Roxburgh Structured for Mission

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8308-9858-9
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

The church is living in a time of massive, unprecedented change. Traditional institutions and structures are unraveling in response to rapid social, demographic and economic developments. The existing ways of being the church are no longer meaningful to many. How should the church respond?Many seek to address this situation by tweaking the established institutions, finding new structures, reorganizing congregations or renewing long-established practices. Some even argue that we need to abandon structures and institutions altogether. We regularly hear proposals for missional churches, organic churches, simple churches, fresh expressions churches and so on.Alan Roxburgh argues that we need to look deeper. Structures embody the core narratives that shape how people see the world. We cannot simply replace old institutions with new ones. We need to examine the underlying stories, metaphors and cultures that give organizations their meaningfulness. The crisis of the church today is a crisis not of institution but of imagination.In Structured for Mission, Roxburgh challenges the church to become a place where people are empowered to reimagine their religious life and experiment with new ways of being the church in a local context. We are living in a brave new world. Will the church be ready?

Alan J. Roxburgh is a pastor, teacher, writer and consultant with more than thirty years experience in church leadership and seminary education. As a senior consultant with The Missional Network, Roxburgh leads training and consulting initiatives across the world. His many books include Reaching a New Generation, Leadership in a Time of Change, Introducing the Missional Church and Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood. When not traveling or writing, he enjoys spending time with his wife Jane and their five grandchildren in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Roxburgh, Alan J.

Leseproben

2

Structures Embody Our Deeply Held Stories

Introduction

The delegated members of congregations from a midlevel judicatory were gathered for their annual meeting. They heard, again, the muted statistical report about membership and financial decline from a national officer located in the head office somewhere in the Midwest. Most in attendance were white-haired. Not much was said in the meeting about the actual report; a few perfunctory questions were asked, but the report was received with the appropriate motion and vote, then people moved on to other business. In the coffee klatches after the meeting, however, the questions being asked by these long-time members of this denomination were new: “Why do we have these national offices? What’s their point? They take our money and give us nothing in return. Do we really need them anymore?” That such questions are now pervasive across Protestant churches is a massive shift in perspective; it signals a sea change from what these once-loyal church members have believed. Not long ago these denominations, with their professional staffs in national offices, were viewed as essential elements of church life. National structures provided brand name identity, leadership and resources for their congregations.

Over the past thirty years it has become ever more clear that such brand name denominational programs and structures no longer provide identity and purpose to their congregations in the ways they once did. The question is why? Chapter one argued that simply stating this fact in order to propose new structures is too simple a response; it fails to get at the question, Why have we spent so much energy and resources in processes of restructuring, reorganizing and renewing, but see little actually change? A key to addressing this question is in understanding what gives structures their ability to provide meaning and direction to a group. This brings us to a term I will use throughout this book: legitimating narratives.

What are legitimating narratives? Organizational structures and the institutions they create are expressions of our underlying convictions about what makes life work and what we believe to be important. These underlying convictions and beliefs are a part of what is meant by legitimating narratives. This chapter explains how the organizational structures of our denominational systems and congregations embody and communicate deeply held stories or narratives about what is important and what we believe about being effective and successful. A legitimating narrative is an overarching story that provides a group (a small unit or a whole society) with a way to express its underlying values, beliefs and commitments about who they are and how life is to be lived. It’s a story that tells a group who they are, what is acceptable and what is a proper way to live. A few examples will help make this clear. The medieval cathedral, for example, embodied (a built, constructed expression of a culture’s deepest convictions about the meaning and purpose of life) a legitimating narrative that shaped European societies through a good part of the Middle Ages. This narrative was, obviously, the Christian story. In that period the great spire(s) of the cathedral continually reminded the citizens living in its environs that all of life was theocentric: God was at the center of and the explanation for all of life. As the spire lifted one’s eyes from the ground toward the heavens, one was remind that humans live inside a great chain of being that moved from the earth toward the heavens, where God reigned. This narrative was further expressed inside the cathedral through the structuring of its architecture. The great vaulted arches lifted the eyes toward its massive dome, upon which would be painted the story of Christ’s ascension into heaven, where God the Father was painted seated on a throne.

Art and architecture blended to express the central story of life on this earth and our journey toward heaven with Christ. Around the cathedral walls were an array of stained-glass windows, each depicting a story from the Gospels or Epistles about some action of Jesus or the apostles. These were not simply images of adoration but a means of teaching people how to live inside this larger story. A cathedral represented and concretized this legitimating narrative. One final image will round out this picture. Inside many cathedrals, above the immense entrance doors, were painted frescos that worshipers would only see as they were leaving. These frescos depicted human beings falling into hell, with devils and other creatures holding them in bondage and terror. This reminder completed the circle of the narrative by telling people what lay before them in the world if they neglected to follow the story given to them in and by the building itself. The constructed space of the cathedral, its bricks and mortar, frescos, art and windows cohered to provided authority and legitimacy to this version of the Christian story in medieval Europe.

Structures and organizations function in ways that embody and authorize the core narratives of a group or society. Democracy, for example, is a relatively new phenomenon in terms of a primary story driving Western societies. In the seventeenth century John Locke helped to frame the political legitimacy of the democratic process. He argued that it was the consensus of the governed that conferred political legitimacy on those governing. This was a massive transformation from the earlier legitimating narrative of the divine right of kings conferred by God through the church. This new story about the legitimacy of the people required new kinds of institutions and organizations to embody itself in a society. The result was a fundamental change in the political institutions and governing forms, with the introduction of institutions and structures such as regular elections and representative parliaments. While we now take these structures for granted, they had to be created out of fundamental changes in a society’s stories about what was central to its identity and way of life. Behind most of our structures lie such legitimating narratives, stories about what a group believes most deeply express its beliefs, habits and practices.

What was so different about the denominational meeting described at the beginning of this chapter was that not too long ago national denominational agencies were viewed as central and normative forms of church life. In that meeting the existing organizational structure of national, regional and local church bodies was still, formally, the norm. Reports were given, motions voted on and officers elected. In the formal meeting nobody challenged this established legitimating narrative. They met as if national and regional church bodies were still normative. In the coffee gatherings afterwards, however, something massively different was happening—practically these people were saying they had lost confidence in such structures; they’d lost faith in their capacity to embody the values, commitments and habits of these people. In recent conversations with leaders in mid-judicatory systems (e.g., executive presbyters, regional conference executives, bishops) oponions are increasingly expressed in terms of their unease over the ways in which the existent structures, institutions and forms of government they have inherited are no longer able to address the complex challenges facing congregations and their leaders. Somehow, usually without a clear sense of alternatives, the legitimating narratives of the church members at the mandated meeting, and of a growing number of national and regional leaders, have shifted in some profound ways.

Changing legitimating narratives. This idea of a change in, or the erosion of, legitimating stories that once represented the core norms of a group or society is not limited to the churches but reaches into many of the legitimating narratives that have informed how our society has worked. The impasse and malaise, for example, observed in national and state governments polarized by ideologies has resulted in a deepening sense that government has little capacity to address the multiple crises in society, education, economics and the environment. When a rising percentage of citizens come to this conclusion, existing forms of political life are losing their legitimacy. This means that a growing percentage of people no longer believe the proposals and claims of existing parties are capable of addressing the challenges society faces. When this happens people begin to withdraw their trust in the stories and structures the parties operate within. Their legitimating narratives no longer compel people’s loyalty or commitment.

The Occupy movement’s demonstrations that began in fall 2011 outside the Wall Street Stock Exchange in New York spread across the United States and spilled over to other Western states. It demonstrated how, after 2008/9, reigning economic narratives were losing their power of explanation for growing numbers of citizens. Something of profound importance was occurring, even if the actual protests and encampments lasted only a short while. The Occupy movement was the tip of an iceberg, beneath which growing numbers of ordinary citizens, who will not demonstrate, sense that the reigning economic story no longer serves them. What is at stake, what is being questioned, are these established, assumed legitimating narratives. Merely addressing the organizational structures (e.g., banking codes) without addressing these underlying narratives will bring short-term change that eventually returns things to the status quo. That is certainly the conclusion that many have reached about changes made to the banking system since...