Interview with Alex McManus, Author of Makers of Fire: The Spirituality of Leading from the Future

I've known Alex McManus since January 2005. We became friends after I heard him speak at a Origins Conference in Orlando FL. Everytime that we've talked Alex has stretched my thinking and inspired my missional imagination. I'm grateful for the opportunity to offer my friends and readers an interview with Alex regarding his recent book Makers of Fire: The Spirituality of Leading from the Future.

What is the inspiration for the title, Makers of Fire?

Over the course of my life, I've had several enduring interests. The first of these is an interest in the future. As a young boy of five or six years old, I remember speaking with my grandfather about Thomas Malthus' predictions that the world would have a global water crisis. He also once said to me that he wanted to live until the year 2000 because there would be dancing in the streets. Ever since then, I’ve enjoyed thinking about the things to come.

A second enduring interest is reading history, especially deep history. When it comes to our species, I’ve enjoyed readings in paleoanthropology and thinking about what life must have been like for the first humans. Brian, have you ever tried to start a fire sans the aid of modern technologies like matches and such?  Can you imagine our existence in the world before we domesticated fire? As I say in the book, In the beginning, the world was dark.

Then came the change.

Somewhere in the prehistorical mist of our ancient past, the first humans unlocked the mystery of fire. What a creative leap it must have been to first imagine making fire. The power of the human imagination coupled with urgent need pushed the limits of human capacity. Rather than waiting for lightning to start a fire, some ancient person stood in lightning's place and provided the heat of ignition. They harnessed that which was once wild and domesticated it. And they made the world better for themselves and for others. This was our breakthrough technology. Everything we enjoy today, was built on this discovery. To me this becomes a symbol, a representation, of human ingenuity, creativity, and innovation. I chose the image of making fire for the book in hopes of burning into our minds the fact that the human imagination is our infinite resource.

So, by Makers of Fire, I mean the entire human enterprise of seeing a need and filling it, the insatiable hunger of human curiosity, the human drive to engage the world and rule it. The human imagination is the well from which we will make the world better for ourselves and for others. So, by Makers of Fire, I hope to point to the human capacity to shape the world for generations to come.

Makers of Fire is also primal. When I speak of making fire, I imagine bleeding fingers and broken fingernails, sweat dripping from the brow, a simple stick of wood spinning into a nest of dry material, a flow of nurturing oxygen, a sense of urgent need. Making Fire is about dreaming --an act of the imagination -- and doing --the primal act of trying and trying again. Makers of Fire is a calling to all of us. How can each of us act, individually and together, to make the world better for others?

Who is the ideal reader of Makers of Fire? I wrote makers of fire as a companion text for the IMN’s certificate course in Strategic and Ideational Leadership. The kinds of people who take this certificate course are future-oriented thinkers and activists. They tend to think differently. They tend to be as engaged with the world outside the church as they are with the world inside the church.

What is the key idea in the book? The book is a calling to embrace fully the reality that we are each and all creators of the future. The first section of the book touches on some of the changes we are experiencing in our present day world. The second section touches on how these changes are creating a hunger for meaning. The third section touches on how we are beginning to explore anew what it means to be a people on a mission to create the future.

How will Makers of Fire help 21st-century leaders? I think the book offers some useful devices to help 21st-century leaders organize their thinking. For example, I describe the task of leadership as comprising of three elements that correspond to the triangle of combustion. In order to make fire, you need three things; fuel, oxygen, and the heat of ignition. In order to Make Fire and “lead from the future”, a leader must be able to do three things: fearlessly describe the present, discern the search for meaning in the moment, and discover pathways forward. Another tool I touch on is the plausibility cone, which describes how the futures are created. The feedback I get, when I share this tool in our certificate course, is that it really helps leaders understand how their work and efforts help shape the future.

Why is it important for Christ-following leaders to be interested in the ideas of futurists? In a professional sense, not everyone works in the strategic foresight industry. But in the personal sense, every human being is a futurist. The emergence of the multi-chambered brain which gave rise to the human imagination. Our imagination gave humans a capacity to imagine worlds that could be. In that sense, every man, woman, and child thinks about the future. In the same way, that we humans are taught to think historically, we can be taught to think “futuristically”.

Related specifically to the Christ following faith, the scriptures themselves seem to be, in my reading, future-oriented. Just to be clear, when I speak about the future I don't mean the eschatological future, I don't mean the end of all things. When I think about the future I'm talking about futurity: that which may  happen among us and become history. In that sense thinking about the future is not about predicting the future but about understanding our place and role in the present.

So even though the church is a conserving institution, and even though we dedicate ourselves to reading ancient texts and reciting ancient creeds and participating in ancient practices, something is missing if our minds and hearts are not also oriented towards the future.

Where can people find a copy of my book? You can find Makers of Fire: The Spirituality of Leading from the Future on Amazon. And your readers can connect with me online through my website: theimn.com. They can find a link to the certificate courses we offer and a link for our newsletter, dispatches from the future of faith.

Thank you Alex. 

Video: Life that Demands Explanation: The Power of Focus (6 minutes)

From Maintenance to Missional: Transitioning Established Churches into Kingdom Outposts

 Pastors often ask me, “I am not planting a new church. God has called me to serve in an established congregation. How can I lead my church to transition from a maintenance mindset to a missional culture?”

I believe that this is the key question for existing communities of faith in the Western world. Every day in the Western world there are 5000 less Christians. This means that the West needs to be re-won for Jesus Christ. But there is good news. Footholds and resources are already in place from which to begin. Transitioning established congregations is not an easy task—but it is an essential one as we seek to be faithful stewards of all that God has given. 

Here are some thoughts:

The key is to create a new culture. I have written elsewhere about viewing leadership in the 21^st century in terms of shaping ethos. The following are key transitional points that push this along:

1) Reintroduce the Apostolic story of Acts. At the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2), a small group of persons whom God filled with the Holy Spirit began to turn the world upside down. The Church launched that day in fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy was a movement of dreamers and visionaries empowered by the promised Holy Spirit from God.

Don’t pass over the phrase dreamers and visionaries too quickly. In many struggling churches, the people of God have lost the capacity to dream of what God might do in and through the community. One of the first steps in transitioning to a missional model is to help followers of Jesus Christ to begin to dream again dreams shaped by the Scriptures.

2) Move from Surviving to Living.

Struggling churches are merely seeking to survive. When followers of Jesus Christ under the guidance of the Spirit begin to dream again, they slowly begin to realize that survival isn’t a goal. Survival is a prison that keeps a group from living. The goal of the Church of Jesus Christ is life in relationship to God. Living may sometimes means dying. Following Jesus Christ involves living as though you have already died (Matt 16:24). A vital relationship with Jesus moves us beyond fear to follow Jesus into the world on mission. This is the source of life.  Apostolic dreams lead to apostolic action.

3) Move God’s people from consumers of religious services to becoming collaborative influences for the Kingdom of God.

Missional churches are not about providing programs/resources to meet “felt needs” as ends in themselves. Missional churches call people to convert to the Gospel. This involves a reorientation from a life focused on self to a life centered on following Jesus Christ. The people of God shift from consuming to becoming Kingdom-rooted entrepreneurs who seek to extend the influence and reign of God to the ends of the earth. Congregations shift from inviting people to have their needs met to unleashing people to change the world.

4) Shift from Attractional Methods to Interactive Engagement.

Too many churches wait for people to show up at the door.  Missional churches are not opposed to advertising or raising awareness of the community of faith, but they do not sit round waiting for the World to show up. Instead, missional churches collaborate and envision ways to engage new Social networks. This is a key shift. The World no longer serves as a threat from which followers of Christ flee. Instead, the World becomes the venue for life and service in God’s mission. By engaging the world, we recapture the biblical vision of reaching the ends of the earth with the good news.

What are your thoughts?

© 2015 Brian D. Russell

Need a curriculum that helps trains disciples for mission rather than maintenance. Check out Invitation. Invitation introduces the narrative framework of Scripture through the lens of mission, character and community. Participants in the study will discover the missional DNA of the Christ following movement and learn to find themselves in the story of God's mission for humanity and all creation.

Missional Leader as Sculptor of Ethos

 For the last decade, I have done much thinking about the essence of leadership—particularly missional leadership. What is it?   What does a missional leader do?

John Maxwell defines leadership this way: “Leadership is influence.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.”  Influence is a potent term.  It captures the essence of leadership. Influence is the ability to persuade or move people or institutions to adopt a certain course of action or to believe certain things to be true.  It is also, as Erwin McManus suggests, the ability to change the things that a person cares about.

In our context as followers of Jesus, missional relates to those things that resonate with the mission of God.  It involves participation in God’s actions in creation.  To be missional is to be in tune with and acting upon God’s will “on earth as it is in heaven.”  Thus, missional leadership is influence that unleashes others to participate in God’s overarching mission for His Creation.

Men and women who serve as missional leaders work to shape and create a mission-centered ethos within their communities. Such an ethos is shaped through language, environment, and actions.  We will now explore these three elements.

LANGUAGE

Secular leaders have long recognized the power of language. Bart Nanus in Visionary Leadership , wrote, "There is no more powerful engine driving an organization toward excellence and long-range success than an attractive, worthwhile, and achievable vision of the future, widely shared."

Missional leaders deploy the power of language to invite people to live in a new land—a land that evokes God-sized dreams and is permeated with the love and hope that God unleashed through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and through the subsequent outpouring of the Spirit on Jesus’ followers.  We, of course, are not describing mere rhetoric—as if human language alone has intrinsic power apart from God.  The Bible as the Word of God invites us into this new world as the Scriptures announce to us God’s mission.

I am convinced that as interpreters of Scripture we need to think about the overarching story of the Bible. Too often we have a tendency to read the Bible as a collection of fragments whose imagery we can capture for a sermon or time of teaching. Yet, the Scriptures focus on the mission of God (missio dei). 

Humanity plays a vital role in God’s mission.  In God’s original plan, humanity was created to serve as a missional community to reflect God’s character to all creation. Human rebellion (described most poignantly in the narratives of Genesis 3-11 and in Paul’s letter to Rom (Romans 1-3) created the need for God to work profoundly for the reconciliation of humanity.  This involved the creation of a new people—Israel through whom God would work to bring salvation to the end of the earth.  God’s plan of salvation for humanity reached its climax in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah.  Jesus fulfilled all that Israel was to be and unleashed his followers to into the world to share the good news of God’s salvation through the power of the Holy Spirit.  The Scriptural story ends where it began—New Creation.  Ostensibly, life in the New Creation will be a renewal of the original purposes for humanity—living as a missional community for all Creation by reflecting God’s character to it.

Thus we may outline the Bible as a whole in this manner:

Creation -- Fall -- Israel -- Jesus Christ -- Church -- New Creation

The missional leader understands, breathes, and lives for this narrative. She or he uses the power of language to help others to catch a glimpse of what God is doing. The goal of this deployment of language is simple: conversion. The missional leader seeks to establish a missional ethos through language so that followers of Jesus the Messiah may be (re)converted and (re)ignited to God’s mission and so that those non-Christ followers may be invited to live for God’s mission receiving the gift of life that God offers through trusting Jesus Christ.

ENVIRONMENT

Designers of missional worship services need to maneuver skillfully between two false temptations. The first temptation is a stodgy allegiance to a traditional liturgical service.  Traditionalists tend to forget that every tradition began as a contemporary and fresh expression of worship in some context. It is simply wrong-headed to think that an orthodox theology will translate only into one type of worship. The second temptation is to overemphasize “edginess” as evidence of missional zeal. It is a fine line between seeking to speak clearly and relevantly to a target audience (or as I like to say “to speak human”) and losing the essence of the Gospel.

Here are a couple of thoughts about shaping environment.

1) Prayer—Never underestimate the importance and power of prayer.  Missional communities resonate with God through prayer.  Leaders must lead from their knees.  The creation of environments must be birth in prayer and sustained by the prayers of the missional leaders and their communities of faith.  There is no substitute for this step. 

2) Scripture—The Bible offers to its readers a new world.  It is an invitation to experience a new life and to live the reality of New Creation in the present.  Missional leaders understand that communities of faith need to be saturated with Scripture.  The Bible is the most profound book that humanity possesses.  Missional communites need to rediscover its power and its ability to shape and create ethos.

3) Deploy Gifts Openly—Missional leaders push their communities to grow in grace and Christlikeness by celebrating and deploying the gifts of the body.  Many emerging Churches have rediscovered the power of art in worship. Dance, music, painting, video, and drama are becoming increasingly common in worship gatherings in missional communities in the Western world.  These features push followers of Christ to use their own gifts. For too long, Christian artists have been held at arm’s length by the Church. This has harmed the Christ following movement because it has stifled the creativity of community as the whole.  Any time that a person’s gifts and talents are squelched the body of Christ is harmed. Missional communities need every single Christ follower functioning fully. Deploying gifts in the context of worship encourages others to use their own gifts for the good of the whole.

ACTIONS

Missional leaders must learn to sculpt the ethos of their communities of faith.  We have already looked at the potential of deploying language and creating environments that reflect a biblical ethos.  The missional leader can also shape ethos through his or her actions.  This may ultimately be the greatest shaper of ethos. 

There are at least four areas in which our actions can model a biblical ethos for our communities to embrace and embody:

1) The missional leader can shape ethos through a commitment to a missional lifestyle.  Mission must be modeled from the top down. Our communities will only be missional to the extent that the community’s leaders embrace mission as a core value and live their lives in light of God’s mission. Our modus operandi must resonate with Paul’s poignant declaration in 1 Corinthians 9:22—“I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.”  

2) The missional leader can shape ethos through the practice of a radically inclusive ministry.  All people on earth regardless of race, sex, color, nationality, religion, or socio-economic class have been forged in the image of God. This is the message of Genesis 1:26-31.  All oppression and divisions among these groups is traceable to the pervasive and persistent presence of sin in every individual, group, and culture (Genesis 3-11). Sadly, the Church has for too long perpetuated these divisions even within the community of faith. Yet, in Jesus Christ, there is a radical newness. Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the possibility of living the life that God created us to live is a reality. The old divisions are gone.  There is new creation (2 Corinthians 5). Paul words in Galatians 3:26-28 are profound—“for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. 27 As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

What does a radically inclusive ministry look like?

a) It empowers women for leadership roles. I fully understand that the evangelical world is divided over this issue, but I am convinced that the biblical witness supports the full inclusion of women in leadership roles within the Christ-following movement. This is not the place for a full defense of this position, but I am convinced that this needs to be part of our witness to the culture.

b) It rejects divisions along socio-economic lines. Missional leaders are willing to pay the price to allow the active participation of poor and rich alike within their communities.  James 2 gives stern warnings about acting otherwise. As the world becomes increasingly urbanized, we will continue to witness extreme poverty. If the Christ-following movement is to ever have a global impact, it needs to begin serving the poor in their own geographic locales. 

c) It develops cross cultural and interracial friendships as the presupposition for the creation of multi-cultural communities that give the world a taste of the diversity of Kingdom of God. Too many leaders lament the segregation of communities of faith, but miss the irony that the basis for desegration is not lament but the active embrace of persons different from ourselves. We need to cultivate friendships and relationships with persons from backgrounds unfamiliar to us.

An inclusive ministry is the pathway to unleashing followers of Christ to deploy fully their giftedness.

3) The missional leader can shape ethos by empowering others to serve according to their giftedness.  The biblical portraits of gifts (e.g., Romans 12 or 1 Corinthians 12-14) suggest that the body of Christ is a living organism in which each member has a crucial role to play.  The people of God need one another.  Biblical community occurs when each believer deploys his or her gifts, talents, and passions within the community.  The missional leader will work to shape the ethos of the community by (re)implementing a biblical vision of the God’s people by empowering followers of Christ to unleash the full range of their giftedness and the natural result of their relationship with Jesus Christ.  Missional leaders rather than being the driving force of every discrete ministry within a community will serve as coaches who train, empower, and encourage followers of Christ in their Kingdom work.   

4) The missional leader can shape ethos by a commitment to living a whole and balanced life as a follower of Jesus Christ.  Human beings were created to live in authentic community in which they reflect God’s character to the world.  Community, holiness, and mission are the essence of the imago dei in humanity. Missional leaders need to reflect these aspects in their own lives. The persons who listen to us and watch us will be persuaded most readily by a life that they would want to live. Following Jesus Christ is not about prosperity or material happiness, but it comes with a joy and fulfillment that cannot be attained by any other means. If we are to shape a biblical ethos for our communities, we ourselves as missional leaders must live whole and balanced lives before our communities.

If you enjoy this essay, subscribe to the blog and never miss another post.

If you are looking for a resource to create a missional DNA in your community of faith through the study of Scripture, check out Invitation.

© 2006 Brian D. Russell, revised significantly June 2012 and March 2015