Missional engagement and reflective learning
Whilst babysitting for my boss last Friday I raided his bookshelf and had quick look through Roxburgh and Romanuk’s The Missional Leader. This seems like a really good book for leaders who find themselves wanting to propagate a missional environment in an established/conventional church setting. Although presenting a single model for transition towards missional community could be a little prescriptive.
What reading the book did do was to again highlight for me just how much a transformation or widening of worldview and mindset plays a role in moving a community towards mission. In working with The Lab, this has been one of the big questions we’ve faced over the last couple of years – beginning with students from conventional church backgrounds and trying to grow missional community.
The first three steps of Roxburgh/Romanuk’s missional change model are fundementally about mindset and worldview:
- Creating awareness
- Creating understanding
- Evaluation…
…towards Experimentation/Action.
What is interesting is how – and this is especially true of a fast-changing, transitional community like The Lab – these three steps seem to actually form a cycle which continues into the later stages of the missional transition. In order for the missional environment to not become stagnant, the community needs to be constantly re-assessing and re-evaluating it’s context and surroundings. It is interesting how similar this missional cycle then looks to the experiential/reflective learning cycle developed by David A. Kolb:
So, then, to become a missional community is to become a learning community actively engaged in reflecting outwardly on our surrounding context and culture – and inwardly on our own organisational culture. This cycle of constant learning and changing must become part of the very culture of our community for us to remain missionally engaged with our local and global context.
We can reframe these two points to say that to maintain a missionally engaged community, two organisational values are required:
1. A constantly shifting (outward) worldview
…which informs and causes…
2. A constantly shifting (inward) paradigm – or understanding of what “church” / “community” should be in that context.
I would argue that it is being able to produce this constantly emerging or transitional culture – maintaining the learning cycle – that is the illusive key to being able to grow a community which is able to remain missionally engaged over more than a short period of time.
This is the flaw we have seen in a previous generation of seeker-sensitive churches. Once we have gone through a process of developing a model of church which engages with the culture around us, that model was then allowed to become the established, stable paradigm – and the cycle comes to a halt. In order to provide long-term answers to the issue of missional engagment, this generation of the missional movement needs to be dealing with this fundemental question of how to maintain this transitional/reflective culture within our church communities.
-
richard
