We are continuing our look at the book by Bill Easum - Unfreezing Moves - Following Jesus into the mission field

The other posts in the series can be found here

Unfreezing Move #4 - Unfreezing the congregation for ministry

Some interesting assumptions are made by Easum at the beginning of this move. Firstly, he states:

“When a congregation is free of major conflict and indigenous worship is in place, its time to mobilize the congregation for ministry” (p104).

While I understand and agree that resolving major conflict is a matter of priority, I don’t understand why you would need to address worship before missional action. The danger here is that Churches never actual feel that they have addressed the move of indigenous worship sufficiently to then address this move of mobilising for ministry. The result then is that the Church would be stuck and this is exactly what Easum seeks to address. I would also suggest that indiginous worship will be enriched and enhanced as the Church engages in missional action. Jesus models in Mark’s gospel that we are to be people of the way – do we not experience God in missional action? Worship can enrich, nurture and support but it is not the goal nor in my opinion is it the move to complete before you move to missional action.

Easum then suggests that Church leaders should:

“Recruit fifty to seventy-five people who are ready and willing to be coached in their faith development” (p105).

In the Australian context, numbers such as these would preclude most Churches. In our context a much smaller number of six to twelve people would be more realistic. However, Easum point is valid - one of the first steps in mobilising the Church for minitry is to identify people who can be coached and nurtured as key people

Another interesting point that Easum makes is that we need to move from the laity doing administration and the staff doing ministry to the laity doing ministry and the staff doing administration. This shift is evidenced in many churches today and sometimes is forced upon the Church by the size of the organization. In larger churches it is simply impossible for a monthly meeting to run the administration of the church or even for part timers to manage the Church and so the staff are delegated this responsibility. This shift also has the advantage of releasing more people into missional action rather than serving on committees.

Easum spends some time looking at how the leadership task should be viewed as multipication and not addition. He borrows a fractal image of leadership from Wayne Cordeiro (www.newhope-hawii.org) and says:

“Fractaling is the constant repitition of leadership over and over. It is everyone training to be a leader. Every leader asks, who can I get to help me on this mission? And how can I break this project down into small enough pieces to include lots of people in the mission.” (p108).

This makes sense and sees the role of the minister/leader to “equip the saints”. The challenge is that many ministers became ministers because they wanted to “do ministry” – they have felt a call to pastoral work or simply like being the centre of attention and leading each program. For fractural leadership to function and for the Church to be mobilised, ministers need to resist the temptation to do everything themselves and set aside pride, honour or glory.

Easum lists four keys to multiplying leaders:

“1. pastors understand that their primary fractal or hub is their flock rather than the whole congregation, and they spend most of their time with them.

2. No one is responsible for more than four people, plus their spouses, so every ten people have a shepherd (spouses are included!)

3. Instead of asking a few people to do a lot, ask a lot of people to do only what they love doing and hold them accountable.

4. Focus the amount of time people have to spend in ministry on those things they are gifted to do. This way no one burns out.” (p109)

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 1st, 2006 at 2:13 pm by phil and is filed under Unfreezing Moves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.