Al Roxburgh’s latest newsletter (1-2nd Feb 2012) offers some useful reflections on adaptive change in response to the invitation to mission and the “great ‘unravelling’ of church life.”
He offers two questions that are well worth reflecting on:
- How do we function in disruptive new spaces?
- What do pastors and denominational leaders do in this strange, disorienting new space into which the Spirit has brought us?
He continues:
“… I find myself continually searching for metaphors that capture the experience of congregations, denominational systems and leaders in being in a new land. The metaphor of unravelling is one people find helpful. It captures the sense of things coming apart at the seams and, no matter how hard we try to fix things with our existing skills and capacities the unravelling continues. The other helpful thing about this metaphor is that it doesn’t have hidden in it implicit solutions or hints about the where the Spirit is taking all this. It just seems to us that the work of God at this moment is to move us out into these unravelling spaces that disorient us but without providing, for now, solutions or directions. Language such as emergence too often carries an unintentional element of solution.
One of our primary defaults as well trained North American church leaders [very true of NZ Church Leaders too!] is to quickly look for solutions. We really do want to know what the plan is or what the next steps are going to be so we can apply our expertise and fix this unravelling. But there are bigger issues at stake for churches just now. Solutions can quickly turn to technique, even among the best intentioned of leaders. Technique will generally take us away from the key questions we need to be asking as leaders in this new space. The question we have to start with isn’t what do we do? As important as that is; rather, the critical question is: What is God up to among us in creating this great unravelling? It’s the God questions that are key not the techniques and solutions. This is why metaphors of desert and exile are so critical in the Scriptures - they are not places of technique or solution but places for discerning what God is up to in strange, difficult places.
Once leaders begin to see this question and get a sense it’s the right one to be asking, they struggle with how this is done when existing skill sets and habits keep defaulting to solutions and fixes…”
You read the whole reflection here. The film starts in Hamilton (NZ) later this month (Feb 16th).
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