Loren B. Mead and Billie T. Alban, Creating the Future Together: Methods to Inspire Your Whole Faith Community. Alban Institute, 2008.
Referenced in: Strategies for Church Renewal – Whole Systems/Large Group
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
Mead and Alban suggest that most resources on congregational planning encourage collaboration among various small-group task forces using a number of assessment tools for larger congregational feedback. Sometimes this results in weak buy-in from a significant percentage of the congregation. The uniqueness of this volume is its emphasis on gathering larger groups, in some cases entire congregations, for the purpose of mission discernment and planning. This generates greater enthusiasm for the process (a rare occurrence in planning efforts) and broader ownership of the ministry activities that are launched as a result.
The authors do not provide a step-by-step process (although chapter three on methods comes close), but a helpful description of four whole-systems approaches and a set of inspiring stories from churches and organizations that have used them successfully. The four methods are subdivided into two subcategories (I have listed a representative text beside each one for those who wish to study further):
Methods for Creating the Future Together:
- Future Search – See Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Jannoff, Future Search: Getting the Whole System in the Room for Vision, Commitment, and Action.
- Appreciative Inquiry Summit – See Mark Lau Branson, Memories, Hopes, and Conversations: Appreciative Inquiry and Congregational Change.
Methods for Discussion and Exploration:
- Open Space Technology – See Harrison Owen, Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide. Third Edition. Revised and Expanded.
- World Café – See Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, and the World Café Community, World Café: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations that Matter, 1st Edition.
Creating the Future Together is similar to an older Alban volume by Roy Oswald and Robert Friedrich, Discerning Your Congregation’s Future, which some may wish to consult as a supplement on convening strategies. Large Group Facilitation is a whole systems design approach to congregational renewal. See the Resource Guide for a brief overview of these techniques.
From the Publisher
Congregations today face a multitude of challenges in trying to adapt to a quickly changing world. Balancing new concerns with core values is a complicated process that can leave too many members feeling that their voices and needs are not being met. Loren B. Mead and Billie T. Alban have developed Creating the Future Together to share their knowledge of how congregations can use large group methods to navigate these new waters.
Large group methods involve getting all the stakeholders together to work on major issues of common concern. Mead and Alban outline four such methods—two for identifying a preferred future and two designed to create community and discover common interest. This book is not meant to be a how-to volume; its primary purpose is to familiarize leaders with these whole-system approaches and to provide a conceptual framework for evaluating their potential usefulness against any given challenge. The authors also share stories from a variety of Christian and Jewish faith communities where ordinary religious leaders, lay and clergy together, have faced issues related to change using large group methods. Combining their wealth of experience in leading religious and secular bodies through times of change, Mead and Alban bring hope to faith communities as they work to embrace, and even thrive through, the need for change.
About the Authors
Loren B. Mead is president emeritus of the Alban Institute and author of numerous books including The Once and Future Church: Reinventing the Congregation for a New Mission Frontier (Alban, 1991).
Billie T. Alban is president of Alban and Williams, Ltd., an internationally known management consultant firm. She is the coauthor, along with Barbara Bunker, of The Handbook of Large Group Methods: Creating Systematic Change in Organizations and Communities.
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