Transforming Church

Only a decade or two ago, and I fear to this day for much of the church, we labored under the responsibility that it is we who have to somehow restore order to that which is becoming ever more unmanageable. With our rather new understanding of the chaordic reality of the universe, mainly contributed to by the corporate and scientific worlds, we realize there is a seam between chaos and order, and it’s within that seam that the Holy Spirit and the church (if it is willing) are able to do their best work. See also the article “Transformation Happens Within Chaordic Parameters.”

As computers have become ever more powerful, quantum mechanics has been struggling to master the elusive challenge of predicting the weather. About the time they think they are on the right track, they realize they are still nearly 180 degrees off. The structures of nature like seasonal changes and weather systems are self-organizing, but it has been learned that they shape themselves functionally rather than through dogmatic adherence to a preconceived structure.

The variables in nature are legion but it was assumed we simply do not yet have a powerful enough computer. Now it has been determined these variables are, simply put, not predictable, even though nature still miraculously functions remarkably well. When quantum mechanics looked into that chaordic seam, they too realized that we will never be successful in pushing chaos back, and we need to seek structures of organization that will allow the same flexibility and adaptability as nature to be able to relate to it.

Like the rest of human institutions at the time, the church’s structures of organization were shaped by an old paradigm. They were actually the product of 17th Century thinking and with them the entire world managed to limp through the end of the Modern Age. Since the Post-modern Age began in the 1960’s, while much of the world has identified with new and changing paradigms, the church for the most part has not.

For the church to persist any further without seeking totally new paradigms similar to those adopted by the corporate and scientific worlds, the church will continue to diminish as we know it. We cannot continue to regard the world as a great clockwork machine that all you have to do is care for the parts. Getting better at that will not lead to efficient function. This is a huge deception we still persist in trusting.

The corporate leaders who have been the paradigm shifters over the last forty years and who have also read The Book of Acts from the New Testament, were the first to point out to us that much of what they were discovering in the corporate world is actually mirrored in Acts. What is described there is a very organic system of organization.

Now quantum mechanics is suggesting that we model nature with its natural systems and what we are seeing again is the organic principle. Margaret Wheatley in her book, Leadership and the New Science, points out four recent discoveries in the “new sciences” that should be applied to all organizational life. These discoveries have been contributed to by chaos theory, evolutionary biology, quantum mechanics, and field theory.

The first discovery is that order can emerge out of chaos. I already alluded to it briefly, but in this discovery the newer sciences are changing our field of vision. Even though the whole universe is filled with chaotic turbulent systems, they all have certain patterns. From this we can learn that though we face chaos in any attempt at transition, new order has tremendous potential to emerge from it. When we look at this in nature, it’s almost as though nature welcomes chaos as the way to welcome new order. This has also meant that science has had to redefine what is meant by both chaos and order.

The church has yet to arrive at this discovery, but only as it begins to live in truly organic systems will it be able to see the significant value of constructive controversy. Presently it is running scared, sacrificing everything to avoid conflict.

The second discovery is a new role for information. Information has always existed and always been there. Work with genetic information, DNA, has been key in this discovery. As reported by Margaret Wheatley, “Many scientists in the new area of evolutionary biology now consider living things as really just information that has taken material form. If this continues to be supported, information is to be seen as one of the primary organizational forces of the universe. In the past we have viewed life as creating or producing information, when in fact it is information that is creating life.”

From the church’s perspective this plays out in the realization that to change our machine model of organization to an organic one, a huge amount of information unique to each instance of transformation is not only helpful but necessary to bring that about.

The third discovery is relationships. Scientists have been searching a long time for the building blocks of matter. Most of us learned in school about protons, electrons and neutrons racing at the speed of light and colliding with one another. Newest to be discovered is that these collisions have produced even smaller particles. Scientists now see this activity as relationships, even as teams that know how to work together.

For quantum mechanics part of the search has been for the nature of light. Is it made up of particles? Is it a wave? We now know that it is both depending on the type of relationship.

For the congregation seeking its organizational definition, this simple insight from nature has profound implications. Seeing ourselves as “atomic particles,” we are best described as what we are in our productive relationship (our calling) with one another.

The fourth discovery has to do with vision. With all of these invisible fields in nature like gravity, their effect can be felt in every living thing in the universe. These fields even collide with one another and create other effects. Vision is the playing field of the organization. In the corporate world vision becomes much more a personal product while in the church we look to the Holy Spirit as our source of vision.

The similarities of vision as a playing field for either congregation or business corporation, however, are apparent. Vision refers to the yet-to-be-played-out immediate months and years of how the organization will pursue its mission. Like some of the phenomena of nature are the result of invisible fields colliding, when vision is everywhere understood in an organization, all those who are part of the organization can interact positively with it, and wondrous new forms of energy and productivity will be created.

In conclusion, recognize the chaordic condition for what it is, never restrain any information that feeds the transformation process, develop a rich diversity of relationships in effective teams and embrace the congregation’s vision as an invisible field from which new energies and ministries will continually emerge.