This is the fifth & final post processing the recent articles from Andy McCullough on changes he believes are necessary for Newfrontiers to decolonise apostolic ministry (please read the previous articles: part one; part two; part three; part four).

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After stating that Newfrontiers apostolic ministry needs decolonising, that it’s current framing is hierarchical & biased replete with unhelpful practices around money (which all sounds pretty bad) Andy rounds off his series with some suggestions on what he thinks is the way forward. He writes,

The Newfrontiers journey from its humble beginnings in a small town in Sussex to becoming a truly global, polycentric, multi-contextual movement, is under full steam. We can’t deny that, in the sovereignty of God, this worldwide family had its origins in the English countryside. We celebrate our history, and the extraordinary things that God has done. Equally, we know that intentional shedding of any outstanding vestiges of colonial language, mindsets, biases and practices is non-negotiable if all members of this family are ever to express their contextual freedom in sharing a gospel whose ultimate destination is every culture, every language, every heart. I believe that this journey requires imagination, collaboration, invocation and personalisation.

There’s boldness here and also a lot of room for misunderstanding because there will need to be an awful lot of negotiating about Andy’s non-negotiables.

It is not always clear exactly what it means to shed ‘outstanding vestiges of colonial language, mindsets, biases and practices’ and it’s not always abundantly clear what exactly they should be replaced with.

And that is because there is a potential conflict between, at the very least, the first two of Andy’s requirements for the journey.

Andy begins with imagination and rightly asks,

What could a truly muti-lingual, polycentric apostolic family look like? What if apostolic ministry were able truly to initiate kingdom advance cross-culturally without importing unhelpful practices mixed up within the liberative gospel of Christ? If we can’t imagine a different future, how will we build it?

You have to aim for something of course, but which something and whose imagination? But the first seed of potential conflict lies in his first sentence. All along Andy has been calling for polycentrism – to allow non-western voices not just a place at the table but at the very least an equal opportunity to shape our shared future regardless of financial resources and to do so in what may be decidedly non-western ways.

Let us let Africans or Asians or South Americans or wherever lead us and shape us, and let us be as prophetically shaped by a word given to us in Arabic, Urdu, Armenian or Korean as we have been by words that have come to us in English.

Andy’s imagination for this future requires a different kind of leadership, a more collaborative one.

The type of leadership required for this kind of future, I suggest, is less a visionary, active implementer-type leadership and more chairmanlike, inclusive leadership that is able to listen to multiple voices. Such approaches represent a different kind of leadership, are often slower and less efficient, involve a larger rather than a smaller core group, but facilitate meaningful diverse perspectives. Anyone engaging with a diversity journey at local church or sphere level will be familiar with the different set of skills required.

Personally I’m not sure that this isn’t exactly the kind of leadership we’ve had for the past decade or more. But even if it were the case that we need to make that shift then I would suggest that that kind of leadership, which Andy describes is a distinctively western 21st century kind of leadership description.

I recently had a conversation with a friend discussing global south leadership in international mission agencies and he made the point that western agencies often try to restrain these leaders because they are often far more hierarchical and command & control in their leadership styles than the westerners were happy with.

Here’s a question: would we reject Asian or African leadership of our apostolic movement because it was a visionary, active implementer-type leadership even if those cultures tend to favour that kind of leadership?

Now maybe we’ll be blessed by a Kofi Annan type of leader but I’m just saying that it’s not necessarily a straight-line from multi-lingual & polycentric to collaborative & inclusive leadership. And I would argue that in saying it should be so is itself a western imposition on our shared future. But that’s the risk of being the first to describe what you imagine. Until someone else does so you’re the only one to shoot at!

Speaking from personal experience I know one of the most challenging leadership issues within our African teams here in Stockholm has been around team ministry & divesting positions from having autocratic power. Most of our leaders had little problem with it while the people hated it. ‘Just tell us what to do’, or ‘You’re the pastor’, or in many cases when they were unhappy with the team leadership of their fellow African brothers they would appeal over their heads to the white ‘senior pastor’ to ‘fix it’. And the ‘senior pastor’¹ definitely did not appreciate it.

So was I being colonial in working with them towards a more collaborative & inclusive form of leadership pattern? Lord have mercy but probably.

This might sound like I’m disagreeing with Andy but the difference is probably neither quite so large nor quite so stark as it may seem. I do think we need to become multi-lingual and polycentric and those are precisely the issues I’m wrestling with in my own local context.

What does it look like for our own church to be a polity of currently 3 and maybe 4 main languages not to mention the other 30 or 40 more that are spoken in our church and what does it look like for leadership and prophetic shaping of the whole to be able to come from any one of the constituent parts and not just as in the present from the western led part (because we were there first, we pay the bills, etc etc…)?

Play that out into a movement of thousands of churches across 80 countries or more and it is easy to see that this is not a matter of merely a waving of the hand and it is done. Andy is also right that revelation not revolution is the way we’ll get there, most likely through a series of incremental steps.

But get there we will and I think the latter house will be more glorious than the former one.

1. this is not a term I use about myself [↩]