Thinking a lot about this last post, especially after reading back over Kester Brewin's book
about organic models of church. I think I might be able to begin to
re-construct some ideas to do with discipline and accountability within
an "emerging" or organic model of church.
1. Discipline comes from the bottom-upwards.
The main reason that terms like "church discipline" seem to leave a bad
taste in my mouth is because they bring up images of discipline enfo
rced
by authoritarian church leaders in order to control their
congregations. One of the main images of an emerging church community
which Kester mentions is a self-organising system – like a colony of
ants. If this model of church organises itself from the ground upwards,
then this is the direction that any discipline should be enforced from.
2. There
should be some rule/structure to govern the process.
Organic means to lie in between the lines between order and chaos – to
tread as closely to the chaotic as possible, without the entire system
falling apart. There needs to be some rule which will hold the system
together – although I guess how loose this is will depend on the
volatility of each individual system itself. For the church community,
this means we need to have some kind of rule by which bottom-up
discipline and accountability can happen to avoid things like abuse of
power, trust and relationships.
3. Rather than structuring the system, the "rule" enforces equality and prevents the system from being abused.
At the moment, I have absolutely no idea how this will work
practically. In the modern world of the machine, equality was enforced
by regulating the way the entire system would work. In a post-modern
world, we need to explore some other way in which to maintain our
church discipline, but without controlling the whole system itself -
allowing room for self-organisation, discretion and relationship. Does
the rule need to be static, or is there some way in which to make it
dynamic – allowing for different outcomes in different circumstances?
4. Discipline (and accountability?) is a shared community responsibility, rather than a one-to-one individual task.
This is probably the idea I am most split on. But I think that with a
model of church which seeks to return to a communal, corporate
spirituality and away from individualism, discipline should also be a
corporate, community responsibility. This would mean a huge change in
the way that most church's structures of accountability work -
accountability becomes a groupwork exercise rather than about one or
two close friends. Group accountability does work – our student
guys have an awesome accountability group which I am part of – though
it does make the whole concept of confessing to each other more
daunting.
So, there's some starting points for re-construction. I've challenged
myself to write a positive, reconstructive post for each negative,
deconstructive one – it's often much easier to criticise than to
present an alternative. I'm quite excited to see this concept evolve as
I reflect on it more.
What do you think about accountability and church discipline? Do you
agree or disagree with me? That's what the comments form is there for
;-).
