In order to offer a taster of one of the issues that we will discussing in the iGroups at the Global Connections conference in November 2009, we have asked two people from within the network for their personal perspectives on what it means for the Church to be a transformed and transforming community. George Kovoor, Principal of Trinity College, reflects on the challenges of training the next generation of church leaders, while Rob Shimwell, Pastor at St. Mildred’s, shares from his experience of helping his congregation to engage with the local community.
Training for transformational leadership - Rev. Canon George Kovoor, Trinity College
The status quo is not a safe place for a student of Jesus because it is a place of stagnation which can lead to irrelevance. The world is in flux and rapidly changing! The collapse of financial institutions has created a crisis of confidence. The melting of the polar icecaps and the depletion of the ozone layer has raised hard ethical and strategic questions about the meaning of human progress. Corruption in public life has highlighted the importance of integrity and the need for authority to be accountable. The economic disparity between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' is widening, demographic shifts, human migration and urbanisation have led to stress, violence and conflict.
I am committed to the development of transformational leadership. My priority is to help students discern the call and activity of God in their lives and to nurture this sense of calling. Ministry and mission are tough many will be discouraged and want to give up. But a strong sense of the call of God will sustain us to persevere and overcome these trials for Christ and His kingdom. Exploring with our students the divine imperative, the 'must' in their lives, which will help them to discover meaning, direction and purpose and will transform them into finisher completers who have learnt to overcome their fears and fragilities.
The place of modelling and mentoring is vital in any form of education and training. One is constantly seeking to share the vulnerabilities and dilemmas of leadership in order that colleagues and students can see how one responds to these opportunities and challenges. Participatory learning encourages people to take responsibility for their future by building on their prior knowledge, life experience and skills to respond to community issues. Students and teachers reflect corporately within a given community and develop a strategy collegially. This is revolutionary because insights are shared corporately; understandings develop through group interaction, resulting in an ownership of the vision by the community.
Developing an international world view is vital for leadership in a globalised reality. A Eurocentric and colonial epistemology is deficient because it is a very partial and often flawed perspective. Training institutions must develop their libraries to reflect global thinking and multiple world views and approaches - even in Christian theology. The use of the World Wide Web and modern technologies are tools which offer opportunities to gain multiple perspectives and insights. Encountering new truth is liberating.
At Trinity college in Bristol we have pioneered a form of community based theological training for mission & ministry. Our curriculum focuses on integration and cross disciplinary studies. Our matrix highlights Christian discipleship, Biblical scholarship in terms of comprehension, competence in research and study. The skill in translating Biblical truth into the local idiom and communicating the Christian message to a given context has a high priority. Leadership is modelled relationally and explored in the areas of envisioning, resource mobilisation, managing change and resolving conflict. Mission is the heart of God and it is at the centre of our life together. It affects our governance, structures, recruitment, curriculum development, community life, and our commitment to engage with the world and the Church around us. We recognise and affirm the advantages of training in situ. Contextual education and training has led us to develop a commitment to relevance, authenticity and functionality raising new questions and tools for learning and assessments to evaluate growth in understandings, competence & effectiveness. Education must liberate, equip and empower us to be fit for purpose within our communities.
Teachers need to engage with both the text and contextual realities in their courses; assignments reflect both textual issues and dilemmas faced by local communities on the ground. Dialogue between practitioners and theorists must be encouraged; practitioners need to be challenged to pause in order to have space to think, reflect, document, dialogue and write and academics in their ivory towers need to listen and engage with practitioners and others on the ground. Opportunities abound for the audacious - innovation and creativity are here to stay and permission to take risks must be given in the knowledge that failure is never final.
The world is looking for leaders with vision, integrity, courage, creative competence rooted in communities and whose confidence and commitment to the Gospel is contagious. Change is not to be feared but must be faced and managed with courage and imagination. Leaders are called to cast vision by interpreting the signs of our times and offer both challenge and support. Remember, it is those who trust in the Lord, anticipate and prepare for things to come, who will lead their communities and institutions into a brighter future.
The parish church as a transformed and transforming community – Rev. Canon Rob Shimwell, St. Mildred’s, Lee
It is four years since we arrived at St Mildred’s, Lee, from St Mary’s, Upton, a large church in a leafy urban village on the Wirral. “Why are you moving to a multi-ethnic parish hard by the South Circular?” they asked! Answer? God had made it clear that this was the right place. Apart from the clarity of his leading, three other things stood out: St Mildred’s had a congregation reflecting the ethnic mix of the community, a passion for mission, and a welcoming heart.
The transformed Church is a reflecting community
Before any church can think about transforming its community, it must share the nature of its community. There should be very little difference between the sort of people you meet outside the church and the people you meet inside the church. The ethnicity of people in church at St Mildred’s every week, by the sheer grace of God, matches the ethnicity of the people we meet every day around the parish. Many come from the Parent & Toddler and Alpha groups, both with wonderfully cross-cultural outreach. This boundary-crossing community wins the right to speak to the surrounding parish with integrity because it reflects its community.
The transformed Church is a relational community
I’m privileged to serve in St Mildred’s where there is a welcoming, encouraging, non-judgmental community, and where so many different sorts of people are valued and loved. I tell them frequently that this is something valuable and fragile that always needs prayerful protection. I can trust that the stranger is welcomed and loved; that the newcomer will not have to stand alone after the service feeling like a fish out of water. Better a church full of good relationships than a church full of busy programmes!
The transforming Church is a non-attractional community.[i]
The norm for churches (and for church plants) is for them to exist within a community, praying and waiting for people to be attracted there to meet with God. “The Come-To-Us stance taken by the attractional church is unbiblical. It’s not found in the Gospels or the Epistles. Jesus, Paul, the early church leaders all had a Go-To-Them mentality.” [ii]At St Mildred’s we are praying and starting to go out, rather than expecting them to come to us. We visit regularly and pray for a different part of the parish each year, trying to cultivate the links and contacts made from year to year.
We have a simple vision for our life together at St Mildred’s: to develop our children and young people’s work, to develop ministry amongst older people, to partner in mission locally and globally, and to build a new hall! One strap-line holds it all together: called to know and share Jesus Christ as Lord.
We will never arrive. The process is circular, just like the South Circular we live next to. The relational church must always be the reflecting church, and the Go-To-Them church, never letting go of its relational character … and so on, with all the glory going to God!
[i]See The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st Century Church by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch, Hendrikson, pp.18ff.
[ii]Frost and Hirsch, Op cit, p.19
