charlieDEAN’S Blog

Last week, I talked about being a “vision collector.”  And before I throw you this quotation about that idea, make sure you read the comments…Brandon’s is great with additional catagories of “vision filter” and “vision reminder.”

Anyway, I’m almost finished with Tim Keel’s book Intuitive Leadership, and in chapter seven, “Being Here, There and Everywhere,” he spends considerable time interacting with Richard Florida’s book, The Rise of the Creative Class (which is now on my “to read” list, for sure).  He’s talking about theories of emergence and emergent thinking and talks about how ideas and creativity isn’t a one-way street — that they should come through a dynamic flow & interaction between “top-down thinking,” and “bottom-up” thinking.  Keel quotes Alan Roxburgh in his book, The Sky is Falling!?!:

“…the role of leaders is to cultivate environments that release the missional imagination of the people of God.   Leadership as cultivation is about creating environments within which God’s people shape their own missional life.  This accounting of leadership takes seriously the biblical understanding of the people of God as the place where God’s Spirit is most specifically at work.  It is in and through God’s people that God’s future emerges.”

Here’s where the rubber hits the road.  For me, as I lead our leadership team at Imago Dei, some of the questions that I think we have to come back to over and over again, if we’re are going to create an emergent environment, are these:

• What is God doing in our community?
• Where do we see new, creative ways of thinking/doing things in our church?
• What is capturing the attention of the prophets, artists, musicians and people who are “in the trenches”?
• How do our young members of the community think?  (I’m convinced that God often stirs the hearts of young adults first.)