Found the following comments by Alan Hirsch on Sam Metcalf’s Blog. Alan is National Director of Forge in Australia. Along with Michael Frost, Alan wrote an excellent book, The Shaping of Things to Come, that has greatly challenged my thinking on movements and movement building. I’ve rearranged Sam’s notes topically as I interpreted them. It seems that Alan was reflecting on the growth of the church in China. Not sure I got it right, but I like the power of thinking of “apostolic environments, transforming discipleship, and organic systems.”
Missional effectiveness is determined by:
1) Apostolic environments
Apostolic leadership draws out the innate leadership in all of us. The management of meaning is an apostolic function.
They look more like Al Qaeda than the Catholic Church. Such movements are like a swarm …a virus that can’t be taken out. They maximize survival by spread. They can only be eliminated by being attacked on an ideological level where the movement is glued together. They are networks of meaning.
The gift that persecution brings is that it forces us to distill to the basic, essential truth that Jesus is Lord and Savior and to cling to him. It doesn’t require professionals to propagate it. It is the absolutely basic and essential emphasis.
2) Disciplemaking and
The West has complicated the church and made discipleship simple. China has a simplified the church and made discipleship complicated. Good disciples produce good leaders.
We can’t learn to love unless we’ve gone the distance with a group of people.
We are people of the “story.” Not just people of the book. Complexity mucks it all up. Jesus movements are not complex. Pentecostal movements are not complicated. They focus on Jesus.
3) Organic Systems.
The centralization of power institutionalizes a movement.
Church planting movements don’t move through hierarchies. Hierarchies stunt growth …there is more clutter to deal with. Control does not bring spontaneous expansion. Bottom up patterns create movements.
China is an atheistic state forcing the church to act out its essential DNA. The worst thing the government could do is to legalize the church.
Suffering people/movements are not usually fundamentalist because they deal daily with paradox.
The institutional church that we have inherited in the West is very clumsy. It will not change. The twenty first century could be our gift to the world-wide Christian movement. We’re at a moment of rapid, discontinuous change of compelling opportunity. What we are seeing are the vibes of a movement via organic systems.
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