Alan Hirsch :: Blog

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Just a note on Rex Miller’s new website. Rex is a respected leader to both the church and business world. His book, The Millennium Matrix, provides a great roadmap for navigating the digital era. The website is full of resources and is updated weekly. The daily blogs provide leading edge insights on digital culture and tools along with thought provoking questions and links to interesting thought leaders. Enjoy.

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In Matthew 29:29-32 Jesus blasts those who are determined to maintain the illusion that they represent Israel’s righteousness (the pharisees) because of their failure to acknowledge the role of the prophetic in their midst. Here is a powerful series of comments on this text by Stanley Hauerwas in his fantastic commentary on Matthew (highly recommended).

This is a sobering list of failure and judgment, with descriptions of hypocrisy and failure in which we cannot help but see ourselves. It is surely the case, for example, that many are kept from entering the kingdom by the lives we lead as Christians. Our problem is very simple–we simply do not know how to live as a people who believe that Jesus is the resurrected Lord. the joy and freedom that should name the lives of those freed from the demons become lost amid attempts to make our difference depend on matters that do not matter. We become adept at praising the prophets of the past, having lost the ability to discern the prophets among us.

Jesus describes the scribes and the Pharisees as “blind guides”. That they are blind is not unrelated to their desire to be guides. Those who would lead others often fear those they lead, and in particular they fear hurting those they lead. They think it is their task to make the life of those they lead secure. Yet a people who depend on prophets can never live lives of safety. A people required to remember that they area people whose forebears have murdered the righteous cannot live lives of safety. Those who would lead too often must hide from themselves what they know to be true because they think that those whom they lead cannot bear the truth. The blindness of the Pharisees and the scribes is a blindness that threatens the church no less than any people. The only difference between the Pharisees and those who would lead Jesus’ people is that the latter lead a people who have no reason to fear the truth.

Jesus’ condemnation of the scribes and Pharisees is sobering, but we dare not overlook the fact that the criticism Jesus makes of the scribes and Pharisees assumes that the people he is calling to be his church will need to be a people like the Pharisees and scribes. He even says that he will send prophets and scribes to the synagogues and towns of Israel. The church will need persons called to positions that help the church avoid hypocrisy through agents of direction to keep before the church the vision of the kingdom; the church will needs agents of memory to help the church read its scripture and tradition; the church will needs agents of linguistic self-consciousness to guard the church from mental laziness; the church will needs agents of order and due process to isnure unity and encourage participation in the decisions of the church (quote from Yoder, 1984,28-34)

Each of these agents will be tempted to hypocrisy. There is no guarantee that ensures we will lives lives of integrity. Hypocrisy can be avoided only if the church is a community capable of truthful speech. If such a community is missing, then those who would lead are doomed. Jesus’ condemnation of the scribes and Pharisees is severe, [but his]…description of how those called to help Israel live faithfully have come to lead false lives is suffused with pathos. His condemnations are harsh, but what could be worse for the scribes and Pharisees, like any of us, to get the lives they think they wanted.

Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew: Brazos Theological Commentary of the Bible (Brazos; 2006) 199-200

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Missional church requires a missional ministry and leadership system.  For the most part, the Christendom church obscured the need for a fully fledged missional leadership system because the self understanding of the church became fundamentally non-missional. Because all citizens were deemed to be Christians all what was really needed were the pastoral and teaching ministries to care for and teach the congregation. These were eventually instituted as offices in the church and became the principal metaphors for church leadership. The net effect is that the whole system weighted itself in favor of maintenance and pastoral care and that these became hegemonic in practice and therefore and both fragmented and distorted the total mission and ministry of the church in favor of only part of its calling.

A direct consequence of this was that the apostolic, the prophetic, and the evangelistic, ministries and leadership styles were marginalized and effectively ‘exiled’ from the church’s official ministry and leadership. This is not to say that these ministries have totally disappeared. Far from it: many within current and historical church life have exercised these ministries without specifically being tagged ‘apostles’ or ‘prophets’, but by and large these lacked formal legitimacy and recognition and they have tended to be exercised outside of the context of the local church, denominational systems, and seminaries. This ‘exiling’ in part gave rise to the development of parachurch agencies and missional orders, each with a somewhat atomized ministry focus. E.g. the Navigators arose out of a calling to evangelize and disciple people outside of the church structures because the church was not effective (or interested?) in this. Sojourners emerged to represent the social justice concerns that the church by and large ignores. World Vision as an Aid and Development agency, etc. But in these were generally initiated and maintained the APE type leadership styles. This divorce of APE from PT has been disastrous for the local church and has damaged the cause of Christ and his mission.

In order to understand the different nature of each of these ministries we need to briefly explore the core task/functions of each, the effect when it monopolizes and dominates in isolation from the others, and the effect when it is integrated with the other ministries. The easiest way to do this is within a comparative table. It is as follows…

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Just so that all my English mates are interested, I am coming to England with the Together in Mission folks (a number of events including their summer school) and will be doing something with the Baptists in Bristol. As far as I am away, these are open events. Feel free to contact the folks involved. Info on the WEBA event is here… forgotten-ways-info-form

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This blog is part of a global syncroblog of over 50 bloggers initiated by the Blind Beggar. The aim is to explore the current use/overuse/misuse of the term ‘missional’. Actually this is timely because I have been chewing on this for a long time and am increasingly alarmed about the potential damage that can be caused though incorrect understanding and use of the word. I have hesitated to write or blog about this because of the sometimes nasty controversy surrounding the whole ‘emerging church’ phenomenon. But sadly, this controversy is precisely where the blurring is taking place–from both sides of the debate. I certainly don’t want to be seen as further marginalizing a group of brothers and sisters that are searching in some way for a place to stand and for a faith that they can believe in. But I believe that this discussion is now unavoidable.  What triggered this post is a recent conversation that I had with Ed Stetzer. He said to me that he had spoken to Tim Keller and Tim had expressed concerns that missional had become the new emergent and that the term had become almost useless and that we had to now think about discarding it. My reply to him was that I was equally concerned about this and that as far as it depended on me that this would not take place on my shift!!

Words carry meanings and the blurring of words leads to a blurring in clarity and understanding. Biblical truth in particular is inextricably bound to the right use of words as images are often suspect conveyors of truth in Hebraic worldview (see Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word) . Part of the role of theology is to guard the meaning of words–to maintain truthful speech in the community of faith. In light of this, the word ‘missional’ carries a very distinct, and I would argue irreplaceable, meaning/s. Why I am so fussy about this word is because I believe it carries the full weight of the hope for the church in the West. I wholeheartedly believe that the recovery of the missional idea of God and Church is critical to the survival, let alone the growth, of Christianity in the West. Much is at stake here! The reason for this is that ‘missional‘ is a word that gives us a perspective on the very nature of God. It has direct links to the doctrine of the Missio Dei…the understanding that God is a ’sent one’, a missionary–a redeemer by his very nature). This has profound implications for the Church’s fundamental stance in relation to the world in which we are called to live. Missional church requires that we, following the Missio Dei, are in turn a missionary, a ’sent’ people. The church emerges out of the mission of God in the world, not the other way around. The way I phrased this in The Forgotten Ways was to say that “…it was not so much that the church has a mission but that the mission has a church.” Another paragraph from The Forgotten Ways…

Missional church is a community of God’s people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God’s mission to the world. In other words, the church’s true and authentic organizing principle is mission. When the church is in mission, it is the true church. The church itself is not only a product of that mission but is obligated and destined to extend it by whatever means possible. The mission of God flows directly through every believer and every community of faith that adheres to Jesus. To obstruct this is to block God’s purposes in and through his people. [82]

This is clearly not the same as the core ideas that inform the terms ‘emerging church’ or ‘Emergent’ (the organization that largely represents it in the US at least). Whilst some people in the emerging church are deeply concerned about organizing around missional ideas, And while there are certainly aspects of missional approaches throughout the movement, the same can be said for all churches, including the church growth movement which is is opposed to. in my opinion what is expressed through Emergent, the Alt-Worship movement, and what has been called Post-Evangelicalism, is not by-and-large a missionary movement, but is rather what I would call a renewal movement. That is, as far as I can discern, its primary concerns lie largely in interpreting theology and worship for the post-modern situation. Therefore, for many who can no longer hold to modernist understandings of the faith, it is a deadly serious search for a ‘place to stand and believe’ or else abandon the faith altogether. But at bestthe emerging church movement is about contextualizing theology and spirituality for a particular cultural context at the dawn of the 21st Century. At worst, it is simply a reaction against both Evangelicalism and a Western church captive to a distinctly modernist cultural understanding of itself. And let it be said that I believe that many of its concerns ought to be heeded, although I do believe it sometimes overreaches itself and discards many hard-won, and profoundly significant, theological insights passed on to us in the historical, orthodox, understanding of faith. As for me, I am happy to call the so-called ‘emergents’ friends and fellow travelers, I personally do not feel the need to question the inherited theological tradition as many of its adherents do.

All this to say that I do not believe for a moment that “missional is the new emergent”! Emerging forms of the church must always be subservient to the missional purposes of the church. We can use the term, as I do in my writings, the “Emerging Missional Church”, but the emphasis should always fall on the term ‘missional’. Actual mission must precede any new cultural understandings that the church might develop of itself. The Emerging Church has a certain validity as a renewal movement, but renewal movements come and go, the Missio Dei however, is something that must have abiding implications for the Church’s theology, lest we lose the irreplaceable redemptive core inherent in the Christian view of the world. My advice to ‘emergents’ is therefore, don’t emerge before you have a mission.

And my advice to all you folks on both sides of the debate that mix up the term, be warned! What you are doing is only making it harder for the Church to come to grips with its deepest sense of call and purpose in this time and place–no less! You are therefore mucking around with what could be one of the most significant ideas that the Church has to grapple with if we are going to survive, let alone thrive, in the 21st Century. For God’s sake, be clear in your use of the term or can I suggest that you stop using it.

To guard against a further degrading of the word, I want to suggest (as I did in The Forgotten Ways) that we combine the term ‘missional’ with the associated term ‘incarnational’ to come up with the term missional-incarnational. Its clunky I know, but the combination of these two words I believe captures far more completely a sense of the Church’s deepest theology and missionary calling in the world. It is laden with profound theological, and therefore missiological, meanings. If ‘missional’ carries the sense of being ’sent’, then ‘incarnational’ gives definition to the nature of that ’sentness.’ If ‘missional’ means being thrust into the world as witnesses to the redemption that is in Jesus, then ‘incarnational’ shows us that we ought to engage the world in the same way that God did in and through the Incarnation of the Word in Jesus the Messiah. We must go into the world to reach people, but we ought to stay and abide in order to communicate the Gospel relationally and meaningfully in any given context. Mission always sets our Agenda and Incarnation must always describe our Way.

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In passing it is worth noting that one important reason why we should be suspicious of hierarchical top-down notion of leadership is because we know from history and from human nature that institutional systems confer social power and concentrates it at the top. The problem is precisely because of human nature that we should be very wary of such power in human hands. It almost always corrupts and damages the relational fabric that constitutes the church. Very few people can handle it and not be altered by it—perhaps only the great. History is quite clear of that. At least we should learn this from the Lord of the Rings trilogy where the ring of power exercises a powerfully alluring and corruptive power on those who wield it. Besides, the servant/slave image of leadership (dis)qualifies all forms of top-down power leadership and establishes the bottom-up servant approach (Rom.1:1, Tit.1:1, etc.) Jesus could not be more explicit when he says to his disciples, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves” ( Luke 22:25-27.) Snyder is right when he says that “The New Testament does not teach hierarchy as the principle of either authority or organization in the church” and that “Jesus seems to be opposed to both the abuse of power and the hierarchical structure on which (such) power was based.”

But there are powerful metaphors that help us to avoid the alluring notions of top-down coercive power; ones which aid us in understanding our task of creating environments where missional church can arise. At Forge Mission Training Network, we like to think of ourselves as midwives to a new dream. Our stated mission is to ‘help birth and nurture the missional church in Australia and beyond.” And while this describes is our own particular calling, the idea of being midwives is both a very biblical and humane image of leadership and I recommend it to you here as describing the actual mode of leadership which informs all authentic apostolic influence. A midwife aids and assists in the birth of a child. All that he/she makes sure that all the conditions are right for a healthy birth—the birth is the result of things beyond the midwife’s influence. It is interesting that Socrates called himself a midwife and that he saw his role as helping others discover the truth for themselves. This he did by the constant use of questions which drove the learner to their own insights and observations. Jesus is very ‘midwifey’ through his use of questions, stories, and parables.

But perhaps one more image of this quality of leadership is needed to pin this concept down in our minds, and this is the image of a farmer. A good farmer creates the conditions for growth of healthy crops to develop by tilling the soil, replenishing it with nutrients, removing weeds, scattering the seeds, and watering the field. He/she is wide open to natural rhythms of nature which are out of hihe/sher control and so they are reliant on God for the sun and rain. The seed itself, if given the right conditions, will flourish in this type of environment and produce good crops. All that the farmer does is to create the right environment for this mysterious process of life to take place.

Apostolic ministry works in precisely the same way. Paul even alludes to similar organic processes in 1 Cor. 3:5-8 when he says “What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor. For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field….” In fact the bible is laced with organic images that engender an ‘ecological view’ of church and leadership (seeds, ground, yeast, body, flock, trees, etc.) If we remodeled our leadership and churches with these organic metaphors in mind we would develop a more fertile communal life. And organic view of church is much richer because it is truer to, and more consistent with, the inner structure of life and cosmology itself.

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The problem with such forms of CEO-type leadership is that it tends to be disempowering to others, and when, for various reasons, that leader should leave the group; it tends to leave the organization weak and under-developed. This is the very thing that apostolic influence is at pains not to do—rather apostolic ministry calls forth and develops the gifts and callings of all of God’s people. It does not create reliance, but develops the capacities of the whole people of God based on the dynamics of the gospel. In a word it involves empowerment. Jim Collins, in his study of outstanding organizations actually says that dominant charismatic leaders are one of the greatest hindrances to an organization moving from being good to becoming great.

Paul doesn’t seem to be a charismatic leader in Collin’s sense at all. He does not dominate, he is perhaps more parental (he uses images of both father and mother) in the way he works (1Thess.1-2, Col 1:24ff,). In fact in 2Cor.10:1 and elsewhere it seems that he so lacks charismatic ‘presence’ and that he constantly has to affirm his leadership by other means. In their observations about leadership dynamics, Pascale et.al. also note that the impact of adaptive catalytic leadership seems to have little to do with personality, charisma, or style. They point to some leaders in large organizations that could hardly have been called charismatic but who managed to move the organization into higher levels of learning and effectiveness in terms of the stated mission. Rather, they suggest that the adaptive leader works with an organization’s latent appetites which are already present in the organization but await articulation. The leader senses the dormant energy and then catalyzes it. Like seeding clouds with iodine crystals. An adaptive shift comes into existence, not because the leader has all the answers and subsequently rolls them out through the organization. Rather movement and adaptation takes place because of the interplay of sympathetic chords in the environment, the issues of the times, the organization’s members, and “…a leader who can express the challenge in a way that invites others into a dance that is being choreographed as it is performed.” It might be useful to recall the impact that a John Wesley had on his followers, the church, and the broader society around about him. He was a classic adaptive leader. Things just seemed to ‘happen’ because he awakened dreams and impulses that were already latent in the people he led and impacted.

Likewise, all the elements of Apostolic Genius are already there, latent in the very mDNA coding of the church, all that leadership needs to do it awaken under the power of the Holy Spirit. The apostolic leader calls this forth, he/she does not create it. Don’t get me wrong, there is real power and leadership in this, but it is of a different sort than that which the kings of the earth lord it over others (Matt.20:25-28. )

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This idea of ‘greatness’ (descibe din previous post) squares with Weber’s explorations on leadership: The ‘charismatic’ leader, in Weber’s thought, is the person who usually leads in times of mission, crisis, or development and always radically challenges the established practices by going to “the roots of the matter.” People follow such a leader because they are carried away by the belief in the manifestation that authenticates him/her and in so doing they turn away from established ways of doing things and submit to the unprecedented order that the leader proclaims. This type of leadership involves therefore involves a degree of commitment on the part of the disciples that has no parallel in the other types of established leadership. Once again, Jesus is our best example. The following he calls for so absolute that it is called discipleship—the process of becoming like him.

Consistent with the people-movement which it serves, apostolic ministry, based as it is on inspirational-spiritual leadership, involves an organic, relational, style of leadership influence that evokes purpose, movement, and response from those who come into its orbit. This is done on the basis of the apostolic person’s discernable calling, spiritual gifting, and spiritual authority. And like all great leadership, it creates a field of influence wherein which certain behaviors take place.

The universe in which we live is filled with fields of influence. Whist being invisible, fields nonetheless assert a definite influence on objects within their orbit. There are gravitational fields, electromagnetic fields, quantum fields, etc which actually form part of the very structure of reality. These unseen influences affect behavior of atoms, objects, and people. But fields don’t just exist in nature and physics; they exist in social systems as well. For example, think about the power of ideas in human affairs—a powerful idea has no substance, but one cannot doubt its influence.

In the last few decades, organizational behaviorists have begun to see that organizations themselves are laced with invisible fields composed of culture, values, vision, and ethics. “Each of these concepts describes a quality of organizational life that can be observed in behavior yet doesn’t exist anywhere independent of those behaviors.” They are invisible forces that affect behavior for good of for ill. We can ‘feel’ the vibe of an organization can’t we? Sometimes in a group of people, we feel obliged to behave in certain ways, even though no one has told us explicitly how to behave. To learn the impact of such fields, just look at what people are doing. They have picked up the messages, discerned what is truly valued, and shaped their behavior accordingly. So when the organizational field is filled with inconsistent messages, when contradictions inform the organizational culture, then invisible incongruities becomes visible through troubling behaviors.

What is remarkable is the entrance of true leadership into such a situation. With inspirational leadership the whole ‘vibe’ changes: things begin to become clearer, competitiveness is diminished, and people feel freer and more empowered to do their tasks and as a result the organization gains focus and energy. The converse is true and obvious: if leadership is or poor quality it creates unhealthy organizations. If it is good it creates healthy organization. We have only to reach into our own experiences to know the truth of this. Such is the power of a person who embodies vision and values—they bring inspiration, coherence, and a sense of direction and purpose to the people in their orbit. Leadership is influence. It is a field which shapes behaviors. This is the basis of authentic spiritual power and authority. Nelson Mandela is a great leader not because he was President of South Africa, but because long before he was president, he was a deeply moral person who embodied his personal code of freedom in his own life. It is the greatness of his life that gives his leadership substance and impact.

To conceptualize leadership as influence, think of a magnet and its effect on iron filings scattered on a sheet of paper. When the filings come into the orbit of influence of the magnet, they form a certain pattern which we all recognize from our school days. Leadership does exactly the same thing—it creates a field which in turn influences people in a certain way, just like the magnet’s influence on the iron filings. The presence of a great leader in a group of people changes the patterning of that group. For instance, Nelson Mandela’s appearance among a group of people will impact them in a significant way. His physical presence will be unmistakable and will change the social climate of the room. Apostolic leadership qualifies the mood of this influence, but the dynamics of influence operates in the same way. It is precisely this field, this matrix of apostolicity that is critical to the emergence of authentic missional church. Because it is the task of apostolic ministry to create environments wherein which the apostolic imagination of God’s people can be evoked, the spiritual gifts and ministries developed, wherein which the love and hope inspired by the gospel can be make known. For instance, John Wimber would have exerted just this sort of influence. Within two decades, Wimber altered the shape of evangelicalism and underscored the role of the Holy Spirit in mission and ministry in a way that has changed us forever. Just as we still feel the influence of a John Wesley even though none of us have met him. Influence is a field that changes behaviors.

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Having defined the function/roles of the apostolic person, we can now look at how apostolic ministry exerts its influence. Part of the resistance to the reception of apostolic ministry in our churches has been because at times when people who claim to be apostles have assumed that this involved a dictatorial approach to the leadership of the church. All too often, this has resulted in a disempowering of God’s people, and instead of seeing them mature and grow in the faith; they basically remain childlike and powerless, dependent on the autocratic and overwhelming paternal power of the ‘apostle.’ This is both a distortion and misrepresentation of authentic apostolic ministry. Apostolic ministry is authenticated by suffering and empowerment, not by claims of positional leadership with its institutional levers.

In our day I believe that the predominant, top-down, CEO concept of leadership has co-opted the apostolic so that many who claim apostolic title actually function like CEO’s. In the Scriptures the Suffering Servant/Jesus image informs and qualifies the apostolic role, not that of the Chief Executive Officer. Apostolic ministry draws its authority and power primarily from the idea of service, calling, and from moral, or spiritual, authority and not from positional authority. Perhaps a useful way of exploring the nature of apostolic authority is identify the distinctive form of leadership involved and see how this creates authority.

In a relationship based on ‘inspirational’ or ‘moral’ leadership both leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality by engaging each other on the basis of shared values, calling, and identity. It involves a relationship between leaders and followers in which each influences the other to pursue common objectives, with the aim of inspiring followers into becoming leaders in the own right. In other words, influence runs both ways. Inspirational leadership ultimately becomes genuinely moral when it raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leaders and led, thus having a transformational effect on both. In this view, followers are persuaded to take action without threatening them or offering material incentives but rather by appealing to their values. They use moral persuasion rather than material reward to influence their followers, appealing rather to higher values and calling. This can be clearly seen in the way Jesus develops his disciples as well Paul’s relationship with Timothy, Titus, and the other members of his apostolic team. But it is forms the basis of his letters to the churches.

Perhaps we can best call this type of influence ‘greatness.’ To be a great leader in this sense is to inspire, to evoke, and to nurture something correspondingly great out of those who follow. Through an integrated life, great leaders remind their followers of what they can become if they too based their lives on a compassionate notion of humanity framed by higher moral vision of the world in which we live. We seldom call a leader with significant technical or managerial ability ‘great.’ We don’t build statues to commemorate great bureaucrats, do we? And it is with understanding in mind that we can identify spiritual ‘greatness’ as the basic substance that provides genuine apostolic form of leadership with its authority. And it is the strongest form of leadership available because it awakens the human spirit, focuses it, and holds it together by managing the shared meaning. Like many leaders in the Chinese underground church, it has the power to hold vast movements together without much external structure. It’s the kind of leadership mythically reflected in the William Wallace character in the movie Braveheart. A man who the people willingly followed, not because they ought, or that he had some official position (he didn’t) but because he reminded them of their right to freedom and helped them obtain it at the cost of his life.

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You just gotta love Reggie McNeal. Here’s a video of the winsome southerner wooing a crowd into missional church.