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Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unraveling: Leadership in a Changing World
In the midst of a massive unraveling where the churches find themselves disoriented and paralyzed, this book invites leaders to embrace three practices formed out of God’s engagements with God’s people in Scripture and our traditions that direct us toward forming communities of hope.
310 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 11, 2025
13 people are currently reading
6 people want to read
About the author
Alan J. Roxburgh
19 books9 followersAlan Roxburgh is a pastor, teacher, writer and consultant with more than 30 years experience in church leadership, consulting and seminary education. Alan has pastored congregations in a small town, the suburbs, the re-development of a downtown urban church and the planting of other congregations. He has directed an urban training center and served as a seminary professor and the director of a center for mission and evangelism. Alan teaches as an adjunct professor in seminaries in the USA, Australia and Europe. In addition to his books listed here on Amazon, Alan was also a member of the writing team that authored "Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America".
Through The Missional Network, Alan leads conferences, seminars and consultations with denominations, congregations and seminaries across North America, Asia, Europe, Australia and the UK. Alan consults with these groups in the areas of leadership for missional transformation and innovating missional change across denominational systems. Along with the team at TMN, he provides practical tools and resources for leaders of church systems and local congregations.
When not traveling or writing, Alan enjoys mountain biking, hiking, cooking and hanging out with Jane and their five grandchildren as well as drinking great coffee in the Pacific North West.
Through The Missional Network, Alan leads conferences, seminars and consultations with denominations, congregations and seminaries across North America, Asia, Europe, Australia and the UK. Alan consults with these groups in the areas of leadership for missional transformation and innovating missional change across denominational systems. Along with the team at TMN, he provides practical tools and resources for leaders of church systems and local congregations.
When not traveling or writing, Alan enjoys mountain biking, hiking, cooking and hanging out with Jane and their five grandchildren as well as drinking great coffee in the Pacific North West.
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August 2, 2025
Alan Roxburgh has written a lot about the future of the church and its missioning in our current contexts. Over his years of analyzing and proposing, he has partnered with inspiring and insightful companions in his writing, people like Mark Lau Branson, Fred Romanuk, Martin Robinson, and Craig Van Gelder. He is in regular conversation with church leaders around the world through his various networks and knows well their struggles with fatigue and fragility.
If you know Al’s work and want to dig deeper into it, this is an excellent book with which to do that. If you are just hearing about Al’s work and want a good summary of it, as it stands at this point, this is an excellent book with which to do that. If you are intrigued to experience how Al works with an astute companion to complement and expand their proposals for the church’s missioning, his companioning with Roy Searle in this book will give you a good sense of the value of such dialogical discerning.
Al describes himself as a pastor, seminary professor, and mentor in leadership and missional transformation, and a member of The Commons Executive team.
Roy describes himself as a companion and former leader of the Northumbrian Community, a leadership mentor, creative pioneer, spiritual director, former president of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, associate tutor at Cranmer Hall, St. John’s College, Durham, a member of the Renovare Board in Britian and Ireland, an associate of the Northumbrian Collective, and a member of The Commons Executive team.
Together, they bring much depth and breadth to their pondering and proposing about the church’s future and the leadership dynamics best suited to revive its flourishing as an agency for the reweaving of an unraveling world.
Roxburgh and Searle are blunt about the crises the church and its leadership faces. We’ve bought into a 75-year Western story of progress built on functionalism (how to make it work), therapy (how to heal ourselves), idealism (what is the true form to construct), and strategy (what tactics will fix what’s wrong). All of these approaches, isolated or combined, seek to control our future. To the degree that church leaders have aligned themselves with these imperatives, they have become weighed down with “expectations, obligations, and the pressure to come up with answers and arrest the decline with diminishing resources.” (p.18) The pressures are draining and depressing, generating a darkness that seems overwhelming for isolated leaders.
Roxburgh and Searle want us to turn our attention to another story. It’s the story of what our triune Creator has done frequently in dark times. They explore how God has shown up to refocus and revive communities of hope in the times of Jeremiah, of Luke/Acts, of Benedict, and of the Celts. Crucial to this shift of attention is trust in and loyalty to what the Spirit of our Creator’s Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, is doing in and for the world. The church is a community of hopeful companions commissioned to sow and cultivate the seeds of the new world the Spirit is composing. The key question directing this shift of attention is “As we confront cascading crises across so many fronts, what does it mean for God’s people to form communities of hope in places we have never been before?” (p.80)
Roxburgh and Searle propose some postures and practices they have tested in a variety of settings over several years of church leadership, as indicated in how they introduced themselves.
A posture, as they understand it, is a particular way of dealing with or considering something. It’s an approach, a set of attitudes and behaviours that generate hope in dark times. In brief, these are the postures they propose for practicing Christian life in dark times:
• attending to what’s getting in the way of good Christian postures;
• embracing the reality that we face in a place we’ve never been before;
• making a path as we walk – being open to testing and experimenting;
• reorienting our lives around God’s agency; and
• embracing humility.
The practices that help us cultivate these postures are:
• dwelling together with God’s, their people, and our neighbours in the particular place where God has sent us;
• discerning together what God is doing in the place among these people; and
• exploring how to experiment with joining God’s workings guided by a willingness to trust that God and to risk the new things that are being generated by our dwelling and discerning for the common good of God’s beloved world.
The postures and practices are all grounded in a foundational conviction that challenges the 75-year story of Western progress. Rather than trusting in human agency, they propose, we would benefit more from trusting in God’s agency.
"Instead of wringing our hands around how to fix our churches, we could choose to join with God in Christ in embodying this new creation in the ordinary, mundane, and human. This is a hope that cannot come from visionaries, gurus, innovators, strategic planners, or Pied Pipers. It emerges form among the ordinary men and women in neighbourhoods, in lives formed around practices of dwelling, discerning, and experimenting." (p.201)
The book is rich in deeper explanations and more detailed examples of how Roxburgh and Searle have seen this happening. These are not presented as ‘shoulds’, but rather as ‘coulds.’ You will have to appropriate these postures and practices in ways you deem most promising given your own context and conditions. You are, by the mercy and grace of God’s agency, ambassadors of God’s forgiving and
reconciling love in your place of living in and for this world.
A crucial component of these proposals for the walking with our neighbours into a healing and hopeful future is the importance of companions on the journey. One destructive dimension of the story that keeps us stuck in a false faith in human agency is the conviction that heroic individuals can bring about the needed changes. Roxburgh and Searle don’t buy it. Here’s a particularly powerful passage on this point:
"We can’t engage this new space as a sola pastora leader and expect different outcomes. The accountability of companions is part of getting perspective when our world is unraveling. Fellow travellers protect one another from getting lost in their own echo chambers. Companions are confidents, not just to listen with us, as important as that is, but to stand alongside us. They bring perspective, discernment, challenge, and support from outside our immediate situation. Companions share honestly what they are seeing in one another. Far more than merely support groups for caring conversations, they’re a covenant company holding up one another in the work of forming communities of hope." (p.101)
It is on this proposal to cultivate companionship that I have my only major question. It has to do with who those companions are. Though subtle, the sense I get is that the companions are other church leaders confronted by disoriented, disinterested, or disruptive church members. I don’t get a strong sense that Roxburgh and Searle see our companions as the people by whom we have been invited to contribute leadership skills in becoming God’s people ever more faithfully, wisely, and effectively. In one of our conversations about this book, one church leader noted that we (especially we clergy) had been admonished in our training not to form close friendships with our parishioners/congregants. That may well be a powerful force in the current disconnect between clergy and their closest companions in Christ in their congregations, companions who live, and move, and have their beings in the neighbourhoods where we have been placed.
Jurgen Moltmann, who continues to be one of the most provocative voices in my formation for missioning, suggests, in The Passion for Life: A Messianic Lifestyle (1978) that the church is a fellowship of the friends of Jesus. Working with these friends, companioning with them in the reweaving of the church’s missioning, is, as I experience church leadership these days, a crucial component in the new leadership Roxburgh and Searle are proposing. I’d like to see a deeper exploration of how the practices can cultivate that primary companionship. Maybe that’s their next book!
Roxburgh and Searle set out to write a book that would urge church leadership to answer God’s call to nourish communities of hope in “this coming night” of unraveling in our social, environmental, political, and economic lives, that would urge church leadership to join with Jesus in “reweaving this broken world.” They have succeeded admirably.
This is a book that will draw your attention back to the bedrock for missioning of God’s agency in redeeming this world with forgiving and reconciling love and that will encourage you to join with the people among whom God has placed you to contribute to that missioning.
If you know Al’s work and want to dig deeper into it, this is an excellent book with which to do that. If you are just hearing about Al’s work and want a good summary of it, as it stands at this point, this is an excellent book with which to do that. If you are intrigued to experience how Al works with an astute companion to complement and expand their proposals for the church’s missioning, his companioning with Roy Searle in this book will give you a good sense of the value of such dialogical discerning.
Al describes himself as a pastor, seminary professor, and mentor in leadership and missional transformation, and a member of The Commons Executive team.
Roy describes himself as a companion and former leader of the Northumbrian Community, a leadership mentor, creative pioneer, spiritual director, former president of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, associate tutor at Cranmer Hall, St. John’s College, Durham, a member of the Renovare Board in Britian and Ireland, an associate of the Northumbrian Collective, and a member of The Commons Executive team.
Together, they bring much depth and breadth to their pondering and proposing about the church’s future and the leadership dynamics best suited to revive its flourishing as an agency for the reweaving of an unraveling world.
Roxburgh and Searle are blunt about the crises the church and its leadership faces. We’ve bought into a 75-year Western story of progress built on functionalism (how to make it work), therapy (how to heal ourselves), idealism (what is the true form to construct), and strategy (what tactics will fix what’s wrong). All of these approaches, isolated or combined, seek to control our future. To the degree that church leaders have aligned themselves with these imperatives, they have become weighed down with “expectations, obligations, and the pressure to come up with answers and arrest the decline with diminishing resources.” (p.18) The pressures are draining and depressing, generating a darkness that seems overwhelming for isolated leaders.
Roxburgh and Searle want us to turn our attention to another story. It’s the story of what our triune Creator has done frequently in dark times. They explore how God has shown up to refocus and revive communities of hope in the times of Jeremiah, of Luke/Acts, of Benedict, and of the Celts. Crucial to this shift of attention is trust in and loyalty to what the Spirit of our Creator’s Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, is doing in and for the world. The church is a community of hopeful companions commissioned to sow and cultivate the seeds of the new world the Spirit is composing. The key question directing this shift of attention is “As we confront cascading crises across so many fronts, what does it mean for God’s people to form communities of hope in places we have never been before?” (p.80)
Roxburgh and Searle propose some postures and practices they have tested in a variety of settings over several years of church leadership, as indicated in how they introduced themselves.
A posture, as they understand it, is a particular way of dealing with or considering something. It’s an approach, a set of attitudes and behaviours that generate hope in dark times. In brief, these are the postures they propose for practicing Christian life in dark times:
• attending to what’s getting in the way of good Christian postures;
• embracing the reality that we face in a place we’ve never been before;
• making a path as we walk – being open to testing and experimenting;
• reorienting our lives around God’s agency; and
• embracing humility.
The practices that help us cultivate these postures are:
• dwelling together with God’s, their people, and our neighbours in the particular place where God has sent us;
• discerning together what God is doing in the place among these people; and
• exploring how to experiment with joining God’s workings guided by a willingness to trust that God and to risk the new things that are being generated by our dwelling and discerning for the common good of God’s beloved world.
The postures and practices are all grounded in a foundational conviction that challenges the 75-year story of Western progress. Rather than trusting in human agency, they propose, we would benefit more from trusting in God’s agency.
"Instead of wringing our hands around how to fix our churches, we could choose to join with God in Christ in embodying this new creation in the ordinary, mundane, and human. This is a hope that cannot come from visionaries, gurus, innovators, strategic planners, or Pied Pipers. It emerges form among the ordinary men and women in neighbourhoods, in lives formed around practices of dwelling, discerning, and experimenting." (p.201)
The book is rich in deeper explanations and more detailed examples of how Roxburgh and Searle have seen this happening. These are not presented as ‘shoulds’, but rather as ‘coulds.’ You will have to appropriate these postures and practices in ways you deem most promising given your own context and conditions. You are, by the mercy and grace of God’s agency, ambassadors of God’s forgiving and
reconciling love in your place of living in and for this world.
A crucial component of these proposals for the walking with our neighbours into a healing and hopeful future is the importance of companions on the journey. One destructive dimension of the story that keeps us stuck in a false faith in human agency is the conviction that heroic individuals can bring about the needed changes. Roxburgh and Searle don’t buy it. Here’s a particularly powerful passage on this point:
"We can’t engage this new space as a sola pastora leader and expect different outcomes. The accountability of companions is part of getting perspective when our world is unraveling. Fellow travellers protect one another from getting lost in their own echo chambers. Companions are confidents, not just to listen with us, as important as that is, but to stand alongside us. They bring perspective, discernment, challenge, and support from outside our immediate situation. Companions share honestly what they are seeing in one another. Far more than merely support groups for caring conversations, they’re a covenant company holding up one another in the work of forming communities of hope." (p.101)
It is on this proposal to cultivate companionship that I have my only major question. It has to do with who those companions are. Though subtle, the sense I get is that the companions are other church leaders confronted by disoriented, disinterested, or disruptive church members. I don’t get a strong sense that Roxburgh and Searle see our companions as the people by whom we have been invited to contribute leadership skills in becoming God’s people ever more faithfully, wisely, and effectively. In one of our conversations about this book, one church leader noted that we (especially we clergy) had been admonished in our training not to form close friendships with our parishioners/congregants. That may well be a powerful force in the current disconnect between clergy and their closest companions in Christ in their congregations, companions who live, and move, and have their beings in the neighbourhoods where we have been placed.
Jurgen Moltmann, who continues to be one of the most provocative voices in my formation for missioning, suggests, in The Passion for Life: A Messianic Lifestyle (1978) that the church is a fellowship of the friends of Jesus. Working with these friends, companioning with them in the reweaving of the church’s missioning, is, as I experience church leadership these days, a crucial component in the new leadership Roxburgh and Searle are proposing. I’d like to see a deeper exploration of how the practices can cultivate that primary companionship. Maybe that’s their next book!
Roxburgh and Searle set out to write a book that would urge church leadership to answer God’s call to nourish communities of hope in “this coming night” of unraveling in our social, environmental, political, and economic lives, that would urge church leadership to join with Jesus in “reweaving this broken world.” They have succeeded admirably.
This is a book that will draw your attention back to the bedrock for missioning of God’s agency in redeeming this world with forgiving and reconciling love and that will encourage you to join with the people among whom God has placed you to contribute to that missioning.
Displaying 1 of 1 review