Individual Entry: Organic Church
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August 01, 2008

Faith : Organic Church

I wrote a somewhat long comment on someone else’s blog, and realized that with a little bit of effort it would make a good post for here, so excuse this little digression from my mission/missionality posts.

There is a sub discipline within Biology called Evolutionary Development (Evo-Devo), which looks at how a complex organism forms starting with a single cell. In other words – how does a muscle cell in a finger know it is a muscle cell in a finger and not an insulin producing cell in the pancreas? Not many Christians tend to explore this field because it was originally motivated as a mean to support the Theory of Evolution – one challenge to evolution was the appearance of radical changes to species in short periods of time. Many people though that such changes would require large numbers of mutations which could not be explained by gradual evolution, so scientists started to take a closer look at just how genes produced bodies, to better understand just how many mutations would be needed.

Now people like to talk about how DNA is a blueprint that describes how to build a body – that someplace in the DNA there’s a description the whole body and how it all fits together; but it doesn't quite work like that – there is no "master plan" that describes the big picture. How it actually works is actually quite chaotic and fundamentally relational – things become body parts because of the relationships they find themselves in with other cells. In many cases cells send out chemical signals that are picked up by other cells, and what each cell becomes depends on a mix of signals they happen to be receiveing.

A cell becomes a muscle cell because it find itself just the right distance away from certain other cells that end up causing the bone to form. It doesn't know if it is in a finger or elsewhere – it just knows “I’m going to be next to a bone, so I should be a muscle”. Other relational factors (distances and orientation from other kinds of cells) control how long the bone becomes, which controls the shape of the muscles. Blood vessels form because cells put out chemicals that say "I need more nutrients". When cells in existing blood vessels detect those chemicals, they split in ways to create new branches heading in the direction of increased concentrations of those chemicals (I'm simplifying a bit here). Nerve cells randomly spread from the brain throughout the body. When they find something to attach to (a muscle cell, for instance), they do. Nerves that never find anything to attach to (which turns out to be a quite common) die off, leaving only "useful" connections.

The point is that creatures (including human bodies) take their shape because of very local, relational decision, not any top-down control. Nothing says "I need a nerve connection between here and here", but yet that connection naturally forms because each part of the body does its part in relationship to the other cells near it.

When I hear people talk about "organic" churches, this is what I think about – churches built based on individual relationships – each person doing what they are able to do given the relationships they have formed with other people in the church. There is no top-down command for how it is structured; the structure comes about based on the people and their relationships with each other. Given that we are all following our DNA (the Bible), certain patterns tend to appear; but no two churches that are allowed for form organically will ever look alike. Sometimes it is chaotic, and may even appear to be wasteful; but those redundancies are there for a reason – to ensure connections are made.

It’s too bad most Christians stay away from this kind of science (because it's connection with evolution) – I believe there is a lot were are meant to learn Christ’s Body, The Church here.

Posted by Steven at August 1, 2008 05:00 AM

Comments

On the topic of other topics for this blog -

60% of the world believes in God (33% Christian, 21% Muslim, 6-8% unaffiliated). That means over a third of the world is Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Animist or tribal. Yes, there are missionaries, but it is inconceivable to me that 2 billion people are not exposed to the Light. You would think the situation would have changed more dramatically over the 2000 years of Christ.

Posted by: janbergs [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 1, 2008 07:03 AM

I don't think your statistics connect the way your propose. You say that 1/3 of the world population doesn't believe (in some way) in the one God. Then you start to talk about their not having heard; but that would seem to assume that anyone who hears about God automatically believes. I suspect a great many Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Animists, etc. have in fact heard; but simply do not believe. How many people in the world have never heard a presentation of the gospel is in fact a smaller number. Still, such people do exist (even in America), and there's no doubt that the church has been failing.

As for this blog – what's on my heart right now is the what and the how of spreading the gospel. The "to whom" will have to wait for some other occasion.

Posted by: Steven at August 1, 2008 08:30 AM