Missional Map-Making: Skills for Leading in Times of Transition

We all have maps through which we navigate our lives. These maps reflect our understanding of how the world works and how we function within it. But what happens when the landscape changes?

Alan J. Roxburgh, missional leadership expert, writes, “Many of the maps we have internalized about what it means to be the church and how to shape churches in our culture no longer connect with or match the dramatically changing environment in which we are living. Because of this, we find ourselves in a situation where we have to become map-makers in the new world.”

His new book with Leadership Network, MISSIONAL MAP-MAKING: Skills for Leading in Times of Transition (Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint; February 2010; $24.95; Cloth; ISBN: 978-0-470-48672-6), helps leaders struggling with these tectonic shifts in the world and the church by providing them resources for charting new paths toward stronger, more vibrant, and more missional congregations.

An evangelical church plans a community event and yet only active church members attend. An emergent pastor wonders how her congregation, who identifies itself by a certain style of worship and age group, can evolve. Leaders in a presbytery must face the reality of no longer being able to afford full-time pastors. For any type of leader in any type of church, MISSIONAL MAP-MAKING gives them the tools to transform their local communities into relevant, witnessing, and missional bodies of change. Leaders will learn the step-by-step strategies that can equip them to become cartographers of the new terrain.