On July 9th 2006, I became lead pastor of Awaken Orlando Wesleyan Church. The
Atlantic District’s own Eric Currie serves on Awaken Orlando’s lead team as
well. My team is committed to shaping this community into a missional
movement that will impact Central Florida as a whole. This is an audacious
goal, but I don’t know how to read the biblical view of God’s mission any other
way. To prepare for this new adventure, I have done much thinking about the
essence of leadership—particularly missional leadership. What is
it? What does a missional leader do?
I have always been drawn to the concise yet profound definition by John
Maxwell—“Leadership is influence. Nothing more. Nothing less.” Influence
is a potent term. It captures the essence of leadership. Influence is the
ability to persuade or move people or institutions to adopt a certain course of
action or to believe certain things to be true. It is also, as Erwin McManus
suggests, the ability to change the things that a person cares about.
In our context as followers of Jesus, missional relates to those things that
resonate with the will of God. It involves participation in God’s actions in
creation. To be missional is to be in tune with and acting upon God’s will “on
earth as it is in heaven.” Thus, missional leadership is influence that
unleashes others to participate in God’s overarching mission for His Creation.
Men and women who serve as missional leaders work to shape and create a
mission-centered ethos within their communities. Such an ethos is shaped through
language, environment, and actions. We will explore these three elements in the
remainder of this essay.
LANGUAGE
Secular leaders have long recognized the power of language. Bart Nanus in
Visionary Leadership, wrote, "There is no more powerful engine driving an
organization toward excellence and long-range success than an attractive,
worthwhile, and achievable vision of the future, widely shared."
Missional leaders deploy the power of language to invite people to live in a
new land—a land that evokes God-sized dreams and is permeated with the love and
hope that God unleashed through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus
Christ and through the subsequent outpouring of the Spirit on Jesus’ followers.
We, of course, are not describing mere rhetoric—as if human language alone has
intrinsic power apart from God. The Bible as the Word of God invites us into
this new world as the Scriptures announce to us God’s mission.
I am convinced that as interpreters of Scripture we need to think about the
overarching story of the Bible. Too often we have a tendency to read the Bible
as a collection of fragments whose imagery we can capture for a sermon or time
of teaching. Yet, the Scriptures focus on the mission of God (missio dei).
Humanity plays a vital role in God’s mission. In God’s original plan, humanity
was created to serve as a missional community to reflect God’s character to all
creation. Human rebellion (described most poignantly in the narratives of
Genesis 3-11 and in Paul’s letter to Rom (Romans 1-3) created the need for God
work profoundly for the reconciliation of humanity. This involved the creation
of a new people—Israel through whom God would work to bring salvation to the end
of the earth. God’s plan of salvation for humanity reached its climax in the
life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. Jesus fulfilled all that
Israel was to be and unleashed his followers to into the world to share the good
news of God’s salvation through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Scriptural
story ends where it began—New Creation. Ostensibly, life in the New Creation
will be a renewal of the original purposes for humanity—living as a missional
community for all Creation by reflecting God’s character to it.
Thus we may outline the Bible as a whole in this manner:
Creation -- Fall -- Israel -- Jesus Christ -- Church -- New Creation
The missional leader understands, breathes, and lives for this narrative. She or
he uses the power of language to help others to catch a glimpse of what God is
doing. The goal of this deployment of language is simple: conversion. The
missional leader seeks to establish a missional ethos through language so that
followers of Jesus the Messiah may be (re)converted and (re)ignited to God’s
mission and so that those non-Christ followers may be invited to live for God’s
mission receiving the gift of life that God offers through trusting Jesus
Christ.
ENVIRONMENT
Designers of missional worship services need to maneuver skillfully between two
false temptations. The first temptation is a stodgy allegiance to a traditional
liturgical service. Traditionalists tend to forget that every tradition began as
a contemporary and fresh expression of worship in some context. It is simply
wrong-headed to think that an orthodox theology will translate only into one
type of worship. The second temptation is to overemphasize “edginess” as
evidence of missional zeal. It is a fine line between seeking to speak clearly
and relevantly to a target audience (or as I like to say “to speak human”) and
losing the essence of the Gospel.
Here are a couple of thoughts about shaping environment.
- Prayer—Never underestimate the importance and power of prayer.
Missional communities resonate with God through prayer. Leaders must lead from
their knees. The creation of environments must be birth in prayer and
sustained by the prayers of the missional leaders and their communities of
faith. There is no substitute for this step.
- Scripture—The Bible offers to its readers a new world. It is an
invitation to experience a new life and to live the reality of New Creation in
the present. Missional leaders understand that communities of faith need to be
saturated with Scripture. The Bible is the most profound book that humanity
possesses. Missional communites need to rediscover its power and its ability
to shape and create ethos.
- Deploy Gifts Openly—Missional leaders push their communities to
grow in grace and Christlikeness by celebrating and deploying the gifts of the
body. Many emerging Churches have rediscovered the power of art in worship.
Dance, music, painting, video, and drama are becoming increasingly common in
worship gatherings in missional communities in the Western world. These
features push followers of Christ to use their own gifts. For too long,
Christian artists have been held at arm’s length by the Church. This has
harmed the Christ following movement because it has stifled the creativity of
community as the whole. Any time that a person’s gifts and talents are
squelched the body of Christ is harmed. Missional communities need every
single Christ follower functioning fully. Deploying gifts in the context of
worship encourages others to use their own gifts for the good of the whole.
ACTIONS
Missional leaders must learn to sculpt the ethos of their communities of faith.
We have already looked at the potential of deploying language and creating
environments that reflect a biblical ethos. The missional leader can also shape
ethos through his or her actions. This may ultimately be the greatest shaper of
ethos.
There are at least four areas in which our actions can model a biblical ethos
for our communities to embrace and embody:
- The missional leader can shape ethos through a commitment to a
missional lifestyle. Mission must be modeled from the top down. Our
communities will only be missional to the extent that the community’s leaders
embrace mission as a core value and live their lives in light of God’s
mission. Our modus operandi must resonate with Paul’s poignant declaration in
1 Corinthians 9:22—“I have become all things to all men so that by all
possible means I might save some.”
- The missional leader can shape ethos through the practice of a
radically inclusive ministry. All people on earth regardless of race, sex,
color, nationality, religion, or socio-economic class have been forged in the
image of God. This is the message of Genesis 1:26-31. All oppression and
divisions among these groups is traceable to the pervasive and persistent
presence of sin in every individual, group, and culture (Genesis 3-11). Sadly,
the Church has for too long perpetuated these divisions even within the
community of faith. Yet, in Jesus Christ, there is a radical newness. Through
the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the possibility of living the life
that God created us to live is a reality. The old divisions are gone. There is
new creation (2 Corinthians 5). Paul words in Galatians 3:26-28 are
profound—“for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. 27 As
many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
28 There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is
no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
What does a radically inclusive ministry look like?
a) It empowers women for leadership roles. I fully understand that the
evangelical world is divided over this issue, but I am convinced that the
biblical witness supports the full inclusion of women in leadership roles
within the Christ-following movement. This is not the place for a full defense
of this position, but I am convinced that this needs to be part of our witness
to the culture. The Wesleyan Church has historically been on the cutting edge
of this issue. We need to recapture this high ground.
b) It rejects divisions along socio-economic lines. Missional leaders
are willing to pay the price to allow the active participation of poor and
rich alike within their communities. James 2 gives stern warnings about acting
otherwise. As the world becomes increasingly urbanized, we will continue to
witness extreme poverty. If the Christ-following movement is to ever have a
global impact, it needs to begin serving the poor in their own geographic
locales.
c) It develops cross cultural and interracial friendships as the
presupposition for the creation of multi-cultural communities that give the
world a taste of the diversity of Kingdom of God. Too many leaders lament
the segregation of communities of faith, but miss the irony that the basis for
desegration is not lament but the active embrace of persons different from
ourselves. We need to cultivate friendships and relationships with persons
from backgrounds unfamiliar to us.
An inclusive ministry is the pathway to unleashing followers of Christ to
deploy fully their giftedness.
- The missional leader can shape ethos by empowering others to serve
according to their giftedness. The biblical portraits of gifts (e.g.,
Romans 12 or 1 Corinthians 12-14) suggest that the body of Christ is a living
organism in which each member has a crucial role to play. The people of God
need one another. Biblical community occurs when each believer deploys his or
her gifts, talents, and passions within the community. The missional leader
will work to shape the ethos of the community by (re)implementing a biblical
vision of the God’s people by empowering followers of Christ to unleash the
full range of their giftedness and the natural result of their relationship
with Jesus Christ. Missional leaders rather than being the driving force of
every discrete ministry within a community will serve as coaches who train,
empower, and encourage followers of Christ in their Kingdom work.
- The missional leader can shape ethos by a commitment to living a whole
and balanced life as a follower of Jesus Christ. Human beings were created
to live in authentic community in which they reflect God’s character to the
world. Community, holiness, and mission are the essence of the imago dei in
humanity. Missional leaders need to reflect these aspects in their own lives.
The persons who listen to us and watch us will be persuaded most readily by a
life that they would want to live. Following Jesus Christ is not about
prosperity or material happiness, but it comes with a joy and fulfillment that
cannot be attained by any other means. If we are to shape a biblical ethos for
our communities, we ourselves as missional leaders must live whole and
balanced lives before our communities.
©2006 Brian D. Russell
If you are interested in reading some of my other writings, I post two essays
weekly on my website:
www.realmealministries.org
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