One of the things we hope will come out of the current economic crisis is for leaders across every industry to rethink how they do life and work. Obviously, the way business has been done lately isn't working so well. Whatever business you're in, it's time for a change.
In our new book, The Future Starts Now, we argue that the future of life and work is renewable. And we believe the basic principles, practices, and process strategies of The Renewable OrganizationTM can help you make the shift from a consumable to a renewable way of living and working together --- no matter what kind of business you're in. But the intended audience for this particular book includes pastors and congregational leaders, judicatory and denominational executives, and leaders of all kinds of faith-based organizations.
If you're a church leader who thinks you know us and have seen everything we've got to offer, you need to take another look. For at least a decade, we have been moving in a couple of exciting new directions, both theologically and theoretically. In this new book, The Future Starts Now, we make both a post-missional and a post-modern move. This is a radical - and important - shift that has the potential of changing everything about the way church is done today. It will mean shifting:
- from trying to "fix" the world to being on the lookout for what God is already up to in the world
- from a centralized, hierarchical approach to leadership and organization to the holy chaos of decentralization
- from The Great Excuse of scarcity to The Great Surprise of emergence as a way of doing what matters
- from the strait-jacket of strategic planning to the freedom of strategic thinking
[Come learn more at a Treasure in Clay Jars workshop --- coming to nine cities in North America beginning October 8th! Click here for more information.]
The first big move we've made is a post-missional one. We have moved beyond the church-centric tendencies of the 20th century theologian, Lesslie Newbigin, and those who followed him (including many of our friends in today's missional and, to a certain extent therefore, emerging church conversations). Our work follows, instead, the overlooked 20th century theologian JC Hoekendijk and is (you could say) much more "worldly" than either Newbigin or those who have carried on his work. We have a hunch that God is on the loose in the world! The world isn't something to be escaped (not even for its own sake, ala Hauerwaus, for example); the world is where the action is! Our job is simply to pay attention to what God is already doing in the world - everywhere we live, work, serve, learn, and play - name it when we see it and jump in to help anyway we can. (Click here for a peek at the other "big ideas" that shape our approach to life and work.)
The way you think about something changes everything. And this shift in our thinking (from "the world is something to be fixed" to "the world is the locus of God's activity") has made us increasingly uncomfortable with the underlying assumptions of the modern approach to organization theory which emerged hand in hand with the 19th century factory and dominated every industry in the 20th century --- including the church. It is one of the main reasons we have embraced a more post-modern (eg., organic, emergent, decentralized) approach to organization theory.
Here's more on our move to a post-missional and post-modern approach in this excerpt from The Future Starts Now:
"...we have also grown increasingly distant from the modern approach to organizational theory that has influenced and, in some cases, defined the approach that has been used by missiologists engaged in congregational and judicatory consulting over the past several decades. This consumable approach, at its core, objectifies the world, treating the environment like it’s a threat to your organization. Since resources are thought to be scarce, your challenge is basically to figure out how to get your share (before the church down the street does) in order to survive. You do that by being more relevant and providing better services to meet the needs of people in your context. Even though many years ago we started out using this approach we simply can no longer support or encourage the kind of thinking that we believe both characterizes and produces a consumable approach to life and work.
Instead we have become very excited about the emergent and organic approaches that are bubbling up in a variety of fields. We have discovered a special and deep affinity for the research being done today in the field of social innovation (which inspires and educates leaders to champion and work for transformative social change, especially that which re-engages vulnerable populations) at places like Social Innovation Generation at the University of Waterloo, Ontario and the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford University; by symbolic-interpretive and postmodern organizational theorists like Mary Jo Hatch and Margaret Wheatley and by contemporary management experts like MIT’s Thomas Malone, all of whom are making strong research-based arguments for decentralization in the workplace, as both the preferred and the inevitable future. These voices, for the most part, have not been part of the missional conversation happening in the church today; this is a great loss and something we hope to change. You will see their fingerprints throughout this book.
We cannot emphasize enough what a radical shift in both theology and in theory this has been and continues to be – for us and for the church leaders we are working with...
Sometimes as we’re describing the practices or processes we’re using to someone, he or she will interrupt us and say something like, “Oh yeah! I see what you’re saying! That’s just like when I was serving at _________________(the last place they served/worked)!” Then he or she will tell us the story and, sure enough, we can see traces of the consumable theological and theoretical ideas that we believe have gotten the church into such a mess and which will prevent us from entering the emerging future. The world, in their story, was a problem to be solved --- and their church worked together to solve it. The leap to a new way of seeing the world as the arena of God’s activity and thinking about their role in it as a co-creator in God’s mission with God and with the world was just too far.
We are working hard to make this leap possible."
Click here to register for ARE's 2009 Tour - "Treasure in Clay Jars" - coming to nine cities in North America beginning October 8th!
Click here to pre-order your copy of The Future Starts Now today!
Click here to contact us for a free review copy (for your blog, online or print magazine, newspaper, radio show or podcast, class, etc.) of our new book.
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