Church: A Living Organism

As Bill Easum has said, “it’s futile trying to revitalize the church, or a denomination, without first changing the system.” So what might a new paradigm or “systems story” look like for the church today that would reverse decades of its decline in the West?

As we’ve discussed, the dominant model of church today is the same that has been in use for thousands of years previous; church as event-driven place, or a Sunday morning service. But perhaps a more Biblical paradigm of the church is one of an organic, living organism rather than a static, calcified institution. Never in Scripture is the church reduced to an attractional once-a-week service; rather, it is constantly described as an organic, subversive movement.

Examples of this organic paradigm abound in Scripture. For instance, in contrast to the cold edifice of the ancient Jewish temple, the temple of Jesus is made of “living stones”, I Peter tells us (2:5). We see Jesus repeatedly using organic and agricultural imagery in describing the Kingdom of God. In Matthew 13, for instance, Jesus uses metaphors of leaven, wheat, and seed to describe His church. We’re told in this passage that “the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed” (13:31). The mustard plant was the “smallest of all seeds” that was known for its invasive nature, most akin to a wild weed or crabgrass today that spreads rapidly with very little effort. In fact, it was against Jewish law to plant mustard in one’s garden as it would quickly spread and take over the entire garden due to its invasive nature. Jesus is telling us in this passage that His church is not an attractional institution, but a wild, invasive weed; “a subtle contagion” that spreads one life at a time. The church of God, Christ teaches us, should be a subversive movement that is able to readily disassemble itself and seep into the cracks and crevices of society, as difficult to stop as a mustard plant or crabgrass invading one’s garden. This stands in stark contrast to a static institution that is unable to reproduce itself without the aid of an attractional Sunday morning service.

Similarly, in Mark 4:26-29, Christ compares the kingdom to growing seed that grows “all by itself”, irrespective of the sower’s efforts. In this parable of growing seed, we see a man who sows seed, sleeps at night, and wakes in the morning completely unaware of how the seed grows. As Neil Cole says, this parable describes a farmer who is “clueless and sleeping on the job”, yet the work grows greater than in his wildest dreams. The message is clear: the work of Christ’s church grows independent of our strategies. The kingdom of God does not grow by carefully crafted ministries, state of the art buildings, or professional Sunday morning productions, but rather it spreads as an undercover people movement that spreads subversively from one life to another. The Jesus revolution is truly a living people movement; like ordinary leaven in ordinary bread (Matt. 13:13), it spreads in an organic fashion, all by itself, one life at a time.

Building on this idea of the church of God as an organic people movement, we’ll continue to explore what a new paradigm of the church might look like in our next post.