No More Box

As I continue to think about decentralization (last weeks post), I have had a few conversations, more thoughts, and read two posts today that I am still trying to process.

Conversations…

In my conversations with Joey and with Mark, the thoughts of decentralization kept coming back to a two-fold solution. One is a deliberate effort on the part of existing church structures to stress the centrality of buildings and programs and to build into people a sense of 24/7 faith. The other is a personal effort on our parts to refocus our lives with Christ as the center.

Thoughts…

So this of course leads to thoughts that center around the fact that I still don’t have pictures.

First of all, we need to picture our lives less as the circles I was trying to describe before, but more as a plotted graph. The center of the graph should be our mission in life. The points on the graph will represent the things in our lives.

Step one, shift the center from where it is now to the actual mission you are called to live on.

Step two is not to move things closer to the center, but recognize that we exist, not on a two dimensional paper graph, but in a multidimensional world. Part of re-centering is shift the axis to the appropriate view, away from two (or even three) dimensional thinking and towards a missional thinking that encompasses the space we live in along with our time and accounts for the movements of the Spirit.

Step three is to move the things in our lives closer to the center of our new axis.

Step four is to eliminate the things that don’t fall in line with our mission/purpose.

Of course this is still all really rough in thinking and I really need some pictures, but…

Additional Reading…

Check out Alex McManus’s post on The Kinds of People the 21st Century Needs (2). Some great thoughts on turning to community without (necessarily) turning to a physical church structure.

Also, Larry Chouinard wrote a great post titled, When the Missional Church Gathers– Revisited.

From his article…

What happens to our view of the church gathered when sacred space is centered and defined by a person, not our geographical location? When the operative terms become "incarnational" and "missional" rather than "attendance" and "membership"? Suppose our strategy and vision for engaging and changing our cultural context involved the fluidity and vision of a movement, whose primary presence is not the real estate we own, but the permeating effects of the way of the Kingdom "seeping into the cracks and crevices of society"?

Next…

This seems like an issue/topic that I will continue to struggle through as I look to the future of the Kingdom and my role in it. Any thoughts? Comment or trackback.

Tags: misional, church