We have named our various ministries “platforms” as we seek to embody Trinity’s model of divesting, mutual reciprocity. Our core leadership group understands that their unique role is not to perform on the platform, but to “set the stage – that is, to create a place where people are willing and able to innovate time and again” (Hill, et al. 2014, Loc 312). We often host creative weekends where our emerging leadership is provided space to “unleash thinking and attitudes” (Loc 1575). By focusing on the creative fringes, our crowdfunding platform is designed to foster “adaptive buffering” (Hickman 2010, 50) through experimentation as we provide them technical tools to create projects and fundraise to completion. We are collaborating not only with those directly within our sphere of influence, but all who share the vision to create shared cultural artifacts in Slavic culture as we together imagine “a world as it is and the world as it should or might ideally be” (Schuyler 2016, 169).
As an emerging international missional community, we don’t consider believers as members who are ‘in or out’. We, as well as our friends invite emerging leaders to our spiritual formation weekends who display the common interest in engaging culture outside of Christendom structures.
Divesting of my leadership role and influence has not been an easy process for me but now bearing fruit and inward joy as we see fresh vision and initiation among a leadership group which overseas a wider volunteer base. I function now as the person responsible to “create a context in which others can collectively do the work of innovation” (Hill, et al. 1389).