Missional Map-Making: Skills for Leading in Times of Transition [Hardcover]

Alan Roxburgh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 8, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0470486724 | ISBN-13: 978-0470486726 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Missional Map-Making

When church leaders decide to make the fundamental missional shift from focusing on the church itself to asking what God is up to in the neighborhood where their people live, it can be challenging for both leaders and congregants. In this important book, missional leadership expert Alan Roxburgh includes the information and tools leaders need to develop their own maps and chart new paths toward stronger, more vibrant, and more missional congregations. Using the engaging metaphor of map-making, Missional Map-Making explains the perspective and skills needed to lead congregations and denominations over the often unfamiliar terrain of becoming missional.

Building on the work in the groundbreaking book The Missional Leader and on his extensive consulting practice, Alan Roxburgh shows step by step how to implement the strategic missional church model. This proven model also defines the characteristics that describe an effective missional leader and shows how pastors and other clergy can develop the skills they need to best lead their congregation and reach out to the larger community.

Missional Map-Making gives leaders the help they need to nurture their church environments to become truly God centered so that his spirit will guide the mission and the work of their congregations.

From the Back Cover

Praise for Missional Map-Making

"Roxburgh continues to move the missional conversation forward! His Missional Map-Making creatively builds on his previous publications by offering critical perspective on how to navigate the overwhelming complexity of today's world. This important book provides insightful historical perspective toward clarifying the contours of our present landscape, while also being deeply instructive for helping reflective and courageous Christians develop skills for creating new maps toward participating more faithfully in God's mission."

Craig Van Gelder, Ph.D., professor of congregational mission, Luther Seminary

"What if a leader, contra modern expectations, is not to provide dependable predictions, vision, answers, strategic plans, and operational control? Roxburgh claims these modern ways, based on outdated maps, blind us to reality, stifle churches, and result in misplaced efforts, deepening disappointment, and fatigue. Instead, leaders are to be cartographers in a new terrain, shaping churches in which map-makers multiply as God is encountered in biblical texts and local contexts. Roxburgh challenges us with cultural studies and theology so that we gain needed capacities for shaping generative environments in which the Gospel's truth and power forms a people in and for God's mission. Pastors, judicatory leaders, and students need to engage this book."

Rev. Mark Lau Branson, Ed.D., Homer Goddard Associate Professor of Ministry of the Laity, Fuller Theological Seminary

"The issue of leadership is critical in a time of rapid cultural change. Alan Roxburgh helps us with a vital image in the critical quest to recast a leadership approach for our times. The skill of map-making rather than just reading the maps we have goes to the heart of the matter. This is a hugely creative and needed book to help us remake the New Christian West."

Martin Robinson, national director, Together in Mission, and author, Faith of the Unbeliever and Invading Secular Space

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 1 edition (February 8, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470486724
• ISBN-13: 978-0470486726
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 0.8 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #137,519 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alan J. Roxburgh is a teacher, trainer and consultant who works with Allelon and internationally framing resources for the missional church. He coordinates an international project involving leaders from twelve nations who are examining leadership formation in a globalized world. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including The Missional Church, The Missional Leader and Leadership, Liminality and the Missionary Congregation, and Reaching a New Generation. He and his wife Jane live in Vancouver, Canada, and have three grown children.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Required reading for Leaders March 26, 2010

By Rob Edwards

Format:Hardcover

In a culture where the terrain is continually changing, dependence on out-dated maps will not get you to your desired destination.

In Missional Map-Making, Alan Roxburgh outlines the skills that are necessary for becoming map-makers as we lead congregations and denominations over the unfamiliar terrain of becoming missional. Maps, he says, are about our "internal understanding of how things ought to work and the habits and practices we develop over time based on these inner understandings" (p. xi).

Relating the story of a conversation with a minister in Toronto. Up until now, the church has known what to do inside our buildings where people expect church services to take place. The minister went on to say, "...when it comes to the world outside there, we don' t know what to do any more! We're making it up as we co along because our maps of how church operates in the world don't make sense anymore" (p. x). Our old maps cannot solve the challenges of our new context.

Roxburgh uses the first two-thirds of the book helping his readers understand how we have formed the predominate maps that have guided our understanding up to this point.

He then discusses eight currents of change which are propelling the church into a new territory that requires new maps, and new map-making skills:

1. Globalization (from bi-polar East/West dichotomy to homogenized McVillage)
2. Pluralism (not just religious, but cultural, linguistic, culinary, fashion)
3. Rapid technological change (mobile web, social networking media leading to the de-localization of social life)
4. Postmodernism (move from metanarrative to pastiche)
5. Staggering global needs (AIDS, clean water, food)
6. Loss of confidence in primary structures (political, juridical, medical, educational, religious, and economic)
7. Democratization of knowledge (decentralized dissemination of knowledge, viz. Wikipedia)
8. Return to romanticism (living in the moment, trust in intuitive insights and truth from personal experience)

All too often, Roxburgh says, churches have relied on methods (strategic or long-range planning) which are based on a map that engages the world in a linear (goal->action steps->analysis) model that produces organizational change but not missional change. Becoming missional is not a simple matter of organizational (re-)alignment (lining up the parts of our organization like balls on a pool table), but much more like herding cats, Roxburgh says.

In the last third-three chapters-of the book, Roxburgh presents a four-step process for developing the skills of missional map-makers in local churches:

1. Assess how the environment has changed in your context (how has the context changed and how are people responding to it?)
2. Focus on redeveloping a core identity (how can we cultivate environments that re-create a core identity by re-forming the Christian life around the core of the Christian narrative and what would that look like in daily practice?)
3. Create a parallel culture (how can we introduce practices and habits that shape a common life to a small group that will change the organizational culture from the bottom up and the inside out?)
4. Form partnerships wit the surrounding neighborhoods and communities (by helping the small group learn to discern and identify where God is working in their neighborhoods, how can we help connect conversations and invite experiments in what it means to live as God's people in today's world?)

The missional map-maker "is less a pedagogue and more a poet" (p. 176).

Missional Map-Making is not about a cookie-cutter approach to franchising missional churches by replicating a series of steps to achieve a pre-determined outcome. It's about how to create new maps as we live the adventure of participating in God's mission in the world. And it should be required reading for every leader pursuing God's mission.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Practical Approach March 13, 2010

By Chauncey A. Lattimer

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Roxburgh has once again produced an excellent and very practical look into what has become a front-line topic - the missional church. This book provides the tools and information needed for the leader to begin making the 'maps' necessary to move to a missional perspective of doing church. Maps, he writes are "our internal understanding about how things ought to work and the habits and practices we develop over time based on these understandings" (xi). This is very similar to an examination of what has been spoken of as "worldviews."

In terms of its structure, the book is divided into two main parts. Chapters 1-7 form the first (When Maps No Longer Work), which examines the maps that we have internalized from the 'modern' culture of our past. It is the contention of Roxburgh that "the maps we have internalized about what it means to be the church and how to shape churches in our culture no longer connect with or match the dramatically changing environments in which [we] are living" (xii).

The second section of the book (The Map-making Process) includes the final three chapters and is primaily an outline of the four steps that he sees necessary for doing missional planning. These are: Step 1 - Assess how the environment has changed in your context (127); Step 2 - Refocus on redeveloping a core identity (134); Step 3 - Create a parallel culture (143); and, Step 4 - Form partnerships with the surrounding neighborhoods and communities (164).

A favorite quotation - "In this time of radical discontinuity, the ke theologcal notion guiding our path is that God calls a people, and among the people, the imagination for a new future can be born." (179).

By the way, there are an unusually large number of typos, wrong words, left out words, etc. in this book, which took away from the overall quality.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Not Much New December 28, 2010

By Matthew Morine VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I have really enjoyed Roxburgh's work in the missional area. His book "The Missional Leaders" was excellent. So when this title came out, I wanted to read it. The first part of the book is mostly about how the former maps of the church and society no longer work in this culture. He mostly deals with the church framework of creating a strategy for outreach or church functioning that seems to be less helpful. As the culture shifts from a Christian mindset to a post-Christian perspective, the old maps no longer lead to the right direction. He makes a strong case for this approach. The maps are broken, we need new methodology. But then the author seems to go back on this advice in the second section as he attempts to recreate a map that will work. Most of his suggestions are not new, and one wonders about even following this map as the author argued so well against having a map in the first place. I mostly feel that this book was a repeat of some of his earlier work. His book on "Introducing the Missional Church" and "The Missional Church" are excellent, but this book does not seem to add much to the conversation.