The purpose of this project is to explore self-leadership issues and adaptive challenges the executive director of Christian Reformed Home Missions (CRHM) must address to provide helpful and transformative leadership within the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA). An action-learning project is constructed from a missional-change perspective to test, assess, discern, and identify critical issues of executive leadership in leading a denominational mission agency into a journey of missional transformation. It is framed around a question: What are the critical skills, capacities, and habits required for an executive leader to lead an agency from providing denominational programming to enabling missional engagement with churches in their local contexts?
Part One provides the leadership context by naming ministry challenges. The Missional Network Exec Leader 360 Survey tool is used to establish a baseline reflection on the executive director’s current leadership and learning. Part Two engages theological reflection by discussing theological themes and theoretical frameworks pertinent in developing missional imagination and organizational culture change. Part Three reports on the design, development, and key learning of a thirteen-month action-learning project. It concludes by proposing an action plan addressing the identified challenges in the areas of cultivating missional imagination, managing adaptive and technical work, forming plurality of leadership within CRHM, and leading “up and across” in the CRCNA.
Six areas of key learning points are significant discoveries that may assist those seeking to initiate and lead missional change processes in church systems: Managing change; Honoring the past and moving beyond the past; Communicating well; Continuing balcony reflections for awareness and understanding; Addressing adaptive and technical challenges; and Cultivating spiritual practices. Possible topics for further research that come out of this project are establishing mission order, forming leadership community as communitas, and exploring the possibility of becoming Abbot and Abbesses.
Content Reader: Alan J. Roxburgh, DMi
