Experimenting on the Journey of Spiritual Discernment

The Second Year in the Partnership for Missional Church
By Jannie Swart

This article is a continuation of the newsletter series on the Partnership for Missional Church (PMC) and gives a brief overview of the second year of PMC.
The first year of PMC focuses on the growing sense of awareness in the local congregation that cultural change is necessary. Through deep listening, the local congregation discovers partners on its journey of spiritual discernment. The second year takes the listening and discovering into a phase of experimenting. The focus shifts from the imaginations and actions of the early adopters and innovators in the congregation to those thoughtful, progressive leaders who can get things done and who are willing to take risks and experiment.

Beyond Grand Plans to Experimenting
The natural tendency for congregations is to move very quickly into a mold of strategic planning for the future. So many times we want to start addressing the challenges and fixing the problems by borrowing from visioning models and long-range planning tools. However, in CI’s more than 17 years of experience working with congregations, we’ve discovered that they often “hit the wall” in this approach, because it does not consider some important dynamics in congregations’ cultural change. In the second year of PMC, we deliberately focus on these dynamics and the polarities that come with them.

The Polarity between Early Victories and Long-Term Change
The second year in PMC focuses on cultivating an environment in local congregations where it is possible to manage the important dynamic between those who can achieve immediate success and change in the congregation and those who understand the long-term, deep, cultural engagement needed. It helps congregations to empower both the sprinters to achieve early victories and the long-distance runners who can endure the challenges of long-term change. Congregations need both the sprinters and the long-distance runners on the journey of spiritual discernment if they want to move beyond merely becoming armchair critics of their cultural environment to achieving effective change for the sake of God’s mission in that environment.
To accomplish this, we introduce Missional Engagement Teams (METs) and Plunging Groups into this second phase of PMC. Through the discernment and action of both the METs and Plunging Groups, as well as the interaction between the learnings from both, local congregations start to engage themselves with those people in their environment to whom God is sending them and experiment with one or two particular aspects within their system for the sake of that engagement. The ultimate goal is to form new Christian community with those to whom God is sending the congregations and to bring about the cultural change necessary within the congregations’ system to develop and sustain this new, emerging community.

The Polarity between Technical and Adaptive Change
In achieving the above, congregations need both technical and adaptive change. There will always be the kinds of challenges on this journey that simply need change of a technical nature that entails the solving of an easily identified “problem” by using existing competencies in congregations. However, the more difficult part is to address the kind of change that is of an adaptive nature and which requires a deep engagement with the entire system of the congregations. This is the kind of change for which congregations do not have readily available answers or fixes and ask for an experimenting approach as the way of discerning how to deal with these challenges. The METs are intended for these kinds of experiments, but are doing it in such a way that any failure will not threaten the whole system of the congregations. During this period, congregations learn how to take risks and that it is fine to sometimes fail while experimenting.
The second year brings a willingness to move beyond the fear of failing to trusting God’s promises to the church, and therefore to be prepared to try something new for the sake of God’s mission in the world. Failing to risk is a guaranteed failure; trusting God’s promises of mercy and future for the congregation is the way of discernment in and through risk and failure.