More on Missional

An interesting article by Alan Hirsch caught my eye on the Christianity Today website this morning.

As I continue to think about missional church and what that actually means in terms of the changes we need to make to become more and more missional, I was drawn to this piece about leadership. The misisonal church, Hirsch argues needs a different pattern of leadership:

We need more than a pastor and/or teacher leading a congregation. A missional church requires pioneering, innovative, organizationally adaptive, and externally focused leadership, and this means a five-fold understanding of ministry leadership.

Hirsch argues that: Missional churches require all Five aspects of ministry Leadership on the team. His five aspects are taken from Ephesians four–Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors and Teachers. I'm not sure what he makes of the exegetical arguments about the text–are they apostle-prophets, evangelists and pastor-teachers, or apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers? 

But his contention rings true that the model we have for church leadership today, primarily pastors and teachers, is at the heart of our problem. Our received model puts a high premium on looking after the sheep, and a lower premium on searching out the lost sheep. We are, to use and old phrase, more focused on maintenance than mission for the most part. Shifting away from this inward focus to a more outwardly focused pattern of church is taking time, but I do see evidence of it working its way through church life.

Hirsch goes on to talk about how the church in which he was involved restructured their leadership around a team representing these five aspects. I don't see anything particularly new about this, after all the concept of team leadership has been around for quite some time. I'd also suggest that we're not unfamiliar with the challenges Ephesians 4 presents to us. On the other hand, choosing this as the basis for organising the team, moving away from a single leader making all the decisions, may well be new for many a more traditional model of church.

The challenge comes in the smaller churches where leadership is thin and the minister has to fulfil more than one or two of these roles. He or she may even have to fulfil all five if the church is to grow. But then again, if we want to grow we will need to change.