Alan Roxburgh and Roy Searle, Forming Communities of Hope in the Great Unraveling: Leadership in a Changing World. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books (paperback), 2025. 214 pp.
Forming Communities of Hope attempts to speak broadly to recent shifts in Western Christianity. In previous works, Alan Roxburgh has teamed up with Fred Romanuk or Mark Branson to examine missional church leadership. His collaborator for this volume is Roy Searle, an English church leader keenly familiar with major shifts in church thinking across England and the UK. Together, they seek a new paradigm for construing church leadership.
The premise of Forming Communities is that the Western world is living through a period of enormous disruption and that the changes currently underway are immense and irreversible. These changes are having a significant impact on Western churches, resulting in an unraveling. That so many church leaders feel a lack of competence and confidence in the face of these forces is entirely predictable and understandable, they say.
The authors repeatedly state that “we’re in a place we’ve never been before” (6-8 and elsewhere). They describe their belief that our sustaining stories and methods no longer hold credence. The only healthy way forward, they argue, is to embrace the dissonance of the moment and allow God to reshape God’s people for a new season of life and mission. But this is unlikely, they suggest, without new approaches to leadership.
The book contains four sections: (1) a short introduction to the problem, (2) stories of God’s people who had to navigate similarly difficult and dark times, (3) suggested practices for leaders, and (4) the authors’ perspectives on what it takes to lead in this moment.
The fourth and final section is full of helpful thoughts and anecdotes. For example, they suggest that an important work of missional church leaders is to fight loneliness by building resilient communities. They write, “We have produced, in the language of T. S. Eliot, a wasteland in which, as caring pastors, we try to shore up spaces of sanity for our people. But it hasn’t worked” (100).
That leaders must consciously choose to dwell in their local communities and among their people is another important thought. “The modern story has colonized us with the lie that social mobility provides freedom, whereas dwelling means failure and loss of status” (121). Knowing, they suggest, requires relationships, and this is impossible without paying closer attention to the local than to the global.
While Roxburgh and Searle plant some wise signposts for Christian leaders, especially in the final section, the book feels disjointed. It reads like an off-the-cuff series of observations rather than a thoughtful product of careful research. The authors repeat many points and assume their foundational arguments rather than proving them. They often make strong assertions (such as at the end of a paragraph on page 179, “This is the task of leadership”) without enough definition. For example, they state (20), “The Euro-tribal churches are lost in the fog of it all.” They may expect the reader to nod in agreement, but they offer no nuance and little to support such a claim. These kinds of black-and-white statements may not need much explanation if one is familiar with Roxburgh’s books or with the Pioneering or Fresh Expressions movement in the UK. Still, new readers may struggle to follow such statements. Sometimes, they settle for making bold claims instead of rigorously building their case. I was also confused about why the authors footnote some statements but leave others without documentation. For example, on page 20, they present claims as interpretations of the current disruption, yet they offer no evidence to support them. Or on page 68, they frankly state, “we are at a tipping point where full-time, professional clergy are about to disappear.” Based on what evidence aside from their feelings? Or on page 14, they state that “Brooks calls [this] a conceptual blindness.” Who is Brooks, and where does he say this? I could go on, but you get the point. The authors lack thoroughness in their approach and argumentation.
Roxburgh and Searle have not missed the mark in their advice for church leaders. Indeed, I have taken several important notes from the book for my personal reflection. I wish they had built a stronger case for their sage words of wisdom.
