Abstract:
Studies in missional ecclesiology emerged as one of the significant trends in
mission studies in recent years. The role of leadership in missional ecclesiology is
investigated from the perspective of an organic leadership paradigm (Avery). A novel
understanding of leadership as the Spirit-led transformation of people and institutions by
means of meaningful relations to participate in God’s mission is seen as best suited to the
adaptive leadership challenges that face the missional church, and it allows the church to
stop fretting over the church by entering into the trialogue. The trialogue is the discerning
interaction between church, culture and biblical narrative – to seek, discover, understand
and share in what the Holy Spirit is up to in the close-to-the-ground particulars of the
church’s engagement in, with, against and for the world. The trialogue, shaped by a
hermeneutic of love, can be informed by the twin movements of dwelling in the Word and
dwelling in the world. It is a kind of orthoparadoxy – the dialectic between theory and
praxis, text and context, dwelling in the Word and dwelling in the world. Entering the
trialogue raises the leadership challenge of creating new social imaginaries
(Taylor)through biblical imagination and storytelling, simultaneously cultivating a culture of
transformation.
