Cultivating Missional Systems

A few weeks back Luther Seminary played host to the 2005 consultation of the Gospel and Our Culture Network. Titled Cultivating Missional Systems, the event reported back findings from a three year research project on, you guessed it, embedding missional church ideas in larger systems of congregations. The rationale here is twofold: 1) congregations risking change will seek out structures of support if they don't already exist or are not adequate to the challenge, 2) congregations lacking adequate structures may realize missional ideals, but only in the short term. Isolated congregations lack the external resources to make long-term succession possible.

Here then are four highlights from the consultation and its chief sponsor, Church Innovations:

Change
Drawing on the work of Everett Rogers (Diffusion of Innovations) and Ronald Heifets (Leadership on the Line) distinctions were drawn between technical and adaptive challenges. Technical challenges presume clear problems, a clear solution, and a strategic plan to bridge the gap between them. Adaptive challenges concern underlying matters of "habits, values, and attitudes". The misidentification of an adaptive challenge as technical results in great heartache and woe. For example, the example offered by Pat Keifert of Church Innovations, take weight loss. When considered as a technical challenge, the strategic response is quite clear: eat less and exercise more. The continued existence of overweight people and a diet book industry suggests that weight loss is not in fact a technical challenge. So then, how can we rightly distinguish technical and adaptive challenges. Moreover, what interventions are required to respond, and before that to desire and imagine responses to, adaptive challenges?

Church FutureFinder
Church Innovations commends the Church FutureFinder as one response to these questions.

"Church FutureFinder is a database of current and historical congregations. It can be accessed online at http://www.churchinnovations.org/churchfuturefinder. Once you register at the website for FutureFinder, you enter at the appropriate level to enter data and obtain reports. CFF is in use in several seminary courses, getting ready to be launched into a seminary internship system, and available for congregational leaders to play with."

Small Groups
What would it look like to engage small groups, not as a program, but as a strategy for ministry?

Dwelling in the Word
Finally, consider this framework for moral deliberation: dwelling in the word.