Rethinking Perspective

Last week our Sunday morning pastor announced that heard God tell him that he needed to go into another ministry during other half of his carrier. If God spoke and someone listened and responded how can the results be bad. I know that God is doing something now. I also know that he hasn’t told me what any of the details are yet.

It was said some time ago that we must change our die. We have heard God speak about with he wanted done. In some ways we have made great strides to accomplish the vision that God had laid out for our body. In other places we have done nothing but remain complacent and stagnant. Maybe the only way to make us into one united vision is to prune off the dead branches. This time I am sure that when we complete the pruning that there will be something left. This time there will be a great movement as the old passes away and a new vision for the kingdom of God is executed.

Now, all that I long for is that the dead and lifeless gets taken down as soon as possible. It is time to get down to business. This morning on the drive to the Sunday morning gathering the following lyrics came to mind as I shuffled through the ipod for the song:

“Let’s get down to business
I don’t got no time to play around with this?
Must be a circus in town, let’s shut the shit down
On these clowns, can I get a witness?”
- Eminem from business

When I got there we sang:
“Not our will but yours be done. Come and change us.”
Wow. I hope that we really mean that today. I am ready. Come change us.

So Beth told me a story about how she sang the following lyrics in a musical sometime in the 70’s. She assures me that it was meant to be satire at the time.

Sing to the tune of “A Mighty Fortress is our God”
(Please make clear it’s satire…)

A might fortress is our church
A bulwark never failing
Against the changing neighborhood
Where sin is all-prevailing
Around us are the slums
The drunks and pimps and bums
The nice folk had to move
But we return to prove
We won’t give up our fortress

If we let those outside in here
They’d make the place a shambles
You can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear
Or gather grapes from brambles
Your sheep protect the fold
Our fortress we will hold
‘Gainst those of darker skin
The goats will not get in
We won’t give up our fortress

I am just glad that when we talk about church we are not talking about those in the building. I am glad that we have stopped trying to put others into the building so that they might be…(something else I guess) . I am glad that we see church as an activity that happens outside the walls of any building. I am glad that we see the mission of God as relationship before anything else.

So I got an email from a very old friend of mine. It appears that her boyfriend is dying of cancer. She asked if anyone could put up a website for him, so I did. Click this image and check it out.

So as many of you may or may not know i have been reading quite a bit in the last few moths. In fact I have been reading more now than I ever have. I suppose their are several reasons for this. For the first time in my life since kindergarten I have been out of school for and entire year. So now that I can direct my attention towards reading materials that are not ‘required reading’ I have done just that. So I put together a list of books I have read and books I hope to read soon. I went a little crazy with my new linking tool along the way.

Books I have recently read:

• The Emerging Church by Dan Kimball
• Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality by Donald Miller
• Practitioners: Voices Within the Emerging Church
• A New Kind of Christian: A Tale of Two Friends on a Spiritual Journey by Brian McLaren
• Preaching Re-Imagined by Doug Pagitt
• Faith of My Fathers by Chris Seay
• The Secret Message of Jesus : Uncovering the Truth that Could Change Everything by Brian McLaren
• Velvet Elvis : Repainting the Christian Faith by Rob Bell

Currently Reading:

• The Last Word and the Word after That : A Tale of Faith, Doubt, and a New Kind of Christianity by Brian McLaren

Those I hope to read this summer:

• The Complex Christ : Signs of Emergence in the Urban Church by Kester Brewin
• How Movies Helped Save My Soul: Finding Spiritual Fingerprints in Culturally Significant Films by Gareth Higgins
• Misquoting Jesus : The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D. Ehrman
• Making Sense of Church: Eavesdropping on Emerging Conversations About God, Community, and Culture by Spencer Burke, Colleen Pepper
• Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens by Neil Cole
• The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21 Century Church by Michael Frost, Alan Hirsch

And lots more…

So what is on your reading list? What am I missing?

Community as a scale free network:

What if the buildings are not the church nor are the people inside the church? What if the church is the interconnectivity between like-minded believers? What if our churchness could be gagged by the amount of unification and organization we possessed as clusters of believers? What if as we began to more closely identify with the gospel we set up small groups of believers that were centered around specific actions that the gospel called us into?

The realization of a new model:
One of the best models that I have seen for what is becoming a new dynamic in community formation is the example of a scale-free network. When researchers went out to map out the way people and pages were linked together in the then newly formed world wide web they found that instead of randomness,

“…a type of dynamic, self-determining, relational order with an uneven distribution of links [was present]. They christened their network discovery a ‘Scale-Fee Network’”

Clusters are the network of people we are connected to that are all involved or interested in diving deeper into a specific calling of the kingdom of God. In essence our churches become our networks (or our networks become our churches not sure witch).

So let me try to create some sort of framework for our emerging culture, who is looking for ways to experience the dynamic ebb and flow of the kingdom of God in everyday community. Gone are they days when all decisions, missions, and thought had to be passed through appointed ministry leaders in a pyramid shaped hierarchal system. Networks of people form in clusters. When a group of people becomes interested, motivated or lead by the spirit they join together. They form a cluster around that activity. A single person may be part of many different clusters. A single person can be connected to a cluster for a long or a short period of time. One person or one cluster can be connected to, as may other clusters as is necessary at that particular point in time.

Power Structures:
Because we now see ourselves as people who are part of clusters and not the bottom rungs of a hierarchal command ladder, our leadership styles change. Dwight Friesen looks at scale-free network situations in order to envision the types of communities and power structures that are created within this next wave of revival.

“To understand churches as Christ-clusters is to be immersed in a radical fluidity. Churches can no longer be seen as “once for all” organizational structures to which people come, attend or join in any formal sense. In this new paradigm, they become co-created relational networks centered in Jesus Christ.”

Leadership is different in this new cluster model. Positions of leadership are not given so much as they are discovered. Each topic of conversation, mission, exploration and community is a group-determined hub that gathers people. People gravitate towards these community hubs because they crave the connections provided. Friesen goes on to state that,

“Whereas leadership within the institutional church relied in part, on titles,
positions and hierarchy to maintain its authority, the scale-free kingdom self- organizes around hubs that give away their authority. Christ-clusters are formed around hubs which provide nodes with the connections they crave.”

In this networked model churches will need to grow, change and adapt. In an article for relevant magazine Andrew Jones talked about how influence and growth occur,

[Communities of Faith are] “not a centralized network but neither is it a distributed network that hands out power equally. There are hubs that attract more links than others, which enable these clusters of nodes to grow exponentially large and influential.”

So who cares right?
Here is what has happened to me over the last few weeks that I have been thinking about this concept. First, I realized that there is no man to fight against. Second, taking even small actions in the direction of Jesus and rallying community members to partake is the main reason I exist. Third, I am bound by no structure other than the ones I have created.

Sources:
Dwight Friesen
“Scale-Free Networks as a Structural Hermeneutic for Relational Ecclesiology” (pdf version; file size= 796KB) »

Andrew Jones
http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god_article.php?id=7041