As I prepare for the start of the transition stream in Forge Victoria, I have been looking at some books that I think are helpful resources.

Unfreezing Moves by Bill Easum.

I reviewed Easum’s book for my book review earlier this year but it is worthy of inclusion in the list of books that have stimulated my thinking this year. Easum’s book outlines nine moves (or strategies) that he believes will have the effect of unfreezing a local church. It is Easum’s thesis that many local churches are “stuck” and need to look at various factors that will allow them once again to move towards are more missional footing. While I believe that Easum is still trapped in a church growth paradigm and is heavily influenced by his North American setting, I do think that Easum’s moves are worthy of reflection and will stimulate thinking. His nine moves are: (1) a solid community of faith, (2) discovering and articulating the DNA, (3) indigenous worship, (4) mobilizing the congregation for minisry, (5) redemptive missional opportunities, (6) organising around the DNA, (7) hire servants, not professionals, (8) space and place as metaphor, and (9) radical generosity. These “unfreezing moves” can helpfully enable a local church leadership to critically reflect and anaylse their church and to identify possible transitioning points.

The sky is falling - leaders lost in transition by Alan Roxburgh

Alan Roxburgh is a well known missional thinker and speaker and this book contains much of what I have heard Roxburgh speak about through various seminars over the last five years. Roxburgh has recently done a fairly intensive consultative process with the Churches of Christ and therefore I am very familiar with his work but it is very helpful and convenient to have much of this material in a published book. In the early days of Northern Community I went and heard Alan Roxburgh speak and he was one of the most influential thinkers and writers upon my own ministry,

In this book, Roxburgh vividly articulates the missional situation and context that the western church finds itself in today. He articulates this in his very title of the book - the sky is falling. Through the book he looks at the many historical and sociological factors that have come into play to bring the western church to this point. He also describes the pain and grief that this leads many church members and leaders to feel.

Roxburgh suggests that the people of God have always experienced this type of adaptive challenge. Drawing on the work of sociologist Victor Turner who studies primitive cultures rites of passages, Roxburgh argues that what we are experiencing is liminality and that this environment will form comunitas environments that will respond to this new missional context.

There is much in this book that is worthy of discussion and reflection for the Transition Stream and it is bound to become of the key texts for the forge Transition Stream. In fact it is likely that this book will be used for group reading and reflection for the monthly clusters. It is important to highlight one more element that Roxburgh picks up and that is his suggestion of a new ministry role that could be formed - that of a abbot or abbess. The model suggested is one where someone takes the role of overseeing a number of communities and holds the communities together with common purposes, practices and values. It is a interesting model and one that personally resonates with me because this is the experience and model that Northern Community has taken with our multi-congregational approach. Roxburgh is not suggesting that the model is new but one worthy of re-visiting.

The Missional Leader - equipping your church to reach a changing world by Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk.

In this book Roxburgh and Romanuk outline a model for a local church to change and transition to meet new missional challenges and needs. They highlight six critical issues for missional leadership: (1) missional leadership is the key - but how do you do it?, (2) most models repackage old models, (3) discontinuous change is the new norm, (4) congregations still matter, (5) leaders need new capacities and frameworks, (6) a congregation is a unique organization.

In articulating their missional change model for the local church, Roxburgh and Romanuk remind us that change rarely happens in a straight line. It is more like a sailboat tacking into the wind than it is about running a race from point A to point B. The authors utilise the thinking and writing of Everett Rogers. Rogers is a anthropologist who has researched how change takes place in cultures. Rogers stages of changes are: (1) knowledge, (2) persuasion, (3) decision, (4) experimentation and implementation and (5) confirmation and reinforcement. Roxburgh and Romanuk have learnt from these stages and developed a missional change model (MCM). The missional change model is five stages that are: (1) commit, (2) trial, (3) evaluation, (4) understand and (5) awareness.

Transforming Communities -re-imagining the church for the 21st century by Stephen Croft.

Many of the authors of the books that are written about leadership for the new missional context are North American and therefore come from certain paradigms and hold a number of common assumptions. It is refreshing, therefore, to read Croft who is the warden of the Church of England theological college Cranmer Hall. Croft has broken his book into four parts. The first part of the book is a parable about dealing with change. The second part is the part of the book that all books of this nature include: an overview and analysis of the situation that the western church finds itself in and identifies a number of challenges for local church leaders and denominational leaders. The third part contains an exploration of this situation through theological and biblical reflection. Finally, part four contains practical leadership suggestions and frameworks for church leaders and ministers interested in building networked smaller missional communities together.

The Church in Transition - the journey of existing churches into the emerging culture by Tim Conder

This book is written by a minister of a local church in the United States of America. He is a minister who has a foot in both camps - having many friends and collegues in the emergent USA scene as well as leading a local church. It is an interesting book because of this dual role as most of the emergent books are written from a church planting perspective. This is not a criticism or even a failing of the emergent library of books but rather recognizes the experiences of the authors.

Conder uses his local church ministry experience and his emergent association and awareness to identify seven deadly fears and seven essential conversations. The seven deadly fears are: (1) The emerging culture’s attachment to post-modern thought leaves no room for the truth of the gospel, (2) The emerging culture’s emphasis on community minimizes the importance of personal faith, (3) Attempts to do culturally relevant ministry in an emerging culture cause the gospel message to be softened and distorted, (4) Ministry in the emerging culture leads to the devaluation of the Bible, (5) Ministry in the emerging culture means abandoning Christian ethics and accepting immoral behavior, (6) Transition to ministry in the emerging culture means the loss of the traditions and practices we hold dear, and (7) Transition to ministry in the emerging culture demands that a church abandons its distinctive theological identity as liberal or conservative.

It is interesting to reflect on these seven deadly fears and ask if this is the experience in Australia too. I know in my own denominations some of these fears would not be held tightly and would not be too much of a concern but perhaps other mainline denominations would experience it differently. One of the intriguing elements of the forge Transition Stream will be the different denominational flavors that will discuss these types of themes. I am looking forward to that learning experience.

Condor’s seven essential conversations are as follows (1) Changing your worship service and why the obvious starting place is usually not the best starting place, (2) transition in spiritual formation, (3) transition in leadership, (4) transition in community formation, (5) transition in mission, (6) transition in worship, (7) the journey into the emerging culture.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 4:03 pm by phil and is filed under Forge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.