Seeking a Missional Imagination
There’s been a dis-ease in the back of my mind for a while about the directions of the missional conversation in North America. I’ve written about one: it’s too ecclesiocentric. Most of what I read with missional in its title is about the church and making the church work with new formulas and programs. The missional conversation is about what God is up to in the world; church conversations are a sub-set we’ve turned into the main thing.
Another issue has been hard to put into words; but, yesterday I was reading the New York Times Book Review and saw how to address it. Russell Shorto has just released a new book, Descartes’ Bones. The picture on the cover is intriguing. 
It shows a headless skeleton. The reason for the image is in the plot of the book, which I won’t give away. Descartes lived in massively turbulent times when the tectonic plates of society were shifting. People were filled with anxiety and the question of God was up for grabs. It was a time, like ours, when established formulas and frameworks failed to address an emerging modernity.
Liminality
I’m an avid follower of PBS’ Lehrer Report each evening. On Tuesday, October 21st, Paul Soloman, the News Hour’s Economics Correspondence, interviewed two people about the current economic crisis. (Transcript) My interest was the presence of Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author the The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable) and the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot famous for chaos theory, who generated the idea that when a butterfly flaps its winds in the middle of a South American rain forest it causes a storm over New York City. They were discussing how we typically imagine ourselves living in a managed, predictable world where repeated patterns of activity cause us to assume the patterns will continue on into the future. Their challenge this belief by stating that, in fact, small, unnoticed disturbances result in massive, unpredictable consequences in the most unexpected places.
Leaders who Limp
I was thinking about Allelon’s focus on the formation of leaders for the missional church when I attended a play recently and saw a movie just released on video. These days we hear a great deal about the leadership and character. It is certainly the case that character is an essential part of excellent leadership — we follow those whom we trust. In elections in Canada (a general election to see who will form the next government) and the United States (a Presidential election to see which man will lead the country), the issue of trust and character have emerged at center stage. Over and over again, in debates and political ads, the focus has been on character — can you trust this man or that party? The question of character becomes significant in times of upheaval when the boundaries are shifting and people become unsure of the way ahead. These were the questions I reflected upon while watching both the play and the movie.
Preparing for Lusaka: MiWCP Questions
The MiWC meetings in Lusaka have drawn some interesting responses from around the world. It is heartening to see the global reach of Allelon’s friends in the missional conversation.
Numbers have written asking if they could participate in the Lusaka gathering. Some of you are deeply involved in these conversations even within Africa and thought that this was one of those events were you should be involved. We had little sense of the interest this would raise.
The web site has an extensive description of the project. It is a research-based project spread over some five years that will address Newbigin’s question of a missionary engagement with late modern, Western culture(s) from the perspective of the local, ordinary narratives of people in specific contexts. Six countries are involved. Each sends a team to two people to the yearly planning, design and reporting events we have (these are not conferences but working meetings that assess and move the project forward). Neil Crosbie (UK) and I are taking responsibility for shaping the planning of the event and the forward movement of the Project.
African Leaders and Mission in Western Culture Project: Coming alongside our global partners
Over the last three years Allelon has brought together teams of key missional leaders from the UK, NA, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. From this has emerged the Allelon Mission in Western Culture Project. This international project is working on understanding the kinds of leaders we need to form churches on mission in late, modern Western culture. Our annual Summit is in Lusaka, Zambia this August.
We’re inviting you to join us in this global partnership. We want to bring a significant number of African leaders to this unique gathering of missional practitioners and thinkers to our meetings this August into Lusaka, Zambia. Our African friends want to bring 16 national leaders to Lusaka from across Africa to engage the missional challenges of Western culture with a global team of practitioners and leaders.
EuroChurch Conference, Lisbon, Portugal
Eurochurch.net has networked with churches in Europe and organized conferences for more than 25 years to cultivate a generative conversation about the nature of mission in the new Europe. Eurochurch members come from all over Europe and the UK. One partner in the group states that we
…are hopeful about the future of the church in Europe because we believe that God is at work. We recognize that the future is shaped by committed minorities who use creative imagination to explore God’s purposes. We acknowledge that history often hinges on the courageous activity of a single generation. We desire this generation to be a hinge on which the future will be redirected. We are convinced that missional thinkers and practitioners need to be encouraged to provide future leadership.