Bounded Church, Fuzzy Church and Centered Church
Church
The Bounded Church consists of a group of people clearly marked off from those who do not belong to it. This takes a variety of forms - a church membership roll being an obvious example.The bounded church is soft at the center, hard at the edges. The bounded church makes it quite difficult for people to negotiate its maze of cultural, theological, and social barriers in order to get "in". And by the time newcomers have scaled the fences built around this kind of church, they are so socialized as churchgoers that they are likely to be able to maintain their connection with the social groupings they came from. They have been fundamentally changed by the experience of wanting to be on the inside of the church.
The Fuzzy Church, has no real ideological center. It is just made up of people hanging out together. They are not sure what brought them together or sometimes even why they meet. The fuzzy church is soft at the center, soft at the edges.
The Centered Church has a very strong ideology or culture at the center but no boundaries. This centered church is hard at the center, soft at the edges.
This means that rather than drawing a border to determine who belongs and who doesn't, a centered church is defined by its core values. People are not seen as in or out, but as closer or further away from the center. In that sense, everyone is in and no one is out. Though some people are close to the center and others far from it, everyone is potentially part of the community in its broadest sense.
The well-known Engel Scale is helpful in this regard. This scale - developed by James F. Engel in the 1970's - identifies the typical process a person goes through in finding faith in Jesus, with zero being close to the center and -10 being far from it. Although it's a very cerebral - intellectual - model, and, in truth, people move closer to the center through relationships, rather than just through knowledge - it's a useful guide, at least, in the sense of people moving through a process:
-10 Awareness of the supernatural
- 9 No effective knowledge of Christianity
-8 Initial awareness of Christianity
-7 Interest in Christianity
-6 Awareness of the basic Acts of the Gospel
-5 Grasp of the implications of the Gospel
-4 Positive attitude to the Gospel;
-3 Awareness of the personal implications
-2 Challenge and decision to act
-1 Repentance and faith
0 Regeneration.
In and Out or direction of travel - We have developed a 'them' and 'us' culture with two distinct categories - the 'saints' and 'sinners'; the 'ins' and the 'outs'; the 'saved' and the 'unsaved'. We have separated what we refer to as 'evangelism' from 'discipleship'. We have designated two different tasks, for two different audiences, using two languages. And on that basis we have convinced ourselves that we need two messages; the first for the 'outs' to get them 'in'; the other for the 'ins' to make sure they stay there.
C S Lewis wrote, in Mere Christianity. "The world does not consist of 100 per cent Christians and 100 per cent non-Christians. There are people who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name . . . There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so. There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by him that they are his in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand. There are people in other religions who are being led by God's secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it."
While most of his contemporaries used the language of clear-cut certainties - you were either a Christian or you weren't - the fluid language used by Lewis was utterly radical. Lewis was pointing out something he believed to be plainly obvious, not only from his experience of life, but also from his reading of the Gospels - things just aren't that black and white.
Shorthand terms, like 'Christian' and 'non-Christian' may at first appear useful, but once you dig a little deeper you soon realise that they can cause us to miss the point entirely. As far as Jesus was concerned, it is evident that it wasn't how close someone was to him at any given stage in their life that mattered as much as the direction in which they were travelling. Judas, for example, shared some of Jesus' most intimate moments; he was one of the inner community of twelve, right up until the Last Supper. For anyone looking in from the outside his relationship with Jesus would have appeared, superficially at least, cosy and close. But begin to scratch beneath the surface and you would have soon discovered that he was heading away from Jesus rather than being drawn closer - he was travelling in the wrong direction.
When a huge crowd stands around a bonfire, its light naturally illuminates those closest to the flames. Others, who prefer to keep their distance, are hidden in the shadows. But in between these two extremes the vast majority of people catch and reflect, to a greater or lesser degree, something of the fire's glow. In the course of the evening, however, people will move through the crowd in both directions, some to be closer to the fire, others to retreat from it.
Wherever Jesus went he drew huge crowds. Closest to him were Peter, James and John, his most enthusiastic students; armed with an endless list of questions and comments. Around them stood the other nine disciples, all hanging on his every word. Beyond them was the wider circle of followers. And circling them stood various other groups of people, ranging from the interested to the casual passer by (who didn't have anything better to do than stop and watch) and the questioning to the downright sceptical. As Jesus addressed these crowds he had just one task, one language and one aim for them all. Whether they were highly committed or hugely cynical his goal was simply to draw them all ever closer to himself; to woo, to inspire and to encourage everyone present with his one message: "The Kingdom, the in-breaking Shalom of God, is available now to everyone through me."
Many people who would never attach the label 'Christian' to themselves are actually in the process of moving closer to Jesus through the crowd. The Church may have huge difficulty in even recognising that this process is taking place, but all the same, God is slowly and surely transforming their lives. The Church's task is to pick up on this process and work with it rather than ignore it - to offer acceptance rather than rejection.
As a bishop in the Church of England once famously replied when asked by an over-enthusiastic Christian if he was saved: "I have been saved, I am being saved and one day I will be saved." God's work is an ongoing task in each person's life. It's one and the same message for the person who has been a Christian for decades or for the kid on the street who has never sat through a sermon in his life.
Jesus only ever used the phrase "you must be born-again" twice - and that was in one conversation with the same man - Nicodemus. And yet it has become the basis for one of the most confusing, misused and abused, misunderstood and despised ideas in the history of the Church. For huge numbers of Christians, being 'born-again' has become the expression they almost invariably use to speak of the moment when they 'found Jesus' and even their subsequent ongoing state. However, for the vast majority of people outside the Church, the term has come to symbolise everything about Christianity they most despise and fear. For them it sums up a type of Christianity that is not only judgemental, bigoted, arrogant and narrow-minded but is also about a 'them' and 'us'; 'in' or 'out', pharisaic approach to life.
The truth is that when Jesus spoke to Nicodemus (a sincere, questioning and spiritually-seeking Pharisee), he was not using the term 'born-again' in the same sense we have come to do. Jesus was simply saying that entering into God's Kingdom or Shalom is about seeing the world differently and adopting his new agenda. It's about dropping the crushing, life-draining, religious dogma and discovering the freedom that God loves you as you are and that his Kingdom is available to you. And the point is, this was the journey Nicodemus was already on - after all, why else was he secretly seeking Jesus out in the middle of the night? He is already searching, asking questions; he is catching some of the fire, but he wants to get closer.
Dallas Willard makes the point that because we've all been born once we should all understand the universal and obvious truth it teaches - none of us, not one, can remember anything about it. Birth is real, indeed essential, but it is a process that begins long before it is complete, it happens without our conscious effort and what's more, it's some time before any of us is aware of what has taken place.
The bounded church is focused heavily on getting people into the religious zone. This is represented by the unyielding allegiance to the work of getting people to come 'to Church'.
Inviting people to corporate worship meetings is good - there should always be regular opportunity invite not-yet-Christians to experience Christian community and corporate worship. But for the centered church the emphasis is well and truly on a cross-cultural go-to-them mentality. It assumes that in every human being there is a longing to know the reason for their existence, the purpose of their lives.
Christology, Missiology and Ecclesiology.
The bounded church allows its ecclesiology to shape and limit its mission. The centered church understands that it is the other way up - our Christology must inform our missiology, which in turn determines our ecclesiology. All that we believe about God as revealed in Christ (his nature and style) must shape all that we believe about our mission (its nature and style), and the way that we do church should simply be the best way to encapsulate, express and achieve that goal. We must confront the tendency for the process to end up reversed.
The shape of the way we do church - our traditions, our meetings, our buildings, our liturgies, our governance, our dress and countless more of our cultural preferences - cannot be allowed to determine the shape and style of our mission and so limit what our communities and our society as a whole can see or know of Christ. It is time to do it differently.
Steve Chalke
22 September 2009