Cultivating Missional Change

Cultivating missional change reflects extensively on developments in the broad missional movement since the publication of the seminal book Missional church (1998). Purposely looking backwards, it endeavours to discern the way forward for missional theology and missional churches. This publication is the outcome of a conference on the future of missional theology and missional churches, held in 2015 in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Noted missional theologians such as Darrell Guder, Patrick Keifert, Stefan Paas, Graham Cray and Coenie Burger are amongst the contributors. The book is much more than conference papers. Important themes concerning the future of being missional surfaced during the conference. The collection, therefore, includes ten chapters written afterwards, serving as an indispensable roadmap for the continuing conversation on central missional themes. Although critical of the way in which some missional views and practices developed, Cultivating missional change is convinced the term "missional" is just too important, too central and too meaningful for the Christian tradition to be abandoned. Cultivating missional change offers a clear understanding of being missional, and promotes a more biblical and well-defined grasp of the Christian church as a missional church.

In The Missional Leader, consultants Alan J. Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk address two questions: "How do we do missional?" and "What does missional leadership look like?" Drawing on their many years of experience, the authors show readers how to bring God's word into the community outside the church's walls. They focus on how to lead missionally on the ground, in the local setting, even amid leaders' experience of massive change within the church and in the wider world. The challenge for many church leaders is that they are not equipped to lead a church in shifting from a consumer model of church to one that is missional. They were trained in a Christendom mindset--to meet the needs of the church's members. This book assists leaders in shifting from dominant models of leadership rooted in strategic planning--with mission and vision statements, desired outcomes, measurements along the way, and determined goals. It provides a praxis for beginning where people are, rather than where the leader wants them to go. Roxburgh and Romanuk give frank recognition to the fact that the shift from a consumer model to a missional mindset will almost certainly be stormy, disruptive, and disorienting. This is not a book of quick fixes and slick slogans, but one that sets out a comprehensive and in-depth treatment for a different way of leading. The Missional Leader is a critical commentary that needs to be read in the light of today's realities.

Written from a post-Christendom/emergent worldview, this books was born of a singular question asked in hundreds of ways: "What do we do to be faithful in this changed and changing reality?" Whether shaped by anxiety, a foretaste of coming changes, excitement, or energy at the prospects of witness and service the future holds, the question remains the same and the answers elusive. Part one addresses church functions under categories of governance, modeling, collaboration, champion, catalyst, mission, covenant, disciple, change and leadership. Part two offers further explication of the functions, including books recommended for in-depth study, application ideas, and further exploration of themes.

Written from a post-Christendom/emergent worldview, this books was born of a singular question asked in hundreds of ways: "What do we do to be faithful in this changed and changing reality?" Whether shaped by anxiety, a foretaste of coming changes, excitement, or energy at the prospects of witness and service the future holds, the question remains the same and the answers elusive. Part one addresses church functions under categories of governance, modeling, collaboration, champion, catalyst, mission, covenant, disciple, change and leadership. Part two offers further explication of the functions, including books recommended for in-depth study, application ideas, and further exploration of themes.

Ecclesiology is the study of the church and has two focal points; the one is the historical and doctrinal perspective on the church, and the other is the church as situated in a local context in the sense of the local practices of actual congregations. The ecclesiology or, more correctly, the ecclesiologies of this volume mainly focuses on the second aspect, i.e., understanding the local congregation or parish as a community of believers. A congregation may firstly be described by posing a theological question: What is the local missional church or congregation all about? This question may be answered from different perspectives, but it remains essential to answer it from a theological perspective. The first five chapters in this book focus mainly on a theological understanding of the congregation. This is done from different disciplines within the study field of theology. Congregations are, secondly, social realities and should be described and analysed through an analytical or empirical lens, or, to answer the question attached to the first empirical-descriptive task of practical theology, “What is going on?”. The remaining chapters use a quantitative and qualitative lens and give an empirical analysis of the congregation. The intention is to critically reflect on the church and congregations’ ecclesiology from a theological and analytical perspective with an emphasis on the South African context. It wants to map markers for the development of contemporary ecclesiologies, and the different chapters are meant as mirrors to look in and reflect on the theological and contextual relevance of denominations and congregations in South Africa.

This study resource focuses upon Christian practices: those behaviors by which congregations shape, teach, train, equip -- cultivate -- their identity, vision, and mission as Christian communities. Thus baptism, Eucharist, forgiveness, ministry, discernment, and worship are practices through which a people are formed in a distinctive way of life. Questions for reflection and discussion are included to stimulate use within groups for study, learning, and formation.

Too often, the solution sought by many struggling churches is to make the homerun hire—to find the charismatic leader who will take them to the promised land of growth and vibrant ministry. While this strategy occasionally pays off, it has overwhelmingly failed as seen in the hundreds of churches across the United States that close their doors annually. Is it possible that there is another way forward for those seeking to lead local congregations into missionally vibrant ministry, especially those located in multiethnic urban areas? In Charismatic Leadership and Missional Change, one church’s journey from a struggling, primarily Anglo congregation of less than 100 members to becoming a missionally vibrant, multiethnic church of more than 700 attendees with no clear ethnic majority documented. The charismatic leadership style that drove this change is discussed and critiqued, as well as the adaptive challenges that have arisen in the church because of it. An alternative approach—interpretive leadership—is proposed as a different pathway forward in response to these challenges. The result, the author suggests, will be to empower the diverse, everyday people of God to participate in God’s mission in exciting and surprising new ways.

This book explores the theme of the missional conversion of the church, namely how the church is transformed toward its missionary vocation, from a biblical-theological perspective. The purpose of this book is to find biblically grounded, theologically sound, and practically applicable principles helpful for the church which seeks to be continuously shaped into a missional community which authentically and fully participates in God’s mission today. The biblical-theological findings on how the triune God in the biblical narrative shapes the people of God toward their missionary vocation demonstrates, first, that, in Scripture, the missional conversion of the church is primarily the consequence of its continuous encounter with the triune God, and, second, that this divine-human encounter for the missional conversion of the church is ineluctable in view of the ongoing tension between the missional faithfulness of God in fulfilling the missionary vocation of the church, on the one hand, and the missional failure of the church in its missionary vocation, on the other hand.