IT’S MISSION, STUPID

 

Three seems to be the magic number for memory retention, so I’ll keep my categories to these three, when it comes to developing missional leadership:

 

1. 1. Abide in Christ in a way that others may imitate

2. 2. Understand the context and articulate the Gospel within it

3. 3. Renew people’s understanding of God’s intention for their lives

Abide in Christ in a way that others may imitate

 

The Facebook mantra ‘move fast and break things’ has a lot to answer for. It has helped to create a culture where good leadership disrupts, sits back to see what happens and then tries to take advantage of that. It presupposes an alpha kind of person who is always energetically on the move and unafraid to get their own way. I realise this is a caricature, but these people exist in church ministry, and we may see more of them as a new cohort of church leaders comes from this era of disruption. We live in a culture of speed. The faster things can be done, the better. We imitate the things we worship or are enslaved by, and as AI colonises the culture, its sheer speed will become more of the metric by which we judge one another.

 

We would be laughed out of most boardrooms saying this, but we can’t lose sight of the calling to move slow and build things. This is no mandate for lethargy, because moving slowly takes discipline, wisdom and attentive listening to God. Jesus used phrases like ‘abide in me, as I abide in you’; ‘I am the vine and you are the branches’. There is nothing hurried about the process of growing fruit. One ordained priest recently told me about his experience of a silent eight-day retreat where he surrendered possession except the Bible. He nearly went mad in the first two days but found remarkable renewal in the following six. That’s not for everyone, but it highlights how utterly addicted to movement, entertainment and information we have become.

 

I wonder how much permission giving we need to do to help people wrest themselves from overloaded lives and ministry. In their overload, clergy can feel immune from judgment because they are working so hard, but perhaps we need people to work hard in another way. Perhaps we need to.

 

It’s fascinating that in his letters, the apostle Paul does not always say: be filled with the Spirit; he also says: be imitators of me. He knew the power of the influencer two thousand years before it became a cool role in the new economy. There is a body of epidemiological evidence for how we influence those around us, for better or for worse. We pick up clues on how to live from those around us and imitate others shamelessly. If the missional leader has good habits, this will make an impact with big ripple effects. If they have bad habits, it will do the same. And if we want to share the good news of how much God loves people in Christ, how invested in our lives he is, we need to evidence this personally.

 

Understand the context and articulate the Gospel within it

 

There are two sides to this context now, in ways not true only thirty years ago. There is the local and the digital. We understand neither perfectly and should be suspicious of anyone who says they have grasped the culture because there are so many influences on us now, playing out in dynamic and often careless ways. When we talked about mission in the public square thirty years ago, we saw this as a place where majority opinions are formed, through TV, radio and newspapers. I am not sure there is a public square any longer. It feels more like a thousand courtyards facing inwards. We don’t know what’s going on in most of those courtyards, but these micro-cultures are powerfully impacting on the way people think, and they are believing untested sources that may not even have been created by human beings. We talked about the perverse metanoia at work in our last residential, where people are lured into believing lies, which only takes them further from Jesus, who is the truth.

 

Missional leadership is wising up to these changes and also being self-aware in how they are changing the missional leader. I spend a portion of time now talking through how clergy engage online, and how they think their parishioners are, and it is sometimes a revealing conversation.

 

St Paul’s encounter with the chattering classes of Athens in Acts 17 remains a textbook way of faith sharing. He talked about being all things to all people, in order that he might save some and we see this in Athens. Paul, the stern monotheist, commends the Athenians for their commitment to religion even though it is idolatrous in his mind. But in that idolatry, he found the inscription to ‘an unknown God’ and ran with that. We need to interpret the cultures we find. Ridiculing them or condemning them won’t help those who find their identity in that culture. How do we assist our missional leaders to do this work? And how do they equip their parishioners to do this. I have suggested before that people may benefit from developing a street apologetic; honest and humble ways of defending the faith when it is questioned. We can’t turn people into Alastair McGrath; I can’t turn myself into that. But if people don’t have a reason to express the hope that is in them, why should anyone else be convinced?

 

Renew people’s understanding of God’s intention for their lives

 

The end point of parochial work is to create missional disciples. This is Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 28. And to do so perhaps we have to do some disruption ourselves: to reverse what feels like a law of spiritual physics. We operate with a strong centripetal force in church life, puling people into the centre. It is not intentional, but it is pervasive. We talk about releasing people’s gifts, but too often mean how these gifts can be used inside church in order to serve the congregation, share the load and ensure the smooth running of regular worship and activity. We need ministers and volunteers, of course, but if this is our main goal in releasing gifts, it may lead to a bigger centre, an introspective culture and a chaplaincy model of ministry rather than a cure of souls.

 

The goal is to develop a centrifugal force in church life, which propels people out to live as missional disciples, how to take up their cross and follow Christ in the 167 hours of the week they don’t spend inside church. When we talk about vocations, we necessarily think of licensed and commissioned roles because this is where our work takes us, but I think we will have made the mental journey we need to make when we say the word vocations and the first thought that comes to mind is how we can support people as Christians in their work as refuse collectors, solicitors, carers, IT specialists, teachers and Amazon deliverers.

 

It strikes me with real force every time I conduct an everyday faith anointing service, how I come into church with a sermon I hope will fit because it’s what came to mind as I sat at the desktop, only to hear people tell the stories of what’s really going on. Here’s a flavour of what I have heard, and what people ask me to pray for as they are anointed, whether they are in paid work or not:

 

I have to make people redundant this week

 

I hate my job, and I’m trapped in it

 

The images I have to look at as a news editor are destroying my belief in God

 

I am European director for a major industry

 

I care for my dying husband

 

I am afraid all the time, please help me

 

I allocate resources in the NHS that mean life or death for people

 

I am starting secondary school soon

 

I am leaving home to attend university

 

I have a bad back and unless it is healed, I will lose my only source of support as a self-employed gardener

 

I’m nearly 100 and want you to pray for my witness to the care home I’ve just moved into

 

I want to change jobs, but don’t know what God wants

 

I have dementia and want you to pray for those who will have to look after me as I get worse

 

I work for the Foreign Office and can’t cope with its policy on Gaza (this woman cried so deeply about this, she had to helped away from me)

 

Fascinatingly, the prayer that recurs most often is along the lines of:

 

I’m retired and I don’t know what God wants me to do with my time

 

Fascinating, because the public perception is that retired people are busier than ever, but I think there is another side to this for some.

 

If missional leadership is to mean anything, it has to be dreaming up ways of releasing people, not to do more stuff in church, but to live for Christ among those who don’t know how much he loves them.