Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Almost every day we see and hear evidence that the institutional church is not capable of dealing with the challenges facing it. Here are two newsletters that address this topic: See “The Decline of Institutions” in this Newsletter and “The Bankruptcy of the Elite in this Newsletter.”

For my doctoral dissertation I focused on information flow in organizations. When I made the changes in my life some 25 years ago I shifted that interest to the individual and the church. So, I believe that this is an information flow problem.

Almost 20 years ago I read two books that profoundly influenced my thinking regarding how we do church – ecclesiology.

In The Community of the King I learned that the “Church” that Jesus and Paul, working together, established describes functions and not a hierarchy:

Note that Paul is not referring here to some hierarchy in the church, though sometimes such an interpretation is read into the text. Rather, Paul is showing that God himself has provided for order by giving, within each local congregation and in the church generally, persons capable of exercising the various necessary functions. This is a functional and to some degree chronological explanation (“apostles . . . prophets . . . teachers”), not a fixed hierarchy.

This was mind blowing to me as I had worked with functions: Design and Manufacturing, for example, and not Departments in an organization in my dissertation work.

In The Second Reformation I learned about the significance of the “Corporate Experience” and the “Personal Experience’ and all that entails – about corporate worship and small groups.

Recently I have begun to explore The Underground Network (see also Tampa Underground Network) and read The Underground Church: A Living Example of the Church in Its Most Potent Form. This video: Underground People on Vimeo provides a powerful introduction to this endeavor.

My initial reaction, after some research and reflection, is that this basic concept provides a powerful solution to the challenges raised by Rod Dreher in The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.

The work continues. Interested?