Missional Transformation

Do you remember those pictures that used to be the thing in the mall? You would look at them for a long time, kind of cross-eyed and suddenly a whole new image would emerge. All at once, the picture would just come bursting off of the page. I assume that the picture was not transubstantiated, that the details in the picture remained the same. But with a different focus you couldn't make out the old picture any more, only the new one.

Missional transformation bears something of that same dynamic. Missional transformation is not primarily a program or new set of initiatives in congregational life. It's the development of a new imagination so that everything is part of a surprising new picture.

Put another way, missional transformation is deep, cultural change. When we talk about a congregation as a culture, we are discussing issues of identity. And when we talk about issues of cultural identity, we are talking about narratives--the stories that authorize our practices.

This perspective on change requires more than a pulpit or a classroom. You can't simply teach yourself into this kind of change. Learning to tell a new story requires new experiences, reflection, and articulation.

In my experience, congregations expect very little in terms of what their members experience. Primarily, we expect them to experience Sunday morning worship. Other experiences are options, like leather seats on a car. It's nice if you practice spiritual disciplines, participate in the world with the poor, or share your faith with others, but its really kind of up to you.

We ask members even less intentionally to reflect or articulate what they think God is up to in the midst of their experiences. This is not only true at a personal level, but congregations do surprising little corporate reflection, or discernment, concerning what God is up to in their midst.

One final point for this post. Transformation tends to come in relation to adaptive challenges, those pesky anomalies we can't quite solve, those instances or chronic problems in congregational life that keep us off balance. These are the things we tend to avoid as church leaders. But they are often the kinds of challenges that force us to focus our eyes differently and see every detail in new perspective.

Thomas Kuhn maintains that the big shifts in scientific paradigms did not come as the logical result of a series of experiments. Rather, they came by imagining a new structure altogether based on a problem for which the old structure could not account. The same kind of thing is often true for churches who are seeking change. It often comes, not as a result of a carefully mapped out strategy complete with mission and vision statements, but around sometimes surprising and perplexing events that call for a new account of things.

I was a minister for a congregation in Oregon for eleven years. The most transformative events in my eleven years were three deaths that occurred in the congregation. None of those would have made it into a strategic plan for congregational change. They were transformative because of how death and grief had been dealt with (in this case not dealt with) in the congregation's recent history. They afforded us the opportunity for reflection and articulation, and in so doing gave us capacity to authorize a new narrative.