Where does the future lie?

This is a great line from Roxburgh and Boren's book Introducing the Missional Church as it is adapted on the website:

God's future is among God's people

Here's a fuller explanation from the book itself:

The Spirit of God is among the people of God, not in the experts and the ordained, but right in the midst of all the ordinary men, women, and children who comprise this faith community. Therefore God's imagination and God's future is among these ordinary local men and women who gather to worship, who confess their confusion, who know their church is messed up and needs to change, and who confess that they don't have a clue what might be involved in this change or how to go about it. This is where the Spirit is at work. How dare anyone write off the church! This means that the answer to the question, "What is God calling us to be in the communities where we live and work?" is among the people, not in the experts or outside consultants or even in some program that worked somewhere else. And therefore, the job of the leadership is not to come up with grand plans for the congregation but to cultivate an environment in which the missional imagination of the people of God is called forth in lived action and lives.

Chew on that for a while!