Movement catalysts are those (often cross-cultural) workers willing to take a back seat and instead focus on finding, empowering, training and coaching indigenous leaders to lead movements. Finding indigenous leaders that will run with movement is what I want to focus on today. It is an integral process in the Discover phase of catalytic work. It can also be one of the most challenging actions to take as there are so many great potential leaders out there but we can’t focus on them all. When we focus on the wrong ones, we will fail to see movement leaders emerge and kingdom growth occur.
I’ve recently been reading more on blue ocean strategy that is prevalent in business coaching and actually am finding several of their paradigms helpful in considering catalytic movement work. I want to focus on one specific paradigm within their toolset though right now. It’s one that I think helps in this finding and focusing process (with a bit of obvious modification to fit in the movement and mission sphere). As an aside - if you are curious about blue ocean strategy, in short it claims that most businesses settle for the tried and true red ocean (or current market share) rather than branching out into the wild, unexplored blue ocean. This premise immediately intrigued me because all of the successful movements that I know of occur in the wild places unexplored by the modern church. If you are curious to read a bit more about this visit its core site at https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/.
Anyways that paradigm that I want to focus on right now is what they call the pioneer-migrator-settler map. In brief, as it relates to business strategy, their are settlers (products that target or imitate the current market), migrators (products or ideas that seek to improve what’s currently on offer) and pioneers (products and ideas that intentionally innovate and push the company into the wild, blue, unexplored ocean). I think this base idea is wildly helpful in creating a paradigm to find and identify movement leaders. It immediately resonated with my time spent trying to do this in field locations. So - I wanted to present a brief case study, shared through this pioneer-Migrator-settler lens and then start to build an understanding of what catalysts might do as they go out to find indigenous leaders to launch God movements.
The Settler
I’m going to go a bit in reverse order and start with the settler. In this case, the settler was someone I met very open to the idea of movements but never very willing to step out beyond his traditional leadership spaces. He was a traditional pastor in a national church and quite committed to those structures (even though he would often voice something different privately).
It was a relationship I was initially excited about as he was positioned to open up a population segment we hoped to engage because of his day job. So we started a partnership where I’d engage with him and coach and train him (and those around him who worked with him in his day job) in movement principles. Unfortunately it never took off quite as I would have hoped. He often disengaged from core movement principles (focusing on apologetics rather than gospel sowing, attractional church rather than simple church, centralizing leadership rather than spreading it out). Ultimately, he preferred to just connect people to me or others rather than engage in the movement oriented work himself.
As a pastor, I believe he found a degree of comfort that was hard to overcome and so found it easy to stay in this space. We still worked to inspire others and we would try to “do the things” ourselves but movement never really took off. It could have been that we were working in the wrong space or with the wrong population segment. But more likely it was because I was engaged with a settler who would dip their toes into the blue ocean but always swam back to the safety of the known.
The Migrator
The Migrator is an interesting case study in and of itself. To be quite honest I have zero regrets working and engaging with migrators. In fact I think they might be some of the most important links for seeing movement happen in reached cultures, cities and highly variable situations. At the very least - I’ve time and again seen migrators breathe new life into what I think were mostly dead spaces. If I could name any specific mistake, it would be not successfully leveraging them to find pioneers.
So who are these migrators? In short - they are leaders quite comfortable swimming in both waters (but often with a preference for the safety and security of traditional spaces if not for themselves for their family). This isn’t always the case though. Sometimes they are leaders that start out in the red ocean and just need some time, space and encouragement to swim out into the wild blue.
One migrator I walked with was able to convince the churches he walked with to directly baptize individuals (and not wait for a missionary to come and do it). Progress but not movement. Another migrator engaged what many considered to be an apostate church in a neighboring country and saw a number of discovery groups launched only to have them fold back into existing high church structures (but hopefully with renewed vision and passion for Jesus). A third is who I want to focus on for the remainder of this section. What he represents is the potential diamond in the Migrator stream.
This migrator existed initially in the red ocean space but worked to make what was red intentionally purple (and eventually blue). He himself caught the movement bug and started with his church. Lo and behold - many of his people caught it as well to varying degrees! He quickly found himself with a blend of traditional and movement oriented churches (around 40 at last count). Generational growth happened but it was small and contained to a handful of leaders and churches of varying styles.
About 18 months into our relationship a blue unexplored ocean did present itself and he engaged to the best of his ability but struggled as family and existing church structures limited his involvement. He has persevered though and is himself working as a movement catalyst in this wild blue ocean now on a soon-to-be full time basis.
God’s kingdom is moving and expanding through migrators and it’s well worth our time to pay attention to them.
The Pioneer
The pioneer is the category that is fully willing to dive into the deep end of the blue ocean and not look back. As each challenge rears its ugly head - the pioneer willing takes the risk of the wild, untamed blue ocean rather than the safety and security of what is known. Early on when he engaged the existing church and saw their disdain for the world around them he quickly moved to unreached locations. When he found a particular location that was incredibly excited to hear about Jesus, he chose to focus there. Rather than centralizing power and leadership to tightly, he chose to build teams and train new leaders and build a culture of multiplying and dispersing leadership. At each step he chose that which would lead deeper into the untamed and unknown rather than settling for what is easy.
And it’s worth saying that it’s not been easy. Scars definitely abound - but he’s now sitting with a growing school of fish taking over that wild blue ocean space. And not only that - they are finding new blue oceans to engage now.