of the local church getting involved in God’s mission on the global level. On a positive note, even if you do not buy into all of the authors’ ideas, prescriptions, and methods for missional leadership, this book will give you plenty to think about. It asks important questions about which leadership models are being embraced by churches. It challenges us to engage in meaningful dialogue in church. And it alerts us to the fact that we are in a period of change unlike anything we have navigated in the past.

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