The Sky Is Falling: Leaders Lost in Transition [Paperback]

Alan J. Roxburgh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2006

This is more than a book, it is a manifesto, a proposal for a new way of imagining a common life together as the pilgrim people of God seeking to fulfill God s purposes for the world in our time. If we need new kinds of churches, we cannot develop them with old kinds of leaders. We ourselves need to become those new kinds of leaders, even as we all look to the next generations to help them be formed in new apprenticeships in the kinds of skills this book describes. Alan Roxburgh s most radical and powerful insight: having new kinds of churches with new kinds of leaders is not the point. In the end, even though we in the church talk and talk (and write and write) about church, church, church, church ... it s not about the church. The church exists for something bigger than itself. Understanding that one thing alone will be worth your expense, time, and effort in turning this page and reading on with an open mind and an open heart. Taken from foreward and endorsements by Brian McClaren & Tim Keel

Editorial Reviews

Review

Leadership always functions in a given situation or context. How do we lead today in our current cultural situation? Finally... here is the conceptual framework every leader needs to navigate stuck-ness between a past to which we cannot return and a future yet to emerge. --Todd Hunter, President, Alpha USA Former President, Vineyard Churches USA

If you re looking for a model of risky practices for your emergent church ... if you want the most effective strategies for reviving a traditional church ... if you seek dependable and reassuring methods ... forget Roxburgh. But if you believe, as I do, that churches today have encountered profound cultural shifts, that leaders need conversations across tribal boundaries, and that we need our imaginations to be immersed in biblical narratives, then this book is what we need to deepen and guide our discourse. --Rev. Mark Lau Branson, Ed.D., Homer L. Goddard Associate Professor Ministry of the Laity, Fuller Theological Seminary

The church in North America is in a crisis precipitated by a revolution in culture. Alan Roxburgh provides a realistic analysis of this crisis and warns us not to look for easy answers or quick solutions the time of transition will be with us longer than we like. So he does not provide the latest how-to manual for successful church leadership we have enough of those already! But neither does he get stuck in analysis paralysis. Instead he suggests a way that we might work together long-term to develop a more faithful engagement of the church with the mission of God. The Sky Is Falling should stimulate important conversations and provoke (I hope) some courageous experiments. --David G. Dunbar, President, Biblical Theological Seminary

About the Author

Alan Roxburgh has over twenty-seven years of experience in church leadership and seminary faculty. He was responsible for teaching in the areas of leadership development and domestic missiology. He serves as Vice President for Allelon Canada and, as such, serves as the Director of the Allelon Missional Leadership Network (AMLN), a network of relationships and resources that create a movement of missional formation among leaders, local churches and training schools throughout North America, Europe, and Australia.

Product Details

• Paperback: 187 pages
• Publisher: Allelon Publishing; 1st edition (February 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0977718409
• ISBN-13: 978-0977718405
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #373,056 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sky is Falling Review, September 26, 2006

By 

Andrew F. Menzies "Missional Diatribe" (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sky Is Falling: Leaders Lost in Transition (Paperback)

Alan Roxburgh is a pastor, teacher, writer, mentor and intellectual. He has had various professorships in distinguished academies and seminaries and currently teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary and has been engaged in research on the connection between the Gospel and Western culture for much of three decades. Roxburgh travels widely through much of the West and brings a genuine global perspective. He is the author of titles including Reaching a New Generation (1993), Crossing the Bridge: Leadership in a Time of Change (2000), Leadership, Liminality and the Missionary Congregation (1998), Missional Leadership: Equipping your church to serve a changing world (2006) and now The Sky is Falling: Leaders Lost in Transition. He has co-authored and contributed in many other publications.

Roxburgh is ignored at our peril and in The Sky is Falling book he traces the seeds of the Emergent and Missional Conversations and where they could lead. In many senses this is building upon his previous publications however this book contains an important addition. Roxburgh imagines how those inside church systems and those who have left for new endeavors can help each other. The Sky is Falling opens an imagination for new possibilities through the idea of local missional networks under something like an abbot.

The Sky is Falling develops the possibilities of this cultural moment through unpacking what occurs in and through communitas and liminality. This is very helpful territory to any leader who is struggling in a church or denominational structure or who has left theses structures for new horizons. It helps explain some of what and why this occurs and the possibilities for missional imagination because of and in spite of these systems. It isn't a long book but what Roxburgh covers in 150 pages could have saved me about 50 other Missional and Emergent books worth of time and money!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Sky Is Falling : A Critique, May 14, 2009

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J. Little "J.Little" (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sky Is Falling: Leaders Lost in Transition (Paperback)

Alan J. Roxburgh uses his book The Sky Is Falling to bridge the gap between the denominational structures (the Liminals) and those involved with the emerging/emergent movement (Emergents). He points out that over the last fifty years there has been a huge shift in church dynamics and church preference due to the rise of the postmodern era. There is a large percentage of the US Christian population that feels disillusioned by the denominational structures that have historically led the missional call of God in America. These folks (the Emergents) have broken ties with denominational structures and their leaders, the Liminals, to form their own congregations. The Liminals as a response to the changes in American culture have held tightly to traditional ways, turned their focus inward, and guarded against transformation until they realized they were failing. Seeing the dire need for Emergents to hold fast to tradition (to understand how God has historically moved in the world) in order to sustain themselves and for Liminals to seek new culturally innovative ways of being missional, Roxburgh challenges both sides to engage in missional conversations with one another manifested in communitas. Together, he believes, they can find answers to many of the challenges facing followers of Jesus and what it means to be "Christian" in today's postmodern world.

Both Sides Need Each other...Communitas
Roxburgh argues that both the Emergents and Liminals have much to learn from one another and need to form communitas with one another to see the missio dei come to fruition. It is his, "conviction that without dialogue and cooperation between these two tribes--the Liminals and the Emergents--we will never be able to discern the shape of the communities God truly wants to call forth." He feels that because both groups are trying to address similar questions of missional faithfulness in the midst of sweeping change in Church life they need dialogue with each other. He writes, "The Liminals can receive from the Emergents their gifts of imagination, critical evaluation and feedback, and holy restlessness. The Emergents can receive from the Liminals the gifts of history, tradition, habits, capacities, and foundational theologies handed down to them through years of schooling and discipleship." Roxburgh believes communitas must be based on a dialogue committed to understanding and addressing the discontinuous change in the cultures core brought about by the postmodern era.

Guiding Leaders Through the Change Process' Transition
Roxburgh states that both Liminals and Emergents can learn together how the process saving the church and meeting the needs of people in the postmodern era is the acceptance that life is a continuous cycling in and out of periods of stability. Life as a Christian and for the church is in a constant state of transition. This period of constant transition is brought about from the discontinuous change of the postmodern era. Discontinuous change is defined as constant change in the world with no discernable pattern to it. He states that it "exhausts our physical, mental, and spiritual resources by its sheer magnitude because as soon as you adjust or start adjusting to one change (transition) you are hit with another." Thus, we are culturally and as church organizations living in the midst of transition as a result of discontinuous change. Roxburgh says, "While it is highly stressful, it is also a phase that must be lived in for some time if we are to discover the kinds of futures God may want to call forth for God's church" (65). The discontinuous change that Roxburgh describes is understood as an external force placed upon a person, group, organization, society, while transition is the internal response within a person or organization to the change. For both Liminals and Emergents to remain a missional church, Roxburgh believes, they must learn together to accept the constant state of discontinuous change in the world by making transition a leadership disposition.

Get Back To God's Story
Roxburgh states that in order for both groups to be effective for the missio dei they must place the God who has encountered them/us in Jesus Christ back in the center of their communities of faith. Jesus, including scripture, is who shapes and gives meaning to our lives. Roxburgh states that if a genuine form of communitas, as mentioned above, is to emerge in the midst of the church God needs to speak to us through scripture. He writes, "Scripture is the foundation to communitas...is the key to resisting temptation to go back to the old strategies." The reason that Roxburgh places such an emphasis on this is because we, as Christians, have a responsibility to form men and women who will live a committed Christian life for the rest of their lives. We cannot allow the commodification of the Church and needs based church hopping to continue. It produces a selfish needs based Christian that misses God's number one call on our life, to look beyond ourselves: "love the lord your god with all your heart...love your neighbor as yourself...go into the world and make disciples." That is not needs based Christianity, that is Jesus based Christianity. Jesus must be at the center of both the Liminal and Emergent groups in order for them to have a missional conversation.

Critique
While Roxburgh gives some great insight into the state of the Church in America, the affects of the postmodern era, and the need for a common dialogue to occur between the Liminals and Emergents he falls short in his solution for mending the gap between the two groups. His solution to the rift between the two groups is simply find a synergistic leader, one that is mentored by a Abbot/Abbess, who has the ability to network leaders from varying denominations and/or churches to have a missional conversation. While this sounds great in theory, in practice it is another reality. As an optimist I would like to say this would work, but ecumenists today are still trying to settle problems from the Protestant Reformation. If a synergistic leader was all it would take to mend the gap between the Liminals and the Emergents then why have we not found a solution to the rift between the Catholic Church and those denominations that broke away from it?

In conclusion, I thoroughly enjoyed The Sky Is Falling. Roxburgh gave some wonderful leadership principles and ways to stay relevant and transitional to/for the postmodern culture. His thoughts about a sustained dialogue between Liminals and Emergents are wonderful and needed. However, his descriptions of the needed leaders to carry the missional church through the postmodern era fall a bit short of a complete answer. With that said, the myriad of leaders and the guidance of Abbot/Abbess talked about in this book are needed to stay true to God's history and His call on us as Christians.

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sky Is Falling: Leaders Lost in Transition, May 30, 2008

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Richard A. Fancher "Golf Rev" (Houston, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sky Is Falling: Leaders Lost in Transition (Paperback)

This is an excellent work by Alan Roxburgh on this subject. In fact, it is one of the best I have ever read. I have read other works by Mr. Roxburgh and he is a very relevant and very thorough writer. I highly recommend this work.