Leadership in the Green Zone

Roxburgh and Romanuk offer the following characteristics of leadership in the Green or Emergent Zone. They argue that such qualities are required for any missional or apostolic effort — whether planting churches or building spiritual movements.

Leaders in the Green Zone:

1. Are comfortable with ambiguity and are able to manage it. They can live with “loose coalitions drawn by the pursuit of an elusive dream” and they don’t need the quick closure of a solution or a large thought-thru plan.

2. Focus a sense of shared conviction. They say over and over: “We’re together for something important; it has taken hold of us; we must pursue it.” By focusing this sense of shared conviction, they allow the vision to form in the imagination. The refinement of that vision is discovered as they and other merge “mission and ministry.” Leaders in the Green Zone themselves (while helping others) “enter, indwell, engage and listen” to the people of the local community.

3. Cultivate a high level of social interaction among the missional community. Communication is face-to-face; they confront challenges that can’t wait fro a scheduled committee meeting. Missional communities don’t know what the next steps involve, so they need to be with each other to “think out loud and test new ideas.”

4. Work well in informal organizational life–especially at the beginning or pioneering stage. There are no handbooks or sets of rules, not resolved missional or visional statements. Although the clear sense and shared conviction of being God’s people in a particular context is present, the shape of it all can’t be known at the outset. Leaders in the Green Zone can are ok with that. They focus on cultural rather than organization formation of the community.

5. Create an environment where failure is permitted because they know it will happen often. Leaders in the Green Zone cultivate a environment that “values and permits risk.” Challenges are not crises or exceptions to be managed, but opportunities to be embraced.

6. Keep the missional community free of hierarchy and top–down or expert authority.

7. See strategy as emergent, not linear. Leaders of the Green Zone don’t “move according to a predetermined plan but learn to cultivate engagement and experiments that release the missional imagination of the people.”