Alan Roxburgh, The Sky is Falling: Leaders Lost in Transition, A Proposal for Leadership Communities to Take New Risks for the Reign of God. Allelon Publishing, 2006.
Referenced in: Missional Strategies by Alan Roxburgh
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
This was the first of a series of books by Alan Roxburgh on the missional conversation, It is an inspiring and challenging series of essays pointing church leaders to see things through missional eyes. It functions well as a manifesto on the missional ethos. Most of the information is repeated or expanded in Roxburgh’s other works. See the Ministry Resource Guide on Missional Strategies by Roxburgh to understand the contribution of each volume.
Roxburgh describes the church in postmodernity as consisting of two reactionary tribes who suffer from “change-induced stress.” First is the Liminals who realize the need for and want to change but do not know what to do. Second is the Emergents who have given up on any existing form of the church and react against it, sometimes without necessary guidance. Both, however, are responding to the belief that “the sky is [indeed] falling,” i.e. we are living in a time where continuous, predictable, incremental, minor changes to established churches will not do. Instead, we undergo discontinuous change where the church encounters cultural transitions on every front simultaneously. Roxburgh says churches must make deep changes, not just tweaks of the established church, but complete overhauls of congregational cultures. He discusses the five phases of this cultural change, and how each helps churches live into the biblical narrative. On a profound level, it requires communitas, a kind of open, collectively owned space where people of faith “discover one another on a very different level of identity and role than from the previous period.” (109) He also discusses the kind of transitional leadership it takes to facilitate this kind of missional community.
From the Publisher
This is more than a book, it is a manifesto, a proposal for a new way of imagining a common life together as the pilgrim people of God seeking to fulfill God s purposes for the world in our time. If we need new kinds of churches, we cannot develop them with old kinds of leaders. We ourselves need to become those new kinds of leaders, even as we all look to the next generations to help them be formed in new apprenticeships in the kinds of skills this book describes. Alan Roxburgh s most radical and powerful insight: having new kinds of churches with new kinds of leaders is not the point. In the end, even though we in the church talk and talk (and write and write) about church, church, church, church … it s not about the church. The church exists for something bigger than itself. Understanding that one thing alone will be worth your expense, time, and effort in turning this page and reading on with an open mind and an open heart.
About the Author
Alan Roxburgh has over twenty-seven years of experience in church leadership and seminary faculty. He was responsible for teaching in the areas of leadership development and domestic missiology. He serves as Vice President for Allelon Canada and, as such, serves as the Director of the Allelon Missional Leadership Network (AMLN), a network of relationships and resources that create a movement of missional formation among leaders, local churches and training schools throughout North America, Europe, and Australia.
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