Christopher Mason :: Friends blog

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Back we go to the series of posts on organic systems…

Not surprisingly as we move closer to a network structure, we will not only find ourselves closer to the structures of the NT people of God but also more aligned around the dynamics of Apostolic Genius. It is therefore critical to explore the nature and forms of networks. In doing so, we need to realize that this is closer to our truest expression of ecclesia, even though it might at first seem somewhat strange to us at first. In doing this we must realize that we explore things that relate not just to issues of reactivating missional church, but to much of what we experience in God’s world. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, the guru of network thinking says it this way..

Network thinking is poised to invade all domains of human activity and most fields of human inquiry. It is more than another useful perspective or tool. Networks are by their very nature the fabric of most complex systems, and nodes and links deeply infuse all strategies aimed at approaching our interlocked universe.”

In the literature networks come in basically three types :

• The chain or line network, as in a chain where people, goods, or information move along a line of separated contacts, and where end-to-end communication must travel through the intermediate nodes.


• The hub, star, or wheel network, as in a franchise or a cartel where the agents are tied to a central (but not hierarchical) node or actor, and must go through that node to communicate and coordinate with each other


• The all-channel or full-matrix network, as in a collaborative network of green groups and activists where everybody is independent but connected to everybody else.

According to Arquilla and Ronfeldt

Each node in the diagrams may refer to either an individual, a group, an organization, part of a group or organization, or even a nation-state. The nodes may be large or small, tightly or loosely coupled, and inclusive or exclusive in membership. They may look alike and engage in similar activities, or they may undertake a division of labor based on specialization. The boundaries of the network, or of any node included in it, may be well-defined, or they may be blurred and porous in relation to the outside environment. Many variations are possible.

It might be clear to see that of the three network types, why the all-channel form has traditionally been the most difficult to organize and sustain. This is so partly because it requires lots of communication. But it is this precisely this form of network that maximizes potential for collaborative undertakings without centralized organization. And this all-channel form is gaining new strength and legitimacy from the information revolution—for instance in open source programming and online business and networking. In networks of this kind, the organizational system generally tends to be flat (as opposed to hierarchical.) Also, in its purer form, there is no single, central leadership, command, or headquarters—no precise heart or head that can readily be identified. “The network as a whole (but not necessarily each node) has little or no hierarchy; there may be multiple leaders. Decision-making and operations are decentralized, allowing for local initiative and autonomy. Thus the design may sometimes appear headless and at other times many-headed.” The structure will tend to be comprised of small units or cells. However, the presence of “cells” does not necessarily mean a network exists—a hierarchy can also be made up of cell, as is the case with most churches with an active cell group program.. It is the way in which the cells organize and relate that makes them a network.

We’ll take this further next post.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheForgottenWays/~3/374476189/

I have to admit that I totally love Nelson Mandela. I do believe he is the greatest leader alive today and a remarkable example of grace. Time magazine recently did an article on him and his view of leadership. Interestingly he says that these are not principles but tactics. He is a man of principles but in terms of leadership he says it is all about tactics. Here are his eight principles…

1. Courage is not the absence of fear — it’s inspiring others to move beyond it


2. Lead from the front — but don’t leave your base behind


3. Lead from the back — and let others believe they are in front


4. Know your enemy — and learn about his favorite sport


5. Keep your friends close — and your rivals even closer


6. Appearances matter — and remember to smile


7. Nothing is black or white


8. Quitting is leading too

Read the whole article here.

BTW sorry that I have been tardy with posting at the moment. I am very, very, busy.

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Why does the gospel look to so many like a bowl of lima beans? (article by Mark Labberton taken from Christian Vision Project)……

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheForgottenWays/~3/367589949/

I have been part of the Presbyterian Global Fellowship’s conference on missional church (see personal blog) and one of the speakers was Mark Labberton. I had never heard of him, but I have to say that I think he was brilliant. I ran out to buy his book, The Dangerous Act of Worship, and was not disappointed. Here is a quote from p.71…

Our central lie is in the discrepancy between the language of worship and the actions of worship. We confess “Jesus is Lord” but only submit to the part of Christ’s authority that fits our grand personal designs, doesn’t cause pain, doesn’t disrupt the American dream, doesn’t draw us across ethnic and racial divisions, doesn’t add the pressure of too much guilt, doesn’t mean forgiving as we have been forgiven, doesn’t ask for more than a check to show compassion. We “sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” expressing our desire to know Jesus, but the Jesus we want to know is the sanitized Jesus that looks a lot like us when we think we are at our best. Despite God’s Word to the contrary, we think we can say that we love God and yet hate our neighbor, neglect the widow, forget the orphan, fail to visit the prisoner, ignore the oppressed. Its the sign of disordered love. When we do this, our worship becomes a lie to God.

–Mark Labberton, The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God’s Call to Justice (Downers Grove: IVP, 2007), 71

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheForgottenWays/~3/364875560/

Just an update on the books I have been working on. They will both be published at the end of this year. Check this out…

• The Forgotten Ways Handbook: This book is a very practical guide to applying The Forgotten Ways for activating missional movements and for remissionalizing the local church/organization. Each chapter contains a dejargonized, summary version of each element of mDNA, a set of suggested practices to embed these in the church. All this is built around adult learning models and group work. My friend and Forge colleague, Darryn Altclass, has added his insights into the deal. Published by Baker/Brazos

• reJESUS: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church: (co-written with my old co-conspirator, Michael Frost) This is a radicalizing book that aims at helping the church recalibrate itself around Jesus as the protoypal Christian. It is what I would call a missional Christology. And it is wild! Published by Hendrickson.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheForgottenWays/~3/363802733/

Why Your Faith Does Not Work: (Excepts from The Trouble with Paris)

She looked like a girl who had it all. She was strikingly beautiful, confident, and hip. Half the guys in the room were looking at her, and all the girls in the room wanted to be her. She had ticked all the boxes: she was deeply involved in her church, had a high-paying job, travelled all over the world, and had a social life most of us would be jealous of with a bevy of male suitors. Yet for her this meant nothing.

She looked me square in the eye with pain in her face and told me, “I was promised an awesome life!” I was immediately thrown. This girl had everything that society tells us will make us happy. Yet as I listened to the reality of her life, I realized nothing could be further from the truth. Behind the glamorous exterior was a person who was struggling, who was unsure of who she was, who struggled with feelings of depression and with the dissatisfaction of constantly feeling as if she needed more. Her life was in limbo, and she was constantly waiting for this awesome life to turn up, yet it never came. She had finally come to the realization that she was miserable, and she felt very, very, ripped off.

This is a story that can be heard among those who have left the Christian faith because it didn’t deliver them the perfect life they believed they were promised. It can also be heard in the dissatisfaction and frustrations of those who still have faith. And finally, it can be heard in those who never have had faith yet have invested all of their hope in the fact that one day the perfect future will arrive. If we are to live lives of meaning, satisfaction, and happiness, it is essential that we understand what effects our culture has on our quality of life and quality of faith. Let’s begin with faith.

Something Is Eating Your Faith

Throughout the developed Western world, a corrosive epidemic is eating away at the faith lives of Christians. It assails us in our darkest moments; it comes to us at three o’clock in the morning when we can’t sleep. It confronts us at every corner, three to ten thousand times a day. It whispers to our hearts that “we’ve got it wrong,” that our faith should not be in Jesus Christ of Nazareth but in something else. In this context your faith is getting torn apart and most likely will not survive. Contrary to popular belief, you and your friends probably won’t lose your faith because of sex, drugs, or doubt but for a much more insidious reason. Sure, you can fight it, you can think, It won’t be me, but how do you fight an enemy you can’t name, an opponent you can’t see?

The thing that will eat away at your faith, make it impotent, and finally kill it off cannot easily be named. It is a framework, a formation system, an entire worldview. It tells us how to live and how to act. It speaks to our sense of identity. It shapes our personality. It tells us what to love, what to commit to, and what to have hope in. It is a virus that eats our faith from the inside out. This virus is the allure of the hyperreal world.

If you want to blame someone or something for your life not ending up as wonderfully as you were led to believe it would, a good place to start is the cultural phenomenon called hyperreality. The combination of a hyper consumer culture, mass media, and rampant individualism has created a world of hyperreality. What is hyperreality? It’s a term I learned from a French guy named Jean Baudrillard. He was a twentieth-century philosopher who took a trip across America, visiting places like Las Vegas and Disneyland. He said that our culture had become hyperreal, meaning that we could now have things that were even better than the real thing. The media-drenched world in which we live has overextended our expectations of life.

Following are some examples of hyperreality:

• A fairly pretty girl works as a model to support her studies. She does a photo shoot for a fashion magazine. The photographer skillfully uses wardrobe, lighting, and makeup during the shoot. After the shoot, computers are used to take away the model’s imperfections and to improve her overall look. The magazine hits the newsstands, and through the magic of technology, a fairly pretty girl has been turned into a stunningly beautiful cover star. Thousands of women buy the magazine and wonder why they cannot be as beautiful and glamorous as the model on the cover, not realizing that if they walked past the actual model in the street, they would not even notice her.


• A man drives to work every day past a billboard advertising vacations on an idyllic Pacific island. As he works in his stressful office job, he fantasizes about relaxing on the white beaches under the palm trees of the beautiful Pacific paradise he sees on the billboard. The man purchases a two-week vacation on the island. Upon arrival the man discovers that for most of the year it rains. He tries swimming only to find that the coral cuts up his feet and that he has to be careful not to contract malaria from the mosquitoes on the island. The man spends most of his vacation watching satellite TV in his resort room.


• A group of friends share a house. Each week they watch a situation comedy about a group of friends who share a house as well. As they watch, each person wonders to why they cannot be as close and as happy as the characters in the sitcom. In real life the cast of actors cannot stand each other.

Hyperreality means that often we cannot tell the difference between what advertising tells us about products, places, and people and what they are like in the real world. In the rush to sell us things, corporations have sacrificed reality; truth telling is gone. Sociologist Krishan Kumar explains :

“Our world has become so saturated with images and symbols that a new “electronic reality” has been created, whose effect is to obliterate any sense of an objective reality lying behind the images and symbols. In this “simulated” world, images become objects, rather than reflecting them; reality becomes hyper-reality. In hyper-reality it is no longer possible to distinguish the imaginary from the real . . . the true from the false.1”

An ad by the New York tourism board is not going to tell us about the street crime, high prices, pollution, and poverty we would find in the city. Rather, they are going to show us the New York we know from countless movies and TV shows like Seinfeld, Sex in the City, and Friends. And if they are smart, they will use the Frank Sinatra song “New York, New York” to top it all off. After seeing an advertisement for New York and experiencing New York, we would be left scratching our heads and asking, “Which is the real New York-the metropolis we know from our years of watching popular culture or the actual city situated on the East Coast?” We would have confused the symbol (the popular culture imagined New York) with the real city. Of course, the popular Hollywood version of New York would be the more attractive one. This is hyperreality. It gives us a world of symbols that are detached from the reality of what they are supposed to be symbolizing and appear more attractive than the original objects they are representing.

From The Trouble With Paris: Following Jesus in a World of Plastic Promises. Mark Sayers. Thomas Nelson. 2008

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheForgottenWays/~3/361482496/

Mission in the West can be difficult, it is new uncharted terrain. Two of the great errors that we can make as we birth and nurture missional-incarnational movements, is to assume that we understand and know the context in which we incarnate, and secondly assume that we and the people that we lead have not been compromised by the culture in which we live. That is why the following resource is so needed.

My good friend and colleague Mark Sayers has just released his much anticipated book The Trouble with Paris: Following Jesus in a World of Plastic Promises. The book wrestles with the questions of why so many people in the West struggle to come to faith, and why so many Christians end up leaving their faith, particularly young adults. Mark points the finger at the way that consumer culture creates a sexy, photo-shopped, mirage-like version of reality (a hyperreality) that is supposedly only one purchase away, which has a corrosive effect upon faith and ends up directly competing with the kingdom of God.

Mark has managed to write a book which has real intellectual clout yet is also readable and approachable. It has picked up praise from everyone from Shane Claiborne to John Ortberg, and is creating quite a stir amongst young adults back in Australia.

There is a reading guide for people going through the book in groups that you can download for free here

An essential, timely and prophetic resource for missional leaders!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheForgottenWays/~3/360048952/

What eventually became known as DOVE Christian Fellowship International (DCFI) had its roots in a bible study involving young people coming to faith in the Jesus People phenomenon in the early 1970s. Larry Kreider, the leader of the group had became increasingly frustrated with the cultural mismatch of the prevailing church and the people they were reaching, and so began to develop what he called “an underground church model.” Gaining inspiration from the house churches in the book of Acts and around the world, they structured themselves in as a movement that met regularly in cells across the city and so began the story of DCFI. When the new movement officially started in 1980 there were 25 people meeting in one house church. By adopting the networked structures of Apostolic Genius, the movement had swelled to about 2500 believers meeting in over 125 cell groups all over south-central Pennsylvania by 1992. During this period they also began planting churches in Scotland, Brazil, Kenya, and New Zealand.

In spite of this significant growth, they felt that they had reached a growth barrier because they had become somewhat reliant on centralized structures to manage the growth and they decided that they “needed to adjust our church government and give the church away.” They felt that the vision God had given them was “to build a relationship with Jesus, with one another, and reach the world from house to house, city to city and nation to nation,” and this simply could not be fulfilled with their prevailing church structure at the time. And so they self-consciously began to transition into what they called an “apostolic movement.” Unlike a denomination or association of churches, which confers ordination and provides general accountability to church leaders through centralized structure, they conceived an “apostolic movement” as being a networked family of churches with a common focus minus the restrictive structures of a denomination.

They soon found that “apostolic ministry provided a safe environment for congregations and ministries to flourish and reproduce because the new model created space for growth by emphasizing leadership through relationship and influence rather than hands-on-management.” As a cell-based church planting movement, they soon recognized the strategic need to train church planters and leaders with a missionary heart and spirit. They felt called to “mobilize and empower God’s people (individuals, families, cells and congregations) at the grass roots level to fulfil His purposes. Every cell group should have a vision to plant new cells. Every church should have a God-given vision to plant new churches.” The new network structure combined with the apostolic movement ethos and leadership has allowed them to grow from the initial 8 congregations to around 100 networks involving exponentially more people in fifteen countries around the world.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheForgottenWays/~3/356739260/

If Apostolic Genius expresses itself in a movement ethos, it forms itself around a network structure. And once again this tends to be very different to what we have come to expect from our general concept of church. When we use the word “church” it is very hard to get some kind of building out of our minds. But this is not the way that phenomenal expressions of Christian movements experience it. This is due partly to the fact that the early church didn’t have such buildings and the Chinese had all their church buildings taken away from them. But it is also because buildings are not what is meant in any of the theological images of church in the Scriptures. Since Constantine it seems that we have simply got it all mixed up. On comparison, the Chinese church is much closer to what the New Testament intends, as well as more consistent with the New Testament experience, of church. It is we who are inconsistent in this regard—it’s that simple. So what do networks look like?

Liquid vs. Solid church

Peter Ward has written an excellent book exploring the theological, ecclesiological, as well as sociological dimensions of networks. Following Zygmunt Bauman’s brilliant analysis of culture in terms of liquid and solid modernity, he uses the term liquid church to describe the essence of what a truly networked church would look like; a church responsive to that increasing fluid dimension of our culture which Bauman called liquid modernity. He contrasts liquid church with what he calls ‘solid church.’ To simplify this, solid church is roughly equivalent to what I have here described as institutional church. Because of the continuing existence of solid modernity he does not counsel the total abandonment of solid church, but he does suggest that it is one of decreasing effectiveness. Solid church is related to solid modernity. And solid church has generally mutated from its original basis into becoming communities of heritage (that embody the inherited tradition), communities of refuge (a safe place from the world,) and communities of nostalgia (live in past successes). He suggests that almost all manifestations of solid church fall into one or more of these categories.

He says that “the mutation of solid church into heritage, refuge, and nostalgic communities has seriously decreased its ability to engage in genuine mission in liquid modernity.” This is so because the church finds itself increasingly stranded from its surrounding culture. He remarks that this has seriously damaged the gospel genetic code of the church because the church cannot truly be and become itself in such a condition. Solid church has mutated the gospel code because it has by and large ignored cultural change and found itself changed in ways that are less than planned or perfect. In catering to the religious needs of some (largely the insiders) it has as a consequence failed to respond to the wider spiritual hunger of not-yet-Christians. What is more, “the mutant genetic code within these kinds of churches means that they are a poor starting point for a new kind of church that connects with the flow of spiritual hunger evident in our societies.” This highlights the need to engage liquid modernity with a liquid form of church. Liquid church is essential because it takes the present culture seriously and seeks to express the fullness of the Christian gospel within that culture. The defining element of this is church as a living, adaptive, network highly responsive to the deep spiritual needs and hunger expressed in surrounding society.

Make no mistake; liquid church as Ward defines it is theologically much closer to the conception of ‘church’ advocated in the New Testament teachings. Not only because it is missional and responsive to the surrounding context, not only because it is structurally more consistent with biblical ecclesiology, and because it takes the twin doctrines of what it means to be “in Christ“ and the ‘body of Christ “ with utmost seriousness and reworks them in light of the missional situation. It is clear that the church in Corinth was distinctly different in structure and ethos than the church in Jerusalem and yet they were both legitimate expression expressions of the Body of Christ. There is little by way of uniformity of structure in the NT church.

The reality of the church is to be found only “in Christ”. “Christ is our origin and our truth. To be a Christian is to be joined to Christ and to be joined to Christ is to be joined to his church.” This is what constitutes the body of Christ. It is this primal connection with Jesus that defines what it means to be a Christian and to be in his church. How this expresses itself will depend largely on missional context. In a liquid culture, Ward says we need a liquid form of church that can express truly what it means to be “in Christ.”

He comments….“To be joined to Christ is to be joined to the body of Christ. This corporate and corporeal expression of Christ is fundamental to any theology of the church. The idea of the body of Christ goes very deep into people’s minds. Yet it is worth reflecting on how we express this truth, for to say that the body of Christ is the church is not the same as saying that the church is the body of Christ. The implication of my reading of Paul’s theology is that we should place significantly more emphasis upon the way our connection to Christ makes us part of the body, rather than the other way around.”

Our problem it seems is that we too quickly identify the concrete-historical expressions of church as the body of Christ. And while there is a truth to this, for the church is the body of Christ, perhaps the greater truth is that the body of Christ is the church. When we say that the church is the body of Christ, it claims a certain authority for a particular expression of church. To say that the body of Christ is the church is to open up possibilities as to how it might express itself. This doesn’t just localize it to one particular expression of church. The body can express itself in many different ways and forms. The distinction is paradigmatic. To restate it in these terms enables us to escape the monopolizing grip that the institutional image of church holds over our theological imaginations and allows us to undertake a journey of re-imagining what it means to be God’s people in our own day and in our own situations..

So how can liquid church express itself? Ward points out that all liquids are characterized by flow. In contrast, solids are located and firm. Shape or solidity, to use Bauman again, is the equivalent of “fixing space” and “binding time” and therefore there is no need for change or movement. However, if we are to envisage a liquid church, then like liquids themselves, movement and change must be part of its basic characteristic. “We need to let go of a static model of church that is based primarily on congregation, programs, and buildings. In its place we need to develop a notion of Christian community, worship, mission, and organization which, like the NT ecclesia, is more flexible, adaptive, and responsive to change.” Rather than the later centralist and more ‘solid’ hierarchical structure of the later church, when we look at the structures of the NT church we can observe the more fluid network.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheForgottenWays/~3/353829052/

Guys, I am at the Christian Associates staff meeting in Hungary (I am a member of the leadership team) and we have had Greg Boyd as our speaker.  I have to say that he is one of the finest Theologian-Prophet-Preachers I have heard.  His stuff on the Kingdom of God is superb.  I thought I should share him with you.  Do yourself a favor, go to the ITunes store, search for podcasts by “Christian Associates” and download the podcasts (also the one by the magnificent Debra) and tune in.  You can also sample some of Greg’s (sometimes controversial) writings here.