Robinson, Anthony B. Changing the Conversation: A Third Way for Congregations. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008. ISBN: 9780802807595.
Meet the Author
Anthony Robinson is an ordained United Church of Christ pastor who currently serves as President of Congregational Leadership Northwest. He travels throughout North America as a speaker, teacher, preacher, consultant and coach serving congregations and their leaders. Robinson has taught at several schools including Toronto School of Theology, Seattle Pacific University, Seattle University, and Vancouver School of Theology. He is the author of nine books and a frequent contributor to various periodicals including The Christian Century, Congregations, and Perspectives.
Book Basics
Building on his earlier work, Transforming Congregational Culture (2003), Robinson continues to develop his practical, proven and proactive methodology for changing congregational culture. In Changing the Conversation, he suggests that the best methodology is a third way that is between the polarizing alternatives. Robinson
offers the needed framework of the larger cultural change, from Christendom to post-Christendom and from modern to postmodern, which has resulted in a changed role for the church. Additionally, he explains the need to focus on adaptive rather than technical change while admitting that often the two are intertwined.
Reading, pondering and applying the ten chapters to a given local church setting provides any and all congregational leaders a healthy means of evaluation that moves toward renewal. Ideally, the text should be read, discussed, and utilized in a group setting either via the congregation’s formal leadership body or a less formal working group. Each chapter offers numerous discussion questions, which appear scattered throughout the chapter and help make the readers move the conversation from a general idea to an applicable possibility within their own congregational context.
So What?
On the whole, congregations in mainline churches have been experiencing decline for the past forty years. Robinson’s book offers a biblically sound and culturally relevant approach to congregational renewal. Adaptive rather than technical change is essential for a congregation to move from decline or plateau to renewal . Guided by the Spirit, servant leaders must step forward to begin to change the conversation. In some cases the changing conversation may mean that the decline has been so dramatic that the right decision is death, which may then lead to resurrection or congregational rebirth.
Does your congregation know its purpose? Has your congregation engaged in a visioning process in the last five years? When it comes to congregational renewal, how do you hold in tension the essential urgency of the matter with the appropriate patience and awareness that it is a long term task?