In Ed Stetzer’s “Missional Monday” post, he introduces Dr. Linda Bergquist, one of the Framers of the missionSHIFT Manifesto.

It’s almost impossible for me to call her “Dr. Bergquist” (though she immensely deserves the title), as I’ve known Linda B. since 1995 and we’ve worked together on numerous projects. I’ve served on the teams for at least five church plants in the San Francisco Bay Area where she was the church planting strategist, and we were bothpart of a Church Planting Strategy Team from 1997-2001. I have lost track of how many times I’ve been in the Bergquist home for get-togethers for church planters, or for strategy/focus group meetings, or for class sessions (I’ve taken probably every seminary course she’s taught), or for just plain old fun times with a broader group of friends from the Bay Area. She was my professor for the church planting “theological field education” practicum, and I was her project manager/editor for her Doctor of Ministry project report.

Linda B. not only understands the meanings of missional, she lives it out in a way I aspire to emulate. In fact, if I had to name the one person I know whose presence, smile, and demeanor most let people feel an immediate and complete sense of welcome upon first meeting, it would be Linda Bergquist. And for me, the Bergquist family represents the essence of what it means to be what the Bible calls “people of peace” – showing hospitality and kindness to all, not being a “respecter of persons” while simultaneously being respectful to all persons, going outside themselves to help others.

The missionSHIFT Manifesto and conference will benefit immeasurably from the presence of “Dr. Linda.” Be sure to read Ed Stetzer’s interview with her, and her book Church Turned Inside Out: A Guide for Designers, Refiners, and Re-Aligners (co-authored with Dr. Allan Karr), and anything else you can find that Linda Bergquist has written …

My answer is: “Yes.”

With a new decade underway and multiple manifestos and declarations drafted in the past few years, a number of analyses, interpretations, and concerns are being raised about the emerging and missional “conversations” and the related “movements.” (For instance, see the blog post In which I discovered that I don’t care about the emerging church anymore by Sarah Bessey/Emerging Mummy, and  on thinning ice by Rick Meigs/The Blind Beggar, on the missional conversation.)

As one who has tracked these movements since the mid-1990s, the issues of their trajectories and sustainabilities have been on my radar for a very long time. I’d like to add some thoughts about movements to the mix, in this post especially about missional and perhaps post another day about emerging.

Movements are what they are, and they last as long as they do for different reasons. Sometimes the need is neither long-term nor deep, and so the movement arcs and then fizzles like any other fix-it or fad. Sometimes the audience in need is not as widespread as it appears at first, and the movement doesn’t develop enough of a broad base to be sustainable for the long-term. And sometimes, there may be internal dynamics that create a situation of implosion.

I think the latter is what may harm the missional movement if we don’t recognize the situation soon and address it.

Specifically, I would suggest that the internal dynamics of the missional movement revolve around two kinds of people who talk about “missional.” The issues of risk involve vastly different ways they process information. I believe similar dynamics were at work in the emerging movement, and that this is why I believe the “missional conversation” could easily end up mirroring the decline/demise of the “emerging conversation.”

Note: This is NOT meant to criticize anyone for lack of sincerity on being/doing missional – only to offer my understanding of why there are differences and conflict within the ranks of the “missional movement” and why this leads some to drop out of the “conversation.”

Group #1 – The Experientials. The first group explores the term missional in order to better understand what it is that they have already been doing – processing their experiences, identifying what they value and what they’re doing/feeling that doesn’t fit with the standard operating procedures of the previous paradigm, figuring out course corrections that will better align their theory with the practicalities of a lifestyle of living their faith and sharing their life.

Group #2 – The Theoreticians. The second group talks about missional in order to figure out how to move toward cross-cultural activity when they do get involved with it – working on how the theory of being missional differs from what they’ve learned or done in the past, figuring out a missional strategy for the future, designing missional projects for their group and brainstorming about how to vision-cast this thing to get people to buy into it.

Thus, the first group processes missional from an action-to-reflection model and the second group processes missional from a theory-to-application model. And so, the two groups may talk about similar material, and overlap in many of their core concerns, but they do this from very different vantage points. One is considering “How DID I do missional?” and the other is focused on “How WILL I do missional?”

If that’s accurate, then a key part of the problem is that the theory-to-application people dominate the conversation. They are functioning in the paradigm that still controls most institutions and conventional programs and methodologies. (I know that’s a huge assumption, but if you don’t buy into it, can you suggest broad-scale evidence for some other conclusion?) And they generally do not do a whole lot until they’ve got missional “adequately processed” because it’s important to them to get the theory right so their actions are right.

• But is this actually an overfocus on getting “the right results,” such that they’re bound by being perfectionistic about this?
• And so they keep talking talking talking because ideation and theory and correctness are driving them.
• Sure, they want to do things decently and in order, but is it possible that their conventional mode of processing theory, theology, and ministry actually works against risk-taking, instigating, and course-correcting?

Is it any wonder that people who process life this way may drop out of the emerging and missional conversations eventually? “Enough theorizing – I’m ready for action!” (Like Sarah Bessey talks about in her post, she awoke one day and found she’d grown beyond the emerging church conversation.) But the conversation remains dominated by those seemingly intent on figuring out how to remake conventional models into missional, to the point where it seems there are no distinctives to being “missional.” Mega-church and seeker church and externalized church and multi-campus church and all sorts of things can all be “missional” in this paradigm, even if their “missional” activities are designed to bring people back into the church building, and/or to program external ministries instead of equip disciples to start their own neighborhood ministries, and/or if the use of off-site teachers/preachers means no one is mentoring a new wave of gifted teachers/preachers. And that is not helpful for missional practitioners who don’t fit those conventional models. So the “movement” doesn’t really move forward that much …

Meanwhile, the action-to-reflection people drop into the missional conversation for fellowship and glean insight into what they’ve already been doing. In their mode of processing, the clues to better practice are found embedded in stories of others who embody missional values by being engaged in cross-cultural ministry. They rarely find significant help in pragmatic top-ten-tip lists because their own cultural situations are generally far more complex than quickee universal-application tips can accommodate. So:

• They’re looking for stories and paradigm systems, and find the conversation dominated by talk of theories and principles.
• They’re looking for feelings and experiences they resonate with, and find the conversation dominated by talk of ideas and strategies.
• They’re looking for newer, qualitative ways to evaluate personal and social transformation, and find the conversation dominated by talk of relatively conventional quantitative measurements of involvement and impact.

Is it any wonder that people who process life this way may well drop out of the emerging and missional conversations sooner or later? “I’ve had enough of talk talk talk!” They are doers and beta-testers, and the talkers actually become beta-blockers. When “missional” becomes the newest tweak version in the ever-lengthening chain of GenX that became postmodern that became emerging, then the “movement” doesn’t really move forward that much …

Again, this is NOT meant to criticize either group for lack of sincerity on being/doing missional – only to suggest that there are radical underlying differences in paradigms and processing going on, and that continuation of a “missional movement” and collaboration in missional activities will require cross-cultural bridging of these differences. (Of course, if we say missional is about being cross-cultural, but we can’t actually act cross-culturally, we deserve to implode, don’t we?)

So, if this interpretation of internal dynamics is even partially accurate, what can we do to prevent the missional conversation from imploding the missional movement? Or, if you don’t think that assessment is at all accurate, what evidences do you have to critique my approach?

Let me suggest you spend some time considering your responses to those questions, and I’ll plan to post my thoughts on correctives as soon as I can get to it …

The missionSHIFT conference site today made changes on its Framers’ page, expanding the diversity of this group.

Still listed are:

• Ed Stetzer
• Tim Keller
• Alan Hirsch

Three additional Framers are:

• Linda Bergquist
• Eric Mason
• Dan Kimball

Gone from the original list of five Framers are:

• Brad Andrews
• Philip Nation

The conference convener, Dr. Ed Stetzer, introduced Eric Mason on his blog today (February 2).

As additional profiles are blogged, I’ll plan to link to those.

Meanwhile, the speakers for the event are:

• Ed Stezter
• Matt Chandler
• Alan Hirsch
• J.D. Greear

I just added a significant update onto my original Open Letter to missionSHIFT. The update deal with additional aspects of the missionSHIFT conference and the historical context. I have also cut-and-pasted the update below.

Update on missionSHIFT Conference – January 30, 2010

There has been a reasonable amount of push-back today on missionSHIFT about representing diversity among Framers and/or Speakers. If you check #missionshift on Twitter, you’ll find that questions are being raised about inclusion of diversity, primarily by gender, race, and socio-economic class. Along with that, some were starting to recommend potential participants whom they see as “missional.”

Meanwhile, I was glad to read late today some encouraging news on the blog of missionSHIFT catalyzer Dr. Ed Stetzer. He received this comment from Rachel, who said:

I will truly and really hope that you mean what you say when you say “We do want to hear from a broad group of voices. So, I am hopeful.” Perhaps you would seek some non-white and/or female, perhaps from the margins folks? Until all means all, it seems a little shortsighted and Kingdom short-shrift.

Dr. Stetzer stated that:

We will be announcing some [additional] folks in the coming days and they include women and persons of color. They have already been asked and accepted. We just need to get our details together before we start announcing them.

I appreciate that it always seemed to be in the missionSHIFT plans to have a broader range of people and perspectives represented. That was not so clear to me in reading the initial missionSHIFT website, and I haven’t noticed any changes there yet. But, I am a bit more hopeful about the direction of the event, and will watch the missionSHIFT conference site when I can for the promised official updates.

One reason I even raised this issue about missionSHIFT’s profile is that our views on diversity deal with larger implications of the meaning of “missional.” I’m not really interested in consuming some group’s view of missional that is too small, and the most constructive thing I’m probably able to contribute right now is to participate by producing important questions about the core meaning of “missional.”

I thought missional deals with incarnational, and incarnational deals with being cross-cultural when our context calls for it. So, to me, it just doesn’t seem “missional” when a national-level event is pretty much monocultural Anglo, and even moreso when it is overwhelmingly mano-e-man-o-cultural. Don’t get me wrong – I hope I’m not stuck in the postmodern political correctness doctrines of “identity politics” where a person “only” gets to represent whatever their inherent identity characteristics allow. That was so … 1980s! And so unbiblically restrictive and disrespectful! Check out my posts on Start with the End in Mind Part 1 and Part 2 to see what I do mean, and about how multi-racial doesn’t guarantee being multicultural, and multicultural doesn’t guarantee being intercultural. I just hope we are striving for becoming more Kingdom cultural!

Second, I also see our views on diversity as important in the larger context of recent history and attempts to draft statements – evangelical, emerging, missional, etceteral – for instance, the criticisms that were raised about the Origins Project launch in mid-2009 and about the forthcoming and sold-out Verge Missional Community Conference in February 4-6, 2010. Both of these had reasonable issues raised about their leadership composition. For Origins, it arose when the original launch site featured the three male conveners in a way that seemed to negate the enterprise’s presumed interest in gender and racial and generational diversity among its leaders and participants. This was corrected quickly to portray the larger group of 16 diverse leaders in the more balanced way visually that actually represented how the group functioned, instead of implying that the three initial instigators controlled the movement.

Some of the controversy for Verge came in light of their stated interest in being “missional” and their focus on “the DNA of Gospel Movements.” Verge promotes on the home page the 13 male “leading thinkers and practitioners of gospel-centered missional community” plus 1 male worship leader; and on the bloggers page, 12 male and 1 female pre-conference conversation facilitators. (About 10% of these are apparently non-Anglo.) Since when does the presence of seminal thinkers and practitioners alone lead to a full DNA of organic, missional reproducibility? Just askin’ …

In both situations – the larger implications and the Church’s recent history – regardless of our sincerity in SAYING we value diversity in our “evangelical-emerging-missional” endeavors, unless we BOTH SAY AND SHOW it from the outset, we leave people only with assumptions about whether we truly meant it or not. It is our responsibility as organizers to say what’s on our minds and do what’s in our hearts, it isn’t the responsibility of our readers or reviewers to figure all that out on their own. And yet, if we are silent about such details, aren’t we actually telling people to assume whatever?

The Origins Project made course corrections so their visual messages matched their verbal messages. It appears The missionSHIFT Conference will do likewise. Unfortunately, it looks impossible now for Verge Missional Community Conference to do anything for their 2010 event, and perhaps it is too tied with denominations and sponsors of certain theological positions for them to do otherwise in the future. However, the fact that there are oversights, mistakes, and some course corrections at least suggests that “missional” also means “learners.” And that is an important thing. It may take a few more generations for us in the American Church to become less West-o-centric and Anglo-male dominant, and the road may be hard, but an opening to learning means we’ll get there …

Brad Sargent

January 30, 2010

I’m not able to spend a lot of time keeping up with missional blogdom these days, but occasionally I get over to JR Rozko’s blog, Life As Mission. On January 29, 2010, he posted an important article on Transitioning Traditional Churches Into Missional Ones. You need to check out his post and the comments! Here is an article I wrote in response.

Thoughts on Transitioning Traditional to Missional

Some very insightful material and comments – thanks, JR! This is a complex issue. I haven’t been reading on the subject of shifts, as my available time has been directed at writing instead. So, no specific books to suggest, but could share some concepts arising from my experiences.

I’ve been involved with several situations that could be considered attempts at established churches becoming more transitional and/or missional. Two of them in particular had the main problem of major differences in core paradigms held by participants.

1. CHURCH MERGER. One was a merger situation of a church plant with a declining church. We thought the vitality of the church plant could carry the weight of the other body. That was naïve. What we didn’t realize going into this was that a merger actually involves the death of both parties to what they were, and a significant period of gestation for something new that is not exactly like either of the older versions of the partners or even a mere combination of them. And then – maybe – something different is rebirthed.

That process is perhaps the essence of transition in the peculiar era in which we live: It’s the merging of people from two vastly different paradigms, and not simply reconciling the differences, but reintegrating everything against a comprehensive biblical worldview AND reflecting new kinds of questions the current culture asks that we need to ensure our paradigm covers. In this merger, there were points where each side seemed to try to exert personal or paradigm control over the other: trying to force old wine into new wineskins or force new wine into old wineskins.

In retrospect, I think it would’ve helped to s-l-o-w down and apply some “strategic foresight” and contextualization tools: (1) Studying the local cultures and their paradigms to see what the current situation was. (2) Studying the congregation to see how it could POSSIBLY connect missionally within its neighborhood. (3) Facilitate a process where the group considers not just what is possible, but what is PREFERABLE. Limit group activities to the most preferable future scenario. (And this is where “appreciative inquiry” can help in discerning what is preferable.)

These three processes CAN be facilitated so that both analytics and intuitives can participate. Analysis tends to represent the approach taken in conventional culture and older generations to divide things into details, then examine and interpret them. Intuition tends to represent the processing approach in the emerging culture and younger generations, sort of “gestalting” a whole experience and taking in massive amounts of interconnected information that give a three-dimensional understanding. Conventional/analytic leaders tend to vision cast toward the correct concepts for the future. New-edge/intuitive leaders tend to vision-carry to role model the future.

I’ve rarely seen this kind of approach taken. But, it generally has proved helpful. I’m part of an international missional/social entrepreneurial team. The intuitives generally are instigators and catalysts of social transformation enterprises; the analytics generally are the project managers and sustainers for the enterprises. Sound familiar, like an adaptation of APEST/APEPT from Ephesians 4 perhaps?

I have seen the opposite, though, where people stubbornly or subtly refuse to accommodate each other in different modes of thinking. I hate to say it, but I guess they chose the consequences they got. Such as … the intuitive types who “get it” about the way culture is changing globally go off to plant a church because they want to do something new, or they just leave because they sense no hope due to overcontrol by people with conventional paradigms. And the fewer intuitives left, the more likely the conventional thinking gets even more entrenched, making it even less likely that a culturally intuitive (and younger) leader could survive in a sea of convention. Such a destructive downward spiral was the case of a second church …

2.ATTEMPTED TRADITIONAL TO TRANSITIONAL. The other church had almost no 20-/30-somethings, with Builder and Boomer leaders seeking to add in the younger generational layer in order to have someone to pass on their legacy to. Over a period of about five years, more leaders from younger generations came in – the first wave by personal invitation, and then they began bringing in friends. But most of them worked from a more non-linear paradigm. This came into regular conflict with the conventional-hierarchical-linear paradigm of senior leaders, and ultimately, most of the non-linear types left. And by the end of 10 years of “transition,” the church was pretty much back where it started, both culturally and demographically.

I’m reminded here of a quote from long-time church consultant Lyle Schaller, when he taught in 1999 at a conference on the church, leadership, and seminaries in the 21st century. In talking about paradigm shifts, he said:

“When the sequential [i.e., conventional] church leaders do not accommodate the concurrent [i.e., random, non-linear] thinkers, the concurrent people lose hope.”

As best I can recall, Schaller also believed many major denominations were going to be in big trouble, as were many seminaries, because of this problem of paradigms. In fact, he expected many such organizations to fail within 25 years.

JR Rozko recommended a book on “appreciative inquiry.” This process can be helpful to figure out what assets a group has, or track what its long-term “redemptive purpose” seems to have been in that cultural/neighborhood setting. However, a note of caution: I saw church leaders at the second church who supposedly wanted to transition. But it appears to me that they ultimately hid behind what they traditionally did well. They let a focus on “being positive” and “unity” obscure the very areas that needed strengthening to truly transition into a paradigm that fit with the emerging cultural framework that had been changing around them for decades. They did not transition because they sought to reformat, not reintegrate. The “new” version looked strikingly like the old, still in the images of the current leaders and the church’s past glories.

From this, I came to see that we may find that what assets or purposes were invaluable in a former paradigm, culture, or church methodological model could actually prove to be a liability in the context of the dominant paradigm or current culture. Transition is about a paradigm SHIFT, not simply a purpose-statement or program SHUFFLE.

PUSH/PULL. A final note. I am still working on this concept and how to express it, so for now, I’ll just have to blurt it out and keep refining it. It’s the idea of push and pull, and how they sometimes get reversed in the transition process. Conventional leaders tend to vision cast to “push” people toward what they see the future should/will look like. New-edge leaders tend to vision carry and embody what that future already looks like, so they can “pull” people toward that future. I think transition could work better with this specific combination of push/pull – it keeps people of different paradigms and generations in a mode of constructive collaboration.

It doesn’t work well when the new-edge leaders try to push people toward the future (those who live in that unknown land can easily generate fear in those who don’t) while the conventional leaders try to pull them there (these leaders may only glimpse that “right” future in theory and have gaps in their practice).

Does that make sense? A blog-post and story for another time … and this topic is, in fact, on my schedule to address before I end my futuristguy blog this April (or however things unfold).