The Blind Beggar was looking for a Missional Elevator Pitch, and after a few comments and such, he’s proposed one version of an elevator pitch for “missional.”
We’ve been talking about missional leadership lately… so Grace has posted part 3 of her leadership series, in which she challenges the idea that leaders hold the vision for the community. She quotes Len Sweet before going on to generally debunk some ideas and offer some further insight as to how vision and leadership emerge from within a community.
Leadership as “visionâ€? has become another way about exercising dominance and pushing other people around your ideas…Vision has become a way of declaring dominance, of achieving alpha status and stats.
More good stuff from Grace. And speaking of Leonard Sweet, I stumbled on another blogger quoting him, and picking a good snip, too:
The old model of church is “killing the West,� Sweet said at the conference. The out-dated model is “attractional, propositional and colonial.� It must become missional, relational and incarnational, he said.
I concur. But back to the subject of management, Bob Carlton adds a few thoughts, including the observation that “Informal leadership is much more meaningful than who reports to who on some crazy org chart.” and the most important note that “people are not sheep.” He continues, “The act of managing someone – manage comes from the Italian maneggiare (to handle — especially a horse) – one of the modern myths that I am so thankful seems to be dying a much needed death.”
Ah, reimagining leadership…. ’bout time.
Hey Bro, thanks for the shout out, and for the heads-up on those good leadership posts by Grace.
What I find fascinating — and exciting — is that it now appears to be kosher with us emerging types to speak of “leadership” again. It was just a couple of years ago that I’d find myself in the crosshairs of a HTML assault rifle for suggesting that “leadership” isn’t completely unbiblical and passe.
This is very cool!
(And Grace’s posts rock.)
I’m glad you guys like the posts.
As my husband reads the posts, especially the latest one, he keeps saying, “I can’t believe you’ve finally come around to admit that there is leadership.” That is based on many months of me coming unglued on him (in a nice way) when discussing what a leader should be, he would mistakenly refer to “the” leader. In my defense, I explain that I had never fully ditched the idea of leadership, just the single leader model.
So yeah, I’ve put down the assault rifle too.
Leadership is important, but it must be done as was so well modeled for us by the Master. Fun snippets.