From a post by Alan Roxburgh and Chris Erdman on cultivating growth:

Cultivation is an ancient word taken from agricultural practices. It is an organic metaphor rather than one of managment or warfare. A gardner or farmer understands that the life and purpose of plants or crops is not something over which the farmer has a great deal of control. And so, leadership as cultivation is not about people fitting into your strategy; it is about providing the environment in which missional imagination buds and develops and in which the farmer may well be astonished by the results.

I like this image of ministry. At a recent meeting we were discussing the nature of leadership from a couple of perspectives - first from the perspectives of the question of the terms on which ministers are engaged by a church and secondly in relation to the questions of women in ministry and lay leadership. Those two topics seemed to pull us in different directions. In talking about one, we were struggling with the idea of what separates paid ministry from other forms of employment - should we apply the same rules and understandings to it. In the other discussion, we were drawn to discuss leadership and ministry as a means of voice, empowerment and expression of diversity. To this we add the reflection of the missional leader as a cultivator.

Which prompts me to wonder what are the cultivars of missional leadership? In a gardening sense, a cultivar is a plant which has been intentionally cultivated and shaped by the gardener’s hand. The building blocks are all naturally occurring in the garden, but the attention and work of the gardener creates some specialness about the plant which suits it to a particular place or function. Many of our modern food crops began life as cultivars as people adapted wild plants to the function of nourishing people well.

If missional leaders are cultivators, what are their cultivars?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 24th, 2005 at 7:47 pm by dan and is filed under leadership, wise words. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.