Missional Map-Making

Skills for Leading in Times of Transition

Alan Roxburgh

• Editorial: Jossey-Bass
• Año: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780470583227
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Théologie et religion
• Categoría: Religion

Guidance for church leaders to develop their own maps and chart new paths toward stronger, more vibrant, and more missional congregations

In the burgeoning missional church movement, churches are seeking to become less focused on programs for members and more oriented toward outreach to people who are not already in church. This fundamental shift in what a congregation is and does and thinks is challenging for leaders and congregants. Using the metaphor of map-making, the book explains the perspective and skills needed to lead congregations and denominations in a time of radical change over unfamiliar terrain as churches change their focus from internal to external.

• Offers a clear guide for leaders wanting to transition to a missional church model
• Written by Alan Roxburgh, a prominent expert and practitioner in the missional movement
• Guides leaders seeking to create new maps for leadership and church organization and focus
• A Volume in the popular Leadership Network Series

This book is written to be accessible to all Christian congregational styles and denominations.

PART ONE

WHEN MAPS NO LONGER WORK

CHAPTER ONE

MAPS SHAPING OUR IMAGINATIONS IN MODERNITY

Several years ago, my wife, Jane, bought the Launch Edition Mini Cooper. It had a number inscribed on the tachometer indicating its special status as one of the few launched. It was one sweet vehicle. In the early days, Jane made it clear that I would have limited driving privileges. So I was delighted when one Saturday morning she said, “Why don’t you drive?” Jane was in the passenger seat. She pointed into the distance and said, “Just look at that mess. I’ve got to fix that right away. Those birds are so messy!” I followed her finger into the distance, looking for birds or evidence of their mischief. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “I can’t see any mess!” Jane laughed and pointed again. “Look!” she exclaimed. “Can’t you see that? The birds must have done it while we were in the store.” This time the finger seemed to be pointing a little lower on the road. I leaned forward to take a closer look. “I can’t see a thing!” I reiterated. Then Jane realized what the problem was. “No!” she laughed, “not the road; the windshield! Look at the mess on the windshield. I’ve got to get it cleaned before it bakes on!” Finally, I “saw”; the mess wasn’t “out there” but on the windshield.

When driving, we see through the windshield but not the windshield itself. Most of the time, we are unaware it is there. Maps work the same way. When navigating the streets of Vancouver where we live, we envision the maps in our heads and just take our directional certitude for granted. We use them to move about easily and freely but hardly ever stop to think about the maps themselves.

We use these inner maps to control and manage our world. In modern, Western societies, we have assumed ways of driving on the road, for example. In the world of church and ministry, despite denominational and other differences, we have a basic inner map of how a pastor should function in a church (notice even the image we use here, where the place of a pastor is in a physical location called a church). We have been given internal maps about how to go about raising children; these are often quite different from the ways, for example, children are raised in non-Western cultures. These inner maps of how things are supposed to work have been very effective in enabling us to manage and control our environments. Obviously, many of these inner maps are still just as effective and important for our everyday life in the modern West. Other maps that we have taken for granted, however, are being challenged. The nature of marriage is one current example. Another is the map of our economic life: the way our pensions and retirement were supposed to work no longer matches the financial realities many of us are facing. Within the church, other real and important overarching inner maps are also being challenged, such as the role of church leadership and who should lead. Many of us have shared the strong inner conviction that as church leaders in times of change, we must find ways of regaining control over our increasingly unclear church environments. When we sense that our inner maps of church leadership are becoming less and less effective and the images of leadership in which we were trained are not robust enough to encompass our current reality, another inner map tells us that we have to find a way of taking control in order make things work again. A simple story illustrates the persistence of these inner maps.

I’d had a long week crisscrossing North America in airplanes and was heading home—the interrupted schedules and mechanical breakdowns were far from my mind. When I called home, Jane picked up the phone to tell me she had our granddaughter Madeline in her arms. Maddy was communicating that she wanted down; she didn’t want to be held too long in anyone’s arms. My joy is holding Maddy, but she isn’t someone who wants to be held much, or at least is willing to be held only on her terms. She isn’t going to be managed; she has her own sense of what she wants.

I thought of Maddy as I boarded my flight and absorbed my first inklings that this would be a night when plans for getting home at a decent hour would evaporate. The flight was already ninety minutes late. When we were finally on board, the captain’s voice crackled in the speakers. A computer wasn’t working; a mechanic would need to replace it. I calculated: it would be midnight before we landed. Anticipation of ending the late summer day on our deck had just been thrown out. Life messes with our plans. A woman then called an attendant. She was connecting in Vancouver with a fight to Thailand; she wasn’t going to make it and didn’t want to overnight in Vancouver. She wanted off the flight. As she walked off, the captain came back on to tell us the ground crew had to reopen the compartments below and remove this passenger’s luggage. It would be 1 A.M., four hours later than scheduled, when we would land in Vancouver. So much for best-laid plans.

I thought of Maddy, of the ways I want to hold her and how she is always saying “up” or “down” to tell me she doesn’t belong to me. I won’t be managing this relationship according to my preferred imagination. Like all important relationships, ours will follow the mysterious and unpredictable unfolding of interconnected lives, not some tidy picture I dream up. The mystery of our differing person-hoods will weave a tapestry neither of us, nor anyone else, will be able to map or control.

Strapped into my seat, I reflected on this powerful inner map that we think lets us plan, predict, measure, and control the directions and outcomes of other people’s lives. Where did this delusion come from? Why, after years of experience to the contrary, do we still think we can have a wonderful plan for other people and, moreover, expect their lives to unfold according to that plan? For years, this internal map told me that it was possible, with the right vision and the right plan, for a church to build a roadway along which people would move toward the goals and mission I and other leaders had articulated with such passion and conviction. On the plane home, I wondered why I had been so blind as to actually try to control, manage, and align people in the churches I served. This conviction that leaders need to come up with a plan around which all the church’s life is aligned is a deeply embedded map still shaping the actions of many church leaders. We need to understand why we as leaders have so strongly embraced this map because we are now in a space where this kind of map is less and less helpful.

HOW MAPS WORK

We’re born into a world with cultures that already have maps. The argument of this chapter is that for us in the West, our primary map has been modernity, and modernity has in many ways profoundly reshaped, and even deformed, the Christian imagination in our culture. From birth, we’ re formed and shaped by the common understandings of the culture into which we’ re born to the point where we assume that our culture’s map describes the world the way it is. Our cultural map of modernity shapes how we see the world, ourselves, and our relationships. This map “makes sense” to us because we live in the world it depicts.

These cultural maps use metaphors, images, symbols, and stories that enable us to navigate our worlds: even to this day, for example, church steeples dotting the landscape remind us how thoroughly church attendance once ordered our lives as a culture. The maps lie so deep in our imagination and reach so far back to our earliest memories and education that we find it difficult to recognize them as our cultural maps. Instead, we perceive them as the taken-for-granted descriptions of the way the world works, and our culture rewards us for adhering to them (similarly to how some societies drive on the left side of the road and wonder how others could be crazy enough to drive on the other side, the “wrong” side). Another example of culturally ingrained maps would be the ways church leaders, especially in the United States, aspire to modernist maps of leadership highly dependent on techniques of church growth and markers of success such as numbers of people in attendance or numbers of decisions made at a meeting or the percentage of the congregation involved in certain midweek programs, but as we move more into a globalized postmodern world, these inner maps of success bear little correspondence to the desire of people who seek not to fit into an institution but rather to discover empowerment and liberation. In some parts of the world, married women have few rights and cannot leave the home without permission of the husband, whereas in other cultures, married women are considered equal partners with their spouses. The power of these inner maps is made painfully manifest when people from such cultures move to the West and engage with Western ideas of gender equality. Married women from parts of India, for example, have been beaten or murdered by their husbands when they begin to adopt Western practices of equality. Another instance of these cultural differences are the attitudes toward alcohol. In Muslim countries, the consumption of alcohol is completely frowned on. In America, it is seen as part of a dependency culture, whereas in Europe, it is more a part of a merriment culture. The differences in our inner cultural maps were starkly apparent with the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the Bush administration’s accompanying belief that any country would naturally welcome a liberator and adopt some universal sense of democracy even if that meant the end of many of its own traditional institutions. Maps like these are in operation all the time, shaping how we make decisions, see the world, and take action; they are so much a part of our lives that we don’t actually notice them. That’s why we speak of them existing in our imagination. In this sense, imagination doesn’t mean make-believe but suggests an image or picture that represents some object that isn’t directly accessible to us. For example, when we encounter the phrase “North America” in this book, the actual landmass or histories of the nations that comprise North America aren’t directly before us, but we each have in mind a picture or image of what “North America” embodies. Our imagination makes accessible what would otherwise be unavailable to us.¹

Let’s consider an illustration from a different culture to help us see how our own maps shape our imaginations. The Passover Seder is a ceremonial meal that Jewish families have practiced every year for millennia. Seder means order; it describes the specific order in which the supper is to be celebrated in terms of prayers, eating, storytelling, and song. It begins with the youngest son asking the father, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The father’s response begins, “On this night we remember we were slaves in Egypt . . . and the Lord . . . delivered us.” Whenever the members of a Jewish family participate in this liturgy, they are following a map that forms their identity as few other things ever will. The food they eat that night is filled with symbols that remind them of that other night, thousands of years before, when their ancestors were slaves and God delivered them. This mapping of identity is profound. The table ritual begins with the pronoun we—this is more than a memorial. It is memory made present. Those at the table are also the we, distinguishing Jews as God’s chosen people. The story roots them in memories of slavery and deliverance, the work of death on them as a people, and God’s liberation of them as a people. These powerful maps of identity determine present actions. Here is an example of how someone following this map expresses this imagination. The poem, written by a rabbi, is about the killings in Darfur. It goes all the way back to the Passover and its lived imagination.

We Jews see with ancient eyes and attend with ancient ears. We were not born yesterday.

Not long ago we swore over the cremated bodies of our fathers, mothers and children a solemn oath. From the depths of our souls we cried, “Never Again.” That oath carries the past into the present and pledges to do today whatever is in our power to prevent the perverse plots to extinguish the promise of life.

“Never Again” will we allow the world to dissemble, to pretend that we are voiceless, soundless, without legs or hands.

Ours is a solemn oath in memory of those who were slaughtered in deathly silence.

We are pledged to wake the world from the paralysis of will. We are partners with God in protecting His Children. We dare not shut our eyes or our mouths or our ears.

Who is Darfur to us? And who are they to us?

They are us.²

The maps in our imaginations tell us who we are; they provide for us the geography of our identity as a culture and inform the ways we act. They’ re part of who we are, but they are also so pervasive in our imaginations that we don’t notice them. Anyone who walks into a medieval cathedral will be struck and overwhelmed by the power and beauty of its height drawing us upward, its huge stone pillars and curved arches. On the ground, the overall design of the nave, aisle, and transept (note how the language itself now sounds unfamiliar to us—we sense we know but can’t quite attach an image to what each word designates) described a world, mapped an imagination, about the relationship between earth and heaven, humans and God, that we can hardly imagine for ourselves. The stained-glass windows are of immense beauty, but beauty was never the point; rather, these windows mapped the journey of life on earth and described the future after death. The cathedral was a living, physical map of the Christian imagination. It is a way of understanding our place in the world that no longer carries meaning for us. We cannot decipher the meanings written into the brick, mortar, carvings, and glass. These are no longer part of the ways we see or construct the meaning of our lives as modern people. Indeed, this other map we call modernity has come to shape our imagination of how the world is supposed to work. It’s crucial for the church and its leadership to grasp the pervasiveness and power of modernity’s maps when it comes to the ways we lead and form our churches.

MODERNITY’S MAPS

Modernity is the cultural map that has profoundly shaped the West, dominating the cultural imagination of people in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Its roots reach back to the Enlightenment, when the French philosopher René Descartes rejected the traditions of the medieval intellectual map, questioning the scholasticism of his day with its notions that physical actions could be explained in terms of God acting on things and developing a method of approaching the world we now know as rationalism. This was a massive shift in imagination, a revolutionary new way of seeing the world.

Central to the map of modernity are convictions about the sources of truth and knowledge and the method for attaining truth and knowledge. Compared to all previous maps across cultures, in which a divine being was the source of truth and knowledge, modernity places the autonomous individual at the center as the source of truth and knowledge.³ This autonomous self is radically separate and above everything else, a subject relating to myriad objects. With this shift in imagination came a method by which this rational subject could compel truth and knowledge from the objective world. This form of rationalism came to be known as the scientific method. These two elements combine to create the basic terrain of modernity’s map: a fundamental division of all reality between the subjective human self and an objective, external world.

According to this map, we habitually assume that the world is composed of a set of objects divided into separate and distinct parts. With the right techniques, sufficient knowledge, and enough metrics, it is possible to break things down into their simplest, most discrete pieces in order to understand them and then put them back together in ways that give us control and predictability over our environment.

Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, helps us see more nuanced detail in the map of modernity by describing two perceptions—one social and the other philosophical—that control the modern imagination.⁴ Sociologically, modernity partitions each human life into a variety of segments, each with its own norms of behavior. Thus the public is divided from the private, the corporate from the personal, fact from value, truth from faith, childhood from old age. These divisions reflect a part of the modern map that assumes that all of reality is made up of separate, distinct parts. This is why, for example, it was possible to see the world as a collection of separate objects (the atomistic view of the world) that we could use and manipulate as we chose. What we have in modernity, on one side, is this tendency to “think atomistically about human action and to analyze complex actions and transactions in terms of simple components. In this way the view that particular actions derive their character as parts of larger wholes is a point of view alien to our dominant ways of thinking.”⁵ A classic illustration of this atomistic thinking is the way individuals claim they can do what they like as individuals because it is their action alone and nobody else is involved. This is why some people can justify getting behind the wheel of a car after drinking: it’s their choice, one that doesn’t affect anyone else. In modernity, we have built a world that we believe is made up of individual, personal actions that don’t have any effect on others. If we stopped to think about this for a moment, we might be appalled at such a notion, but because this is one of the default maps, we keep acting as if it were the case, in spite of evidence to the contrary. The individual is sharply separated and distinguished from the particular roles he or she may play in society, exemplified in the notion that what someone does behind closed doors is nobody else’s business. Recent scandals in which well-known North American...