I’ve been wrestling with Roxburgh’s and Romanuk’s The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach the World. Over the next few posts, I’ll reflect on their model of the missional leader or movement builder as one who is a cultivator of an environment.
Cultivation is an ancient word taken from gardening and horticulture. A cultivator works with plants in a garden. It is an organic rather than mechanical or tactical metaphor. One who cultivates a garden understands that the life and purpose of each plant is not something over which one has control . . . He or she must work with the plant in its growth, must ensure the right amount of water, must protect the plant from too much sun or cold, etc.
Leadership as cultivation involves creating the environment in which spiritual movements can bud and develop it’s about cultivating space.
Seeing leadership as cultivation contrasts with pastoral models (caring for the flock of God, counseling, and spiritual care) or entrepreneurial models (the leader who knows where the church needs to go and has the vision, passion and strategy to take it there.) R & R argue that the idea of leadership as cultivating an environment is difficult to grasp because of our ingrained conviction that leadership is about providing solutions and strategies with predefined ends.
In contrast, cultivation describes a leader as one who works the soil of the people and circumstances so as to invite and constitute an environment where people discern what the Spirit is doing in, with, and among them as a missional community.
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