Leadership and Change
Week 10 of our unit for Uniting College for Leadership and Theology continued the theme of Leadership and Change.
We revisited Luke 10: 1-20 and spent time talking about Lectio Divina as a four part process.
We then looked at the Five Marks of Mission as a resource for exploring the nature of mission with churches, including Steve Taylor’s version offered to the Uniting Church SA for the Australian context.
We talked about some classes of change using this table from the Centre for Parish Development. [The Chicago-based Centre had closed]. I had a range of resources for talking about systemic change but we didn’t use any more of them.
The main focus of our session was to workshop some issues around planning for the major class assigment of planning for missional change with a congregation. What might this look like over 3 to 6 months or longer? So we worked on three different groups/participants in change processes – the congregation, its leaders, and a small mission team.
Possible questions to explore- Possible learning processes
- Possible resources
I provided an outline of the Mission Pilot/Experiment process that we used in Port Phillip East Presbytery with the guidance of Phil McCredden from Ecclesia Leadership.
Mission as Community Development
Week 11 was about Mission as Community Development – community well-being as part of God’s work of renewing the whole of creation.
We began with me talking about my explorations in growing bush tucker in our garden – native Australian food plants – along with a tasting of lemon myrtle, rivermint, cinnamon mint, wattleseed, mountain pepperleaf and Geraldton wax. A multi-sensory, fun, learning experience. This provided an analogy with local mission – realising that there is local knowledge that is often invisible to outsiders. Community development is based on the principle that community life is built on the strenghts of its members, yet these strengths are often not recognised, appreciated or fully developed.
Jeremiah 29: 1,4-9
We read, listened, and reflected on one of the lectionary readings ofr the current week. Such a wonderful text.
Mission thinkers and practicioners in this area include the authors of The New Parish, Discovering the Other, Adaptive Church, and No Wastelands. Along with Alan Roxburgh’s writing, these authors have an emphasis on seeing.
- Seeing the existing good in a community
- Seeing below the surface – how the community works
- Seeing future possibilities where others may not
So we discussed how this might relation to understandings of mission as incarnational (including Sam Well’s term “being with”)
Missional Leader
We spent almost an hour with the wonderful Rev Christine Palmer from Suburban Seeds in outer south-west Sydney, Christine is a Uniting Church minister with a call to local community ministry. Her story is inspirational, visionary and down-to-earth. Christine helpfully distinguished between community development per se and her approach of community engagement as incarnational mission.
Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD)
ABCD is a widely used and well-respected approach to community development. The best starting point is the ABCD Institute website and the early textbook by John Kretzmann and John McKnight (listed here).
So we talked about some core ideas – Needs vs Assets, Dependency vs Capacity, the six core assets, and some data about communities and “connectors.”
I also introduced Search Institute‘s research regarding Development Assets of young people.
Appreciative Inquiry and Asset Mapping
So the final part of the class was a brief introduction to Appreciative Inquiry through the experience of Asset Mapping, using the common exercise which is outlined in Harder’s book Discovering the Other. We each had some cards. I invited people to write down some particular personal and community strengths. We then looked at ways to join together unlikely combinations of strengths to create new opportunities for collaboration.
…all the while filming this on multiple cameras and devices for on-screen viewing and later sharing…