I’m continuing to devour the book by Margaret J Wheatley called, Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time

I think most of us will agree with this quote…

As leaders, we have no choice but to figure out how to invite in everybody who is going to be affected by change. Those that we fail to invite into the creation process will surely and always show up as resistors and saboteurs. But I haven’t become insistent on participation just to avoid resistance or to get people to support my efforts. It’s because no one person is smart enough to design anything for the whole system. No one of us these days can know what will work inside the dense networks we call organizations. We can’t see what’s meaningful to people or even understand how they get their work done. We have no option but to invite them into the design process.

The challenge is living this out, is it not?

How does this happen?

What are the processes and practices that give leaders opportunity to invite people into the process?

Perhaps a good question is, what posture do leaders currently take that make this harder than it needs to be?

Edwin Friedman spoke the following at the Baccalaureate address to Albert Einstein High School in 1964:

“The universal ingredient and force which permeates all of life – namely change – is changing for the faster, and this means that it will become more and more necessary for each of us to be more resilient and flexible, more spontaneous in dealing with the new and unforeseen, and it will become less and less easy to find security and stability by just adopting the traditional customs and ideas and attitudes of the past.” (From the book: What Are You Going to Do With Your Life?)

Sounds applicable to the church eh?

“The Bible renders to us the story of God’s mission through God’s people in their engagement with God’s world for the sake of the whole of God’s creation…”

The Mission of God
Christopher Wright

“We can begin [to reorganize our lives around the Kingdom of God] by surrounding ourselves with other people who are asking the same questions – who are suspicious of the emptiness of consumption and who dare to risk just a little bit more and dare to love just a little bit deeper.”

- Shane Claiborne as quoted by Tom Sine in The New Conspirators

“We believe that we are the church, that is, we are a community of God’s people called and set apart for witness to the good news of Jesus Christ. We are blessed to be a blessing. As the Father has sent Christ, so Christ sends us. Jesus Christ has defined us as his witnesses where we are. We believe therefore that the Holy Spirit not only calls us but also enables and gifts us for that mission. Our task is to determine the particular focus and direction of our mission. We are to identify the charisms given by the Spirit for mission. We have the responsibility and the capacity, through the Holy Spirit, to shape ourselves for faithful witness. Our purpose defines our organizational structures – which means that our mission challenges us to re-form our structures so that we can be faithful in our witness.”

Darrell Guder in Missional Church

“Poor people die not only because of the world’s indifference to their poverty, but also because of ineffective efforts by those who do care…”

William Easterly, in the book The White Man’s Burden

“The stickler is that Christianity doesn’t make a very good religion in this sense. Christianity is not a faith of conservation and preservation. It is a faith of creation, participation, movement, and change. For conservation to happen, something needs to be stopped. Something needs to be limited. Something needs to be ignored. And too often that ‘something’ is the unstoppable, unlimited, impossible – to -ignore activity of God at work in the world.”

Doug Pagitt (From the first chapter in his new book. Read the first chapter here)

“So many people think preaching the Resurrection means doing a little bit of apologetics in the pulpit to prove it really is true. Others simply say, “Jesus is raised, therefore there is a life after death.” This isn’t the point! Those types of sermons may be necessary, but there’s more to it than that. To preach the Resurrection is to announce the fact that the world is a different place, and that we have to live in that “different-ness.” The Resurrection is not just God doing a wacky miracle at one time. We have to preach it in a way that says this was the turning point in world history.”

NT Wright (thanks Bob for the link)

“It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians.”

Dietrich Bonhoffer in Life Together

“The community that confesses that Jesus is Lord has been, from the very beginning, a movement launched into the public life of mankind. The Greco-Roman world in which the New Testament was written was full of societies offering to those who wished to join a way of personal salvation through religious teaching and practice. There were several commonly used Greek words for such societies. At no time did the church use any of these names for itself. It was not, and could not be, a society offering personal salvation for those who cared to avail themselves of it teaching and practice. It was from the beginning a movement claiming the allegiance of all peoples, and it used for itself with almost totally consistency the name ecclesia – the assembly of all citizens called to deal with the public affairs of the city…the church could have escaped persecution by the Roman Empire if it had been content to be treated as a “cultus privatus” – one of the many forms of personal religion. But it was not. Its affirmation that “Jesus is Lord” implied a public, universal claim that was bound to eventually clash with the cultus publicus of the empire…”

Lesslie Newbigin in The Open Secret