First Presbyterian

I have been fond recently of quoting a writer by the name of Joseph Myers, who critiques the ‘business’ model of doing church. While much of the western world has adopted a corporate business model for their community which worked effectively enough throughout the twentieth century, he writes, this traditional mindset does not seem sufficient for many people any longer as the culture radically changes on many levels. “People seem to be longing for a more organic approach to life – even church life,” he says. A church is, after all, a local expression of the body of Christ, and a body is an organism much more than it is anything like a Fortune Five Hundred corporation. Myers asks why a group of believers shouldn’t model themselves after living organisms instead of impersonal corporations. He thinks that treating ourselves once again as living members of an organic body – rather than useful components in a master business plan – is the most vital way of returning the twenty-first century church to a living experience of the life which God has intended for redeemed humanity down through the ages. In order to be expressed in community, the life, love and mission of Christ requires togetherness, to be sure. But a strict corporate business model of facilitating order within that organic life is only one possible metaphor we can use to imagine our life together.

How might we transform our imaginations were we to think of our church as a garden instead of a business organization? What kinds of ministry, mission and connectedness might spring up - in the same way the seeds of ministries and initiatives have spontaneously sprung up in the past - from our midst in simple response to the circulation to our souls of the life-giving nutrients of the gospel? The argument is, if Jesus is the living water, and we are the soil, then the good news is the seed which God has designed to grow and spread and bear fruit in people’s lives — much more than it has been designed to be programmed, manipulated, controlled or bureaucratized. In other words, God is much more invested in preserving a community of witness, than in saving an institution.

In these somewhat disconcerting cultural times in which we are no longer able to take for granted the ‘way we were’ as a church in ages past, when the only constant seems to be change itself, some have even suggested that the best metaphor for where we are as a church is in a compost heap. If you think about the undeniable decline of church attendance over the past fifty years, the garden seems to be filling up fast with the decaying matter of structures past – with the body of Christ itself still having the potential of being simultaneously energized by the grace of God with the fertile possibility of new life.

Whatever the metaphor we choose to use, the reality is that the call to faithfulness remains constant in every age. If we think of the root meaning of ‘obedience’ as being the command to listen, and act on what we hear, we can embrace with freedom together Christ’s calling by simply opening our ears to his presence in our midst. We can follow him faithfully into this new cultural age, even if that calling means changing how we ‘do business’. If you find yourself among those with more questions these days than answers about church, one opportunity you have this summer will be to explore them with us on our annual All-Church Retreat Weekend, now only three months away. Our Retreat Team is already organizing our weekend around an organic theme of Charting Our Course Through Living Waters. But even sooner than that, our entire extended church leadership, from music and worship to education to deacons to fellowship to building and grounds, will be engaging in a three-week ‘community garden calendar planning’ event in June – plotting out the year ahead as a way of working to create together a conducive congregational environment where the love of Christ can be more fully expressed, and the gospel of Christ more widely proclaimed. Now that is a course worth charting!