Movement Building as “Cultivation of Environments” (Part 3)

Opt for the Green Zone

Roxburgh and Romanuk offer, what they call, The Three Zone Model of Missional Leadership. The model describes an emergent zone (green), a performative zone (blue), and a reactive zone (red). I wont go into the details of the each zone. You can find them described on pp. 41-60 of their book. But, I will lay out the emergent zone….for it is here where “leadership as cultivation” is most prevalent and most applicable to building spiritual movements everywhere. In other words, we need to “opt for the green zone.”

The two activities of the emergent or green zone are pioneering and experimenting.

Pioneering refers to the creative ways we incarnate and engage the communities and neighborhoods (campuses, military locations, etc.) as God’s missionary people. It is emergent in the sense that clusters of people find innovative ways to become missional. In other words, we don’t wait for or pursue some top-down, pre-planned strategy. Instead, we are innovative and adaptive like as jazz ensemble reacting to one another and to the environment. Our collective intelligence or “joint imagination” has its greatest play in such a pioneering environment.

Leaders who would pioneer “churches or movements” must cultivate the type of environment within which this “collective missional imagination” can emerge. In other words, they cultivate an environment in which missional people creatively and freely engage together with their communities and one another, trusting that the Spirit will work.

Experimenting refers to the ability we have of adapting through experimentation to the growing need to give form and order to what is emerging. In other words, leaders begin to help develop structures, habits, and practices which allow the movement (or emerging church) to regularize its engagements with its context. The tension here is retaining the free missional engagement of an active emergent culture which interacts dynamically and naturally with its environment while beginning to embed habits and practices internally. Failure to manage this tension moves the “movement” out of the green zone.

Next Post: The Characteristics of Green (Ermergent) Zone Leadership