3. Consultancy for Mission and Ministry and I explore how that academic work
a. Reading in missiology
The Anglican report ‘Breaking New Ground’[10] led me into deeper thinking about missiology. I began to recognise that mission was about much more than Church Growth, that it was about God’s mission, not the mission of the church and my Zambian experience of 20 years previously helped me to recognise the value of mission being God’s work through the local people (see also (Donovan, 1978).)
Reading Robert Warren’s Healthy Church Handbook[11] and the ground-breaking ‘Mission shaped Church’ report[12], together with much of Martyn Atkins’ writing, helped me to see mission through people as central to my thinking, rather than growth through process.
David Bosch’s magnum opus on missiology[13] shows how, throughout history there have been significant shifts in the paradigm of mission and I am beginning to feel that we may be in the midst of another such paradigm shift in British approaches to mission in the early part of the twenty first century, with Fresh Expressions of Church becoming ever more significant in my work. For me Bosch’s most revealing insights are the recognition that mission is always shaped by its context and the challenge to protestant understandings of mission
“with respect to their overly pragmatic mission structures, their tendency to portray mission almost exclusively in verbalist categories, and the absence of missionary spirituality in their churches, which often drastically impoverishes all their commendable efforts in the area of social justice.” (p.212)
b. Learning from the new sciences and management
Writers exploring the developments in the social sciences of the more recent non-linear or non-Newtonian ways of thinking in science, such as Mitchell Waldrop[14] helped me to recognise the changing ways of thinking in the scientific world, which were based more on Einstein than on Newton; theories that were much less linear. In turn, writers such as Meg Wheatley and Joshua Cooper Ramo [15] in the social sciences began to pick up this thinking in terms of leadership and organisational change.
One particular image from this thinking that has helped me to see how changes, such as church closure, occur is the sand pile.
We are all familiar with the idea that sand can seemingly continue to be added to a pile until, at some point that we cannot predict, just one little bit more sand causes the whole pile to collapse – self-organised criticality! In the context of church it illustrates how just one small event can cause the whole thing to change and collapse. The issue then is what to do with the sand. Do you rebuild the pile, or take it elsewhere to build a different pile? (Bak, 1996)
Patricia Shaw, Ralph Stacey and others pick up this complexity or ‘edge of chaos’ kind of approach in looking at changing organisations. Shaw is particularly insightful in her reflections on ‘water cooler conversations’. It is here, in these informal conversations, she suggests, that mind-sets are changed and not in the formal meetings of an organisations.