Understanding church design from the inside out

Church Turned Inside Out, which I recently co-authored with Allan Karr, is inspired by ideas in diverse disciplines: art, physics, business, mathematics and living systems theory, and it applies these design concepts to all kinds of churches. We wrote it for "designers, refiners and re-aligners" who love God's Church and believe that it has the capacity for great beauty and great effectiveness. Our goal is to help the Church embrace the future by both addressing present tense challenges and designing for the next phase of our common history. If this all sounds really broad, that is intentional.

Design is principle based and applicable to almost any situation. Its basic intent is to align and integrate the essential nature, purpose and mission of any organization with its form or structure. For churches, this means that good organizational design is not the result of merely aligning the right things or the best resources (leaders, teams, culture, methods, support systems and right theology). It means riveting around the character and the design direction of our creator. He is more than simply the maker of the universe; He is also its designer.  He does not just bring everything into existence; He crafts, formats, arranges, plans, frames and interconnects everything He makes from the simplest to the most complex.

Many of the breakthrough innovations of the Church in the last few decades have been concerned with organizational (structural) changes that were conceived in order to better enable God' s people to carry on His mission.  Saddleback's "purpose driven" model was an effort to align church structures around what they called out as the five purposes of the Church.  They began by organizing and staffing around those purposes, and over the years, integrated those same five points into all arenas of church life. Every kind of group that existed for any kind of reason began to embody the same purposeful DNA. Seeker model churches, such as the original Willow Creek, aligned around a theological call to reach people who were not already Christians and a cultural perception that evangelization would best happen in their community by creating safe, attractive, enriching environments for people to explore faith issues.  The primary church gathering thus became an evangelistic, seeker-oriented service. The simple church movement is centered on a theological bent of "Jesus plus nothing" and a missional belief that simplified structures, indigenous leadership and easily reproducible methodologies best enable rapid reproduction of Jesus DNA. In each of these cases, theological commitments inspired change dynamics and new kinds of wineskins.

Structural change for Kingdom causes is nothing new. God told Moses to change the way the people of Israel were organized for their journey to the Promised Land. The early church created a system for better serving the needy, thus releasing the 12 for a different kind of work.  John Wesley was an organizational genius. He formed assemblies, societies and classes, appointing both ordained and lay itinerant clergy to lead over wide geographical areas.  In this way he established an accountability system that protected the integrity of the message and fostered a missionary movement. In each case ecclesial structure represents a response to something theological.  Breakthroughs happened when pre-existing structures (and corresponding methodologies) were challenged so that the meaningful content of the gospel could be more effectively released. In other words, structure is flexible. It should always serve, never define, kingdom intent.

In Church Turned Inside Out, we reverse the normative way of thinking about church. Instead of starting with paradigms, models and methods, we end with them. We ask that church leaders first examine their own values, giftedness, wiring, strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, plus those of the team or family they work and share life with most closely. Part of this process is discovering particular aspects of scripture where God is clearly indicating a directional decision. This can mean a variety of things- a particular passion to empower lay people, serve the poor, fight injustice, create a multiethnic community or release creative, authentic worship. The larger community (macro-community) and its culture are also vital to the decision making process. At the same time, there are practical concerns and complex situations that are also a gift of God. Together these things help church leaders discover new and existing forms for church that are most closely congruent with the purpose and mission with which God has entrusted them. In some cases, a refining or aligning of something that already exists is the best solution, and in others, new paradigms may emerge.

One of the organizational charts provided in Church Turned Inside Out considers church types by organizing principles. Organizing principles help ask, "what's the big idea?" The easiest way to discover a church's organizing principle is to ask the question, "what kind of church is it?" or "tell me about your church, or the church you dream of starting." The most immediate answer is most frequently the real organizing principle. "It's a Korean church (cultural), a Baptist church (traditionally structured after denominational programs), a seeker church (organized around evangelism), a house church (relational and meets in a home), or a church that reaches my generation (also cultural). Most organizing principles are cultural, theological, denominational or model-driven. Some organizing principles are insufficient over time.

For example, the church mentioned above that organizes around being Korean makes its primary decisions and measures it success around gathering and ministering to Korean immigrants. When immigration patterns change, they cease to grow, and have lost the opportunity to evangelize succeeding generations.  The house church that organizes around relationship begins to understand its need to multiply and begins a network of relational churches. Utilizing the principles of inside out design these imaginary churches, and many like them, can prolong and maximize effectiveness, address and solve problems they never understood and forge creative paths to the future.

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