Glen Fitzjerrell's Blog

The following post originally appeared as an article on the Ginkworld website.

About ten years ago, a member of the Insane Unknowns gang showed me something on a prison deck that I’ve seen a few times since, but haven’t really understood until recently. Now I see it as the promise that the church can emerge and that it can be beautiful when it does.

As part of my ministry I regularly visit prisons here in the Chicago area (for more see http://www.missionusa.com). After getting to know this particular gang member and having a few conversations about the Gospel, he prays the sinner’s prayer and enters into a relationship with Christ. When I come back the next week, he has a surprise for me: he had been witnessing to his “cellie” (cellmate), and his cellie wanted to accept the Lord into his heart too! The following week he had a slightly larger surprise: these two gangbangers had led everyone on their prison unit (about 30 guys) to the Lord!

As the weeks went on, they would give me updates on how things were going. Since they only barely knew what it meant to be a Christian, they started reading the Bible for instructions on how to be Christians and they would simply live out what they read. They had different guys reading different parts of the Word, and then they would get together and piece the meaning together like a mosaic. When I would visit the unit, they’d ask me to explain parts of the Bible with obscure cultural references. I wonder, were these conversations similar to the conversations Paul had with the churches he would visit?

Around here we call this, “Christianity in a vacuum”. But even more remarkable than this emergence, is its on-target growth. As I watched the group grow, everything they did was good, solid Biblical Christianity. This has been true each time I’ve seen it occur. There was nothing about it that you’d call charismatic or Calvinistic or Roman Catholic or any other institutional labels.

How does something so pure emerge from the bottom-up when it doesn’t have the benefit of proper doctrinal instruction from clergy? Yes, I was there to help, but I mostly “kept it between the ditches” as we say in Texas.

“Christianity in a vacuum” has been so rare and fragile, that until this emerging church conversation, I’ve almost dismissed it as an unrepeatable fluke. I’ve felt this way because each time I’ve seen it, it’s been short-lived. And guess what kills it: Christians. In the example above, it was a Christian volunteer going in and “sightseeing” on this group.

She saw the guys getting in a circle and asked what was going on. One of the men said that every night all of them stand in a circle to symbolize their unity, hold hands like kids crossing the street, and tell each other what conflicts they had with one another. They would work it out while holding hands, and once everything was resolved, they’d pray and go to sleep.

This volunteer wanted to know where they got the idea, and the inmate told her they got it from The Bible, where it says they shouldn’t “let the sun go down on their anger”. Then the inmate asked, “isn’t that what you do in your church?” The pained look on the woman’s face was enough to kill what they had going on that unit. The inmates realized they were living this thing out in a way that most Christians weren’t bothering with. But the real question is, how could this woman (who did, for the record, have a fine grasp of Biblical theology), end up being the disease instead of the cure?

The answer became clear when I began to understand the meaning of the term emergence.

By and large, we think of the world as a place where organizing happens in a very top-down way. At the top of a government or business or church denomination sit the (hopefully) wise and capable people who determine mission and values, and these things trickle down the organizational ladder to the masses below. Of course the further down you go, the less wise and informed the people are, and thus the lower you go the more chaos there is. Entropy (the tendency for things to go from order to chaos) increases as you move down, and therefore the people at the top must be there to guide the rest of us.

Looking at it this way, one would think that nothing but anarchy would emerge from the teeming millions at the bottom of the organizational chart. Certainly nothing coherent, cohesive, and better than the values and goals from the top. But the truth is, there are examples of complex, cohesive, and beneficial organization flowing from the bottom-up all around us.

Steven Johnson, in his book Emergence points out that ants have (obviously) very crude brains, but working together, they are capable of very complex, precise, and elaborate organization. All accomplished without a leader of any kind. The “queen” of the anthill isn’t actually making any decrees or organizing things at all. It’s the interaction that the ants have with each other and their basic DNA that help them fit together and develop something that is much more than the sum of it’s parts. An ant colony is more elaborate, adaptive, and functional than any one organizing ant leader could come up with.

So emergence is the principle that while organization and values and mission do come from the top-down, they also flow from the bottom-up, based on the complex interaction and unique connections that those teeming millions have with each other. The ideas at the bottom form a mosaic so compelling it must rise in importance.

Scientists say that for order to emerge from chaos there needs to be some way of selecting the quality concepts from the poorer ideas and concepts (like a noise filter that tunes a clear signal from background static). So emergence isn’t really a free for all. And the emerging church will want to find a way to determine how to help good and insightful concepts to emerge to form that mosaic we’re all hoping to see take shape.

I wonder if something similar to my experiences on those prison decks will happen as a chaotic mixture of churched and unchurched people use the internet to interact and share ideas. I’m betting they’ll form mosaics of their own in a vacuum outside of denominational leadership, pastoral programs, or faceless regional bureaucracies. Will something good come of this? I’m as apprehensive as you are, but… I have seen it work out quite nicely before.