How does one go about bringing about missional transformation in a congregation? Well, it is not easy, which is one reason why the church planting movement has taken hold so strongly. As one church planting director told me, when things change, they mutate, and most mutations die.
But there are steps that can be taken to bring about missional transformation in an established church. In their book, The Missional Leader, Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk give the following initial steps in this change process.
Stage 1: Creating Awareness.
Through intensive communication events, both one-on-one and in groups, leaders take people through dialgoue and discussion about the need for missional transformation of the church.
4-6 months
Stage 2: Creating Understanding
The dialogue and discussion serve to bring thinking and feeling modes of understanding together into a coherent pattern of understanding.
3-5 months
Stage 3: Evaluation
What is currently happening in the congregation is evaluated in light of awareness and understanding.
3-5 months
Stage 4: Creating Experiments
People begin to identify actions that they believe will move them toward becoming a missional church. The critical word is action. People will experiment through action.
3-8 months
Stage 5: Commit
People commit to getting others involved in the process of moving through awareness to understanding, to evaluation, to experimentation, and finally to commitment.
So in this process, there is a minimum of a year to two years before this missional change really even begin. I would also caution against placing too much faith in top-down methods in bringing about this change. Most do not understand what it means to be missional. Some think that it is a fad. Some think that it is an instant pathway to church growth. Some equate it with evangelism, which may even include out dated methods of evangelism.
The best kind of missional change comes from both the "bottom" and the "top." Anything that comes from just the top is likely to be shallow and short-lived. If instant results do not happen (in the way expected-i.e., more paying members), then there can even be a turning against the concept.
On the other hand, any missional change that merely comes from the "bottom" can easily be squashed by the those at the top who feel threatened, don't understand it, or who think that it is a waste of time.
It is estimated that to bring about missional transformation in an established congregation takes 10 years, if it can be done. The problem is that most genuine missional leaders find waiting 10 years to do what ought to be done now terribly difficult.
May God bless those who are bringing about missional transformation, as well as those that are starting missional churches!
(P.S. The "Five Steps" in the Missional Change Model is there for the Boomers, who love putting numbers in titles and having simple steps to follow. Gen X, however, is less impressed with this.)
What do think of the above model and timeline? Where should we put more time and energy--in planting new churches, or in bringing missional renewal to established churches?
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