The other week I had my first ACOM Intensive. Stephen Said was the facilitator and it was on the subject of Missional Leadership. I’m not a great note taker, in fact I really just wrote down things that interested me or that I was asked to. Anyway here are my notes …
One of the first things we did was watch the movie Molokai. The intention was to see if he was a good missionary and if so why, my basic reflections were …
- impressed by his faithfulness, even while enduring much suffering and injustice
- inspired by his love
- challenged by his sacrifice
- tired of the institution and its capacity to hold back God’s work
We spent quite a lot of our time in discussion about the kingdom of God (or as Stephen likes to call it God’s Transforming Dream). This was a great discussion including issues such as what is heaven and its relationship to the kingdom, what is the gospel and a bunch of other stuff that I remember being good but can’t think of right now. :-p
The two things I found the most helpful would probably have been the time we spent talking about key practices of missional leaders (notes below) and working on the approaches to discipleship in a modern context compared to a postmodern one.
Key practices of missional leaders.
Critical Contextualisation
- observe one area of culture,
- engage with scripture on that issue,
- build the interpretive bridge.
Telling the story of the Kingdom of God – God’s transforming dream – understanding and articulating an alternative reality
Mediating Reality/Meaning
- we suffer a crisis of meaning because we’ve had the mystery explained away by scientific reasoning
- we live in a mediated reality – certain people control our reality through media, etc
- missional leaders have a responsibility to help people understand the real world
Embodiment
- you cannot separate the missionary from the mission
- against the darkness: a transforming vision St Francis of Assisi in an age of anxiety – Richard Raw
- Jesus does not call us to have the answer, Jesus calls us to be
I wish I’d taken better notes, but I never do, I always get lost in the conversation.
My definition of Missional Leadership at the end of the three days was:
Missional leadership is the action of influencing other journeyers to follow the God of mission by discerning, telling the story of the KoG, mediating reality and embodying the KoG with them.
Filed under: kingdom of God, leadership, missional practice, uni work
I can tell that this is not the first time you write about the topic. Why have you chosen it again?