PART FIVE: OPENING OUR DOORS
Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me. Revelation 3:20
To mature in living system ministry, we internalize the ways of God—his ways of growing and nurturing what is alive. And to learn to internalize his higher ways, we need constant, intimate, across-the-table fellowship with our Savior. As Brother Lawrence used to say, we need to “practice the presence of God.” Ultimately, one day we will be in heaven where we will be perfectly united with God. In heaven there will be no closed doors and no need for Jesus to knock. But for now, we have to intentionally open our doors when he knocks. We must work constantly at this business of letting him into our busy lives and paying attention when he gently knocks and tenderly calls.
Am I a Servant, Master, or Friend?
If I have found one thing that helps open my ears to his voice, it is maintaining awareness of my proper role. If I get my role wrong, I won’t even be listening! I need to position myself by choosing the right role as I become a coworker with God. Here is how I like to frame the question as a reminder to keep myself on track: “In this situation, am I assuming the role of a servant, a friend, or a master?”
Our Western culture, fueled by fallen human nature itself, has given us a warped view of our role on this earth. Like the Laodiceans, our dependence on our riches, knowledge, and technology has given us a sense of self-sufficiency that we don’t even realize has pride at its base. As post–Great Transition Westerners, the majority of us live as the world’s elite have lived, the way the kings of old lived, becoming like rulers and acting like masters. But that is not the role Jesus has mapped out for us!
When faced with our tendency to be rulers, most of us quickly repent and determine that we will, instead, begin to act like servants. And while it is better to be a servant than a master, as maturing daughters and sons of God, that is not our role either! In John 15:14–16 Jesus taught about our changing roles. Through salvation, we are legally adopted sons and daughters of God. When it comes to our role in ministry, we all start out as servants, but then he invites us to be his friends! Read carefully how Jesus explains the difference in these verses:
You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last. (John 15:14–16, italics mine)
So we must constantly be ready to say “no” to the temptation to assume a master’s role. Let’s be earnest and repent from the times when we fall into the wrong role, and let us humbly accept and step into our new role as friends. Friends of the Master hear the voice calling and open the door to intimacy.
The Ministry Practitioner
Who will participate with God in his work? In my mind, I am writing to ministry practitioners. But who or what is a ministry practitioner? Ministry practitioners are a rather large and diverse group. But across the spectrum, I see three types, which I call technicians, systems actors, and systems thinkers.
Technicians are ministry practitioners who live their lives with a strong focus on low-level tasks and constructs. They may be very busy in the work of organizations and churches. And while they may be deeply concerned about justice, social action, training, managing business efficiently, spreading the gospel, or many other ideas, their context and their focus is on manmade constructs and the organizations we use to control our constructs. This is a difficult place to serve, and there are, within this group, both very effective and very ineffective ministry practitioners. To be effective, the ministry practitioners who comfortably fit into the role of technician need to learn to discern the living system around them and properly integrate their work within that living system.
Systems actors work appropriately in the complexity of living systems, but they do it intuitively. Their intuition has been trained by living in the social systems and learning at a deep level how God’s living systems work. Something in their mental makeup allows them to interact naturally and effectively within larger living social systems. They follow hunches. They show up at the right time and good things happen around them in the social systems. Although systems actors usually come from primary cultures, many effective systems actors are from secondary cultures. Also, because of the influence of the broader community, some who are primary culture people become increasingly secondary later on in the way they do their ministry.
I find that even these highly effective, secondary culture systems actors, as well as their primary culture counterparts, typically have a hard time explaining why their ministries bear fruit. When they try to explain what they do, systems actors usually start talking about low-level programs and actions rather than explaining the hidden essence of the vitality or the inner knowing that led them to take the right action. They are like farmers who are pretty good at raising crops and responding to the environment intuitively, but they do it in a way that they cannot explain or teach consciously or academically. They are not yet systems thinkers.
Systems thinkers, then, is my third category of ministry practitioners. These are secondary culture, Western Christians who carry out truly effective ministry activities consciously and intentionally, while paying constant attention to the ways large living social systems work. To be a systems thinker, a ministry practitioner must use high-level perception, intuition, or subconscious understanding to go beyond the limits of the conscious mind, but then cognitively recapture what has been learned in order to apply that learning to future ministry.
Ministry practitioners who are systems thinkers have learned to function well in large living systems. They will know intuitively that what they do on an individual and local level will affect what goes on regionally and systemically in the world. They have learned to give precedence to the high-level order of living systems over low-level constructs. Then, when they use low-level organization and constructs—and they will use them—they use them wisely. But, importantly, they can both understand and articulate their understanding about large living systems. These are the kinds of practitioners who help guide churches and ministry organizations to work in harmony with the living system order in the city or the culture.
A Practitioner Science for Working with Living Systems
Contemporary, secondary culture Christianity needs to intentionally use the discipline of systems thinking. It is a practitioner-friendly social science well suited to ministry. When Christian missionary strategists began to use the practitioner-oriented social science of cultural anthropology in the 1950s, it transformed missions. Christianity went from being a Western religion to a world religion in a generation. To nurture secondary culture Christianity, a similar practitioner-oriented, systemic social science is needed. What science should it be? Based on my experience here in Boston, I think it should be systems thinking.
Secondary culture Christianity has not yet used systems thinking on the practitioner level. By not integrating this systemic, practitioner-friendly social science into missiology, we have ended up with ineffective, low-level ministry that focuses on our limited organizations and programs, rather than effective ministry that focuses on highly complex and powerful living systems. Properly implanted into contemporary Christian ministry, systems thinking can empower contemporary, secondary culture Christianity, even as the use of cultural anthropology helped the modern missionary movement following World War II.
Working with God
To work in God’s field, rather than taking charge and doing our plan as we used to do, we take a humble and respectful approach before the Creator and his large living systems. We learn to participate in meeting needs by transplanting living subsystems and implanting inorganic constructs into the living social system. Just as Paul planted and Apollos watered, we, too, have our unique tasks as technicians, systems actors, and systems thinkers—but it is God and only God who makes all things grow.
A surgeon can transplant a living organ into a compatible host living system. We might also say that people are mobile living systems that can be transplanted into a social system. This happens whenever someone moves from one location to another. Through the process of immersion, a church planter who moves into a neighborhood may eventually become a successful transplant into the living system of his or her new community.
Transplanting also happens on a large scale. Paul speaks of the wild olive branch of the Gentiles being grafted into the cultivated olive tree of the nation of Israel. A more recent example of large social system transplants is the multinational diaspora movement of hundreds of thousands of people who have moved from the Global South to Western countries, many of whom have brought their vital Christian faith with them. Hundreds of new churches can spring up from the soil when Christian immigrants move into an area and become transplanted there.
The skill of transplanting a living subsystem into a living system is an important skill for us to learn. There is power within living social systems, power that comes from the Giver of Life and that is resident in the system. We have a lot to learn about how we can transplant visions and dreams into the larger sociosphere where they will be nurtured by the life in the system. But also, it is necessary to learn the skill of implanting a human construct into living systems. We can learn a lot about how this works in the social and spiritual realms by first observing it in the physical realm.
Implanting, as opposed to transplanting, is deliberately embedding something inorganic into a living system. My artificial knee is a good example of a non-living entity that can be embedded into a living system in such a way as to create benefit to the system. Since it causes no pain or discomfort, most of the time I am completely unaware of its presence in my body. I simply enjoy walking.
Similarly, non-living constructs can be implanted into living social systems. A program, strategy, or structure is not alive in itself, but it can be made vital if it is embedded into a vital, living social system. Could it be that the technology, organizational expertise, and mechanistic understanding we have today can be used by God to accomplish his work at the close of the age? I wonder what it would look like if the technological tools, resources, and understanding of the world were not inflicted upon our culture like a bullet, but rather were implanted—if they fit right in, enhancing the living system rather than threatening its existence.
The proper implanting process for developing any program is first to be immersed in the situation. No heart surgeon would implant a pacemaker without thoroughly understanding the recipient’s body. While immersion in the social system precedes the implanting of organization and technology, a shared vision guides the implanting. In living system ministry, this shared vision can emerge through prayer and fellowship with others who are concerned about a certain issue.
Our job is to make our low-level organizational constructs and programs operate in tune with the larger living systems of our churches, our parachurch organizations, our schools, towns, and cities. And that is what we are learning from the Laodicean letter. When we follow the pattern that Jesus laid out for the Laodiceans, we learn how to operate in a complex environment, even one that seems chaotic to us. We will be in a constant learning process through the redemptive rotary of confession, forgiveness, and substitution. This leads us eventually to gain a high level of understanding that explains how our complex system can be engaged to do the job through the way the living systems operate.
Multiplication
God is at work! While what he is doing may at first be invisible to us, we can learn to discover a way to both uncover and interact with what he is doing simultaneously within us and in the social ecosystem around and beyond us. This discovery is thrilling! When our ministry is aligned with what God is doing in a complex living system environment, and vitality begins to flow through the veins and arteries of the living social ecosystems, there is an explosion of life. We can’t help but celebrate that God’s returns are very much alive and healthy, and we watch in wonder and amazement as we see God’s living systems multiply abundantly! Engaging in systemic multiplication is critical if secondary cultures are to produce the same multiplying developments as primary cultures have done.
I have identified three large living systems that God uses as hearts, veins, and arteries for the life of the gospel to flow from one social system to another. 1) Cities are the hearts that pump the life of the gospel through the veins and arteries of 2) relational cultures. The direction it follows is along the prescribed circulatory system of 3) diaspora movements that extend all over the world. New Testament Christians used these three living systems to spread the message in three decades to the then-known world. While each is a living organism in its own right, they work powerfully as tools in the hands of the Master to carry the gospel from one place to another. They exhibit so much power I call them engines.
The engine of cities. With tremendous power, a city spews out—like from the mouth of a volcano—whatever is in it. A city is a natural exporter of either good or evil. This natural flow of energy outward from the city’s center is a powerful force that affects how Christianity grows and declines in a region. It is important to work with the powerful draw and flow of cities. Paul spent much of his time in cities because he knew that what grew in a city would be automatically exported to the region. What happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas.
The engine of relational cultures. The gospel flows naturally along relational networks. This is how many of the churches in Boston and outside the city were planted. Relational, primary culture Christians nurture broad movements of the faith by working through whole systems of people rather than through isolated individuals. Rather than planting a single church, relational cultures plant groups of churches. The resulting impact of this whole systems approach can be compared to the difference between a farmer who plants one apple tree and another who plants an orchard. It is not merely the greater number of trees that increases the size of the harvest, but cross-pollination between two or more trees is required for optimum harvest. Trees produce more fruit in groups.
The engine of diaspora movements. One of the greatest dynamics taking place in the world today is the diaspora of various people groups all over the globe. It seems as though almost every city anywhere in the world will have people in it from everywhere else. For many reasons, not all of them positive, people are on the move. The third engine for spreading the gospel is the huge diaspora movements of relational culture peoples being used by God to evangelize the cities, the region, and the world.
I would encourage us to become more aware of the importance of the three engines, and of our foolishness to avoid them. If we are not using the power of the three engines for spreading the gospel, it may be because we are not asking the right question. Are we asking, “How do we do the job?” Or are we asking, “How does the job get done?”
(text excerpted from The Cat and the Toaster, pp. 217–262)
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