“Cities don’t die (but corporations do),” Seth Godin. Makes the point that cities rarely ever disappear or become obsolete, but organizations do all the time. (Is Detroit an exception? or perhaps it’s simply becoming smaller, not disappearing altogether.)
At the Reset conference, the point was made that many organizations are sliding off the Fortune 500 list. Part of this was due to an inability or lack of desire to acclimate to a necessary change.
Mission agencies, too, will not be immune to this. It is possible for a mission agency to go belly up. It happened to Caleb Project, ACMC (sorry to both of you guys, home to many of my friends). Other mission agencies have merged over time (e.g. AWM into Pioneers, recently, but I don’t know if that was finance related or not). I know that many organizations are struggling.
Godin insists that it’s about control and fringes: that companies are risk- and failure-averse and so outlaw behavior (e.g. experimental) that will avoid it; but in so doing they rigidify and cannot adapt to changing times.
I’m not sure that this works in every case, but clearly organizations like YWAM are right now better off than some of the larger ones. (Then again, calling both YWAM and the IMB an organization is to obviously stretch the definition of “organization” into a fairly large umbrella.)
I don’t think any of the really big mission agencies are in danger of going under—but I fear for some of the mid-sized ones.
At the same time, the really innovative missionary teams on the field—the equivalent of a YWAM base—will likely find new homes. I know that plenty of people come off the field every year, and there are crash-and-burn teams all the time. Nevertheless I have a sneaking suspicion that those who are really passionate, entrepreneurial, and able will find a new home to slide into should their parent org go bust.
Is this the difference between companies dying and communities living on?
Is your team resilient enough to survive if your organization doesn’t?
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Organizations who have overhead will face this a lot more than decentralized structures. The future may very well be in “hubs” and “orders” that are swarmish—communities with a very specific type of missiological DNA that operate under an apostolic paradigm of ministry who are not being ‘sent’ from ‘sending agencies’ or structures, but are part of going structures that have no offices, secretaries and so on. I think the work of mid-size and large mission organizations can be valuable, but I don’t see them making a dent in unengaged peoples at this time which is somewhat related to certain organizations transitioning into survival mode, and others who have gone from sending pioneering teams into doing discipleship and encouragement work among unreached groups that already have some work being done among them and a small but capable national church.
I may have blurred the original question you asked because I brought in unengaged peoples being related to organizational issues–but I’ll leave it to someone else to point out if I blurred too much.
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