| A Letter From the President Click here to return to the Church Innovations web site. Things go on well . . . even without me. In my last CI Newsletter I noted all the things that I was doing during the Fall. This included the amazing events, including conferences and retreats and in South Africa evaluating and celebrating the first five years of the Partnership for Missional Church in Southern Africa. Incidentally, that work of evaluation continues with some reports from some of the scholars and leaders from southern Africa attending our Spring Think Tank jointly sponsored with Pittsburg Theological Seminary. It also included the fruitful writing and research at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton this Fall. Unfortunately, some of that writing and research was lost when my computer and my backup drives were stolen in Aarhus, Denmark at a marvelous conference on Edinburgh 1910 – Aarhus 2010. (More on that event can be found in a separate article in this newsletter.) What I didn’t discuss, and to some extent did not know about at the time, but what is a major area of growth at CI, is everything that was and is happening without me. Although it has been so for some time now, my absence this Fall highlights that things go on well at Church Innovations without my being present. Of course, this has been planned for and to some degree true for some time. But my complete physical absence and even daily absence even by technical means this Fall underlined the tremendous strength and depth of the team at CI. From our beginnings, CI sought to form something different in research and consulting organizations: a learning organization. We took seriously from the beginning the work of systems thinkers, including popular business gurus like Peter Senge. We sought to move beyond the star-focused consulting model by having a team of associated consultants who shared the same vision for mission and worked as teams, most often in pairs (following the clue of Luke 10 and other New Testament precedence). We sought to create a partnership with scholars in theological education and with other critical disciplines in innovating the church’s capacities to participate in God’s mission in and for the world. We have done so, and this learning organization is growing in its strength to innovate such capacities. While I was gone, for example, the CI team working with our partners at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, especially Don Dawson, and our long time co-workers in PMC in the Synod of the Trinity, Bruce Stevens and David Dawson, planned our Spring Think Tank for Pittsburgh. I attended not one of those meetings and am thrilled at the design and superb improvements on a proven model for discerning God’s preferred future for the missional church movement. From the CI side we had Barbara Miller, our COO; Dr. Patricia Taylor Ellison, our managing director of research and development; Robert Armstrong, our director of the Partnership for Missional Church; and Caroline Hvidsten, our managing director of PMC; plus Gary Pearce and Daniel Lautenbach, bringing the learning from previous Think Tanks to this next step in our spiritual discernment journey. Once again, leaders from around the world from many different social locations within the missional church movement will be discerning together. While contributing to ongoing work in research, especially the research phases of PMC, Dr. Ellison along with Ph.D. candidate Scott Hagley, who is completing his dissertation this Spring, have moved into the final stages of a significant research project in growing healthier congregations in times of conflict and opportunities for mission. This research project, generously funded by the Otto Bremer Foundation, a long time supporter of our work, is evaluating and improving our already successful resources in conflict and mission. We have long worked on developing the capacities of leaders of congregations, especially lay leadership, to guide congregations in those times of conflict created by our continuously changing environment in a missional era. For years we have known how potent the works of the Spirit are in congregations. We have known ways of helping leaders to attend to, assert, decide and act upon the movement of the Holy Spirit within the realities of conflict. Working with the assumptions that these moments of conflict are likely also invitations to multiply mission, this research project is exploring with congregations ways of improving our process of spiritual discernment. With Dr. Ellison’s leadership, her team has brought our previous knowledge to a new stage of development and the results are exciting. Stay tuned to these new innovations in our resources for assisting local churches to thrive in change. When I think of the thousands of local churches who are struggling with critical questions of our common moral life and how few are able to direct those energies generated by such struggling toward mission, I am terribly discouraged. When I see the proven record of our resources to assist congregations to take that struggling and focus it upon innovating mission, I am filled with gratitude that God has led CI for over 20 years to work on innovating these capacities. Now, connecting our resources to those most desperately needing them is our great challenge. While I was reading, writing, and reflecting with fellow scholars in Princeton, the PMC team, especially Bob Armstrong and Caroline Hvidsten, were growing capacities to support that critical part of our ministry. New clusters of congregations were brought into the partnership and the last cluster events for two of our clusters were planned. One of our partners recently indicated the tremendous improvements in support, documentation, and design in the opening stages of Phase 1 of PMC from the start up just in the last year. All of this happened because of the powerful work of Bob and Caroline and their team of staff and associated consultants. PMC grows on well without my attending a single meeting. While I was with international scholars in Princeton, Dr. Ellison was furthering the work of our International Research Consortium. She was planning and creating the materials and resources for our work in the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Norway this January and February and our work at its meeting at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands this June. Emerging from our modest start seven years ago with the theological faculty of the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, and the Norwegian School of Theology in Oslo, Norway, this shared work of a theologically formed social scientific understanding of local church mission and the systems that support them is flourishing wider and deeper. At the same time, our board of trustees appointed a visioning work group to guide the discernment of the next 10 years of Church Innovations Institute. This group has rightly asked questions of succession since some of the key leaders at Church Innovations are in their 50s, including myself, and we need to bring on leadership that is a couple decades younger. This succession planning allows us to bring new leadership into key positions well before the key persons are even vaguely weakening in their capacities to do our work. All of us presume our strong participation over the next decade in this shared work, but it is time to hand leadership over to a younger generation while we present leaders can still fully support the new leadership’s direction. This board group has met a number of times without my attendance and I am thrilled that they have taken this kind of initiative. It is time to plan succession so that the mission of CI can go forward into new generations. The list of things that go on well even without me could continue. But even this list gives those of you who are faithful partners some evidence for sharing my delight, gratitude, and hope in our continuing shared vision to innovate your church’s capacities to be renewed in God’s mission. Peace, Pat Keifert |
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