Vol 1:15 Visioning and God's Mission (Part 4: Leading that Cultivates Mission)

Missional leading is different than the kind of leadership many of us have done or experienced. I remember a number of years ago when I stepped out of the pastorate to do doctoral studies, I found myself being on the other side of the pulpit. Sitting in the pew, I realized that the pastoral leadership in the church I was attending did not connect with me, nor as I noticed, those sitting next to me. As I reflected on this, I realized that this was the kind of pastoral leadership I had brought to my previous 11 years of ministry – this current style of leading did not connect with those I had been called to shepherd.

This began a ten year exploration of reframing the way I fulfilled my calling as pastor – and I came to discover that the kind of leading that is essential is one that cultivates God’s mission – and cultivation is quite different from the “CEO-type” model many of us have come to accept as normative.

Many of our models of leadership or leading have to do with exerting direct control or action to bring about particular outcomes. These models tend to view people as means to accomplishing such purposes, seeing people as “having gifts,” rather than being the gifts the Spirit of God has gathered together in a community. Seeing people as ones whom the Spirit of God is forming, calls for a different approach to shepherding the body of Christ – a more organic, relational approach, and though we are focused on a task of being sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s present and coming reign, leading people cannot be a mere task.

Alan Roxburgh, in Missional Leader, gives voice to leading as cultivation.

“The idea of leadership as cultivating an environment is difficult to grasp because of our ingrained conviction that leadership is about providing solutions and strategies with predefined ends. Rather than the leader [or leaders] having plans and strategies that the congregation will affirm and follow, cultivation describes the leader as one who works the soil of the congregation so as to invite and constitute the environment for the people of God to discern what the Spirit is doing in, with, and among them as a community” (Missional Leader, 28).

He expresses that cultivating leading “releases the missional imagination of God’s ordinary people” (Missional Leader, 29).

I believe that leading that cultivates begins with realizing that the Spirit of God is already at work in our congregations; the Spirit is gathering the people who are uniquely suited to the mission for which we are being called and sent. Their particular gifts and passions reveal how God is equipping us as a community to participate with God in God’s redemptive mission.

Rather, than leadership receiving a vision from on high and then disseminating or “selling” that vision to the congregation (which I believe is more of an Old Testament model of leading), missional leading or leadership expressed through the servanthood that Christ expressed and modeled, focuses on discerning and expressing the calling and vision that the Spirit has placed among us through the gift of people the Spirit has gathered.

As shepherds give energy to developing relationships, discovering stories, gifts and passions of those whom the Spirit is gathering, leadership can begin to discern the visional patterns of what God is accomplishing in us and through us. As these patterns are expressed, vision is cast, but it is not a vision that has to be “sold” to the people, or for there to be “buy in” from the people, because this vision has already been rooted in the life of the congregation by the Spirit of God.

When Martin Luther King, Jr., expressed, “I have a dream,” he was not selling a dream, but was giving voice to the dream that was already in the hearts and lives of people – that is what made his declaration so moving. Likewise, when pastoral leadership discovers, for example, numerous musically-gifted people within their congregation, rather than saying, “hey, we’ve got a good pool of people to audition for filling existing ministry positions (seeing people as means), missional leadership begins to ask the cultivating and discerning question – “I wonder why God has gifted us with so many musically-gifted people; what is the Spirit of God saying to us regarding how we are to utilize music in participating with God in mission?”

This is a different kind of leading – one that is rooted in servantship; one that recognizes that the Spirit of God is already at work among us; one that recognizes that leading involves cultivating the soil of the congregation so that what can grow is what the Spirit of God has already planted.

There is much more I can say on this – I teach a whole seminar on this in various theological settings. But the point I am making is that missional leading is leading that follows the lead of the Spirit – what the Spirit is already engaged in within our church communities, and in the communities in which the church lives out its presence. Are we about casting our own vision, or are we about having eyes and ears to sense God’s vision already planted among us to which we learn to give voice and cultivate communities to respond?