Category Archives: Revitalization

Remixing Leadership: A Shared Mode

Circuit riders, traveling great distances across the frontier and overseeing multiple communities, had to employ a leadership strategy that was shared, relational, decentralized, and self-organized. Their approach has implications for the network society today.   

Part Three – Reimagining The Parish

Bringing back the circuit rider for a new missional frontier requires us to rethink what we mean by “parish.” If the world is truly our parish, how do we re-envision what a circuit might look like? In the previous post, I described how digitality creates a new kind of space and makes possible new formsContinue reading “Part Three – Reimagining The Parish”

Bring Back the Circuit Rider

Part Two – “Digital Circuits and Riding the Flows“             The early circuit riders crisscrossed wide swaths of terrain on horseback. 21st century circuit riders are traveling a new global mission field accessed through internet connected screens.             In Fresh Expressions in a Digital Age: How the Church Can Prepare for a Post Pandemic World,Continue reading “Bring Back the Circuit Rider”

Bring Back the Circuit Rider

Part 1 “The Lost Genius of Early Methodism” In A Field Guide to Methodist Fresh Expressions, I suggested we need to rethink and reemploy the tradition of the circuit rider.[1] In response to the missional imperative, John Wesley, and the early Methodists in eighteenth century Britain innovated the practice of traveling place to place toContinue reading “Bring Back the Circuit Rider”