Monday, September 18, 2017

Holiness Reeducation "Lessons from the Missional Frontier: Get the Professionals Out of the Way" by Greg Arthur for Monday, 18 September 2017

Holiness Reeducation   "Lessons from the Missional Frontier: Get the Professionals Out of the Way" by Greg Arthur for Monday, 18 September 2017
At Duneland Community Church we are always working to perfect the art of failure. In fact we even wrote a book about it. (You can pre-order Edison Churches now!) Long ago we committed ourselves to the pain of failure. This was the only reasonable course of action as we began a journey to an uncertain location, with a meandering path, and guides who had never actually been where we were going. This hasn't been the blind leading the blind.
Our journey has been the determined but untested dreamers leading the trusting slightly uncertain faithful across the missional frontier.
Rallying a group of people around a vision is difficult enough under normal circumstances. Doing so while the vision is a bit foggy and ambiguous, requires huge amounts of faith, and is built around a long slow process of personal and organizational transformation, is advanced level crazy. You have to be cut from a different cloth (note here that I mean a weird and slightly insane cloth) and you have to be willing to endure the pain of failure repeatedly.
Reflecting on our missional failures a pattern has begun to emerge for us. The missional ventures primarily led by professionals have largely failed to thrive. (The only thing that would make Josh and I professional in these ventures is the amazing reality that we are getting paid for this) The missional efforts led by lay people, however, have had a much larger success rate. In fact the only new ground we have taken and begun to build outposts on have all been led by amateurs. (Note once again that I use this term in a technical sense. All our leaders are exceptional disciples and bold leaders. They just lead mission out of the margin of their life.)
In many ways this disparity between the success of clergy and lay people makes tremendous sense on the missional frontier. As leadership flattens and we take seriously the priesthood of all believers we are seeing the empowerment of everyday leaders. We are unleashing our apostles and evangelists to go and lead the church forward. As our embraces spirituality but rejects organized religion everyday leaders will have more legitimacy than clergy in neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. The future is in the hands of the amateurs, supported, equipped, and unleashed by clergy.
Never has this truth been more evident for me than just last night. Last night our church took a massive step forward in mission. Yesterday saw the launch of a new missional venture in a mobile home community. Led by an incredible group of lay leaders, we launched a pilot outreach in this community to connect with children and families. The main leaders of this new work live in the community and have developed great relationships with the families there. When the invitation to join us for dinner and a kids club went out, the community respond with enthusiasm. It was clear from the moment people started showing up and interacting that this is absolutely going to work.
As I ran errands, greeted people, held babies, cleaned tables, and took pictures it was beautiful to watch our leaders lead. They were ready to be missionaries. Josh and I were there to be support staff and it brought us great joy.
It was so clear who was in charge, who was empowered by the Spirit, and who was vital to the success of this mission, and it wasn't the pastors.
 Monday, September 18, 2017
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