Lord Glasman is closely associated with Blue Labour and the attempt to help the Labour Party discover its Christian roots. He recently helped us launch the Journal of Missional Practice at the House of the Lords. Martin Robinson caught up with Lord Glasman recently at the House of Lords and capture this brief conversation.
The headlines across the media last week were reporting the common anxieties again. This time it's tiny little Cyprus. Will this little island in the Mediterranean be the tipping point for Europe? Will their refusal to go along with austerity measures precipitate the final unraveling of the Euro? How to address the crisis that is European Union (EU)?
Last year in Toronto one of the Munk Debates was held around the issue: Be it resolved that the European experiment has failed. These debates are funded by the Munk brothers and are designed to address critical issues of global importance. Peter Munk introduced this debate about Europe and its future with these words: What lies at the core of the EU breakdown, and what we are witnessing, is the historic recalibration of the role of the modern state in real time. That statement, made in 2012 is even more the case in the spring of 2013.
The crisis of Europe has to do with the very nature of something we have taken for granted for about four hundred years - the modern state. As a result of this crisis the citizens of Europe are struggling to reimagine what role nation states and their governments can and should have in their lives. This is a basic question that goes to the core of identity, society and culture in the modern period. It is a fundamental question of how states (if they should exist as they are in the first place) ought to function and how they should be structured. Beneath these questions lie much deeper ones about the purpose, goals, and values of a state. A similar wrestling is occurring in in North America.
If the North American church is to become a missionary movement in our culture, it will need a leadership that is not primarily shaped by executive, administrative and expert roles. These leaders will need to become more like Abbot and Abbesses; men and women whose vocation is cultivating local movements of God’s people. This is about a fundamental shift in imagination. Up to now the dominant focus of national and regional leaders has been upon the established roles that think, primarily, of how the local fits into national/regional agendas and priorities. The whole agenda of these leaders has to be turned on its head. The transformations required to achieve this are immense, but without this change the viability of the church as a missional community is questionable. A major adaptive response to leadership is required.
We often believe we know where we are going and that we can develop plans that will securely get us to a desired place. This is especially true of leaders. Given the huge cultural shifts we are in the midst of, this kind of predictability in solving massive leadership challenges and deep transformation no longer exists.
Missional coaches accompany people on a journey of transformation. This journey is secure as God is out ahead of us not because of our great skill set, plan, program or new “magic bullet”. Transformation inherently includes deconstruction. Deconstruction is necessary before reconstruction is possible.
The Introductory Issue of our Journal of Missional Practice is now available with articles by Juan Martinez, Martin Robinson & Alan Roxburgh.
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