EMQ » October–December 2021 » Volume 57 Issue 4
[memberonly folder=”Members, EMQ2YearFolder, EMQ1YearFolder, EMQLibraryInstitution”]By Craig S. Hendrickson
American Society of Missiology Monograph Series
Pickwick Publications, 2018
140 pages
US$21.00
Reviewed by Martin Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Practical Theology at Azusa Pacific University and minister of the Hollywood Church of Christ, California, and former missionary in China for five years.
Craig Hendrickson, Associate Professor of Missional Leadership at Moody Bible Institute, declares he wrote Charismatic Leadership and Missional Change in order to promote missional conceptions of church and leadership that attend to the challenges of cultural pluralism. The longitudinal case study at the heart of his text explores the ministry and leadership of The Lighthouse, a pseudonymous and ethnically diverse congregation in Southern California “on its journey from attractional toward missional” ministry (95).
Hendrickson’s short study – an adaptation of his doctoral dissertation at Fuller Theological Seminary – opens with a well-written synopsis of his primary research questions, theoretical frameworks, and implications of his research.
Chapter one analyzes survey data and demographic information to substantiate the claim that The Lighthouse is “one of the most culturally, economically, and generationally diverse evangelical churches in North America” (2). In chapter two, Hendrickson reviews the congregation’s ministry strategies over the last two decades to identify the origins of the congregation’s current clergy-centric and ecclesiocentric approaches to ministry (“mission-actional”), approaches that tend toward programmatic and consumeristic strategies for missional change and “that tend to treat congregational members and neighbors as objects of mission rather than as subjects and co-participants in God’s mission” (47). In chapter three, Hendrickson turns to the concept of “place” to expose the profound “gap between their espoused and lived values” (62) evident in the congregation’s lack of meaningful relationships with people in their immediate community. Hendrickson continues his critique of the church’s over-dependence on the pastoral staff for its mission initiatives in chapter four. Here, in the book’s most poignant passages, Hendrickson discloses “a clear ethnic hierarchy within the polity and ministry structures of the church” (76). He attributes this repression of African American candidates, in particular, to “a Euro-centric leadership schema shaped by modern management frameworks” (73). In chapter five, Hendrickson analyzes The Lighthouse’s current leadership praxis in light of two Lukan narratives and the missional leadership frameworks of Mark Lau Branson – co-author of Churches, Cultures, and Leadership (2011) – advocating for plural leadership and racial/cultural inclusivity in corporate processes of missional discernment. In chapter six, Hendrickson continues engaging Branson’s frameworks, endorsing interpretive leadership – in which leaders cultivate an interpretive community of diverse peoples that shapes new meanings and practices together – as the answer to the adaptive challenges articulated in the previous chapters. A short concluding chapter addresses the implications of his research and questions for further study.
In the end, Hendrickson concludes that “a shift in Pastor Steve’s [pseudonym] leadership style is required to shape a new missional identity at the Lighthouse – one where the ethnically diverse, everyday people of God can have their missional imagination shaped by God’s initiatives in their midst” (120). Practitioners partial to the scholarship of missional church authors Mark Lau Branson, Craig Van Gelder, Dwight Zscheile, and Alan Roxburgh will feel at home in Hendrickson’s discourse, though his largely deconstructive and descriptive project may leave practitioners eager to read about practical, non-programmatic, non-clergy-centric, on-the-ground leadership practices. Missional church authors have rightly noted the stunted missional praxes of certain authors that foreground human agency rather than God’s missional initiatives. Yet, I wonder about the tendency among modern leadership theorists to decry hero-leader and managerial paradigms of leadership and yet promote solutions that in effect place the agency of the leader center stage. What does it say about our view of agency within church life when, instead of fixing mission by fixing the church – per Van Gelder and Zcheile’s (2011) critique of ecclesiocentric models – missional leadership texts ostensibly fix mission by fixing the leader? These lingering questions aside, I highly recommend Charismatic Leadership and Missional Change as an invaluable case study for graduate students studying missional ecclesiologies.
