Customer Reviews

The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World (Jossey-Bass Leadership Network Series)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Alan Roxburgh has finally pulled together all the pieces that he has been writing about and teaching for a number of years. Some of this stuff he taught in a course I took with him 14 years ago at McMaster. He highlights the character required, the skills required, and the processes required, of pastors seeking to innovate toward the missionally-engaged congregation. There are far too many people using the term "missional" to signify whatever they want. Alan and the others in the Gospel and Culture Network are giving us principles, practice and definitions that do justice to what Newbigin meant when he started some of us using the term long before it became vogue.

I'll be usng this book for a class that I am teaching. It covers the basics of "missional church" all right, but the strength of the book is chapters 3-5, where a change strategy for adopting missional church paradigm is lifted up. The last chapters, on leadership, I found less helpful in part because it is grounded not to the experience of a church becoming "missional" but to the author's evaluation instrument. The authors acknowledge but underestimate the membership loss that comes from adopting the missional paradigm: they estimate 10 to 15%, without systemmatic research I have found closer to 50% loss in several cases in the UCC.

Having read many books on leadership, and having read a few on the missional church, I was very pleased to find this volume with a missional approach to leadership. The author asserts that this approach can be used in any church setting to give the congregation more of a missional church direction. Although the entire book is well-worth reading, the most intensive section is chapters 3-5. I recommend this one highly.

The Missional Leader provides some very important insights and guidance for church leaders attempting to navigate the challenges of this age. The wisdom about discontinuous change and the adaptive challenges it brings is critical for leaders to understand and embrace. Insights about changing congregational culture are fresh and well grounded theologically and in human behavior.

Unfortunately, the book lacks adequate editing. Stories are repeated in the same chapter, some paragraphs read like a first draft rather than the refined prose that such an important work deserves. I hope any future editions of this book will undergo some additional editing.

This book resonates with me, so much of what I read on church style talks about how to improve worship, your discipleship programme, your homegroups programme, or what ever... This books does not talk about programmes, it talks about the style of leadership that is required in today's church. And it stand in stark contrast to the likes of Leonard Sweet. Rather than promoting the idea that the church needs a captain of a ship, as we are going into a storm, it talks of ploughing the soil, of working the land, which is much closer to the biblical narrative than the winner-takes-all/captain-of-the-boat-follow-me approach. It is a book that believe that the Holy Spirit is alive and working within us today, it gives hope. It is comprehensive. It is the best book on church leadership I've read in the past 5 years.

Excellent book to help guide a church into mission thinking and action. I recomment this for all leaders in a church that seeks to be "missional" in the true sense of the word.

I have been a "fan" of Alan Roxburgh since 2004 when I read his book Crossing the Bridge where he describes the journey the church is on as crossing a bridge and not knowing where it leads. In Missional Leader he continues the theme, but now adds some "how to" material. If you are looking for a "cookbook" on how to do leadership look elsewhere. This is not what you will find. If you want a book that will challenge some of your deepest held beliefs about what it means to lead a church, then you have found the right book. Roxburgh and Romanuk point you in the direction to look, back to the Bible to find our story once again in God's story. Once I began reading I had to finish and even now it is shaping my thinking about leading my congregation into the future. What that looks like, I wish I know, but in an old phrase, "I don't know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future."

Alan Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006)

Roxburgh and Romanuk offer sound frameworks for a leader to help a church to dream together, cultivate an imagination for mission, develop a plan for change and implement it. They stress the importance of missional leadership and imagining fresh approaches for mission rather than merely adopting and repackaging existing programs: `Even though the regular operational or administrative functions of a congregation continue to require attention, they must now support other leadership skills: cultivating the missional imagination of the people of God in the midst of massive change.' (p.14) Their `missional change model' assumes that the people of God have the capacity and resources to do the mission that God is calling them to. It also assumes that conflict and tension are necessary and unavoidable accompaniments of any change, and that change needs missional change-agent skills and capacities. For example, Rogers' stages of diffusion of innovation are helpful for understanding that the process of implementing any change takes time through a number of stages: knowledge, persuasion, decision, experimentation and confirmation. The writers encourage questioning and cultivating a conversation to adapt and best serve their community.

Originally reviewed for D Cronshaw "The Emerging Church: Pioneering Leadership and Innovation Reading Guide", Zadok Paper (Forthcoming 2010).

An excellent must read for the church leader. It's worth the cost of the book to read chapter three concerning missional church cycles.

I was thoroughly engaged by both Dr. Roxburgh and Dr. Romanuk as they discussed the various elements that contribute to the process of change. They make change easier to grasp by discussing its various element. This book also satisfies my desire for intellectual engagement about the Church and its relationship to the world that we live in. While it causes the reader to reassess the current direction of the Church, it encourages hope among those who wish to help foster more effectivity. I consider reading this book to be time well spent.