Missional Renaissance Leadership Community

Yesterday was the first day of a two-year Leadership Community called, Missional Renaissance Leadership Community. This LC is comprised of leaders from ten cities who have come together to accellerate their learnings and mission through cross-domain cooperation. Reggie McNeal (author of The Present Future, Practicing Greatness, etc) and I have been working on pulling this group together for around 6 months and we really like the folks that are in the room and we feel humbled by their commitment and achivements thus far. The city teams ideally are comprised of the senior pastor who serves as the invitor, business leaders, city officials, heads of major non-profits. This group has two CEOs of major corporations, the executive director of United Way, the police chief from a major mid-west city, school board members etc.

Leadership Communities are designed around three realities--what is, what could be and what will be so all of our exercises are designed to produce creative, cross-domain (domains being channels of influence in a community--business, arts & media, education, church, etc) thinking recognizing that it is at the intersection of domains that the best ideas will emerge.

Got to run to get to day 2 but our first exercise was called, "Finding Yourself in the Picture." Renaissance artist would often paint their patrons and themselves in a painting along with the other characters. So using 24 pictures each city had to describe which picture best described their city and how the different domains were working in the city. The creativity and interpretation was just great.