why does there have to be a senior pastor?

i often hear people asking, this question: why does there have to be a senior pastor, or any paid staff at all, can't we just all sort of "be the church" without all this organization and politics?

this all started with my stumbling across Swarm Sketch. one example of these sketches is to the left titled "Prison Break". these sketches are drawn collectively. each person can only add about one inch of line at a time, and then you get a chance to vote on other people's lines. lines with lots of votes are darker.

what is interesting to me is that if you look at past sketches, every single one of them looks, at first glance, like a page filled with meaningless scribbles.

but isn't this what you are always destined to get when nobody is "in charge"? competing visions, some people who don't even care about vision are there only for the chance to draw and fill space, no one person given enough time or resources to fully accomplish anything. maybe these are great visual maps of any collaborative process.

that doesn't mean they aren't beautiful or interesting. it just means that what is beautiful or interesting about them is how they are put together. and though there is an ugliness or chaotic look from the outside, even that ugliness is beautiful because it is reflecting a beautiful thing about the community that produced it.

so, "why does there have to be a senior pastor?" the answer is that, if you aren't willing for your community to look to outsiders like one of these sketches, then you need to have someone in charge, telling people to not draw in the blank space, and assigning people to work on pieces, and maybe even erasing things that should not have been drawn because they distract from the goal of the drawing. this is not a bad thing for a person or a community to do.

however, i am still attracted by the chaos in these pictures, because when i read the words of jesus, it seems to me that he too is concerned about how communities are put together, perhaps even at the expense of the beauty of what they produce. at the same time i wonder if i would have the courage to live in a community as chaotic and hard to explain as one of these drawings.

Comments

[Mark Pettersen]

As a senior pastor, and therefore a biased source my comment is: Even with a senior pastor, there is lots of chaos and surprises coming from the body of Christ. Perhaps the bigger question is, how controling should a senior pastor be of what is done or not done in the fellowship. Differently, how much chaos is healthy and displays the grace of God? How much is distracting and pointless? And how do you discern the difference?

[Michael Toy]

My first reponse is just to say that, my main point, though I maybe didn't make it well, was wondering if people who are asking "can't we just be the church" really understand what they are asking for. We are not going to naturally produce a healing community of people with a unified vision. More likely we are going to produce a chaotic group of individuals loosely collected around a theme. Your observation that even in an environment where someone is actively trying to shepherd a community, the result is probably essentially that same chaotic group is kind of amusing to me, in a smiling-at-the-sad-truth kind of way.

Clearly nobody is advocating either completely anarchy, or absolute dictatorship. The extremes are only useful in helping you maybe understand the consequences of leaning one way or the other.

So somebody has to ask questions like the ones you ask.

When we leave the metaphor of swarmsketch behind and start talking about actual communities, this all gets way more complicated, because the very existence of a process of deciding has a tremendous effect on the network of relationships that make up a community. It affects how people dream. It affects how much people participate in the shared vision of community. Swarmsketch completely ignores people except as a source of lines and votes.

And so while my original post was more of simply noticing that there is a correlation between the cohesion of a community and type of controls places on the activities of a community, the discussion seems to lead pretty quickly from there into some really difficult questions.

What does it mean to be healthy as a community?
What is the impact on this health of a community, of differing methodologies for decision making?

I'm assuming that there is not a "right" answer to the first two questions. You could choose different metrics for health (growth, strong relationships, impact on the world outside the community) and that decision will affect that community. Each answer might be a compromise which carries strengths and weaknesses. So then these questions arise:

What types of goals as a community would lead one to choose certain ways of interacting?

And specifically, if I were interested in a community which was more "swarmsketch" like, what would the strengths and weaknesses of that community be likely to be?

[Michael Toy]

and after working for a such a long time on my response i realized i didn't really address your questions.

>how controling should a senior pastor be of what is done or not done in the
>fellowship. Differently, how much chaos is healthy and displays the grace of
>God? How much is distracting and pointless? And how do you discern
>the difference?

i love the idea that in some way chaos can sign the grace of god.

to paraphrase paul, "what then, shall we let everyone do everything so that there will be lots and lots of grace? let's not go there!"

clearly grace is not carried by chaos, so that more chaos brings more grace.

this is just another illustration i think of the fallen nature of creation. the very existence of laws, "the right way to do it", produces rebellion. the opposite produces soul-less chaos.

the thing which produces life, which brings grace, i think, is the willingness to be someone who asks these questions knowing that they will never truly be answered.

[Audrey Ryder]

I see many people shifting away from traditionally-understood church heirarchies and programs. I often hear people expressing a deeply-felt desire for church to happen in a far more relational, community-based, grass-roots level that connects with their real, every day lives. A need for church to grow out of family and nieghborhoods and communities. In a far more organic way than we are used to. On this whole subject, Barna's new book entitled Revolution is hugely compelling...

[thebizofknowledge]

I stumbled across your blog while I was in the process of doing some online research. I was utterly fascinated by the whole concept of the swarm sketch; I'd never heard of that before, but it sounds like a great collaborative game.