Missional Renaissance Leadership Community

Reggie McNeal, Leadership Network‘s Missional Leadership Specialist, announces the formation of a new Missional Renaissance Leadership Community.

Ten churches across the country will partner together over the course of the next two years to compare notes and strategize how to best become incarnational in their respective communities. I had the privilege of participating in these churches’ inaugural meeting in Dallas earlier this month. My role will be to document the surge of missional activity within these and other churches over the course of the next twenty-four months.

This particular community is being facilitated by Reggie and Eric Swanson, LN’s Director for Externally-Focused Churches. Eric and Reggie did a good job at providing great content for the participating churches. But what I appreciated the most was the time they built into our two-day gathering for the churches to listen to each other and to plan specifically what they plan to do to operationalize learnings after leaving Dallas. faithmaps’ readers will recall I had complained earlier this year about such gatherings where creating this kind of space isn’t a priority.

The other thing I appreciated about the gathering was the participation of community leaders. In fact, churches couldn’t participate in this community unless they brought community leaders with their team. So, for example, one group had their metropolitan city’s police chief, another brought the CEO of their metro’s museum, and a third invited a city councilwoman to participate who was also very involved in her state’s gubernatorial politics. Their ready participation illustrated the fact that most of these churches were not just sticking their toes in the missional river for the first time, but were gathering to amplify and focus their current efforts.

Long-time readers will recognize the harmony between a missional focus and our concern with transpropositionality, a term that was developed within the faithmaps discussion group community some years ago. The relatively recent re-emphasis within evangelicalism on practical involvement within its community breathes health into a movement we have suggested has had too much of an exclusive focus on propositions.

What are your thoughts about the recent resurgence of missionality?

Who are your thoughtleaders in this space?

What books have you found particularly helpful?

Who is doing this well?

How do we keep from over-balancing and ignoring the Scriptures and theology as we get our hands dirty and our hearts engaged?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and am frankly excited to see what we can learn over the course of the next two years.

Our next community gathering will be in April 2008 somewhere in California.

Eric Swanson documented some of his thoughts about the gathering here and here.