Foretaste: Leadership for the Missional Church

By Paul M. Dietterich

We have too often missed the point that it is the community of faith, the church, that is called to be a sign, instrument, and in particular a foretaste of the reign of God. So what would an appetizer of God's coming reign look like anyway? The focus of this book is not only on what a church does but how it goes about doing what it does. The common life and shared ministry of the church are a powerful witness to God's loving and reconciling activity. A world wracked with fear, incivility, win-lose competition, and anger calls for churches that manifest the fruit of the Holy Spirit. This book dives into the key leadership behaviors that cultivate transformed and transforming faith communities--skills that every church leader and leadership team need to know, learn, and practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Nov 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532665530

Paul M. Dietterich

Paul Dietterich, ThD in Practical Theology, is Executive Director Emeritus of the Center for Parish Development. As a pastor-consultant-researcher-teacher-writer, he has brought the theological and social science fields together in critical dialogue in service to the church.

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Foretaste

Leadership for the Missional Church

Paul M. Dietterich

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FORETASTE

Leadership for the Missional Church

Copyright © 2019 The Center for Parish Development. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-6551-6

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-6552-3

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-6553-0

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Dietterich, Paul M.

Title: Foretaste : leadership for the missional church / Paul M. Dietterich.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-6551-6 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-6552-3 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-6553-0 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Church. | Mission of the church. | Church leadership.

Classification: BV600.2 .D51 2019 (print) | BV600.2 .D51 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. January 7, 2020

All scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Copyright © The Center for Parish Development, 2019. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Introduction

Part I: The Climate Challenge and Its Solution

Chapter 1: The Motivating Power of Climate

Chapter 2: Climate Is a Missional Issue

Chapter 3: Management Systems and the Climate Each Creates

Chapter 4: A Leader with . . .

Part II: Six Leader Behaviors that Build a Missional Climate

Chapter 5: Supporting Persons’ Dignity and Giftedness

Chapter 6: Practice Receptivity

Chapter 7: Emphasize Performance

Chapter 8: Build Missional Leadership Teams

Chapter 9: Facilitate Work

Chapter 10: Practice Group Decision-Making

Part III: Implications for the Missional Church

Chapter 11: Tasting the Kingdom

Bibliography

Remembering colleagues and great friends

Charles Ellzey

Jan Hendriks

Piet van Hooijdonk

Foreword

Stephen Bevans, SVD

This is a book that is the work of a lifetime. For some five decades, Paul Dietterich has been engaged in helping Christian communities become what Lesslie Newbigin has described as communities that are signs, foretastes, and instruments of the Kingdom or Reign of God.¹ To this task he has brought his considerable skills as theologian and leadership consultant, in partnership with his wife Inagrace (a considerable theologian in her own right) and the staff of the Center for Parish Development, Dale Ziemer and Ray Schulte. This book is a distillation of those many years of practice, reflection, and collaboration.

On the one hand, Foretaste is a very practical book. Paul clearly and helpfully lays out the problems of congregational leadership and even more clearly and helpfully lays out their solution. Then he elaborates the chief characteristics of a good congregational leader and connects them all to the life of the missional church. On the other hand, however—and perhaps more between the lines—Foretaste is a deeply theological book. Paul sketches out not only a rich theology of ministerial leadership, but one that is rooted in a rich ecclesiology as well. Leadership leads the church to be what it is called to be: what Stanley Hauerwas and Wil Willimon have described as a colony of the Kingdom, what Gregory Boyle has named a space where women and men can experience the radical kinship that Jesus proclaims and embodies, or what Lesslie Newbigin has famously called a hermeneutic of the gospel.²

Paul does not mention the Trinity in this book, but I think its theological depth can be best recognized if it is read it through a Trinitarian lens. The church, as Cyprian of Carthage wrote centuries ago, is a people made one in the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.³ Leadership in the church as well participates in the Trinity’s collaborative missional presence and activity. That presence and activity in mission begins at creation, and from the first nanosecond the Trinitarian God has been leading creation to its completion. From the very beginning, God’s Spirit has been active in the formation of the gases, the atoms, the molecules, the galaxies and planets, the formation of our earth, and the development of life—including human life—on it. But Trinitarian leadership has always been collaborative and freedom-respecting. In the beautiful words of Elizabeth Johnson, God leads creation not as a monarch but as a lover.⁴

In God’s wisdom Israel was chosen as a special collaborator in the work of creation, in whom all nations would find a blessing (Gen 12:3). Israel was not always a faithful partner, but God’s leadership was steady and strong and merciful. When, in the fullness of time (Gal 4:4) God’s gentle leadership took flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, anointed by the Spirit at his baptism, and led by the Spirit in his ministry. His leadership was not to lord it over people, but to give his life in service, healing, and inclusion—a style of leadership that cost him his life. But God vindicated his leadership style by raising Jesus from the dead, and at Pentecost the same Spirit that led Jesus in his ministry was lavished upon his disciples to continue his work of bringing all of creation to flourishing and fulfillment. The church serves the world with the Spirit of Jesus, doing mission in Christ’s way.⁵ And those who lead the church can only lead effectively if they embody that way in their own ministry. Paul’s six leader behaviors elaborated in Part II of his book are really Trinitarian behaviors.

This is why, further, Paul is not just offering here a how to manual of leadership. In clear, practical language—in some ways the language of good management—Paul is offering a spirituality of leadership as well. As Lee Bohman and Terrence express it, the heart of leadership lies in the hearts of leaders.⁶ More than a skill, leadership that forms a community that is a foretaste of the Kingdom is an attitude, a habitus, the result of conversion to Christ’s vision. Becoming such a leader is a lifetime task, one that demands perseverance, courage, resilience, and humility.

In these pages Paul Dietterich, ultimately, invites his readers to embark on a spiritual journey, a journey of self-discovery, a journey of self-giving. Readers can be assured that Paul has made the journey himself, and so is a trustworthy guide.

1. Newbigin, On Being the Church for the World, in Weston, ed., Lesslie Newbigin,

138–40

.

2. Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens; Boyle, Barking to the Choir; Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society,

222–33

.

3. Vatican II, Lumen Gentium

4

, quoting Cyprian, De Oratione Dominica,

23

.

4. Johnson, Ask the Beasts, 159.

5

.

Newbigin, Mission in Christ’s Way.

6. Lee G. Bohman and Terrence E. Deal, Leading with the Soul: An Uncommon Journey of Spirit (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,

1995

),

6

.

Introduction

This book is an outgrowth of five decades of research and development by the staff of the Center for Parish Development. The Center is an autonomous, ecumenical research and development agency serving Protestant and Roman Catholic church bodies. The Center was founded in 1968 by Evangelical Theological Seminary and Garrett Theological Seminary to help worshiping congregations become more faithful and fruitful missional outposts in a time of major and profound change. Initial funding came from the former Evangelical United Brethren Mission Board, the Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church, and seven conferences of the United Methodist North Central Jurisdiction. Beginning in 1971, as co-directors of the Center for Parish Development, the late Charles Ellzey and I launched the Center’s own learning process. We were later joined by talented staff members who have contributed creatively to the Center’s mission.

Needed: A Conceptual Model of a Developing Parish

In order to achieve the Center’s mission we had much to learn. We would need to learn what we meant by parish and development, what might be the posture of a "developing parish, what such a parish believes, how its beliefs shape its ministry and mission, what takes place within it, how it structures itself to achieve its mission, what vision guides it, how it governs itself, makes decisions, shares power, develops and deploys leaders. If we were to help churches develop, we would need a researchable diagnostic model of a developing" church. Thus in the early 1970s we began a model-building process. That process evolved over two decades, resulting in a series of analytical models, each building upon its predecessors, and culminating in a still evolving diagnostic systems model of a missional church.

The construction and testing of our evolving diagnostic systems model proved to be quite a challenge. The model-building process involved identifying and integrating resources emerging from the field of organization development (OD), systems thinking, and the theological fields of missiology and ecclesiology. The most recent version of a Systems Model of the Missional Church⁷ identifies six major interrelated and interdependent areas and twenty-three sub-areas for the study of congregational behavior. Each area and sub-area is filled with potential research possibilities. The research on congregational climate shared in this book is one of those sub-areas.

In 1971, when we initiated our studies, the dislocation of North American churches was well underway. America was fast becoming a mission field. The mainline (and other) churches were being relocated from their former dominant role in the center of North American culture to the margins. Declining and aging membership, shrinking financial support, biblical illiteracy, the loss of young people, irrelevance of traditional forms of worship, and confusion about the calling and mission of the church, were among the symptoms of the dislocation of the church. We recognized that a major problem facing North American churches is their tendency to reorganize defensively and reactively. They tend to be directed toward preserving and extending the life of their system in the face of change rather than taking the form of a directed self-transformation in pursuit of a higher order vision and goals.

Needed: A Missional Ecclesiology

In this time of crisis, the tendency in North America was to engage in problem solving to find programmatic and methodological solutions, and many were being proposed. We believed that the challenges facing North American churches would not be addressed at the level of methodology. They are far more deeply rooted than that. They are spiritual and theological. They have to do with the calling and sending of the church. A missional ecclesiology for our time would be required.

To bring theological resources into the service of the church, we turned first to theologians and Scripture scholars on the faculties of Evangelical and Garrett Theological Seminaries. They helped us launch our theological work. In 1983 we enlisted the Rev. Inagrace T. Dietterich, PhD, a systematic theologian, to serve full-time as the Center’s director of theological research. She began the arduous task of developing a missional ecclesiology to undergird the Center’s work, while at the same time creating a flow of biblical and theological resources to help congregations engage meaningfully in ecclesiological and missiological exploration.⁸

A developing church would need to discern its missional calling afresh. This would require the strategic work of discerning a new vision and goals to guide it through its reorientation from a dominant role in the center to a marginal role on the boundaries of North American culture. Discerning a new vision, goals, core beliefs and values, however, is a significant theological journey. The Center’s new ecclesiological and missional resources were welcomed by the Center’s research partners.

Needed: Intervention and Change Processes

Understanding missional church transformation as a learning process also meant that the Center would need to learn how to introduce the requirements for missional church organizations into actual living in ways that would not result in their rejection, distortion either into ritual, or into rigid, dehumanizing, social engineering exercises. We would need to learn how to help churches change toward a missional church orientation. We needed to learn what congregations and their members must do in order to function faithfully and fruitfully as a missional church, and how they can adopt new ways of thinking, perceiving, and acting.

Our third research process therefore involved learning how to consult with churches to help them develop into more faithful and fruitful mission outposts. We approached the consultation process as a collaborative learning process. Pastors, congregational leadership teams, and Center consultants would all learn together as the process unfolded. For help in mastering consulting processes and skills, we drew on the emerging field of organization development (OD), a sub-discipline within the social sciences. OD is a response to change, a complex educational strategy intended to change the beliefs, attitudes, values, practices, and structures of organizations so that they can better adapt to new technologies, cultural changes, and the dizzying rate of change itself. OD involves a planned and systematic attempt to change patterns of organizational behavior. The goals of OD include more effective organizational functioning and the improvement of the quality of life experienced by persons within the organization. Basic characteristics of OD include the application of behavioral science knowledge in a collaborative and participative process, usually by a consultant, in response to some problem or felt need within the organization.

In an OD process, a consultant usually engages with a client organization in a diagnostic process. This is a collaborative process in which the consultant and client together gather and analyze information about the client system and how it works. This is followed by some form of intervention activity, which involves entering into the ongoing behavior of the organization for the purpose of bringing about change. Some of this change can be directed at changing the behavior of key leaders and leadership teams, modifying patterns of interaction, redesigning formal structures, affecting informal structures, changing technical systems, and—most of all—improving the climate of the organization.

To bring organization development resources into a critical conversation with the church, in 1973 we turned for help to the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan and to Rensis Likert Associates. The organizational research conducted by Rensis and Jane Gibson Likert and their colleagues at ISR represented the kind of commitment and intellectual rigor, as well as tested statistical research methods, to assist us in this project. Together we developed the initial Profile of a Church questionnaires and their accompanying survey-guided development process. The questionnaires are based on the organizational profiles initially created and standardized by Rensis Likert and his colleagues. Likert’s initial research was conducted in the 1960s and 1970s. Our staff, over the ensuing fifty years, has continued to develop these instruments and processes in order to assure their relevance. Since 1973 we have:

• continuously tested and adapted these instruments, drawing upon current and continuing organizational climate research, and redefined the principles on which they are based;

• developed Bible studies to accompany their use and to help pastors and other church leaders base their leadership practices in Scripture and tradition;

• developed theological resources to help pastors and other church leaders discover how their leadership practices enable them and their congregations to participate more faithfully in God’s mission;

• created a church-focused survey-guided development process with accompanying resources that make use of the results of the survey instruments to guide the development of pastors and other church leaders and leadership teams for their ministry and mission;

• created additional leadership development processes, training manuals, and other resources for use by congregations and other church-related bodies.

The Center’s research continues to be current and is increasingly viable and helpful. Since 1974 the Center for Parish Development has used these questionnaires to examine a wide range of church organizations in the United States and Canada. These church bodies became the Center’s research partners: local worshiping congregations, regional denominational organizations (conferences, dioceses, associations), faculties and staffs of theological education institutions, and national church agencies, both Protestant and Roman Catholic. We had three main purposes: (1) to determine whether and to what extent a relationship exists between the organizational climate of a church body and a missional understanding of the church’s calling and sending; (2) to clarify the nature of and reasons for such a relationship; (3) to discover whether and how that relationship can be developed to enhance a church’s witness as a Christian missional community.

Many factors influence the witness of a church body. Our concern was with the potential impact of organizational climate. We asked:

1. What kind of organizational climate most closely demonstrates a missional orientation?

2. What is the nature of and the reasons for the organizational climate found in church organizations?

3. How can a church organization change its climate to enhance its witness as a missional community?

4. What specific behaviors by pastors and other church leaders facilitate the cultivation of a missional community?

In these particular studies we did not ask questions about church numerical growth, economic strength, biblical literacy, style of worship, church programming, or other interesting and compelling concerns. Our focus was on the organizational climate of church organizations as a significant part of the church’s witness.

We recognized that in conducting organizational studies of church bodies and intervening in their life, we were engaging in a practical theology conversation, e.g., bringing the theological disciplines, the organizational disciplines, and the practice of ministry into interaction with each other. We recognized that this process would need to be done critically. We believed, further, that the organizational disciplines had developed knowledge that can be useful to theologians and pastors and to the church’s calling and sending, that the theological disciplines are essential to shaping church life and work and that they have much to share with and often to challenge the organizational disciplines, and that pastors and other church practitioners have experience and knowledge that can inform both the theological and the organizational fields.

The central thesis of this book is that the organizational climate of a congregation expresses its understanding of its missional witness; that a congregation’s climate can be changed in ways that incarnate the gospel, thereby enabling the congregation to participate more faithfully and fruitfully in the mission of God, the missio Dei. A primary value of the Center’s research is that it not only assumes an orientation and values in harmony with a missional church ecclesiology but it also reveals the ways God works in the world.

All the above research processes took place simultaneously and repeatedly. Each of the Center’s consulting projects was designed to be unique and provide new learnings. These new learnings were incorporated in subsequent consultations and new resources, which, in turn, provided more new learnings, etc. The Center’s Systems Model of the Missional Church developed and changed many times as the Center’s experience broadened. A missional ecclesiology matured and the process of its development was enhanced through relationships with the Netherlands Practical Theology Consortium and the North American Gospel and Our Culture Network. Inagrace Dietterich became one of the authors of premier resources for a missional ecclesiology.⁹ Dale Ziemer and Raymond Schulte, with pastoral experience and advanced degrees in OD and theology (and now serving as managing directors of the Center), were authors of other books in the series¹⁰ and numerous papers and instructional manuals. They also served as frontline teachers, consultants, and researchers to help pastors and congregations engage in the missiological conversation. The Center staff was becoming more theologically, missionally, and ecclesiologically grounded as well as technically skilled.

The title of this book, Foretaste: Leadership for the Missional Church, is to say that part of a church’s missional calling is to demonstrate in its common life and witness an advance (if transitory) experience of life inside the reign of God—a foretaste of the kingdom. The process of learning to be a faithful and fruitful sign, foretaste, and instrument of the reign of God is a way of participating in Christ. The learning process is missional because such a congregation demonstrates an alternative way to be a society, freed from bondage to Christendom, and simply by existing as a missional community, challenges the dominant culture—a new society in the midst of the old.

This Book

This book is intended to help church leaders identify and learn to practice six interrelated and interdependent behaviors that contribute to forming a missional church climate. In the chapters that follow, these themes are explained and the six leadership practices are described in detail. The book is in three parts.

Part I defines what we mean by organizational climate in the church and how a church’s organizational climate is related to a missional ecclesiology. A theory of missional church organizations is presented.

Part II is intentionally practical. Here the reader will be introduced to the six behaviors growing out of the Center’s research. These six behaviors, when practiced