Interconnectivity Infrastructure of a Faith Community (part 1)
I have been reading a bit lately about how the kingdom could be/already is structured in such a way that we begin to rethink some of our previous conceptions about how who/where the church is, and what is the role of the Sprit of God. So I am starting a series of posts to try and work through some of my thoughts and impulses on what the future/current kingdom looks like through my lens of perception.
God Spoke:
Over the past year several people in my community of faith have had direct visions of what the kingdom of God may have for us as we journey further down the path. First, Jon has a series of posts about a three-point structure PEZ. Liz has also created an image and many pages of notes in her book about how many different communities of faith need to be linked together. Also, during this year through large group prayer God had directly articulated his vision. Now we must start to figure out how to put some more of this vision into practice.
Needs and Next steps:
We need enhanced community. We need an environment that encourages deep exploration into the word of God, and into the sprit of God so that we can gain better understandings about our place in God’s story than we currently have. We need unification. We need different organizational structures. We must be willing to part with our old practices and views despite the difficulty and begin to embrace what God wants to do with us next. We must look for better questions and not better answers.
Changing Landscape:
The landscape of our culture is changing. Many have looked at the recent societal changes that have taking place in the web with the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies and the way they have changed the way we think about our relationships and social structures and noticed ties to the way the kingdom is becoming more fully realized at this point in history.
“Emerging Church 2.0 might be those emerging churches that are shaped by new media values rather than old media. They write blog posts rather than articles, PDFs rather than books, start churches without buildings, and lack a vertically hierarchical leadership structure. Hierarchy is modular and dynamic, rather than vertical and static. I am not talking about cyberchurches that migrate to the web. I am talking about alternative faith communities that emerge online and then seek physical meetings, new aggregations of believers that connect with each other and the world through the complex networks that make up their World 2.0”
-Andrew Jones
Question and Pray
What do some of these structures that we have created tell us about how we work as a community? How does this change the way we need to organize ourselves? What does this mean about the way we think? How does this change they way God will interact with us? I hope this series of posts will help to bring a more fully articulated picture of what God wants to do with us. Please, pray, consider, and comment. If this vision is going to start to cluster it needs many voices.
29 May 2006 Rob
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I’ve read this post several times. There is so much to ponder here. I think the most intersesting parts for discussion are the “Needs and Next Steps” (where each sentence you wrote could be a thesis statement for a dissertation) and “Questions and Pray”.
I’d love to have a more in-depth discussion about where you think God is going with “church”, especially with regards to how the concept of “church” might be different for different cultures/communities across the globe and even withing the US, within our own state, and within our communities here. And I suppose that the final question along that same train of thought would be - Do you think God has a different concept of “church” for individuals - or, its antithesis - that we have a different concept of “church” as individuals and that God changes the way He relates to us based on our concept of that? If God is a constant, what is it we can glean from the Bible that tells us how “church” should be defined in light of a constantly-changing culture? Likewise, if culture is constantly in flux, but the Bible and God are constant, how do we take what the Bible says about church and relate it to our present culture in America, the culture in California, the culture in our neighborhood…AND the culture in Asia and Africa and South America? “Church” everywhere is different, reflecting our Creator.
I think the idea of breaking out of the mold of the old definition of “church” is powerful, but most especially and most specifically with regards to our present generation in America. It’s hard to see outside of our own culture. If I just look at the definition of what I seek in “church” for myself, I can say the following: 1) I attend “church” in the traditional sense because I think God commands it. 2) In looking for a “church” I look for something “real” where I feel like the Holy Spirit is present, or is at least allowed to be present. I’ve dropped to the 3rd and 4th conditions, of having community and outreach, as it seems that so few “churches” fulfill that need in my own life. I think THAT is mainly an issue of American culture, my own life story, and a gross breakdown in the values that God originally planned.
So I guess what it comes to there is, do we try to change our culture or do we try to work within the confines of it? If our culture is not what God intended for us, is it best to live (and worship) in a different community/cutlure that better defines God’s intentions, or is it best to try to live (and worship) in a cutlure that has gone beyond God’s intentions? If we start with the premise that we can’t change culture, how can we better-meet the culture that we’ve created (or that has been created for us) when we are so much a part of that cutlure? Then again, perhaps you’re starting from the premise that our culture is simply changed from what it once was, and that it is not necessarily contrary to God’s Plan for us. In that case, it would make sense that as culture changes, “church” would change with it. And then there’s the idea that even if God is not pleased with the direction of culture (and here, I mean American culture in CA), we are to work within our culture to overcome it (both the aspects of our cutlure that are not in God’s Plan and the old definition of “church”)…in the sense that we create an outlet for a real connection to God and to people who believe in God. But what exactly does that look like? There is just so much to chew on here that it’s almost impossible to post a comment that will suffice.
Maybe, the way church looks is can be different depending on the culture the church is submersed in. Jesus (and later Paul) definitely addressed the cultural issues of their time. They also did a lot of pointing out where the kingdom of God needed to suppress cultural norms.
So to attempt to answer one on of your questions, is that maybe the church both transforms the culture that it lives in and then at the same time transcends parts of the culture where the message of God is subverted by cultural ideals.
Maybe our job in the kingdom of God is to be well informed spiritual tour guides so that we are able to react to our culture. Maybe our place is to walk the earth and point out what the spirit of God is doing when we see it, and also to transform our current culture when we see that it is out of line with God’s plan such as your example about community and serving our fellow man (outreach).
Maybe how this will work in regards to changing with the landscape of culture is that we stop creating Christian sub-cultures that ignore our cultural surroundings and start to look for ways that the message of God exists in our cultural surroundings or needs to exist there. Where our culture is missing God, it is our job to put him there. We help others recognize what they are doing that is in line with God’s plan when it is happening.
[…] More of what we talked about in our converstaions (or related anyway) can be found here and here […]
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