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Missional Map Making
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$ 21.96
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$ 24.95 |
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705382 |
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Item Description...
Overview
Provides guidance for church leaders looking to move towards stronger, more vibrant and more missional congregations, and explains the perspective and skills needed to lead congregations as churches change their focus from internal to external.
Publishers Description
Guidance for church leaders to develop their own maps and chart new paths toward stronger, more vibrant, and more missional congregations In the burgeoning missional church movement, churches are seeking to become less focused on programs for members and more oriented toward outreach to people who are not already in church. This fundamental shift in what a congregation is and does and thinks is challenging for leaders and congregants. Using the metaphor of map-making, the book explains the perspective and skills needed to lead congregations and denominations in a time of radical change over unfamiliar terrain as churches change their focus from internal to external.Offers a clear guide for leaders wanting to transition to a missional church modelWritten by Alan Roxburgh, a prominent expert and practitioner in the missional movementGuides leaders seeking to create new maps for leadership and church organization and focusA Volume in the popular Leadership Network Series This book is written to be accessible to all Christian congregational styles and denominations. |
Item Specifications...
Pages 204
Dimensions: Length: 0.75" Width: 6.25" Height: 9.25"
Weight: 0.88 lbs.
Binding Hardcover
Publisher Jossey-Bass/A Wiley Co.
ISBN 0470486724
EAN 9780470486726
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Availability 4 units.
Availability accurate as of May 27, 2012 12:49.
Usually ships within one to two business days from Momence, IL.
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Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | Stop trying to herd cats! May 31, 2010 |
This book is an excellent analysis of how our culture has shifted, why the old ways of being church simply don't work anymore, and why we all feel so frustrated because we keep banging our heads against the wall, thinking if we only work harder at the same old strategies, things will be different. The author uses the metaphor of map making. We all are using old "maps"---ways of understanding to navigate our culture, but some roads have been closed, some re-routed, and some new ones built. In fact, roads won't always get you where you want to go. Sometimes you have to use trains, planes, and ships----maybe even spaceships!
Another metaphor he uses is playing billiards vs. herding cats. If you have the skill and the strategy, when you play billiards, you can put the ball in the pocket every time. Try getting 15 cats to do exactly what you want them to do. Life (and church) is more like herding cats. Think about it. You can make inanimate objects do exactly what you want. Living beings have a mind of their own.
I would recommend this book as an aid to understanding what we face in 2010, as opposed to what we experienced in 1950 or even 1980. We might want to keep using the same old maps, or we might decide we can use billiards skills and strategies to rearrange a herd of cats, but we are just going to keep being frustrated. We have to get some new maps, and maybe be ok with letting the kitties do what they want to do, as long as we make sure we are caring for them. While we do that, we have to think of ourselves like cartographers of old---creating new maps, even while we don't know what is over the next hill.
Ultimately, this book won't help you "fix" anything with your church. That's a modern, mechanistic goal. But it might help you relax a little, take a deep breath, and steel yourself to plunge off the old worn path into the lush jungle which is bursting with life. | | | | Helps leaders who are handling shifts in the world and church May 17, 2010 |
Missional Map-Making: Skills for Leading in Times of Transition helps leaders who are handling shifts in the world and church, providing resources for new paths in building a different more effective church. Church leaders provide their insights on evolving connections between church and new congregational make-ups, offering fellow leaders tools for change. Step-by-step strategies also offer specifics, not generalities.
| | | | Required reading for Leaders Mar 26, 2010 |
In a culture where the terrain is continually changing, dependence on out-dated maps will not get you to your desired destination.
In Missional Map-Making, Alan Roxburgh outlines the skills that are necessary for becoming map-makers as we lead congregations and denominations over the unfamiliar terrain of becoming missional. Maps, he says, are about our "internal understanding of how things ought to work and the habits and practices we develop over time based on these inner understandings" (p. xi).
Relating the story of a conversation with a minister in Toronto. Up until now, the church has known what to do inside our buildings where people expect church services to take place. The minister went on to say, "...when it comes to the world outside there, we don' t know what to do any more! We're making it up as we co along because our maps of how church operates in the world don't make sense anymore" (p. x). Our old maps cannot solve the challenges of our new context.
Roxburgh uses the first two-thirds of the book helping his readers understand how we have formed the predominate maps that have guided our understanding up to this point.
He then discusses eight currents of change which are propelling the church into a new territory that requires new maps, and new map-making skills:
1. Globalization (from bi-polar East/West dichotomy to homogenized McVillage)
2. Pluralism (not just religious, but cultural, linguistic, culinary, fashion)
3. Rapid technological change (mobile web, social networking media leading to the de-localization of social life)
4. Postmodernism (move from metanarrative to pastiche)
5. Staggering global needs (AIDS, clean water, food)
6. Loss of confidence in primary structures (political, juridical, medical, educational, religious, and economic)
7. Democratization of knowledge (decentralized dissemination of knowledge, viz. Wikipedia)
8. Return to romanticism (living in the moment, trust in intuitive insights and truth from personal experience)
All too often, Roxburgh says, churches have relied on methods (strategic or long-range planning) which are based on a map that engages the world in a linear (goal->action steps->analysis) model that produces organizational change but not missional change. Becoming missional is not a simple matter of organizational (re-)alignment (lining up the parts of our organization like balls on a pool table), but much more like herding cats, Roxburgh says.
In the last third-three chapters-of the book, Roxburgh presents a four-step process for developing the skills of missional map-makers in local churches:
1. Assess how the environment has changed in your context (how has the context changed and how are people responding to it?)
2. Focus on redeveloping a core identity (how can we cultivate environments that re-create a core identity by re-forming the Christian life around the core of the Christian narrative and what would that look like in daily practice?)
3. Create a parallel culture (how can we introduce practices and habits that shape a common life to a small group that will change the organizational culture from the bottom up and the inside out?)
4. Form partnerships wit the surrounding neighborhoods and communities (by helping the small group learn to discern and identify where God is working in their neighborhoods, how can we help connect conversations and invite experiments in what it means to live as God's people in today's world?)
The missional map-maker "is less a pedagogue and more a poet" (p. 176).
Missional Map-Making is not about a cookie-cutter approach to franchising missional churches by replicating a series of steps to achieve a pre-determined outcome. It's about how to create new maps as we live the adventure of participating in God's mission in the world. And it should be required reading for every leader pursuing God's mission. | | | | A Practical Approach Mar 13, 2010 |
Roxburgh has once again produced an excellent and very practical look into what has become a front-line topic - the missional church. This book provides the tools and information needed for the leader to begin making the 'maps' necessary to move to a missional perspective of doing church. Maps, he writes are "our internal understanding about how things ought to work and the habits and practices we develop over time based on these understandings" (xi). This is very similar to an examination of what has been spoken of as "worldviews."
In terms of its structure, the book is divided into two main parts. Chapters 1-7 form the first (When Maps No Longer Work), which examines the maps that we have internalized from the 'modern' culture of our past. It is the contention of Roxburgh that "the maps we have internalized about what it means to be the church and how to shape churches in our culture no longer connect with or match the dramatically changing environments in which [we] are living" (xii).
The second section of the book (The Map-making Process) includes the final three chapters and is primaily an outline of the four steps that he sees necessary for doing missional planning. These are: Step 1 - Assess how the environment has changed in your context (127); Step 2 - Refocus on redeveloping a core identity (134); Step 3 - Create a parallel culture (143); and, Step 4 - Form partnerships with the surrounding neighborhoods and communities (164).
A favorite quotation - "In this time of radical discontinuity, the ke theologcal notion guiding our path is that God calls a people, and among the people, the imagination for a new future can be born." (179).
By the way, there are an unusually large number of typos, wrong words, left out words, etc. in this book, which took away from the overall quality.
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