Continuing our look at mDNA - communitas not comminity and how it applies to Northern Community. The other posts in the mDNA series are here

Closed systems can’t adapt

Hirsch uses the metaphor of fish in a bowl to illustrate how controlled environments weaken the fish. The fish begin to rely on the input of food and the controlling influence on things like the water and temperature. The same pressure may apply to our church systems. As Hirsch writes:

Without any real engagement with the ‘outside world’, churches quickly become sheltered artificial environments, ecclesial fish tanks that are safeguarded from the danger and disturbances in the surrounding environment. They become closed systems with their own peculiar cultures that have little relational, social and cultural association to the world outside.

As a local congregation becomes a closed system it often reflects the era in which it was most recently connecting with its missional environment. On the whole, I would say that the four churches that merged to create Northern reflected a missional paradigm that was operative in the 1940’s to 60’s. This, by no coincidence, was when the four churches were at their biggest and they incorporated leadership structures taken from this era. We may be tempted to ‘add food’ to the closed ecclesial fish tanks in the form of packaged ministry products imported from other missional settings such as the USA or the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. The challenge which faced Northern was instead to rethink the very factors that had formed these closed ecclesial systems.

Hirsch suggests that the best way to do this is to regain an outward focus that will remind us to adapt or die. He writes: ‘we are missing a communitas experience because we are missing the missional component that takes us out of our safety zones into risky engagement with the world’. In his remarkable book, Birth of the Chaordic Age, Dee Hock founder and CEO Emeritus of VISA international defines his new leadership term ‘chaordic’ as:

• the behaviour of any self-governing organism, organization or system which harmoniously blends characteristics of order and chaos.
• patterned in a way dominated by neither chaos or order
• characteristic of the fundamental organizing principles of evolution and nature.

Many local congregations are frozen in their systems. Just as the fish will die if taken out of their controlled environment, we are now as a people of God realising that our environment has changed. This means that we will face many adaptive challenges. For us to survive, we need to control less and allow systems to self-organise around the new missional context. It is important for churches to learn from the lessons of self-governing organisms and become more chaordic in the structures and leadership.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 19th, 2005 at 5:30 pm by phil and is filed under mDNA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.