This essay was published in 2012 as part of the CHURCH collection. Some of the ideas here are still fresh in some places. Still in other places, they are being tried. We have a church that has become a neighborhood hub for a small town market and is now growing. We have over 90 small missional communities with over 1,000 participating in regular life and worship. Some are identity specific others are oriented around ministry. Given the recent discussion about the massive number of church closing in the US and the transfer of those resource dollars being undirected, I thought ideas about new commons building, new space, and new mission might be interesting to come back to.
“When the old way of seeing was displaced, a hollowness came into
architecture. Our buildings
show a constant effort to fill that void, to recapture that sense of life which
was once to be found
in any house or shed. Yet the sense of place is not to be recovered through any
attitude, device,
or style, but through the principles of pattern, spirit, and
context.”
― Jonathan Hale, architect, The Old Way of Seeing, 1994
Let
us begin by looking at the urban environment. The church for many years has
been focused overwhelmingly on the suburban environment for mission. We will address this in a few pages. We
have ignored the signs that reveal that there is an urban mass migration coming.
No matter what your observation bias may be, we are in a massive global
population shift into the world’s cities. Today over half the world’s
population lives in urban areas. Some estimates reveal that in many countries
the percentage is a lot higher. We are becoming an urban world. We begin here
because this is the place where we have the most opportunity to see the future
and move into it.
I
believe that when we think about cities we think about downtowns, office
buildings, skyscrapers, and the like. We think about the infrastructure. This
particular hiccup is what gets us into trouble because as we think about the
city we think about the church in the city—and by the church we mean the church
building. A city is made up of people. A report from the Institute for the
Future reads, “For future smart cities to
thrive, it must be centered around people, not just infrastructure.”[i]
Dan Hill, CEO of Fabrica (a communications research center, www.fabrica.it)
says, “We don’t make cities in order to make buildings and infrastructure or,
indeed, technology—that’s a side effect of making cities. We create cities to come together, to create
culture or commerce, to live, to work, to play—to create more people.”[ii] The problem with how we imagine our urban
mission is the same problem many in the commercial
world face—we forget it is about people and not the structures of the church.
The discussion around smart cities might well echo our own.
Anthony Townsend, Research Director at IFTF and author of the upcoming book SMART CITIES: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and
the Quest for a New Utopia writes: “Citizens are not employees or
customers, they have to be dealt with on a different basis. So the idea that
you can install the smart city like an upgrade and expect people to just live
with it—especially when it takes power away from them—means they're not going
to accept it. So you have to engage with them and grow it from the bottom up.”[iii]
He continues: “This is an age in which
very big things can come from massively coordinated human activity that doesn't
necessarily get planned from the top down. We need to stop thinking about
building smart cities like a mainframe—which is this industry vision—and think
about it more like we built the web, as loosely intercoupling networks.”[iv]
Dan Hill talks about these ‘Smart Citizens.’[v] “Despite
the heavy infrastructure-led visions of the systems integrators and IT
corporations, the most interesting and productive use of contemporary
technology in the city is here, literally in the hands of citizens, via phones
and social media,” he says. “The dynamics of
social media have been adopted and adapted in the last few years to enable
engaged and active citizens to organize rapidly and effectively; a network with
a cause. Smart citizens’ seem to emerge at a far faster rate than we’re seeing
more formal technology-led smart cities emerging,” says Hill. “In the face of
institutional collapse, active citizens are knitting together their own smart
city, albeit not one envisaged by the systems integrators and technology
corporations.”[vi]
What does this mean for us?
We do not build communities to build church buildings. We do not do our
diocesan work in order to maintain the infrastructure of the church. We are in the
business of creating communities so that
people may come together, creating a culture of sharing grace, to work and serve others, to play and celebrate life. Just like many
city planners and governments, we forget our work is about people.
We have created a system by which people are here to support
the church rather than the church support the people in making community. When
we do this we take power and energy out of the organization—we take the life out of
the organism. The only way to build a vital and healthy mission in the future will be to engage
with people in real-time, where they are, and to listen and work with them to
create the new living church.
The
largest aspen grove in the world is the Pando Grove in Utah and it is
considered by many to be one of the largest living organisms in the world with
a massive single underground root system. Likewise, our cities and our
churches, if seen as giant organisms, can and will be part of “massively coordinated human activity.”[vii] The church, if it wishes to be present as a
living organism within the life of the city, will have to couple with the
vibrant city networks. It will be
autopoietic – porous. It will have to build commons (both electronic and human)
throughout the city’s mainframe. The church will have to participate in
organizing and gathering and ministering through the same media relationships
that people use in their daily lives. We are looking at a world of “smart
citizens” and that will mean we are living in a world of “smart” community
members.
When talking about the future of cities, there are lessons to
be learned about what is happening now. Some city planners look at Hongdae in
South Korea. It used to be a very traditional suburb. Urbanization occurred and
masses of people moved into the area. People built up the city by adding to
already existing structures. Office life, shopping, dining, and small businesses were built onto
existing homes and buildings. They were not following the building code. Instead
of stopping this massive DIY movement, the leaders of the city
worked with the people. They changed some of their regulations and began to
steer the life of the growing metropolitan area into a productive and healthy
future.[viii]
What changed? Leaders saw that the city
itself was a “platform” interacting in a relationship with the people. Most
master plans make people conform. This plan adapted to the people. City
planners are asking themselves today: “How can you open up your codes and make
a platform that is open and can adapt to bottom-up practices.”[ix]
We still are in the business of planting churches and hoping
people will come into them. We have a church development strategy and that
strategy seeks to have the people conform to its existing model. The church has
an opportunity to look out and see that we should be interacting with our
people in the mission field. Our platform of structure and polity
needs to adapt to the world and people around us and not the other way round.
We are to be a people-led community with the organization/platform supporting
the work. We are not to be an organization/platform that leads and is supported
by people. This is a very important and integral cultural change. It is a necessary
organizational flip.
How will we begin to be an organization willing to play with
our people? How will we engage with them
and follow them out into the world? We
will have to deliver valuable low cost, lightweight, moveable, transferable,
multi-use infrastructure to our people. This is what we can do with our
organization’s economy of scale. At the same time, we will have to allow our
people to lead us. The Church organization has to adapt to the people we intend
to reach.
Dan Hill writes: “If we're going to figure out what the smart
city is about, we need to involve citizens. But citizens themselves won’t do
enough; you need to engage in the Dark Matter of institutions to resolve it,
for it to become systemic. Think about what we want the city to be about, how
we want our city to work, how we want people to engage. We have to redesign all
kinds of organizations from the bottom up for the 21st century. We'll have to
redesign most things and pull them together so we have active, engaged government
alongside active, engaged citizens focusing their time on what the city can be
in the first place—and with that, we may end up with a much smarter city.”[x]
If the church is going to be part of the city of the future, we
need to be part of the smart city today. We must be involved with the involved
citizens. We must direct our attention to relationships and the
interconnectedness of lives lived together. We will need to rethink our
infrastructure and make sure that it is supportive of the people and their movements
and gatherings instead of the other way around. We must pull together people
alongside our missionary structures and engage with them “focusing on
their time.”[xi] We must be in their time and in their space,
listening and traveling with them as the new urban communities grow and
develop.
I recently read an article about the “design tactics” for
rethinking the development of communities. It began with this quote: “Historically, America’s economic growth has
hinged on its ability to create new development patterns, new
economic landscapes that simultaneously expand space and intensify our use of
it.”—Richard Florida, from the foreword to Retrofitting
Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs[xii]
As more people are moving to the city, so then a new focus upon
making the city inhabitable is taking shape. Designers, architects, and
community developers are reimagining the cityscape. They are not necessarily
building new infrastructure so much as they are recreating the spaces we
inhabit. Anyone in a city center that has watched as an old coffee company
building from the 1930s or a 1920 paper factory is refitted for lofts, retail, and office space can testify
to this reality. In part, it is because as people return to the urban
landscapes those thinking about life in these spaces are asking: “How might . . . existing
downtowns be creatively retrofitted—re-inhabited, redeveloped and/or re-greened
in ways that are economically productive, environmentally sensitive, socially
sustainable, and aesthetically appealing?”[xiii]
It is one thing to think about doing this for our old church
buildings—true enough. But in the thinking of these urban designers, we see
patterns of human occupation that give us a clear picture of the mission context for the city. June
Williamson worked with others to gather information about what was transpiring across
the United States. She wrote in “Urban Design Tactics for Suburban
Retrofitting”: “We wondered what was being done across North
America with vacant big box stores, dead malls, dying commercial strips,
traffic-choked edge cities, outdated office parks, and aging garden apartment complexes.”[xiv] She eventually wrote a book called Retrofitting Suburbia. It is worth a
look if you are a missionary in the urban landscape that is even now evolving.
After looking at eighty sites, what Williamson saw was nothing
less than inspirational. It is hard to believe if you are in a megacity in the
South. Nevertheless, as all patterns indicate, it is true. I remember sitting
in an urban planning meeting and grumbling about new high-rise multifamily
units going into already densely populated areas. I then came to understand
that concrete sprawl was ultimately detrimental to the environment. You want
to build up no out. It points out the reality that in the end, we are going to
be (at least in my lifetime) a more urban population. The last 50 years of
urban sprawl are over.[xv]
June Williamson writes: “We spent fifty years building and living in
these suburban landscapes, and we must spend the next fifty
retrofitting them for the new needs of this century, to help build a resilient
future suburbia that is climate-sensitive, compact, pedestrian-and-bike
friendly, and responsive to changing demographics and contemporary lifestyles.”[xvi]
Some might say that the answers to resilience must be sought
primarily in building up center cities, ignoring the fact that suburbs now
comprise the majority—in land area, population, and economic activity—of our
urbanized areas. This line of thinking overlooks the reality that more
potential gain could be achieved by focusing on adapting our least sustainable
landscapes, in suburbia, to transform them into more resilient, equitable,
adaptable, walkable, transit-oriented, and more public-oriented places. In a
stagnant economy, it is imperative that the built landscape be as
self-sustainable and energy-efficient as possible. Retrofitting and planning
for retrofitting are more important than ever.[xvii]
What is true in the urban area is true in the suburban area. Our cities are being remade
and we need to be attentive as churches in order to participate whether we are
in a suburban church or downtown church. We need
to have our eyes open to the reality of values and trends that are shaping
life. We also need to see clearly where people are migrating and how they are
living. So what is happening and how are people recycling space to build a
better community?
People are redeveloping the existing infrastructures from the
failed big box stores also called the safety
store. At our house we called them safety
stores because as soon as you saw them, we believed people were comforted
by their presence. We imagined a person might say, “Ahhhhh, we are okay. There
is a Bed Bath & Beyond.” Or “I was worried I didn't know where I was. Now I
know I will be okay. There is a Starbucks next to a Home Depot. We are safe
now.” It is safe because you can see it but it is also safe because you can go
inside these stores and restaurants and know exactly where everything is--how
and what to order. Defunct big box stores and old manufacturing buildings of
downtown are being repurposed. Across the country big box stores are being
rethought, gutted, and remade into community centers, gyms, and health clinics.[xviii]
In downtown Houston the Episcopal Diocese of Texas Health Foundation now shares
space with a spirituality center that used to be a stationary/paper printing
building. In the small town where I first served I can think of two places that
were once a giant furniture store and one electronics store. Today, they house
a community college and a mental health clinic, respectively. These are icons
of a culture that is shifting from commercial and commodity centered to people-centered.
Reclaiming big box stores, malls, and shopping centers for
churches, church-run clinics and service centers is a way in which we can
move back into spaces that have long been diminished but even now are being
repopulated. Sharing space with new community centers has the potential for mission.
Another area of renewal is the greening of both urban and
suburban spaces. In downtown Houston, there
is a huge piece of green space where people gather and play called Discovery
Green. There are concerts and movies. One of the largest Easter Sunday services is held there,
followed by picnics and other activities. In a neighborhood just outside of
downtown Houston, an old train track has been retrofitted for a hike and bike
trail. The old concrete bayous are being taken out and new walking and biking
trails will connect the outlying suburbs with the heart of downtown. Across The United States there is a movement to restore and reclaim wetlands and creeks
long paved over.
Williamson gives a great example from Seattle:
In the Northgate neighborhood in northern
Seattle, a little-used overflow parking lot
for a busy regional shopping mall was prone
to flooding. The headwaters of Thornton Creek were buried in a large culvert
beneath the asphalt and local environmentalists lobbied hard for "day
lighting." Developers were also interested in the property while planners
also hoped to see more density, since the terminus of a light rail line was
planned for the adjacent quadrant of overflow mall parking. The win-win
solution? A combination of new "soft" storm water infrastructure in
the form of a very sophisticated vegetative bioswale [a natural porous
stormwater drain]– the Thornton Creek Water Quality Channel – plus mixed-use
development with hundreds of attractive new housing units in Thornton Place.[xix]
How can existing congregations participate in reclaiming
spaces? How can we be present in these green spaces? Also, if we are near a
reclaimed space how can congregations put up respite and prayer gardens? Or create a vegetable garden in the midst of
a food desert. Christians care about the environment and so
we are challenged to connect with those who are doing this work. Whether we are
sharing a hike and bike trail through our property or helping a neighborhood
create green space, this is an
opportunity for community connection.
A third way in which developers are rethinking the urban and
suburban living environment is by rezoning
spaces. Cityscapes and outlying areas are being re-platted and zoned for new
mixed-use development.[xx] What happens is that when this is done, new
opportunities for community growth occur. People move into housing above retail
and restaurants.
The 2013 Kinder Institute Study, the thirty-second study of its type, found that
individuals, for the first time, were, by and large, more interested in living in
the midst of these complex and diverse communities.[xxi] They report that people are shifting away
from a desire to live in the suburbs and single-family type developments. They
would instead prefer to be in a place where there is a mix of retail, eateries,
and homes.[xxii]
We are challenged as a church to send people out as missionaries into these communities. We need to
see them as mission fields. Holding Bible studies in homes or
restaurants is only one way to engage. We used to send out chaplains to
hospitals. How do we send out the people to build communities within these
communities where multi-use is occurring? Can we even put an office or chapel
in the building next to the coffee shop?
Mini worship centers and sacred spaces for meditation for
all to use could pop up in these places.
What we see in general are more beautiful and greener spaces.
We see connectivity for pedestrians and bicyclists. We see spaces being
re-inhabited and recreated. We see retrofitting and repurposing. We see denser
populations focused on play, the outdoors, and coming together for social events.[xxiii] It is the church’s work to both help these
shifts happen and to participate with our communities in creating healthier
environments. It is also the church’s work to be evangelists within this new
changing community.
People trying to do missionary work in these areas are talking
to nones--a new category of
individuals who claim no particular religious inclination. Journalist Terry
Mattingly wrote this about the nones.
“Pollsters at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and similar
think tanks are now using a more neutral term to describe a key trend in
various religious traditions, talking about a sharp increase in the percentage
of Americans who are ‘religiously unaffiliated.’”[xxiv]
That’s certainly an awkward, non-snappy label that’s hard to use in headlines.
It’s so much easier to call them the nones.[xxv]
I once hosted a conversation on Twitter about mission to the unaffiliated none. I got in a lot of trouble from
those who did not affiliate. They reminded me that they were actually quite
spiritual people! Human beings are spiritual people. We have for
a long time said that we are spiritual beings inhabiting a physical body and
not physical beings alone. There are probably some orthodox theological
problems with that statement but I think you get my drift. What has become
clear is that they are none and done. They are spiritual people who have no
church relationship and are done with church as usual.
We are seekers by trade. Human beings have always
been and will continue to be a kind of animal that deeply seeks out the meaning
of things. The Most Honorable and Rt. Rev. Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of
Canterbury, once remarked that it is, in fact, our charism, given by God, to seek meaning. We are a
particular creature that seeks meaning and then tries to give word to it. I
remember very well that he was speaking to biologist Richard Dawkins during a
debate. It struck me and I think it is important to remember any time we begin
to think about people. The people who inhabit our cityscape (and our world, for
that matter) are people on a pilgrimage, seekers after meaning.
In a now not-so-recent article, The Barna Group, a research
organizations had to add new categories to their description of the human
creature because the old ones (churched and unchurched) just didn’t work
anymore.[xxvi]
Despite the Barna Group’s overarching agenda as an evangelical Christian group
and their typical “church is dead” message, they actually have some helpful information worth mentioning here, so that we
can understand a bit more about the people who
are migrating to the center of our cities.
There are a lot of people who do not go to church. That being
said, when asked, those who do not go to church
(six out of ten) will tell you that they are Christian. A lot of those
consider themselves to be people who have recently discovered Christianity. Also, the Barna Group has discovered that a significant number of
people who do not claim any particular
nondenominational or denominational affiliation still participate in pretty
traditional church activities during any given week. I am always suspicious of
this, of course, because I think people, in general, want to be well-regarded and
worry that when the Barna Group calls, they are actually a friend of their
grandmother or mother checking on their
spiritual habits. Still, a goodly number of these unattached people read the
Bible and over 60% will say they talk to God once a week.[xxvii] The Institute for Spirituality and Health in
partnership with Baylor College of Medicine did a research project within the
Texas Medical Center a number of years ago and found that even among doctors,
nurses, and patients they generally tracked these numbers.[xxviii]
There are some other interesting facts that the Barna Group
offers. A lot of people are more likely to say yes to being invited to attend a
small home church. This seems to be an important piece of information if we are to be missionaries in this new context. A lot of
folks attend both conventional churches and house churches—not necessarily of
the same denomination. Still, there is a fair number of people who attend, but
less frequently than did their parents and grandparents.[xxix] Of course, we knew this already.
The Barna Group also has a helpful list of things these
“unattached” believe. I think they probably believe that these “unattached”
qualities are not good news for the evangelical church. They are probably
better news for a church like the Episcopal Church, which is always interested in a good conversation and not afraid of a
wide variety of questions. The Barna Group says that recent surveys reveal that
the “unattached” are:
· More likely to feel stressed out
· Less likely to be concerned about the moral condition of the nation
· Much less likely to believe that they are making a positive difference in
the world
· Less optimistic about the future
· Far less likely to believe that the Bible is totally accurate in its
principles
· Substantially more likely to believe that Satan and the Holy Spirit are symbolic figures, but are not
real
· More likely to believe that Jesus Christ sinned while He was on earth
· Much more likely to believe that the holy literature of the major faiths
all teach the same principles even though they use different
stories
· Less likely to believe that a person can be under demonic influence
· More likely to describe their sociopolitical views as “mostly liberal”
than “mostly conservative”[xxx]
We have a tremendous opportunity to reach out to people who
would find The Episcopal Church a hospitable place. In order to do
that, we are going to have to go where they are, actually invite people to
attend, and we are going to have to be innovative and think small.
Houston, Texas, where I live, is made up of a global
population. We are one of the most diverse cities in the country. Houston has
one of the largest rodeos in the world. I always take out-of-town guests so
that they can experience the rodeo in all of its beautiful and strange glory.
One of my non-Texas friends who went to the rodeo remarked on the ways this was a true cultural experience. If you
have never been, like many whom I take, you might be surprised by what you see
and whom you see. On a recent trip to the rodeo, at the marketplace (which is
an experience unto itself) while a friend was buying a new Stetson Open Road Silverbelly (that is the kind
of hat that LBJ wore), the two of us stood outside the store in the midst of a
sea of passersby. Literally in a few seconds, an Anglo white male, a Hispanic
family, an Indian family (woman in a sari), a Muslim family and an
African-American family—all of many different shades of color and speaking
different languages—passed us. He turned to me and said, “I never thought this
would be a multicultural experience.” In
Houston, at the rodeo, everyone can be a cowboy and cowgirl. It is, in fact, a
very odd and yet energizing slice of America.
Every year you can go to the Rice University Kinder Institute
website and see the studies they have done and are doing regarding the changing
demographics of our city and what it means for the country.[xxxi] The
Kinder Institute states: “No other metropolitan region in America has been the
focus of a long-term research program of this scope. No city more clearly
exemplifies the trends that are rapidly refashioning the social and political landscape across all
of urban America.”[xxxii]
In 1960, which was the last real boom decade for the Episcopal Church (like many denominations), the
population of Houston was 1,243,258 people—6% were Hispanics, 19.8% were Black,
73% were Anglos, and the remaining other.[xxxiii] There, of course, were other nationalities
even then but they were the smallest of numbers compared to these three major
segments of our Houston population. Today 33% are Anglo, 18% are Black, 40.8%
are Hispanic, and 7.7 % are of Asian or other descent.[xxxiv] Over 50% of those Hispanics are between the
ages of 18 and 29, while Anglos make up only 23% of that age bracket.[xxxv] We can see the same huge demographic shifts
across the U.S. In a 2014 Forbes
article Dallas, Boston, Riverside, Denver, San Diego, San Francisco, Austin,
and Seattle were listed with Houston as having scored a 70% diversity index or
higher, and a 20 to 40 age range of 29% or higher. America is literally reshaping
itself.[xxxvi]
Today, our Episcopal Church has a demographic that is
considerably different. As a domestic church, we tend to be 86.7% Anglo, 3.4%
Asian or other, 3.5% Latino, and 6.4% Black.[xxxvii] True, the statistics I mentioned from Kinder
are for Houston. But remember that Houston is considered a trending city for
the rest of the U.S. So what you see in Houston are the future artifacts of what the rest of the country
will experience within its urban environments. The Episcopal Church today is closer to what our world
looked like in1960. So you see the problem? Yes?
I believe the future missionary church will reflect the
demographics of its culture. To become that missionary church will be to bridge
the gap from where we are today to where our culture is tomorrow. This means
that the growing majority of our mission field is made up of a diverse
population. Our communities will necessarily have to take this into
consideration. They will have to be multi-ethnic and multi-lingual. Those who
lead will have to be bicultural and able to transfer between cultures. We will
have to be “culturally humble.” We need to be a missionary Church filled with
people who are willing to have others tell them of their culture and show their
culture, rather than pretend we know who they are and where they are from.
In our church we possess all the qualities needed to live and
thrive in this new mission context. To begin with, we must understand
that there is no such thing as a closed system.[xxxviii] The Episcopal Church as a community, as a mission
society, is not closed. It is always in a relationship with the community around
it. We are constantly in an interchange of ideas and communication that shapes
and forms us. Sometimes it is difficult to see this, but it is nonetheless
true. When scientists observe the molecular world of a cell and observe
autopoiesis, they have to use very powerful microscopes.[xxxix] Researchers William Hall and Susu Nousala
point out in their paper, “Autopoiesis and Knowledge in
Self Sustaining Organizational Systems,” it
is difficult to see how such systems work because we only see what we can see.
We have a hard time focusing on the actual participation with the outside
world. Every system, whether of social or organic is porous. We are more often
than not left only with a hint or idea of the resulting action rather than actually
observing the event of autopoiesis as it is happening. Yet, they argue that it
does, in fact, happen and is an essential quality of living organizations. The
engagement with what is outside is a necessary part of organic life; especially
if that life is to thrive. Autopoietic organizations are bounded, complex, mechanistic, self-differentiated, self-producing, autonomous, and
porous.[xl]
Let us take a moment to apply these qualities to the church as a missionary
society and understand where our learning edges are.
Boundaries
We are a bounded system. We have ways of understanding our
parts and places within the system. We have orders of ministry; we have parts
to play and roles to carry out. We are limited, though, because we have so
narrowly defined these roles that we are not able to use the roles creatively for ministry and mission in
our current context. Here is a great
example. We will license an individual (nonclergy) to take one piece of
communion bread and a sip of wine to one homebound or hospital-bound person.
Yet we are unable to wrap our minds around how that same person might be sent
out to share the same gift of communion with a small batch community of
individuals. We have a way of licensing individuals (non-clergy) to preach and
so we do and they preach inside the church. But we do not use them to go
outside the church to preach and teach in a small batch community.
Complexity
Human beings are very complex autopoietic creatures and we build very
complicated organizations.[xli] We have gotten complexity confused with only
one form of order. We have a simple order that has been replicated throughout
our organization. This order is one that is built upon an antiquated rule of
governance, committee, and board structure. While some of this is important and
even necessary for the health of the organization, we have so organized
ourselves that we are no longer pliable. We will need to be a much more organic
system with a variety of ways so we can organize at different levels and for
different purposes. The old system was built around the idea of permanence.
There are to be organizational structures that are created for the skeleton
of the organism called the Episcopal Church. As we move to the outer parts of the organization, though, we will need
to attach a variety of skins that live and die. We will have to have the
ability to create and to let die. We must organize
for a short while and dismantle quickly to make the mission new. We know how to
form a church like we have done for over 100 years. We, however, are stuck in
the old/current model of church size and must figure out how we might create other forms of communities and how
they might belong to the organization. Our definition of what is a church is too limited.
Mechanistic
We have a very machinelike set of interactions that manage the
church.[xlii]
We have an exchange of financial resources. We have created forms of
communication that are clear. We have policies and procedures that help order
life. Again, though, these are imprisoned in mid-century modern forms of
banking and commerce. We have not updated our business models to keep up with
contemporary practices. We are still, for the most part, only using a fraction
of the communication potential available to us as we perpetuate a culture tied
to newsletters that are our primary form of distributing information. The social and financial mechanism of the new
millennia must be engaged and entered into the organization in order for us to
continue to thrive, and for the infrastructure to hold up as the organization
interacts with the 21st century. We know about pledging and offering
plates. People in our mission context, though, function on less
and less cash and do most of their giving electronically. People give less cash
to organizations, while they still comprehend what it might mean to give to God. They like to give to particular things and have choices. How do we use
modern mechanistic structures to enable them to make their gift?
Self-differentiated
Williams and Nousala write, “System boundaries are internally
determined by rules of association, employment agreements, oaths of allegiance
to organizational rules, deeds, etc., that determine who belongs to the
organization and what property it owns.”
While we have these, we still need to work on this because there are
many more qualities of participation and many more forms of belonging. Our
limited view of this is part of what is cutting us off from the world around
us. In other words, in a world where people used to define themselves primarily
as belonging to this and that group our limited understanding of membership worked. In today’s world
where belonging has a much broader
understanding, our ideas around membership, participation, and belonging
actually prevent us from more adeptly engaging people in surroundings. It is as
if our understanding of the membership boundary has so shrunk that we are no
longer able to engage with many who quite simply think about their
participation in organizations in a different way. In order to be a thriving
autopoietic community, we will need to broaden the ways in
which people can be the church.
Self-producing
We know how to make Episcopalians. We have a variety of classes and we invite people to take them so that
they can become members. We prefer indirect recruiting; this means we put an ad
in our newsletter or we mention at services that we are having a class—but we
rarely invite people personally to attend. We make new members in baptism and
confirmation, but we don’t really train them in anything
other than an old model of church. We also make Episcopalians the good old
fashion way – by having babies. We are going to have to do better at this
process. One of the reasons why an autopoietic organization lives and thrives is
because it makes new members well. It is constantly creating new cells—new
members. At the same time those members are changing the organization. If the
organization ceases to make new members, it ceases to have new energy, new
ideas, and new creativity poured into the system. Just like
any living organism, if it does not have new members (cells), it is in the
process of dying.
Autonomous
Autonomy is the idea that the organization can stand alone. The
organization will outlive any of the individuals that now make up the
organization.[xliii] Let us pause here a moment. The church is a spiritual body and it is the family
of God on earth. It encompasses the human
being and yet is beyond any one individual. Therefore, the nature of the church is
to outlive any of the individuals now involved. In theory, we as a church do
this and will do this. What is important to understand is that we have become
so church building–oriented that the structures and infrastructure of the
organization are in danger of becoming terminal. In other words, the church has
become something other than it is meant to be!
The individual is the organization in this case. This is why we see that
the structures and the polity all need more and
more people and their energy to survive. We are an organization that is
literally eating our people alive. We are consuming ourselves—autosarcophagy. This is a completely
different thing. The people are the ones who are to be the church and
autonomously renewing, creating and recreating the living organization of
church. If we are to be an autopoietic church, we will need to be one
where the local communities are autonomous enough to create and multiply in a variety of ways
so that we are a self-reproducing AND a living organism. It will need to do
this without the oppressive structure we now are trying to maintain.
We have boundaries but we don’t use them to do mission. We are
complex but rigidly so. We are mechanistic but not in a helpful way. We are
self-differentiated but exclusively so. We are self-producing but unsustainably
so. We are autonomous but codependent. We have the DNA for autopoiesis but are
misusing it to our detriment. Why? We are stuck in a model that does not work.
In 1962, children were hiding under their desks in America,
practicing for what seemed like a sure thing—a nuclear attack from the Soviet
Union. By every indication, nuclear proliferation was a likely reality.[xliv] The Cuban missile crisis was hot and the
U.S.S.R. and the U.S. were engaged in massive nuclear buildups and ballistic
missile systems. Both countries were trying to figure out how they might
survive an attack and if they should, in fact, attack first.[xlv] Hawks on both sides of the world were sure
they had the answer. I believe we probably are not fully aware of how close we
came to an extinction event.
One of the issues for the U.S. was how would the leaders speak
to one another, post-event? Because the
military works on a “command control network” they needed one that would
survive the disaster.[xlvi] Enter RAND Corporation. RAND was working with
the military on a number of projects at the time. They had a man in their
office named Paul Baran. He was a researcher and was involved in a lot of a
fancy work that probably most people in the day would have believed was stolen
from a space ship in area 51. Nevertheless, the hardworking Baran slaved away
at trying to figure out this problem. His solution, and therefore RAND’s
solution, for the U.S., was to build a “more robust communications network using
‘redundancy’ and ‘digital’ technology.”[xlvii] Of course, nobody really believed that Baran’s
idea was possible and so they dismissed it, thus prolonging the creation of the World Wide Web by a decade
or more,
Basically, Baran’s idea was that a centralized communication
system relies on only one switch to communicate, store, and send out messages.
A decentralized system would do the same but have several kinds of backup or
other relays. Essentially both of these would easily fall victim to an attack
as in one particular area might completely cut off a region where communication
was needed or worse, in the case of the destruction of the centralized system
where the effect would completely shut down communication altogether. Baran
imagined a different kind of system.
Basically, Baran created a distributed
system of communications. Through the system, information is carried from one node to
another on its own. Each node, while still part of the unit, acts autonomously
and independently. It receives the piece of information, stores it, and sends it along to the next node. If there were a problem
with one of the nodes, then the information could take another route to its
destination.[xlviii]
Here is what Baran actually offered in his paper:
Figure 1 Baran’s Example of network nodes. (Paul Baran, August 1964)
|
Figure 2 Baran applied his design to a real world geometry and landscape.
(Baran, August 1964)
Figure 3 Illustration of Centralized, Decentralized, and Distributed
Network (Baran, August 1964)
Wired magazine interviewed Baran in 2003, and he talked about the system he
had created: “Around December 1966, I
presented a paper at the American Marketing Association called ‘Marketing in
the Year 2000.’[xlix]
I described push-and-pull communications and how we’re going to do our shopping
via a television set and a virtual department store. If you want to buy a
drill, you click on Hardware and that shows Tools and you click on that and go
deeper.”[l] When, in 1969, the RAND group founded ARPANET
(Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) for scientists to share information, they could hardly have imagined the vast expanse of social and commerce that is today
networked globally by the click of a button.
So what kinds of churches will we see living and moving in the
Western world in the future? What kinds
of communities will reach the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual people who inhabit
our mission context?
How will these congregations inhabit the suburban and urban environments of
tomorrow?
Let’s apply Paul Baran’s concept to the church for a moment.
The church that we inherit is primarily a centralized model. It is hierarchical
in nature, true enough, but it is basically organized in this centralized
manner. People come to a central point—the church. There they are ministered to
and there they receive programs, sacraments and pastoral care. Sometime the
priest or ministers will travel out to
the parishioner’s home or to their workplace or hospital. It is, by and large, a centralized model of
community which itself may have several levels of similarly working parts.
Figure 4 Current Church model - centralized.
We have made large strides towards a more decentralized model.
We have done this primarily at the higher levels of the organization. Yet even
in the parish there has been some substantial movement through the growth of
programming ministries in the 1990s that created decentralized systems. Yet it
is not a farfetched thing to walk into a small parish in a small town and see a
centralized system at work. In many ways, both the centralized and
decentralized ideas of organization might be found in Rothauge’s work around pastoral, program and corporate congregations. (In later
years a “transitional” stage was included and “corporate” was changed to
“resource”.)
The form the missionary church will take in the future can be
found in the artifact of the Internet and distributive system thinking. We are
a weak organization today because we still believe that everyone must come to
the same center. When that center is disrupted (for whatever reason—and there
are many), the system is weakened and can even die. There are models where the
decentralized system is working well. I believe, though, in order to engage
with the culture, we are going to need a distributive system of mission.
A distributive system of mission creates multiple communities
connected together. These communities are of different kinds and they do
different things. They share information that they collect from the
organization. They then multiply it through their own webs of connections. A
distributive mission doesn't store everything in one place. In other words, a
distributive system is not a bunch of centralized systems connected. It uses
what it needs within the particular context of ministry. It then shares with
others what it learns and receives from others what it needs to be successful.
Figure 5 A disbursement model of a networked future
Church.
I remember when I graduated from seminary in 1995, we used to say that big
churches were getting bigger and small churches were dying. That is not quite
true today. Every church, regardless of size, needs to move to a more
distributive model of ministry wherein church finds itself part of a web of
relationships throughout its interdependent context.. In the future we will
still have churches like we have them today. They will be of every size.
However, they will be connected to parts of their communities. They will be one
network node within the larger church-wide system. They will also be one
network node within the worldwide network.
Large
churches will have moved into a mix of ministries that are decentralized and
distributive all across the city. They will be running multi-site communities
in people’s homes, in retirement communities, in other church spaces, in rented
spaces and office buildings. If these large congregations are to survive in the coming decades, they will have to figure out
ways in which to connect to their massive membership out in the world where
they are.
While the Episcopal Church has largely
abandoned college campus ministry over the last two decades, it is time to
reengage. This is one of the prime mission contexts for the future Church.
However, mission on college campuses will not look like blown up youth ministry
for college kids. Instead the future of campus missions will look like a
disbursement model mission. No longer will
undergrad and graduate co-eds find their way to a campus center where the one
campus missioner works. Instead the campus mission, like the networked church,
will have nodes of connection throughout the campus. A college campus mission
at a tier one school might actually start college missions on local community
college campuses as well. The future church no longer sees campus mission as a
secondary isolated ministry for kids but as a primary mission site where the
gospel is shared throughout the campus community.
At the Episcopal campus ministries that
remain peer ministry was and still is largely used as the dominant model.
An insular model with one clergy leader running program limits the distribution
of the ministry because it centers itself on the place and person of a campus
missioner. The distributed college campus mission will be aided by a move away
from this insular and centralized ministry, to a student leadership team aimed
outward. The Rev. Joe Chambers at Rockwell House at Washington University in
St. Louis changed over to this new model several years ago. The Rev. Mike
Angell from The Episcopal Church Office supports campus and young adult
ministries, and he believes the outward facing team-led campus mission is
beginning to catch on and spread. Young adults on college campuses are
interested in creating real communities, bound together by relationships, and
with dispersed mission across the campus.
We will also see the proliferation of
small communities in this new distributive model. We will see house churches in
urban, suburban and even in rural areas. Some of these will be
connected to the larger church community as mentioned above. However, many more
will be stand-alone. You may have one missioner priest with a team of lay leaders
overseeing 20 or more of these small communities.[li] The Barna Group has been predicting this
since the 1990s and I have been teaching and talking about this for over two
decades. Yet, the Episcopal Church has had difficulty engaging this model because
we have been primarily stuck in a centralized churchy model.
In the future in the Episcopal Church
there will be many kinds of churches. We will have cyber churches.[lii] Some people have taken cyber church to mean a Sim-City[liii]
type environment where people go to church online. (www.simcity.com) People have created online
gaming-type congregations similar to the Sims. The cyber church of tomorrow
will be a church community that gathers online, shares information and news, but does not have a permanent place.
The cyber church of the future will use the distributive model of ministry to
connect nodes of ministry in space and time throughout the community. It will
be a church that uses different public spaces for worship, teaching, and Bible study. It will adopt other service ministry sites for
its outreach. The primary connection point for members will be the smartphone,
and they will be connected through the Internet to their brothers and sisters,
sharing prayers, thoughts and experiences. They will find out the community
schedule and go to the coffee shop for a Bible study,
meet in a park for prayer and meditation, and work at
a local clinic serving the poor and those in need.
Another kind of community in the future
Church is described by the Barna Group as an event church: “Frustrated with politics and structures in the standard church, many
will participate infrequently in worship events in public places.”[liv] I think we are going to have communities pop
up for limited times around special events or other gatherings. I think we
might see communities pop up during the Daytona 500 or in the parking lots on
Sunday mornings during tailgate season at the local NFL game or Saturdays on
college game day. We already see this on Easter in parks and on other
special days. But I think congregations engaged in a disbursement model will be looking for ways to
send missionaries, pastors, and priests out to be present where
people are. Flash mob Eucharist[lv]
and the presence of the church in the midst of the modern day public square are
mission opportunities of the
future.
Service communities will be another kind
of church that emerges strongly in the next ten years.[lvi] These will be communities that rise up around
particular ministries. We see this already occurring where there is an outreach
to the poor or those in need following a disaster. Communities spring up.
People chose to worship with those they are
serving. A great example is the outreach of Trinity parish in Houston, which
grew up around ministry to the homeless. They started serving Eucharist
following Sunday morning breakfast. What first started as something that was
done for the homeless is now
something that is done with the
homeless and working poor in Houston. People chose to make this early morning
service the service they attend.
The community does its own Bible study,
is creating a pastoral care ministry, and is becoming a mix of people of every
ethnicity and every social stratum who choose to work
together. I know of similar communities in Atlanta and Los Angeles..
The monastic type community will spring up
as a revitalized part of the church’s mission.[lvii] In the Episcopal Church we already have a service corps whose chief hallmark
is living in community together.
(http://episcopalservicecorps.org) Focused on a ministry of service,
they live in community with daily prayer and Bible study. They have a chaplain who
mentors and watches over the community life.[lviii] Still, others are simply communities that
share a common rule of life. The Missional Wisdom Foundation operates a network
of distributed but connected new monastic communities in North Texas. (missionalwisdom.com) Small groups of individuals
choose to live together under one roof and one rule of life. They participate
in the community. We are even now talking about how these same models might be
adapted for people in their senior years who would like to live with others.
Many individuals will find community life
by participating in what Barna calls “dialogue forums.”[lix] These will be where people gather in small
groups to talk about spirituality or discipleship, or read the Bible. This
will take place in people’s homes, in coffee shops, in condominium community
spaces, and in pubs. Many Episcopal Churches have dipped their toe into this
well over the last two decades beginning with “Theology on Tap.” Diocese of
Texas churches joined churches across the country in 2003 in offering
conversation over beer and food at a local pub. These were extensions of
existing congregations. Every church will need to be doing this kind of
disbursed mission in the future. Individuals are going to look
for spiritual opportunities closer to home or closer to their workplaces, and
such communities will be an important way in which community life is lived out
outside of the parish. It literally creates new doors into the community. Many
people who are not attached to a community will find it much easier to be
invited and to connect to communities like this. This is going to grow and
become an essential ingredient of regular community life.
The compassion cluster is a short-term
community located around a particular effort.[lx] These will grow up in the midst of tent
cities that are doing work around a particular crisis. Along the Gulf Coast we
see these pop up after hurricanes. People come from all over and participate in
a community of faith that springs up like the
temporary towns, which house food, volunteer support, shelter and showers for
those being served and those serving. We also saw this happen in the midst of
those who went to help clean up and rebuild after devastating wildfires in
Bastrop, Texas. During the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York, clergy went in and preached and celebrated the Eucharist amongst the protesters. As
we become more aware of events such as these, people engaged in them will bring
both their desire for community and worship with them. The Episcopal
Churches in any given area of the U.S. need to be aware that such compassion
clusters are opportunities to reach out, to serve, and get to know others.
Small groups and prayer shelters will continue to
multiply.[lxi]
Some of these are around reading books together. Others were kaffee klatsches that
now have developed a life of praying together. The individuals in these small
communities may belong to other organizations or they may not be affiliated with
any. They are primarily based upon friendship models. Throughout the
1970s and ’80s, Episcopal Cursillo Reunion groups served as a way to organize a
growing popularity of this kind of mission. They were essential in the growth that was seen during those
years for many communities. They began to fizzle out for the same reason as do
many ministries. They became institutionalized. Such groups, like the
discussion groups, have an important potential of undergirding a distributive
missionary system.
Another community that will be part of the
distributed autopoietic mission strategy is the
“marketplace ministry.”[lxii] I remember that we actually stopped this from
happening in our diocese. We had several clergy who had begun to provide
pastoral care for workers at a local chicken-processing center. At the time, I
don’t think we could wrap our minds around why this had value. There are still
a number of companies who have chaplains on staff to help take care of their
workers. I actually believe that these corporate chaplains are not long for the
world. The economic situation has caused the funds for such excesses to dry up,
and as an ancillary part of the corporation, such services are being dropped.
Hospital chaplains are also going by the wayside as the cost of health care and
the margin for financial success are growing slim. We must engage in this
ministry. These places are still places for ministry. We need to send lay and
ordained people out to be with people in the places where they live and work.
The church must recognize that we still have a mission into these marketplaces,
hospitals, and retirement communities, even if we do not own them or if we are
paid to do them. These are the many and varied places where the people are and
where God is. Therefore, it is
imperative for us to make this an important part of our distributive mission
focus.
This is of course, not meant to be a
complete list of the future Church’s communities. There will be more kinds of
Christian communities created by future missionaries that we cannot even
imagine today but will be intimately tied to future cultural contexts.
Just recently, Warren Bird, Director of
Research at Leadnet, wrote an interesting article pointing out the impact that
multisite communities were having on church participation. The numbers
highlight the fact that the models mentioned above are even now taking root in
our communities. Bird reports the following in 2014:
•
5 million –
the number of people who worshipped at a multisite church in one weekend in the
United States alone, according to the National Congregations Study sponsored by
Duke University
•
8,000 – the
number of multisite churches currently found in the United States, according to
the same study. (The wording of that survey allowed churches to call themselves
multisite if they had multiple venues–such as services in the sanctuary, chapel
and gym, but all on one campus. This is not what I am describing.)
•
9% – the
percent of all Protestant churchgoers who attend a
multisite church
•
3% – the
percent of all Protestant churches that are multisite
•
80% – the
percentage of U.S. states that have known multisite churches[lxiii]
These many and diverse kinds of
communities will be essential in the large congregation as it steps out into a
distributive system of organization. While still other churches may leave their
buildings behind and engage in one of these new forms of community, others may
transform their community into a monastery or service community in place.
Regardless of how these forms are adapted and take shape, they are the face of
the new Episcopal Church.
This is a vision of a distributed network
of communities across a geographic and mission context. These will include
all ages and all ethnicities. They will be monocultural and multicultural. They
will be mixed classes and rooted deep within suburban and urban environments.
They are visions of a living autopoietic organization that is
bounded in multiple forms with belonging
being shaped by the type of community. The diversity and multiplication of
these forms will build a strong, healthy, and complex system. Each of them will be
self-differentiated, not unlike individuals within a wide web of social relationships, but they will all be connected
to the church. The churches’ current mechanisms will need to be retooled to
provide for these new visions of church life. New forms of leadership and new
freedoms will allow these congregations to be self-producing, self-replicating,
and autonomous. They will adapt and change as they engage in their mission
context and in relationship to real people and real spiritual pilgrims.
There are many prophets heralding the
death of the church. They proclaim the death of the church at large and they
proclaim the death of the denominational church. Some even get specific, making
sure that everyone knows which denominational church is next! It is yours, I am pretty sure. You certainly
can believe them if you wish, but I am unconvinced. We are a living and
ministering in a “e” moment.
Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel Laureate in
Chemistry, helps me with this idea. He won recognition for his understanding of
a new concept he called “dissipative structures.”[lxiv] In nature there is a contradictory reality,
and that is that disorder can be the source for new order. Margaret Wheatley say this, “Prigogine
discovered that the dissipative activity of loss was necessary to create new order. Dissipation
didn’t lead to the death of a system. It was part of the process by which the
system let go of its present form so that it could reorganize a form better
suited to the demands of its changed environment.”[lxv] Our problem is that we in the church are
formed by a different perspective rooted in Western science. We believe that
entropy is the rule.[lxvi] So, if we do not constantly work harder and
harder to keep pumping energy and resources into the system, then the system
suffers from entropy—loses steam and dies. Yet even now life is flourishing and
new life is being born. Of course, you immediately can see that this is a
biblical understanding, but as Episcopalians, sometimes it is easier to see it through the
eyes of science.
Prigogine offers that in a dissipative
organization those things that interrupt and interfere are essential to the
health of the system itself. The system receives the communication and decides
if it is to respond, change, or ignore it. Change happens either way. If the
disruption grows so that the organization can’t ignore it, then transformation
and rebirth are possible.[lxvii]
Wheatley says, “Disorder can be a
source of new order, and that growth appears from disequilibrium, not balance.
The things we fear most in organizations—disruptions, confusion, and chaos—need
not be interpreted as signs that we are about to be destroyed. Instead, these
conditions are necessary to awaken creativity… This is order through fluctuation.”[lxviii]
We are in a “dissipative” moment. We
cannot ignore the flotsam and jetsam of the future that is even now washing
upon the shores of the Episcopal Church.
We can see partly what will only become clearer in time. But we have a vision,
nonetheless. As Bob Johansen says, “Leaders make the
future.” It is time that we participate
in the world around us. We are to be about the business of making and remaking. We
have for too long suffered the sin of trying to get it right,
and the shame of coming up short. But in a “dissipative” era we must have a
greater sense of process and participation and experimentation.[lxix]
If we are to move outside of our centralized structures and old exoskeletons, we
must shed our skins and put on new ones. Jesus says, “No one puts new wine into
old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled,
and the skins will be destroyed.” (Luke 5:33ff)
A new urban and suburban world is emerging. We will
continue to see people move towards the cities of the future. What we are
experiencing across The Episcopal Church is globally true. People are entering city
life by the millions and will continue to do so for a long time to come. The
shape of our cities and the multiple possibilities for Christian community are
before us. We have an opportunity. The question for us as we stand in this
“dissipative” moment is: will we shrink from the challenge or face it? It reminds me of a story I know about a man named
Joseph Needham.
We are largely indebted to Needham, a
quirky Englishman, for the information that changed our
understanding of China. Much of what has become common knowledge is due to his
work. He was a man who author Simon Winchester said, “loved China.”[lxx]
Needham recorded the science and discoveries of an ancient people who, in the
1930s, were believed to be living in the dark ages. He discovered that much of
what the modern Western culture took for granted had come from China.
Needham told us that the Chinese invented
technologies such as papermaking, the compass, gunpowder and printing (both
woodblock and movable type) long before anyone else. They also invented: the
blast furnace and cupola furnace, finery forge, paper money, fire lance, land
mine, naval mine, hand cannon, exploding cannonballs, multistage rocket and
rocket bombs with aerodynamic wings and explosive payloads, the sternpost
rudder, chain drives, large mechanical puppet theaters driven by waterwheels
and carriage wheels and wine-serving automatons driven by paddle wheel boats,
semilunar and rectangular stone knives, stone hoes and spades, the cultivation
of millet, rice and the soybean, the refinement of sericulture, the building of
rammed earth structures with lime-plastered house floors, the creation of the potter’s wheel, the
creation of pottery with cord-mat-basket designs, the creation of pottery
tripods and pottery steamers, the domestication of the ox and buffalo,
irrigation of high-yield crops, the multiple-tube seed drill and heavy
moldboard iron plough, to name just a few. In fact, Needham points out in his18
volume magnum opus, Science and Civilization in China, they did all of this
before the end of the first century, before Christ, and in many cases a thousand years before the West.[lxxi]
During one of his many trips to China,
Needham was invited to meet with Mao Zedong. It was not his first visit with
the leader but it would be his last. Needham was unaware of why the Communist
leader wanted to meet with him. When he arrived, he sat across from Mao and
listened as the leader asked him a question. Mao remembered that Needham loved
automobiles and had invited him to help with a very urgent question. It was
1972, four years before Mao’s death, and one can imagine the West was pressing
in on him. At this time, modern conveniences were still out of reach for the
Chinese population, including cars. Mao said that he had to make a decision as
to whether he should maintain his policy of allowing his people to have only
bicycles or allow his people to own and drive automobiles. This was a huge
moment. Here Mao sat at a visionary crossroads. He asked Needham what he
thought. Needham sat at the same crossroads. He paused and in his mind’s eye he
could see the mass of men on bicycles making their way to work every day down
China’s streets. He then began his argument by saying that he had a bicycle
that he liked very much and served him well in Cambridge. He took a breath
before proceeding to say that he believed it was time to allow people to have
cars. However, in that moment Mao put up his hands, showing that Needham need
not continue. Mao had heard his expert and chose to continue his bicycle-only
policy. It would be four more years before Mao’s successor allowed people to
commute in cars. Hua Guofeng became party chairman following Mao’s death. Hua
vowed to bring China into the future and so allowed automobiles, leading in
time to a country that is now a leading manufacturer of automobiles and the
leading consumer of automobiles.[lxxii]
Leaders see the changes that are all about
them and act in a manner that guides their community into the new reality,
which is yet still before us. In this case both decisions were essential to how
life would be lived out in China. Both created and caused a reality for the people
of China. Both had good consequences and bad consequences unforeseen by the
leaders. Both men saw the changes around them, and they made different choices
about how to react to those changes. It is important for us to see clearly the
changes that are already affecting our congregations and communities in order
for us to see the future that is before us. We are to see clearly the changes
that are needed, and we are to have a strong central vision with allowance for
its application in new cultural contexts that emerge in time. It is time we
step into the future and begin to plant these new communities. What will they
look like and how will they make their way into the new missionary age? The
Christian in the new millennium will bring new challenges and opportunities.
For us to be successful, we will need leaders who are digital natives and who can act within the new VUCA world. We need different
kinds of leaders, and we need to rethink ways of forming and training leaders.
This particular task will require that we revisit how we raise different
vocations within the community. How will the digital native relate to the institutions of seminary and diocese? It has been
given to this generation to undertake the “dissipative” moment and to answer
these questions. We are a living church with a vital and necessary mission into the world.
[v] Smart citizens live in smart cities. This is a way of
networking people into a platform that generates participatory community life.
Smart citizens are connected with one another and the population within a city.
For example the Amsterdam Smart City project seeks to connect government
officials, citizens, and academics to build government e-services.
[x] Ibid. IFTF pulled these ideas
together from the “The Future of Everything Summit of Ideas and Digital
Invention,” held on 21-24 March 2013, Manchester, UK. Further info can be found
at: http://futureeverything.org
[xxi] Kinder Institute 32nd Annual
Report,” Rice University, 2013, http://has.rice.edu/uploadedFiles/Houston_Area_Survey/FINAL%20-%202013%20KIHAS%20Report.pdf “When asked a
slightly different question this year, half of the respondents (by 50% to 48%)
said they would prefer to live in "an area with a mix of developments,
including homes, shops and restaurants," rather than "a single-family
residential area." Figures have been consistent across the years in
rejecting basically a 50/50 split since 2007, the first time that question was
asked." They go on to say, "Among the survey participants in the nine
surrounding counties, 43% said they would choose the opportunity to live in an
area with a mix of developments, rather than in a single-family residential
area. These are remarkably high numbers for this sprawling, car-dependent city,
further underscoring the substantial demand for more urban alternatives that
now cuts across the entire metropolitan region."
[xxvi] “45 New Statistics on church Attendance and Avoidance,”
The Barna Group, March 3, 2008, https://www.barna.org/barna-update/congregations/45-new-statistics-on-church-attendance-and-avoidance#.Uh8552TXgVk "With Americans
pursuing a growing number of "church" options, some of the
traditional measures of church health are being redefined. According to a new
study released by The
Barna Group, which has been studying church participation patterns since 1984,
popular measures such as the percentage of people who are
"unchurched" - based on attendance at a conventional church service - are out of date.
Various new forms of faith community and
experience, such as house churches, marketplace ministries and cyberchurches,
must be figured into the mix - and make calculating the percentage of Americans
who can be counted as "unchurched" more complicated."
[xxvii] Ibid. “Six out of ten adults in
the Unattached category (59%) consider themselves to be Christian. Even more
surprising was the revelation that 17% of the
Unattached are born again Christians... A significant proportion of the Unattached engages in
traditional faith activities during
a typical week. For instance, one-fifth (19%) read the Bible and three out of
every five (62%) pray to God during a typical
week.”
[xxix] Ibid. “Homebodies- people who had not
attended a conventional church during the past month, but had attended a
meeting of a house church (3%). Blenders- adults who had attended both a
conventional church and a house church during the past month. Most of these
people attend a conventional church as their primary church, but many are
experimenting with new forms of faith community. In
total, Blenders represent 3% of the adult population.
Conventionals-
adults who had attended a conventional church (i.e., a congregational-style,
local church) during the past month but had not attended a house church. Almost
three out of every five adults (56%) fit this description. This participation
includes attending any of a wide variety of conventional-church events, such as
weekend services, mid-week services, special events, or church-based classes.”
[xxxviii] William P. Hall and Susu Nousala, “Autopoiesis and
Knowledge in Self Sustaining
Organizational Systems, 4th International Mulit-conference on
Society, Cybernetics and Informatics, June 2010, Orlando, Fl. This paper
challenges the idea that there is ever a closed system sociologically or
molecularly. Systems are always porous to their surroundings.
[xlix] Stuart Brand, “Founding Father, “ Wired, September 2003,
http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/9.03/baran_pr.html
[li] Barna, Boiling
Point, 250.
[liii] SimCity was a popular game that allowed people to build
communities online.
[lv] Flash mob Eucharist is a large public gathering where
people have a Eucharist – organized by means of social networks.
[lvi] Ibid, 25. The Barna Group calls these
Boutique Churches: "these are congregations with one ministry: worship, discipleship, fellowship, community service."
[lix] Barna, Boiling
Point, 252.
[lxiii] Warren Bird, “Today there are more than 8,000 multisite
churches,” LeadNetLeadNet,
[lxiv] Wheatley, New Science,
20.
[lxviii] Wheatley, New Science,
21. Wheatley is getting her
information from the landmark paper by Prigogine and
Stengers, published in 1984.
[lxix] Wheatley, New Science,
4.
[lxx] Simon Winchester, The Man Who Loved
China (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008).
