I’ve
been thinking about how a church can best exist as a closely-knit family. The church is comprised of people from myriad
backgrounds. Some have followed Jesus
for decades. Others aren’t even sure if
there is a God. Some in the church
family love their brothers and sisters in Christ more than their own
relatives. Some in the church family don’t
really like many of the people they see on Sundays. How does this widely diverse group, full of
sometime diametrically opposed views, hold together. More than holding together, how does this
group act collectively as a witness, pointing the world toward the Kingdom of
God and the salvation we have in Jesus Christ?
I’ve
been a part of churches as pastor for 27 years dating back to 1991, my summer
as an intern for two tiny Methodist churches in a farming community in
Michigan. In that time, I have seen many
things: a pastor with a live-in girlfriend.
I knew a stubborn pastor who tore his church apart because he would not
compromise with others on the pastoral staff.
Upon seeing what he had done, he collapsed and was hospitalized as he
was crushed under the weight of his own shame and guilt. One year a church had a bomb-threat during
Vacation Bible School; the deacons decided to banish the group they believed
was responsible even though the pastor vehemently opposed this decision. I have seen women in the church browbeat a
Wednesday dinner cook to the point that she quit out of sorrow and heartbreak;
in a fury, the pastor shut down the Wednesday dinner program.
Church life can get messy. How do we fallible creatures live into the
calling God has for us – to join together as disciples of Jesus, witnesses of
salvation, and proclaimers of the Gospel?
We spend lifetimes seeking the answer, but lately, what has come to me
is a different way of considering the organizing principle upon which the
church stands. Obviously, we’d say we
are joined together in Christ, centered on Christ. But what does that mean? What does that look like for our specific
church?
I offer an extended passage from a blog
– the Veritas Forum. The writer
describes “bounded-set” thinking v. “centered-set” thinking. My comments are below, after the quote.
So
what is Bounded Set vs. Centered Thinking? Frost and Hirsch use an analogy of
fences and wells. If you are a farmer with a 3 acre ranch so to speak, you can
build a fence to keep your cattle in and other animals out. This would be a
Bounded Set. But if you are a rancher say with a huge amount of land and
acreage you wouldn't be able to build fences around your whole property. So
instead of building fences, you dig wells. So it is then assumed that animals
won't go too far away from the well, because their life literally depends on
them not wandering too far away from their water source.
So
what does this have to do with the Missional Church? Frost and Hirsh unpack it
this way, "The attractional church is a bounded set. That is, it is a set
of people clearly marked off from those who do not belong to it. Churches thus
mark themselves in a variety of ways. Have a church membership roll is an
obvious one. This mechanism determines who's in and who's out. The
missional-incarnational church, though, is a centered set. This means that
rather than drawing a border to determine who belongs and who doesn't, a
centered set is defined by it's core values, and people are not seen as in or
out, but as closer or further away from the center. In that sense, everyone is in
and no one is out. Though some people are close to the center and others far
from it, everyone is potentially part of the community in it's broadest
sense."
So
in other words, a centered set is about direction. Which way are you headed?
Are you heading towards the center, the core values of the community, or are
you heading away from them? It reminds me of the C.S. Lewis quote, "[The]
situation in the actual world is much more complicated than that. The world
does not consist of 100% Christians and 100% non-Christians. There are people
(a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still
call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other
people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves
so. There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ
but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they are His in a much deeper
sense than they themselves understand…. "[i]
If a church, say our church for example, deemed the best
mode of operation would be as a centered-set, what would that look like? We would still be organized. We would need some process for decision
making. However, it might dramatically
open up who we recognize to be a part of “us.”
It has the potential for us to rethink how we see ourselves as the body
of Christ, a family joined together in shared faith.
Lest we over-rely on a model new to us, Tim Harmon of Western
Seminary writes a short article that serves as a corrective to the
direction-oriented value of “centered-set thinking.”[ii] Even if HillSong were to aspire to operate in
as a centered-set, we would still have standards. We would still have boundaries. HillSong Church is an institution. Hopefully it is more than that, but even if
our conception of church is as a family,
we need norms to function.
I conclude with what I hope is optimistic and not
quixotic wondering. What if we see
people in relation to Christ? Am I
moving toward Christ? Are you in-step
with Christ? Are we walking away from
Christ? Instead of member/nonmember,
believer/unbeliever, or some other delineation we might conceive, what if we
are all directional, moving toward the Savior?
What would our church be like then?
I am not proposing a new organizing principle for our
church. I am simply inviting all who
read this to imagine church in new ways.
Consideration of how others think about church can help us be better in
how we live as God’s family in our setting.
Join with me in imagining. Go to
God in prayer and ask for help seeing our church with fresh eyes.
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