Organic Community: Patterns

Myers' chapter on Patterns is simple yet subversive. He lifts up the age-old dialectic between "prescriptive" and "descriptive" communities. Using family as a model the healthiest families are ones that realize that each member is an individual. In my own life I can tell you that our daughters are two different kids and they each must be parented in different ways. That doesn't mean one set of rules for each but it does mean that I don't make Berit follow Liv's schedule and visa versa (I can only imagine trying to get Liv to go to sleep at 7!). We recognize that patterns are different for each person. We follow descriptive models for how we wish our family to be within which each of us is a free individual yet members of each other.

So why then do congregations force individuals into prescriptive programs that hinder individual freedom and, in fact, cause awkward or uncomfortable interactions that one must bear to get "through"... confirmation being a prime example? The church growth movement is another prime example. All of these models, all of these books, all of these programs that will "work"... and yet, what we forget, is that those books are usually written about the experience of ONE community of individuals that found something that worked for them! We take a descriptive experience, package it up, sell it, and market it. A pastor or leader then buys that book and it becomes a prescription for a community that is made up of completely different individuals in different contexts and different reasons for being there.

Organic community seeks to look for many patterns to connect people to God and each other.

Small groups are another model that works for some but not all. What worked for some becomes institutionalized into, sometimes, the *only* way of belonging to a community.

Myers lifts up Edward Hall's idea of "proxemics" or how people use space. There are four ways we use space: public, social, personal, and intimate.
Healthy people need connections across all four proxemics.
Public belonging: think sports team fans who wear the jersey. This identifies them as part of a tribe but usually no more than that.
Social belonging: Places you reveal small bits of yourself. Your hairdresser, personal trainer, work colleagues. Social belonging gives you windows or opportunities to decide to move into more personal or intimate belonging. Social space also helps us practice our story.
Personal: More private stories are shared. Think of your close circle of friends or the friends who know more about you then anyone else and hold that in trust.
Intimate: These are the people who know the real you. All of your warts and pimples, joys and sorrows. There are very few of these intimate relationships in a person's life. Healthy people have very few of these so you do not need to manufacture them to be a healthy person.

Now you can't manufacture a prescription to move people from one space to another! that would not be organic. It is simply helpful to know and realize that forcing people into spaces they are not asking for nor are they ready for is traumatic and manipulative. I have had that reaction in terms of Teen Encounter Christ weekends where young people are forced from public space (high school) to intimate space in the matter of three sleepless nights and days.

Church leadership can respond to this not by manipulation but by being open to creating spaces that reflect people's needs and then watching to see how they are used. What would it look like for a new member class not to be assigned a small group but to be introduced to the congregations spaces and patterns and then watching how those members interact with them? All connections are important, Myers reminds us, so remove the bottom-line discussion and start to be curious about all of these individuals God has called into your community. What do they have to offer? What is their story? Where are there connections to be made?

Myers key terms for this idea is "relaxed intentionality"... create the environment and then validate people as they naturally connect to each other in public to intimate ways. And one must never forget that God is mixed up in this work as well! Why try to take His hand off the wheel? Our catechism in the Lutheran Church teaches us that the Holy Spirit, "calls, gathers, enlightens and sanctifies us." Why do we so often, as church staff or leadership, try to be the ones who call? Who try endless ways of "gathering" busy folks until we are the ones who burn out? Who take it upon ourselves to enlighten the masses and then decide what it means to be a true "member" of the Church?

That's the main reason I wish to see myself as an environmentalist in the church not a programmer or even a "leader". The leadership can intentionally work to create these spaces and help folks off the assembly-line mentality of the church as factory rather than a laboratory or a greenhouse where God is at work, not us!

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Comments

[Elizabeth]

amen.