The Once and Future Church: Reinventing the Congregation for a New Mission Frontier (Once and Future Church Series)

by Loren B. Mead

The dependency system fostered by the Church of Christendom remains a barrier to building a church for the future. The hierarchical arrangement that grew in the institution through its life was a response to the worldview of its leaders. It was reinforced by the leaders' interpretations of history, and it facilitated responding to the missionary frontier at the edge of the Empire. These reinforcing systems contain unhealthy structures. In an earlier generation we described this as a classically Parent-Child institutional arrangement, locking the child into permanent dependence. In today's language of Twelve Step Programs we describe this as a co-dependent system. Whatever the language or image, we are pointing to the fact that the church has a culture that encourages some to take responsibility for the lives and behavior of others, with loss of authority and independence to those others. Systems that continue as Parent-Child or co-dependent systems will block the development of the kind of individual responsibility and authority that only can shape a church responsive to the new mission frontier.

Let me address the judicatory with my naked point: "Put all your energy into congregations that are at learning points. The others? Leave them alone!"

But in a time of change, when pressure and opportunity for change are not the same everywhere, we badly need innovators, people and groups who will take a stab at a new way with the freedom to fail.

I am aware of two ways in which we undercut the effectiveness of experimentation. In the first case we do not make a commitment that is sufficiently long. Change in religious institutions takes time.

Experiments do not work if you keep pulling them up to look at the roots.

Denominations and congregations also undercut experimentation by excessive turnover of leadership.

Even more painful to me is the way we negate experiments by neglecting to capture and communicate what is learned. The church all too often walks away from pieces of its work with no effort to share its successes and failures.

The important point for us has been the use of boundary as a metaphor for a learning opportunity. We clearly find such boundaries have very high learning potential, but in most cases the persons involved are so busy they do not stop to learn. Indeed, their very busyness is the escape mechanism most people use to avoid the pain of learning and change.

We saw that the newcomer, somehow, makes a decision to cross a boundary from not-in-the-congregation to in-the-congregation. We tried to find out what changed for them. How were they helped to learn the language of the new community? What barriers did the new community have in place that it might not even be aware of? We also recognized that the boundary-crosser generally sees things that natives do not see, so we asked the newcomerto help us map the congregation as they experienced it.

In the final analysis, the issue is one of mission. How do we as Christians—whether mainline or sideline, liberal or conservative, connectional or free—find a community that forms and sustains us in an authentic faith and move out bearing that faith into the structures of our ambiguous society? How do we pass those forms of community on to the next generation?