of Scotland.
Brian McLaren, from within the emerging church conversation, has found it amazing that an ancient institutional church should experiment with new styles of church alongside existing expressions – ‘to create new wineskins while the existing wineskins were still in use . . .’ He believes that ‘England provides a tremendous laboratory to test new ideas and learn from them’ (McLaren, 2009, pp. 17, 26).
The report pleaded for flexible approaches to the creation of new Christian communities. It urged the church not to rely only on a ‘come to us’ approach to mission, seeking to incorporate Christians into the current pattern of church life. Rather, the church should seek also to go out to people in innovative ways. It called for new expressions of church, perhaps meeting in unusual places at unusual times, to help people toward transformed lives via fresh commitment to Christ. It sought not the demise of the local geographically based church, but its renewal through other types of Christian community alongside it and linked to it.
These ideas were not new. In 1968, a World Council of Churches report proposed that alongside the ‘parish’ new churches, taking diverse shapes, should undertake mission in the many contexts of work and leisure where people now lead their lives (WCC, 1968). Four years later John Taylor, General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, wrote enthusiastically about ‘little congregations’ of perhaps just two or three Christians, scattered across the settings of everyday life (Taylor, 2004 [1972, pp. 147–52). Lesslie Newbigin expressed similar thoughts five years later (Newbigin, 1977, pp. 115–18).
Yet these ideas were seldom taken up in practice. They seemed very radical, there were few concrete examples to point the way and the need to think about novel expressions of church did not appear urgent to most leaders. By contrast, Mission-shaped Church provided examples of new and different types of church. It charted a way forward for a church that not only felt bewildered by the sweeping changes in the cultural landscape (which had been true of the 1960s as well), but had also experienced some 40 years of numerical decline. It captured a mood.
The last two chapters have described how the church has regularly reproduced among people outside the church. This chapter tells the story of Britain’s experience of fresh expressions of church, which continue this tradition of reproduction. Although new contextual churches are emerging in a number of countries, Britain’s denominations have been at the forefront in recognizing and encouraging them, and so the story may be of some interest to people outside as well as inside the UK.1 The story will be told within an ‘emergence’ framework derived from complexity theories. The chapter starts, therefore, with a brief account of the latter, their theological rationale and the model that will frame the narrative here.
Complexity theory
Although far from dominant, complexity theories have gained ground in the social sciences as a helpful lens through which to view aspects of contemporary life (Stalder, 2006, pp. 170–85). Originating in the natural sciences, complexity theories are increasingly being applied fruitfully to organizations (for example, Leifer, 1989; Stacey, Griffin and Shaw, 2000), entrepreneurship (for example, McKelvey, 2004) and social entrepreneurship (for example, Goldstein, Hazy and Silberstang, 2008, 2010).
What are complexity theories?
There is not one complexity theory, but several (see Box).2 At the heart of them all is that change is not directed from the top but emerges from the system as a whole. It comes about in an unplanned way. It occurs through the amplification of novelty. A chance mutation in nature or a human invention rolls like a snow ball through the system, growing in influence as other elements or individuals in the system react positively to them. In response, agents ‘spontaneously’ combine to create new patterns of interaction. The emergence of these patterns is unpredictable because they have qualities that are genuinely new.3
Four types of complexity theory
Chaos theory shows how particular parameters, determined outside the system, cause the system’s behaviour to move toward a new state called an attractor.
Dissipative structure theory highlights the role of fluctuations, which are small variations in the movement of the entities comprising a system. The amplification of small fluctuations can cause the system to reorganize in an unexpected way.
Complex adaptive systems theory gives more attention to the interaction between agents. Differences between agents and in their interactions lead to spontaneous reorganization.
Complex responsive process theory sees novelty emerging primarily through human communication.
Source: Stacey, Griffin and Shaw, 2000, pp. 85–126; 186–9.
For some complexity theorists, a key concept is the ‘edge of chaos’. This is the border between order and disorder. When organizations are too orderly, there is little room for change and novelty. But push them over the boundary to chaos, and they fall apart. A region on the safe side of the boundary, close to but not lapsing into chaos, leaves enough freedom for novelty, for the innovation to be adopted by others, for the new eventually to replace an existing approach (the system reorganizes) and for this new approach to take root within the system.
Complexity theories seek to explain how systems self-organize in this way. From a theological perspective, it can be said that out of love the transcendent God passes the power of fertile self-organization to creation while remaining closely engaged through the Spirit. Theologians, such as Polkinghorne (1995) and Peacocke (1995), have offered conjectural models to describe the Spirit’s involvement. Nancey Murphy’s (1995) account is particularly helpful. She proposes that God acts at three levels. At the quantum level God activates each particle’s movement, while respecting the characteristics and limitations of the entities involved.
God is also active in events occurring at all levels of complexity above the quantum level but below free human action. Through the intentional manipulation of each element that constitutes an entity, God maintains the typical characteristics of that entity. So for example God maintains the distinctive features of a billiard ball; the behaviour of the ball in interaction with its environment emerges from the conduct of its constituent parts, whose characteristics God also maintains. Finally, God is active at the human level through his relationships with men and women. In these relationships, as in his interactions with the lower levels, God respects the traits and limitations of the other involved.
Through these levels of involvement, God acts on each piece of the created order to sustain the emergent processes integral to creation and the regular patterns described by ‘laws of nature’. Within the limits provided by the ‘natural rights’ of each constituent of creation, God sometimes governs these components in atypical ways and effects extraordinary behaviours. These exceptions make sense of prayer for events
