Leaders with Over the Horizon Radar
Leadership in the Australian church is strongly shaped by the Christendom paradigm which is primarily suited to maintenance not mission. This is not the Leadership desperately and urgently required for Unbounded Church which is missional leadership.
Essential qualities for leaders of ‘Unbounded Church’ are that they will be ‘Entrepreneurial’, have a ‘Missionary personality’, and be highly ‘Flexible and Innovative’. They will also need to have over the horizon radar-i.e. to be able to see, indeed ‘imagine’, the church as it must become before it is! To put it another way, leaders will need to prayerfully submit their imaginations to the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the voice of the New Testament, and dare to ‘imagine what is not’ for the glory of God. Indeed, to be suitable leaders for Unbounded Church requires a ‘Star Trek’ vision, i.e. a preparedness to go where “no man (or church) has gone before”. Such leaders will not be constrained by a Christendom box, rather they will throw it away. As Alan Roxburgh has said-
“Today’s global culture is experiencing rapid, tumultuous change that is affecting the very structure and significance of church leadership” and “What the church urgently needs are men and women capable of leading others toward missional transformation for a future church which has not yet been imagined.”
The fact is that if leaders cannot imagine the ‘over the horizon’ vision, i.e. of a ‘church as we have not known it’, they will most certainly not be capable of leading people towards it.
unbounded church 