The thing that struck me most powerfully during the day was a diagram from a book called The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World by Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk. The diagram describes 6 different stages in the life of the church and the style of leadership that is operating in each phase. The cycle begins in the middle of the green zone when there is the emergence of new ideas and fresh possibilities, some of which thrive. As growth happens organisation and structure are needed and the church enters the blue stable zone where performance and organisational leadership are appropriate.
The red zone is the danger zone. As the organisation starts to decline the leadership reacts to one crisis after another, often by trying to control and reorganise to recapture the calm happy days of the blue zone. The impact for clergy is that we have to work harder to even stand still! We have no quick solution and everyone blames us for the crisis, when actually we are living in a very different culture and missional climate.
The message for me is that I might need to learn how to do Bridging Leadership (whatever that is) inorder to help the church understand what is happening.
Looking at the diagram again today, I think I tried to jump straight from the Red Zone to the Green Zone and tried to build Cell Church without the rest of the church really understanding why we needed to be there. I also got frustrated by the lack of organisation in the inherited church life which is still needed as the base for our mission. We were and still are suffering due to falling numbers, elderly congregation, only a short history of basing life on what the bible says etc so at times I was and am operating in the red zone reacting to crisis.
In the last two years I have not given up my dream of seeing organic missional churches planted in this area, but I have been leading some of the people through the lower part of the blue zone. I think this is the "transitional leadership" mentioned on the diagram. We are growing a team of people who are disciples who know how to make disciples. We have been using leadership Huddles to do this.
We also have some activity in the green zone as we transition our Cafe Church from being an alternative service to growing an identity as a missionary community which will become a fresh expression of church. In preparation for this we have four people attending the Diocesan Mission Shaped Ministry training course.
Anyway, I have just ordered a copy of Roxburgh's book to see what he has to say about how you do Bridging Leadership. If there are any other sources that people have found helpful please let me know.
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