Displayed below is an actual essay written by one of the LEC1 cohort students. Although the essays will vary widely from student to student according to their various learning objectives, this example will give you an idea of what the essays look like.
Sample essay written by a LEC student
Dwight Friesen kindly agreed to allow his Module 03 essay to be republished below.
George Fox University
Doctor of Ministry
Scale-Free Networks as a Structural Hermeneutic for Relational Ecclesiology
Figure 1
Submitted to:
Dr. Kent Yinger
And
Dr. Leonard Sweet
By
Dwight Friesen
Bellevue, Washington
12/22/2003
Table of Contents
Toward an understanding of “Scale-free Networks”
Kingdom of God as a Scale-Free Network
What might this mean for the “solid” church?
Institutional Church as a Commons
List of Illustrations
Figure 1 – “Human Web,” Unknown artist, (on title page)
Figure 2 – Map of a Random Network
Figure 3 – A Pure Exponential Network
Figure 4 – A Static Map of a Scale-Free Network
Figure 5 – Comparing Random and Scale-Free Distribution
Figure 6 – Perichoretic relationship of Christ-follower/Christ-cluster/World
Précis
The modern world is increasingly marked by fluidity eroding the structures that were once assumed to be solid. Our “solid” definitions of church and God’s kingdom are struggling to find resonance in this liquid society. The kingdom of God is a Scale-free network; it is a vast shaping web, linking all of creation under the relational reign of God. Each node of creation is related to every other node through a dynamic network of constantly morphing links. Within this scale-free network the church is a cluster of people centered in Jesus Christ. Until recently network theory could not explain clustering phenomena; it is the reality of “clustering” that makes scale-free network theory so important. Scale-free network theory accounts for the grouping of nodes around hubs (or popular nodes). It serves as a hermeneutic of the relational structure of all of life, and opens new vistas for understanding and experiencing the living relationship between God’s World, God’s Kingdom and God’s churches.
Within God’s “scale-free kingdom” churches are best understood as Christ-clusters. Christ-clusters are groupings of nodes responsible for discrete Holy Spirit led/cluster-determined cellular functions. These Christ-clusters are usually distinct from, though often synergistically related to, the institutional church. Institutional structures like churches, denominations, para-church organizations, families, colleges, and even corporations can serve as a type of ‘commons’ for Christ-clustering. Leadership within Christ-clusters is a hubbing function that is radically democratic and cannot be positionally hierarchal.
"What is the Kingdom of God like? How can I illustrate it?
It is like a tiny mustard seed planted in a garden;
it grows and becomes a tree, and the birds come and
find shelter among its branches."
– Jesus[1]
Introduction
In his book Liquid Modernity,[2] which cogently contrasts “solid modernity” with “liquid modernity,” Zygmunt Bauman describes solids as having clear spatial dimensions that downgrade the significance of time. As such, solids seem to be set and cast for all time – they appear almost unchanging. This was the ‘solid’ nature of modernity, as it dealt with objective rationality and clear propositional truths. Modernity created the impression that its findings were firm, heavy and unmovable.
Liquid modernity is marked by constant movement, change and flow; nothing is seen as firm or solid. What was absolute is now understood as relative, what was “assume-d” now makes an “ass-of-u-and-me,” and what was orthodox is now understood as opinion. Liquid modernity holds change as the only constant. We understand liquids to travel easily; “They ‘flow’, ‘run out’, ‘splash’, ‘pour over’, ‘leak’, ‘flood’, ‘spray’, ‘drip’, ‘seep’; unlike solids they are not easily stopped – they pass around some obstacles, dissolve some others and bore or soak their way through others still.”[3] Bauman likens our current Western culture to a kind of fluidity which strips away modern certainties, much the way water erodes the banks of a river; culture is constant movement and reshaping of all modern thought, making today’s boulder tomorrow’s sand.
This metaphor of fluidity[4] demands that we rethink our ‘solid’ understandings of philosophy, theology, and social networks. Increasingly strength is understood not as “resisting the flow” or “taking a stand,” but actively participating in the flow with integrity. A semiotic look at Process, Liberation, Openness, Narrative, Relational theologies, and the rebirth of Orthodoxy, along with other emerging fluid articulations of theology, signal to us that the “Christianity” we once thought of as “rock solid” may be even stronger if envisioned as running water.
As John Fuellenbach concluded in Church: Community for the Kingdom:
We cannot predict the future, but we have to invent it, based on some insights of linear thinking and on our understanding of the present paradigm shift.
This requires two things of us: (1) to recognize that we are no longer involved in a linear change; and (2) a tremendous belief in God, trusting the message we have offer is God’s saving plan for all God’s kingdom. The new situation places us almost on the same level at which the early church found itself. The early Christians could not rely on the past, nor did they have clear instructions from the Lord for the future. Reading the signs of the times and trusting in the presence of the Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit, they proclaimed their way of action: “we and the Holy Spirit have agreed” (Acts 15:28).[5]
It is both in and for this liquid context that I propose churches be conceptualized as Christ-clusters within God’s scale-free kingdom. To make sense of this statement we will look at churches through the lens of a recent discovery in the field of complexity. Within mathematics’ study of complex systems, which includes ideas and techniques from chaos theory, artificial life, evolutionary computation and genetic algorithms, is also the study of networks. Recent findings are already proving to be useful in social sciences,[6] biology[7] and technology.[8] Though still developing, our understanding of networks may be moving beyond theory. Michael Schrage asserts, “People can’t break these laws of networks any more than they can violate Newton’s laws of motion.”[9]
Toward an understanding of “Scale-free Networks”
In 1998, physicist Albert-László Barabási and his colleagues at Norte Dame set out to create a map of the World-Wide-Web. Their working assumption was that a map of the World-Wide-Web would form a type of random network. Much to their surprise, they instead found a type of dynamic, self-determining, relational order with an uneven distribution of links. They christened their network discovery a “Scale-Fee Network.”[10]
Networks
The 300 year old study of networks[11] is fundamentally a study of relationships, as networks are systems of interconnected components. “Any collection of interacting parts – from atoms and molecules to bacteria, pedestrians, traders on a stock market floor, and even nations-represents a kind of substance.”[12] Networks (figure 2) are made of two primary elements: nodes (the dots) and links (or relationships), and as such they map points of connection.
Understanding liquidity is central to appreciating the significance of networks. All social, biological and technological networks are constantly changing. New nodes are being added while old nodes disappear, new links are formed while old links dissolve, and the importance of a link is relative to the time/space of its participating nodes. A printout of almost any network map will be obsolete even before the printer has finished its work. So, because of its constant evolution process any network map must be understood as an outdated snapshot rather than an organization-type chart.
Random Networks
From the end of the 1950’s until Barabási and his team’s discovery of scale-free networks, all networks were thought to be random. One of the distinguishing features of random networks is that they are marked by a relatively even distribution of connectivity. In 1959 the prolific mathematician, Paul Erdős and his collaborator Alfréd Rényi made it their goal to describe the networks present in communications and life sciences. Their research led them to suggest that “such systems could be effectively modeled by connecting their nodes with randomly placed links.”[13] Theory of random networks described them as deeply democratic, with most nodes having approximately the same number of links. For this reason, random networks are sometimes referred to as exponential networks because as the network grows larger, the nodes experience a corresponding decrease in connection to the network. For instance, in figure 3, Ego is linked to five nodes, and if the network didn’t grow beyond that, Ego would be connected to 100% of the nodes. However as pictured Ego is directly linked to only 4.7% of the networked nodes; the larger the network the less connected Ego will be.
Breck shampoo ran a television commercial in the mid 1990’s; a spokesperson smiled into the camera and told viewers how she told two friends how Breck gave her thick, long, shiny hair. Then those two friends told two friends, those two told to more, "and so on, and so on..."
This is an example of a random network – purely exponential, even distribution of relationships, with less connection for individual nodes corresponding to the growth of the network. Though random networks do have some real world applications, like a highway system, their failure to account for overlapping relational connections often renders them little more than an interesting mathematical abstraction. The assumption that all networks were random may account for the lack of ecclesial network theory research. . . that is, until now.
Scale-free Networks
As Barabási and his colleagues began mapping the World-Wide-Web it became increasingly clear that individual nodes were not evenly connected (figure 4). Some nodes seemed to be very popular, while others nodes had very few connections.
Their selection of the label “scale-free” was to signal the important difference between it and random networks. Whereas random networks experienced a corresponding decrease in connectivity with their exponential growth, scale-free networks did not display uniform limits of scale. In fact some nodes were significantly more connected than other nodes. Scale-free networks are complex network systems, or systems of relationship, which share an important property, some nodes have a vast number of relational connections to other nodes, while most nodes, by comparison, have just a handful of links. The popular nodes, usually called “hubs,” can have hundreds, thousands, even millions of links.[14]
Though almost every node serves a hubbing function for at least one other node, these well-connected nodes function as relationship facilitators, matchmakers for a disproportionate number of nodes. When a node connects to a well-connected “hub,” the hub’s connections are now one degree away from the newly connected node.[15] This can open new worlds of connection for the node. “The small-world mystery is indeed more than a mere curiosity. It reveals an underlying dynamic of interconnectedness that expresses itself indelibly in who we are, how we think, and how we behave.”[16]
As social beings, we belong to neighborhoods, companies, schools, villages, and professions. Through work, I know colleagues, and they know not only me but each other as well. Playing bingo, Mabel will have met a number of friends, who will also be friends among themselves. The point is that people are decidedly not wired up at random all over the world. And this simple fact, what we might call the “clustering” of social connections, destroys the calculations we made for the random graph, which now appear as little more than a sterile exercise.[17]
Clusters of nodes often develop around hubs. A “cluster” or “functional-module” is a grouping of nodes that are responsible for discrete cellular functions.[18] Clusters become possible through the hubbing action of some very popular nodes. The capacity for clustering is what makes scale-free networks of vital importance for social theory and, in this discussion, for the kingdom of God and churches.
“How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed?
How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard?
And how will they hear without a preacher?
How will they preach unless they are sent?
Just as it is written,
“How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news of good things!” – Paul[19]
Kingdom of God as a Scale-Free Network
The kingdom of God[20] fits the definition of a scale-free network. Jesus described it this way; "The Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast used by a woman making bread. Even though she used a large amount of flour, the yeast permeated every part of the dough."[21] Even Christ’s parabolic descriptions of God’s kingdom suggest that this dynamic relational theory may hold important insight to understanding and experiencing the unstoppable expansion and rhizomic interconnected reality of God’s kingdom.
Buchanan suggests that “some of the deepest truths of our world may turn out to be truths about organization, rather than about what kinds of things make up the world and how those things behave as individuals.”[22] The “truths about organization” he mentions are relational connections: How do the individual parts work together to produce the whole? A serious look at the connections of the cosmos takes seriously the notion that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.[23] As complexity theories are equipping humanity to appreciate the interconnectedness of all creation, those in theistic traditions uniquely appreciate the source of these vast shaping mosaics. Jürgen Moltmann writes, “If all things are created by God, then their protean variety is preceded by an immanent unity. It is through Wisdom that God forms the community of created beings, who exist with one another and for one another.”[24]
Nodes and Links in God’s Scale-Free Kingdom
In a thorough map of God’s scale-free kingdom nodes would represent all aspects of creation, while links would illustrate their relationships. Nodes are not just the living humans that we interact with regularly. Nodes can be the saints of old, families of origin, geographical shapers, political influences, books, ideas, movements, organizations, weather patterns, mountain ranges, automobiles we drive, bloggs we read, all manner of events, etc. All shaping forces must be understood to be present within such a map; the complexity of such a map is virtually unfathomable. However, for the sake of simplicity here, we will primarily use nodes to represent human beings. Networks are alive with activity and constantly changing: new nodes enter while others leave, new links develop while other links dissolve. God’s scale-free Kingdom is never static. The kingdom we experience today is different then the one experienced by Jesus two thousand years ago. It is still God who reigns relationally over all; but the all is not the same.
Links between nodes are not all created equally. All living things develop and change over time, so it is with links. For instance, the link I had to Stan Lundy was, for a season, quite strong; Mr. Lundy was my fifth grade teacher. While I was in his class I would have listed him among the most influential persons in my life. I still enjoy the occasional game of chess which he taught me to play. Mr. Lundy served a hubbing function for me. He linked me to the sixth grade, to the world of chess, to books and ideas that shaped me in a multitude of ways. But our link has changed. All links are occasional; death is the ultimate testimony to this reality, yet even in death a link is not severed. Mr. Lundy’s legacy still lives on in me.
Some links are strong and comparatively binding while others are weak and transient. From a network perspective, the relative strength or weakness of a link is less important to the network then the sheer number of links. The more links, the stronger the network.
Churches as Christ-Clusters
Within the scale-free kingdom paradigm,[25] churches are best understood as node clusters centered on the Lord Jesus Christ. A “Christ-cluster” is a relational grouping of people that are responsible for discrete, Holy Spirit guided/cluster-determined cellular functions. Traditionally, the ‘solid’ church viewed its cellular functions as the offices, and sacraments of “the church.”[26] A scale-free paradigm views cellular functions as any form of communication[27] linking or bridging toward Christ; as such these Christ-clusters are socially constructed realities.[28] Yet, in declaring Christ-clusters to be social constructs, it is vital that we recognize that they are more than mere human social constructs. For God is Himself the center and participating shaper of these social constructs. As we are in Christ and Christ is in us, our dialectical social interactions legitimate our clusters as Christian or, more explicitly, Christ-like. These dynamic communities incarnate the perichoretic relationship of I-thou-Christ. To quote Jürgen Moltmann:
No life can be understood from its own standpoint alone. As long as it lives, it exists in living relationships to others lives, and therefore in contexts of time and with perspectives of hope. It is these that constitute in the first place a living being’s unique vitally, openness and capacity for communication. Accordingly the church’s reflection on itself cannot be carried out merely through the exploration of its foundations and motives that impel it. We must investigate with equal intensity the context of time in which it display its vitality, develops its relationship and unfolds its activity.[29]
Michael Jinkins in, The Church Faces Death writes:
The church gathers round the speech about and for God, the responsive language that is Christian speech, the language borne in listening to the Word of God that by the power of the Spirit of God brings to articulation God’s Word in our humanity.[30]
Or as Karl Barth writes:
[W]hat makes it the church, what distinguishes it from any other fellowship of faith and spirit and distinctive orientation and sacrament, is the vital link between this very specific hearing and making heard, the Word which it receives and passes on.[31]
To understand churches as Christ-clusters is to be immersed in a radical fluidity. Churches can no longer be seen as “once for all”[32] organizational structures to which people come, attend or join in any formal sense. In this new paradigm, they become co-created relational networks centered in Jesus Christ. These Christ-clusters come and go over time and they will be indigenous to the participating nodes.
Consider a woman who works at a law firm with a couple of other Christ-followers. The three have lunch once a week for encouragement and fellowship, to spur one another on toward “love and good deeds,”[33] to nudge each other Christ-ward. She is reading a book by Thomas Merton, volunteers at a nearby Baptist church’s midweek kids’ program, and she usually attends an Assembly of God service Sunday mornings, though every once in a while she opts for Russian Orthodox worship; her official church membership is still at her parents’ Lutheran church. Looking at her life through a lens of solid modernity, her “church” experience appears to be fragmented; however from a scale-free kingdom perspective, she is embodying a oneness in Christ that crosses theological and organizational boundaries. She is clustering with those in her affective community centered in the person of Christ. She has multiple links knitting her firmly in a kingdom network. In this paradigm the question of her “actual” church membership is blurred. Her church becomes a socially constructed Christ-cluster. From an institutional or ‘solid’ church perspective she may appear wayward, or at the least uncommitted, but from a scale-free perspective she is interlaced to Christ and to a meaning-giving cluster of other Christ-followers.[34]
Weak Links
One of the surprising discoveries of complexity theory came from Mark Granovetter of Johns Hopkins University. He proved that a strong network is made up of many weak links. In fact, a network comprised of many weak links is stronger and more enduing than a network made up of few, but strong links.
If a person begins to follow Christ and is discipled by one close friend – with no other support, no other resources, no organizational structures – and then tragedy strikes, severing that link, what is likely to happen to the new disciple? Similarly, a network of highways on an island with one large bridge connecting to the mainland is weaker than a network with multiple smaller bridges connecting it to the mainland. One, multi-car multi-lane automobile accident could shut down a bridge; if the island only has one bridge, it would then be cut off from the main land.
Later in Granovetter’s article, The Strength of Weak Ties,[35] he went on to show that the weak links between people serve as social “bridges.” A bridge facilitates connection to otherwise isolated units. It may have to span a deep chasm or a small brook, but any bridge is better than none.[36] In this sense, the strength of a link is relatively meaningless. A link is a link; strong or weak, it connects two otherwise unconnected entities.
“Notice that bridging links of this sort do not merely connect you to one other person. They are bridges into distant and otherwise quite alien social worlds.”[37] These bridges simultaneously intertwine the Christ-follower with the Christ-cluster, and the Christ-follower with the world, and the world with the Christ-cluster (figure 6).[38] The Christ-follower who is inseparably linked to Christ-clusters is the yeast that is kneaded through dough in Christ’s parable; the “I’m in Christ/Christ in me” living, incarnational relationship is the gospel that spreads through the myriad of links that make up human existence.
Hubbing Leadership
Whereas leadership within the institutional church relied in part, on titles, positions and hierarchy to maintain its authority, the scale-free kingdom self-organizes around hubs that give away their authority. Christ-clusters are formed around hubs which provide nodes with the connections they crave.
Consider the World-Wide-Web. Google, the search engine, is a hub that millions of nodes connect with every day. Nodes do not connect to Google simply for the sake of Google nor because Google has any ontological authority. Rather, nodes connect to Google for the purpose of making the meaning-giving connections the node seeks, and because Google’s authority is itself a social construct, coming from its continued service to its users.
Leadership in a scale-free kingdom paradigm functions as a hub, or as a matchmaker. Hubs are facilitators of relational connection. Hubs help to link nodes to people, to ideas, to resources, to nature, to God, to x. This is a democratic process, democratic in the sense that the nodes decide when and for how long they will connect to any given hub. When a hub, for whatever reasons, no longer connects nodes in ways perceived to be valuable to the nodes, the nodes will seek connection elsewhere. The person serving as a hub may do so for a season or for their entire life. In this paradigm, the hub opens up every link that may be useful to a node; this is a type of kenosis. The hub holds back nothing. There is no advantage to the hub in hoarding any links.[39] After all, if the hub were to hoard some of the most desirable links, then the node would begin to seek a different hub to link through. “If Google can’t help me connect to what I’m looking for then maybe AltaVista can.” Of course, in interpersonal-relational contexts hubbing is more than an “information-pass-through.”
What might this mean for the “solid” church?
Coupled with the increasingly fluid character of contemporary culture is a corresponding erosion of the stability of “heavy” or institutional church. It is in this context that the organized, institutional church[40] finds itself floundering, if not eroding. As Len Sweet stated at the beginning of a chapter entitled Get Dechurched, “Organized religion now stands at the bottom of the information food chain.”[41] The very concept of a scale-free network signals turbulence with our inherited ecclesial structures as do the thousands of websites, books, conferences and the explosion of alternative churches. All of these underscore the transitory nature of this emerging ecclesial paradigm.
The institutional church[42] will continue to play an important, though conceptually different, role in the scale-free kingdom paradigm, and “only by letting go of our grasp on institutional survival can we possibly recover our vocation.”[43] Whereas the heavy structure of the institutional church was once thought to be the constant of the faith and perceived to be the one holy catholic and apostolic church; in this age of liquid modernity this creedal statement of the first ecumenical council of Nicaea in A.D. 325 must increasingly understood to have never belonged to the organization per se but to the living Christ-clusters.
In speaking of the church as “institution,” G. C. Berkouwer wrote, “The Church’s true being is experienced elsewhere as a new reality.”[44] Roman Catholic theologian Edward Hahanenberg recently acknowledged, “The tendency to reduce the mystery of the church to its structural skeleton, to confuse church with clergy, and to limit active ministry to the ordained leads to increased disillusionment with the model of church as institution.”[45] In Resident Aliens, Hauerwas and Willimon state, “The church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy.”[46] It is this ontological social strategy that places the living Christ-clusters in ongoing tension with the institutional church. Throughout the history of the people of God, prophetic voices, reformers, mystics and theologians have challenged the human propensity toward faux structures of authority and strength, calling God’s people to incarnate a Holy Spirit communion.[47]
Undoubtedly, the institutional church has been a rock for the Christ-follower. But just as water is ultimately stronger than rock and as rapid flow of modern life turns the boulders of yesterday into the sand of tomorrow, so the solid institutional church structures are showing the erosive signs of Christ’s ever flowing clusters.
Institutional Church as a Commons
Institutional churches are usually teeming with Christ-clusters, often functioning primarily to provide elaborate systems to promote nodal clustering. The affective community around Pope John Paul II would likely be such a Christ-cluster, as would the affective community around Rick Warren, or the affective community around the volunteer custodian of First Presbyterian Church on the corner. These heavy church structures serve as a “Commons”; a village square, a plaza, a forum, or a meeting place which can encourage Christ-clustering. But in no way are these structures themselves the living church.
Commons as Support Structures
These corporate organizations,[48] or Commons, provide much-needed religious goods and services to nodes and their corresponding Christ-clusters. They provide religious ideologies, theologies, books, resources, worship services, education, music, art, and so on. Commons and Christ-clusters are reciprocal if not synergistic. The Commons may be best understood as a support structure for living Christ-clusters, but ought not to be mistaken for “the church” itself. Those people whom God has called to serve his fluid churches by working within the heavy institutional structures of Commons provide indispensable services for the people and clusters of God. It could be compared to the way a tavern (i.e., the TV show “Cheers”) is a support structure for friends, though the tavern is not the relationship itself.
Support Structures and Hubbing Leadership
There is little doubt that God has and will continue to call persons to serve in his kingdom through these important though heavy structures, just as he calls people to many vocations and careers. Leading a Commons is analogous to working as an executive director of a nonprofit organization, and the leader of a Commons may not necessarily serve as a hub for a Christ-cluster. The converse is also true; the person serving as a hub for a Christ-cluster may or may not be part of organizational leadership in the institutional church paradigm.
Hubs Level the Clergy and Laity Distinction
The cellular functions of Christ-cluster such as pastoring, teaching, preaching, equipping, discipling, and any other ministries or “offices,” have never been limited to clergy at any point in human history. Though the institutional church has rhetorically limited these functions to certain individuals based primarily on orthodoxy, ordination, gender and education, it has only really been able to impose limits in abstraction. From conversations between friends, to a mother with her child, to “non-Christian” friends unwittingly serving as Christ’s emissaries, the institutionally-designated leaders and teachers have never cornered the market on authority. Functionally, anytime Christ-followers cluster, these “offices” are informally engaged.
In this emerging paradigm titles and positional authority carry little meaning; the more important leadership question has to do with one’s “hubbing” service to their nodes of connection.
Conclusion
Recent scale-free network findings offer many useful constructs to better understand the relationship between the kingdom of God, God’s churches, and all of creation. The implications and applications of scale-free network theory for the institutional commons demand much more study and attentive reflection.[49] For all who love Christ and long for the fullness of God’s kingdom to be realized must engage thoughtfully and carefully with the great legacy lovingly offered to us from the saints of old, while simultaneously understanding that “God is in the business of inventively and creatively calling forth communities to think and rethink our doctrines of the church.”[50]
Gases are simple: Molecules fly in empty space, taking notice of each other only when they bounce into one another. Crystals are the opposite but relatively simple, too: Molecules hold hands tightly to create a perfectly rigid lattice. Liquids, however, strike a delicate balance between these two extremes. The attractive forces that keep the water molecules together are not strong enough to coerce them into a ridge order. Trapped between order and chaos, water molecules participate in a majestic dance in which some molecules come together, form small and somewhat ordered groups, move together, and in no time break apart to join other molecules forming yet other groups.[51]
Through a description of the molecular structure of H20, Barabási beautifully describes the incarnational reality that is the kingdom of God; God’s Holy Spirit and his people gather in a majestic, fluid dance, forming somewhat ordered groups that move together and then break apart, only to form yet other groups.
In my first essay we saw that God is ontologically relational and that part of what it means for humans to be created imago dei is that we too, are ontologically relational, and that the perichoretic understanding of relationality provides the best framework for understanding and experiencing relationality. My second essay followed by demonstrating that relationship is connection: all that exists is connected and interpersonal relations are best understood as a living spirit.
Here, rather than presenting a classical ecclesiology, I have offered complexity’s theory of scale-free networks as a hermeneutic of structural relationality; proposing that the kingdom of God is a vast network of relationships under God’s relational reign, and churches are dynamic clusters centered on Christ.
Still further exploration remains regarding the idea of “hubbing” leadership and its rich implications in and for dynamic, relational Christ-clusters.
Notes
1. Luke 13:18-19, New Living Translation. Unless otherwise stated all Scriptural quotes will be taken from the New Living Translation.
2. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000).
3. Ibid. 2.
4. Some ecclesial implications of this metaphor have already been explored by both Leonard I. Sweet, Aqua Church: Essential Leadership Arts for Piloting Your Church in Today's Fluid Culture (Loveland, CO: Group Publishing, 1999), and Pete Ward, Liquid Church: A Bold Vision of How to Be God's People in Worship and Mission - a Flexible, Fluid Way of Being Church (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2002).
5. John Fuellenbach, Church: Community for the Kingdom (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 221.
6. Network theories are playing a vital role in the war against terrorism. Réka Albert, Hawoong Jeong, and Albert-László Barabási, "Error and Attack Tolerance of Complex Networks," Nature 406 (27/07 2000): 378-82.
7. They are vital in the search for practical ways to stop the spread of AIDs Zoltán Dezsõ and Albert-László Barabási, "Halting Viruses in Scale-Free Networks: Can We Stop the AIDs Epidemic?" Physcial Review E, no. 65 (21/05 2002): 0151031-4.
8. And are proving to be invaluable in helping to develop a more stable World-Wide-Web, which is resistant to crashing and to viruses. Réka Albert, et al., "Power-Law Distribution of the World Wide Web," Science 287 (24/03 2000): 2115a.
9. Michael Schrage, "Networks: Network Theory's New Math," Strategy+Business 29 (Fourth Quarter 2002), <http://www.nd.edu/~networks/linked/best_book.pdf>.
10. Albert-László Barabási, Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life (New York, NY: A Plume Book, 2003), 66-69.
11. Swiss born, Russian mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) is credited as being the founder of graph theory or network theory. Barabási, Linked, 9-24.
12. Mark Buchanan, Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), 18.
13. Albert László Barabási and Eric Bonabeau, "Scale-Free Networks," Scientific American (New York, NY), May 2003, 52.
14. Sociologists estimate that most humans know between 200 and 5,000 people by name. Barabási, Linked, 18.
15. According to Small World Theory all human beings are within six degrees of separation of each other, and each web page is within 19 clicks to any other web page in cyberspace. Duncan J. Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003).
16. Buchanan, Nexus, 33.
17. Ibid., 39.
18. Leland H. Hartwell, et al., "From Molecular to Modular Cell Biology," Nature 402, Supplement (1999): 402.
19. Romans 10:14-15, New American Standard Bible.
20. From the working understanding of the kingdom of God as God’s relational reign or God’s affective rule, I place all the created order within God’s kingdom. I do not only place the redeemed within the kingdom of God. Since nothing is outside God’s person or his affective reign I place all under his rule; reconciled and estranged.
21. Matthew 13:33.
22. Buchanan, Nexus, 19.
23. This common statement from Gestalt psychology has even been expanded to better explain relationality. "It has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing up is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful." Kurt Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology (New York, NY: Harcourt-Brace, 1935), 176.
24. Jürgen Moltmann, "The Destruction and Healing of the Earth: Ecology and Theology," in God and Globalization: The Spirit and the Modern Authorities, Volume 2, ed. Max L. Stackhouse and Don S. Browning (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001), 177.
25. I am using paradigm to signify a “tradition-shattering” as opposed to “tradition-preserving” perspective as Thomas Kuhn popularized with his use of “paradigm shifts.” Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962, Second Edition, Enlarged (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
26. “Uttering ‘the church’ as an abstract concept tells us little about the church we inhabit – even if we intone the words in a properly modulated ecclesiastical voice.” Michael Jinkins, The Church Faces Death: Ecclesiology in a Post-Modern Context (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 79. Thus the use of the word “church” with a single catholic meaning will continue to be problematic for the diverse people of God. Such heavy definitions of “the church” which subtly assume a catholicity of form, structure or dogma, suppress (often inadvertently), the unique movement of God within given Christ-clusters. These fluid, Christ-centered clusters are indigenous, incarnations of Christ’s body in and for a specific time and place. As such we do ourselves a disservice to continue to speak of “the Church;” if in so doing we assume a singleness of system and bel ef that is not our human experience. Even a cursory survey of comparative ecclesiology reveals great diversity. The scale-free Kingdom paradigm allows for this diversity in a way that the “Solid” paradigm does not.
27. I use the word “communication” to signify the process of exchanging information, usually via a common system of symbols. It takes a wide variety of forms, from face-to-face conversation, hand signals, messages sent over global telecommunication networks. The process of communication is what allows us to interact with other people; without it, we would be unable to share knowledge or experiences with anything outside of ourselves. Common forms of communication include speaking, writing, gestures, and broadcasting. The Latin root word of "communication" is comunicare, which has three primary possible meanings: 1) "to make common", which is probably derived from either 2 or 3. 2) cum + munus, i.e. having gifts to share in a mutual donation. 3) cum + munire, i.e. building together a defense, like the walls of a city. Wikipedia.org, "Communication" Path: http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication#Defining_communication., 11/12 2003]
28. Socially constructed reality forms a concept within the sociology of knowledge and within the social constructionist strand of postmodernism, stressing the on-going mass-building of worldviews by individuals in dialectical interaction with society at any time. The numerous realities so formed comprise, according to this view, the imagined worlds of human social existence and activity, gradually crystallized by habit into institutions propped up by language conventions, given ongoing legitimation by mythology, religion and philosophy, maintained by therapies and socialization, and subjectively internalized by upbringing and education to become part of the identity of social citizens Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1989).
29. Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 132.
30. Jinkins, Church Faces Death, 72.
31. Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991), 23-24.
32. John Naisbitt, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Lives (New York, NY: Warner Books, Inc., 1982), 211-30.
33. Hebrews 10:24.
34. This proves my mom to be right. My mother often told me to choose my friends carefully, because: “you’ll become like the friends you hang out with.”
35. Mark Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties," American Journal of Sociology 78 (1973): 1360-80.
36. Though outside the scope of this essay, the strength of weak links and their social bridging could have far reaching implications for missions, and could benefit from further exploration.
37. Buchanan, Nexus, 44.
38. Howard A. Snyder, Kingdom, Church, and World: Biblical Themes for Today (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1985).
39. This has been termed the, “Matthew Effect in Science.” Taken from Jesus’ statement, “To those who use well what they are given, even more will be given, and they will have an abundance. But from those who are unfaithful, even what little they have will be taken away.” (Matthew 25:29) Robert K. Merton, "The Matthew Effect in Science: The Reward and Communication Systems of Science Considered," Science 159, no. 3810 (05/01 1968): 56-63.
40. According to Peter Berger, “Institutionalization occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by types of actors.” Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality, 54.
41. Leonard I. Sweet, SoulTsunami: Sink or Swim in New Millennium Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1999), 146.
42. I am using the term “institutional church” broadly. It includes all organizational systems, from Papal hierarchy, to Free Church structures, and from high church to house church. As Peter Berger’s statement in footnote 41 makes clear, institutionalization occurs naturally through the habitualized actions of actors. Thus it takes very little to solidify any social ecological organism.
43. Jinkins, Church Faces Death, 14.
44. G. C. Berkouwer, The Church, trans. James E. Davison (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1976), 418.
45. Edward P. Hahnenberg, Ministries: A Relational Approach (New York, NY: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2003), 103.
46. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1989), 43-48, Emphasis in original.
47. When God said through the prophet Samuel, that he desires obedience more than sacrifice, or when Jesus said that one day God’s people would worship in spirit and in truth, to the Great schism of the East and West and the desire for a centralized church structure Earle E. Cairns, Christianity Through the Centuries: A History of the Christian Church, 1954, Second edition (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1981), 203-07. The Protestant Reformation was, in part, an attempt to remove the authority of “the church” replacing it with the Word. I also think of Kierkegaard and his harsh criticisms of the church or Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity.”
48. Almost all gatherings of people on Sunday mornings that we generally call “churches” fall into this working definition of a corporate organization. However I would also leave room for denominational structures, certain schools, para-church organizations, and a wide range of Christian ministries.
49. In my research I have found only one essay using scale-free network theory to further our understanding of religious study. See Paul Ormerod and Andrew P. Roach, "The Medieval Inquisition: Scale-Free Networks and the Suppression of Heresy," Cornell University and arXiv.org, <http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0306031>, May 2003.
50. Jinkins, Church Faces Death, 102.
51. Barabási, Linked, 73.