Church for Every Context. Michael Moynagh

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Johnson, Manyika and Yee, 2005, pp. 25–6) have shown the growing importance of human interactive skills within network enterprises – ‘companies thrive on good company’ (Starkey and Tempest, 2005, p. 152). From this, it is not much of a step to view organizations as the sum of the conversations within them (for example, Shaw, 2002).

      These conversations give rise to processes with emergent properties. Stalder maintains that ‘Castells substantiates, by way of standard empirical research methods and a rather traditionalist terminology, some of the core arguments advanced speculatively by the new complexity-oriented social theory’ (Stalder, 2006, p. 185). In conversations, for example, ideas may be combined in novel ways, which can lead to new types of action, which spark new conversations, leading to further novel combinations.

      Leadership in particular acquires a bottom-up quality. It is a feature of networks that they have no internal authority able to dictate what happens. Networks and their tasks are too complex for command and control. Top-down orders get reinterpreted or ignored in the conversations that make organizing possible, while people in authority lack the time or knowledge to enforce their instructions. This has contributed to the end of deference, which extends to small, simpler networks where in theory the top can exercise control.

      Leadership gets dispersed as different actors take the lead at different times in the conversations to which they contribute (Lichtenstein and Plowman, 2009, pp. 2–3). This means that the appointed leader must foster conditions that will encourage conversations to be fruitful. Coming to terms with this dispersed leadership, however, is difficult when senior management has responsibility for meeting stakeholders’ objectives and ensuring that legal requirements are met. As we have noted, management continues to seek new forms of control to secure regulatory compliance and improved performance. Thus emergent processes tend to co-exist awkwardly with top-down regulation. Tension lies between the two.

      Bottom-up emergence produces effects at higher levels. The interactions of lower-level agents generate the level above. But these higher levels are largely beyond the control of lower-level agents, they exhibit properties not revealed at lower levels and they influence levels below through downward causation. Networked financial markets, for example, are like a ‘mighty whirlwind’. They take on a life of their own. They are beyond the control of agents within them, but have an impact upon them. Governments work within national frames of reference to develop strategies for interacting at a global level. But these interactions create international bureaucracies that have their independent logics. These logics then constrain the actions of governments that brought them into being (Stalder, 2006, pp. 190–2).

      In the network society, new contextual churches will have emergent properties. Focused churches will give rise to networks at a higher level, and these networks will exert downward causation on the levels below. The structure of ‘temples, synagogues and tents’ described in the last chapter can be understood in these terms. Assuming momentum gathers pace, it will bring about a reconfiguration of the church. In addition, if leadership is dispersed and emerges through conversations, it becomes vital that church leaders attend carefully to the minutiae of conversations and help others to do so too – a theme taken up in Chapter 16.

      The economic and social turn

       The logic of combining scale and specialization creates opportunities for focused churches that are well connected.

       The space of flows opens doors to network churches that exist alongside geographical ones. It fragments localities, which challenges the church to draw these fragments together. It provides new opportunities for churches to work together to serve society.

       The proliferation of networks makes society more conversational, and conversations give rise to processes with emergent properties. These processes are shaping the cultural context of the church.

      Conclusion

      Some people, such as Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank (2010), believe that there is no need for new types of church. At its best, inherited church is well engaged with local communities. Clergy are known in schools, youth centres and by the police. They coordinate the local response to racism, lobby about the drains and support local voluntary groups. They encourage the laity to be involved in residents associations, local politics and in the pub darts team. The church meets people at times of crisis and celebration. Evangelism often permeates all these activities.

      If this was the whole story, there would be no need to explain the church’s decline in much of the global North. Secularization theory exists because the church has contracted. This shrinkage questions any claim that the existing church alone can meet today’s missional challenge. As society disengages further from the church, why should more of the same solve a problem that was created by more of the same? The church needs to adapt.

      Against many of the secularization writers, however, it is premature to pen the church’s obituary. Decline seems to stem from the church’s own limitations. With the fragmentation of life, the church has failed to accompany people into the numerous settings where they now live. It has become detached from their concerns, failed to open sufficient doors to newcomers and persisted with an ecclesial model that is self-defeating. The birthing, still at an early stage, of contextual churches in the splinters of society could herald a church that serves people in the ordinary settings of life, and becomes significant to them once again.

      To serve these contexts well, new churches will need to connect with expressive selves who lead immanent lives, have a desire to be good, are increasingly sociable and, if they are interested in spirituality at all, prefer it in the form of a quest. Churches will be supportive communities that engage with practical, everyday concerns, respond to ethical desires, connect transcendence more tightly to day-to-day realities and provide a welcoming environment in which individuals can tread their spiritual paths. Churches that do this will be in tune with the network society. They will be focused, serving specific groups of people, but also be networked, pooling resources for mission and discipleship. They will be emergent, displaying the self-organizing properties of networks that now shape society.

      All this describes some of the potential contours of church in every context – church in the different settings of life, church that enriches everyday existence in life and church that is responsive to the dynamics of network life. Yet if contextual church is a plausible response to today’s cultural landscape, what are its theological foundations? It is to this question that we now turn.

      Further reading

      Davie, Grace, The Sociology of Religion, London: Sage, 2007.

      Heelas, Paul, Spiritualities of Life: New Age Romanticism and Consumptive Capitalism, Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

      Stalder, Felix, Manuel Castells. The Theory of the Network Society, Cambridge: Polity, 2006.

      Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007.

      Questions for discussion

       How far should the church adapt to changes in society and how far should it seek to be distinct from society?

       Can it be said that the expressive self is a Christian self СКАЧАТЬ