Missional Tribe

Greetings! And welcome to the reborn Missional Tribe site.

“futuristguy” here to talk a bit about this pre-Easter resurrection. I’ve served as historian/archivist for several non-profits and networks over the years, partly because I am a collector. (Okay, I admit it – I Collect Stuff.) And partly because I’m … well … a futurist! As someone interested in using tools of “strategic foresight,” it’s my perspective that understanding our possible futures depends on what’s in our historical DNA. So I thought it’d be appropriate in this post to bring things up to date a bit, for those who knew us from our previous M.T. site – which, ironically, is now empty because The Insidious Spammers attacked, wanting to sell all of us their Tiffany knock-offs, watches, and porn.

That first launch site ended up being more than we could handle … or, should I say, more than our brave administrator, The Then-Anonymous-and-Mysterious Brother Maynard, could handle. We were forced to implode in order to save the site for the future. (Sidenote: The Obi-Wan Implosion Option worked for Luke Skywalker. Hopefully it worked for us, too, preserving the work force and our force at work.)

So here we are in the midst of Lent ~ March 2011 ~ and, after discussions off and on amongst the M.T. Instigators since at least Epiphany, it seems time to relaunch Missional Tribe as a blog site. We seven ’Gators caught up during a recent conference call, and sensed the same overall needs were present within the online “conversation” about missional living in a post-Christendom era. That hadn’t changed in the year or so since we folded our M.T. #1 site.

If anything, the need for civil, serious, and slower dialogue has clarified and intensified. Since over three years ago when the seven of us connected, the general environment of the so-called “conversation” seems to have degenerated from real dialogues to diatribes. The level of inflammatory rhetoric seems to have increased on the snark-o-meter. The level of serious grappling with the topics and perhaps even learning from other blog commenters seems to have decreased on the co-sojourn-ometer. The drivenness for Christian “celebrityship” seems to have continued on the how-now-kowtow-ometer.

Is it ironic that a Tribe wants to squelch diatribes?

Is it okay that we’re disgusted with the negative tone and ill timing of so many incendiary dialogues?

Is it time for an alternative form of collaboration and investigation?

Anyway, we all feel we still have constructive things to say about missional living and about the forward movement of new collaborations, but none of us has the time to blog regularly. Maybe life circumstances lock us into doing something small and local in the Kingdom – but at least doing something. Maybe big isn’t better. Maybe there needs to be a place for people like us who can’t maintain the pace that goes on in some of the other online spaces. Maybe M.T. is meant to no longer be empty …

Next: A retrospective of FAQs about Missional Tribe’s origins, and after that, a short version of its history.