GUEST POST BY BOB WILSON For much of its history, the church has largely disregarded Jesus’ teaching in Luke 22:24-30 to lead differently from the Gentiles. Instead, it has “established and embraced the leadership models of ‘the Gentiles’”, leading to church history being “replete with examples of leaders actively accumulating, protecting, and abusing power, frequently […]
leadership
Unilever: Leading Globally, Empowering Locally
Case Study Executive Summary By the late 2000s, Unilever, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, faced growing complexity across its operations in over 190 countries. Under the leadership of CEO Paul Polman (2009–2019), Unilever embraced a polycentric leadership model, empowering regional hubs while advancing a unified purpose: “Making sustainable living commonplace.” This case […]
Reimagining Missions: Paradigms Paths & Partnerships
GUEST POST / CASE STUDY BY KIRK FRANKLIN Facing momentous change, missional leaders and practitioners face daunting complexities and remarkable new opportunities. Long-held patterns of sending and receiving are giving way to vibrant, interdependent, collaborative efforts spanning languages, cultures, contexts and continents. Instead of relying solely on inherited structures or leadership models of a bygone […]
Polycentric Christian Mission and Ministry: An Introduction: From Everyone to Everywhere
A PCL whitepaper by Graham Joseph Hill: Polycentric Christian Mission and Ministry: An Introduction: From Everyone to Everywhere
Leadership, Hierarchy, and Resilience
GUEST POST BY DR. KATHY ALLEN I have been reading the resilience literature to create a simple framework that would be easy to grasp while providing a directional heading for our organizations and ourselves. This is the first of a series of blogs that reflect this theme — building resilience in our systems.
View from the shared ‘top’: A case study in leading as a team
Anonymous case study In 2017 our organization decided to go from a single International Director to an International Director team. There were lots of questions about whether this would work. No one knew of a good example of this at a top level of an organization. In fact, one leader that we suggested the idea […]
Polycentrism in the Missio Dei
Kirk Franklin1, Nelus Niemandt1 Structures for mission have been under review as a result of many factors. In particular have been the widening influences of globalisation, and to a lesser degree, glocalisation. Various models of leadership praxis and structures have been proposed along the way. As Christianity moved farther away from the Christendom model of […]
A Case Study: A Journey of Leading in Polycentric Theory and Practice in Mission
by Kirk FranklinOCMS, UK Abstract Leadership and governance structures for any organisations involved in God’s mission need to come under review because of the growing influences of the interconnected globalised world. As Christianity moved farther away from the Christendom model of centralised control to other models of leadership and governance, other paradigms have been proposed […]
A Case Study in Polycentric Leadership Structure for a Movement
R. Elliott Snuggs This case study is taken from an article titled “How Movements Organize” written by R. Elliott Snuggs. The article helps modalities and sodalities understand themselves as movements rather than organizations. It was written for the Asian Access movement and is adapted here to understand movement structure in relationship to polycentric leadership Core-Network-Cloud: […]
Accelerating the Great Commission
Where Do We Need More Research? GUEST POST BY JOSH LAXTON This is part of an article series I wrote with Ed Stetzer. Question 4: Where is further research needed to accelerate the Great Commission? We live in a world that’s always conducting research. Because we are bombarded by various kinds of research every day, […]
