DECODING THE CHURCH
I'm inching my way thru Howard Snyder’s new book. A few quotes:

+> “...Behind these proposals is the faulty assumption that the church is like a machine and that churches are pretty much the same everywhere, with interchangeable parts. Plug in the right program and, and off it goes!

“Many of us have felt intuitively for years that this approach is wrong. Complexity theory helps us see why. The life of the church – any church – is made up of too many factors to give us any confidences that a method or program developed in one context will work in another. The church’s DNA is just too complex – and too unique in each local embodiment – for that to be true.

“The church is a complex system, a living organism. Stop and think of the complexity of a church composed of only fifty people. There is first of all, the complexity of the interaction of all these people (multiply fifty by fifty...!) Second, there is the relation of each person to God, with no two relationships being quite the same. Throw in the complexity of personality types, cultural backgrounds, family experiences, job involvements, physical health or illness, denominational traditions, aesthetic tastes, and the multitude of choices each person makes daily, and you begin to get some sense of the church’s real complexity! The church is a complex ecology of spiritual, physical, social, political, psychological, and economic dimensions.

“We should rejoice in this! We should celebrate the church’s complexity and allow the church to be the church, not to try to squeeze it into some ill-fitting framework. We should concentrate on the basics, which means carefully and closely following biblical instruction concerning the church and its life.

“The church is a body, not a machine or a corporation. The church is not an army of Christian soldiers. An army functions by forcibly restricting the complexity of human interaction and programming it into a strict chain of command. An army is an unnatural community – very effective for one purpose, but not for building a healthy community. The church is a body, and the body is a complex system with unique DNA.

“This can help us appreciate the church in all its complex beauty – even the strange mix of faithfulness and unfaithfulness that so often marks it. This view seems, in fact, to be the biblical perspective. We get into trouble when we try to program the church, just as we do when we try to program a teenager, or the love between two people, or the life of a family. Human relationships are too dynamic for that.” (pp. 37-38)

+> “The church has a mission to God as well as from God...

“The church’s fundamental mission to God is worship. This truth, however, can become a cliche that actually subverts mission. Worship, so-called, can become a diversion from mission, especially in postmodern North America, where ‘worship’ may mask considerable self-centeredness. Too often worship is more consumer-centered than God-centered.” (p. 50)

+> "Elephants and dinosaurs are impressive, but they thrive only in certain environments." (p. 64)