Leadership Formation in the African Context

Missional Leadership Revisited

Samuel Deressa

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781725290402
  9781725290419
• eBook ISBN:
  9781725290426
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: African History

The teachings of Christian leadership have been dominated by a focus on the influence of a leader on its followers. Samuel Deressa's new book, Leadership Formation in the African Context, highlights how an African concept of community and holistic approach to ministry provides a biblically sound approach to understanding leadership formation and practice in this new age. This book links the issue of missional leadership with the life of the congregation. It provides theological and practical insights into how we can understand leadership formation in contexts where churches are engaged in the Missio Dei as a community of believers.

Chapter 1

Introduction

As an African, I see myself as a product of a community where religion played a vital role in shaping the society. As a child, I was taught how to behave, worship, and relate to others in my community. Growing up, I observed how every member of the community was curiously watching over my shoulder, trying to shape my future to help me be someone who would meet their expectations. Through the years, I have come to understand that “belonging is the key to existence” in the African contexts: “since I belong, therefore, I am, the sine qua non of existence.”1 This is different from western contexts, where individualism has often taken the place of community.

As John Mbiti rightly articulates, the communities in Africa

Make, create or produce the individual; for the individual depends on the corporate group. [According to African cultural world view], physical birth is not enough: the child must go through rites of incorporation so that it becomes fully integrated into the entire society. These rites continue throughout the physical life of the person, during which the individual passes from one stage of corporate existence to another.2

I have been through this cultural process to be who I am today. There is no doubt that there exists an intersection between the culture that nurtured my ethos and my faith. I have become aware that it was the culture that dictated my faith, and vice versa. The aim of this book is to explore such experiences by focusing on the study of congregational culture within which emerging leaders (like myself) are being formed and empowered in the African context. It explores the connection between two important concepts: spiritual formation and leadership formation.

Leadership formation continues to emerge today as one of the main topics discussed among scholars and church leaders. As the church faces massive shifts throughout the world, these scholars and leaders ask what it means to be a church and how to raise effective leaders in this new age. For churches in the Global North (the western world), the decline in membership of historical denominations, the growing number of migrates with diverse religious background, the rapid expansion of mega churches, and many other changes that are happening have resulted in the disruption of long-standing practices. Because of these shifts, there is a growing recognition among church leaders that business as usual is no longer possible, and that there needs to emerge a new or different alternative to what has been traditional leadership formation and practices.

In addition, global Christianity has experienced a major demographic shift in the past few decades. With the decline of Christianity in the North, and accelerated growth of Christianity in the South, the South has now become the heartlands of global Christianity. With this demographic shift, the Southern Christians have been aware of the need for missional leaders who can play a role in creating, shaping, and leading missional churches in global mission. This is mainly because, as Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk have rightly stated, it is impossible to have a missional church or effectively engage in God’s mission without missional leadership (and vice versa).3 What does it mean to raise leaders in this new global age? How are disciples being formed in light of God’s mission in the world? This book will address these questions by drawing mainly from the insights shared in the missional church literature to date, and attempts to contribute some new insights in to thinking further about leadership formation from African perspective.

Missional Church Conversation

The missional church conversation started in North America as a response to Leslie Newbigin’s critical analysis of the missionary encounter in the 20th century. It was Newbigin’s impression that the church in England had lost its connection with its cultural context that became the reason for the start of this conversation about mission. Newbigin, after working as a missionary in South India for a decade, came up with the following question: What is a missionary engagement with western culture in our time? Newbigin reflected much on Barth’s idea of the Trinity and mission and its implications for the western context.

Challenged by Newbigin’s writings, the missional church conversation was started in North America in the late 1980s. It was his identification and framing of crises and challenges in the way mission was understood and carried out in the western world that attracted American missiologists to engage in this conversation—which then resulted in the creation of the Gospel and Our Culture Network (GOCN). GOCN played a significant role in initiating and leading the conversation. This conversation mainly addressed ecclesiology and mission, with a focus on the dynamic interrelations between gospel, church, and culture. As Guder and Barrett emphasized, this conversation was need to create a missional reor...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Litrature Review
• Chapter 3: Theological and Biblical Perspectives
• Chapter 4: Theoretical Perspectives
• Chapter 5: Research Methodology and Design
• Chapter 6: Results of the Study and Interpretation
• Chapter 7: Theological and Biblical Reflection on the Research Findings
• Chapter 8: Theoretical Reflections on the Research Findings
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Appendix E
• Appendix F
• Appendix G
• Appendix H
• Bibliography