October
8
2009
city church, soil and rhizomes
Every once in a while previous thoughts return, fall into place in a larger puzzle, and a new picture emerges. Sometimes the picture is evolutionary – sometimes it seems different enough from a previous image that it is revolutionary… It turns previous conceptions on their head. This happened to me on Saturday morning as I was thinking about churches.. and Church.. in our city.
In botany, a rhizome (from Greek: ῥίζωμα “rootstalk”) is a characteristically horizontal stem of a plant that is usually found underground, often sending out roots and shoots from its nodes. Rhizomes may also be referred to as creeping rootstalks, or just rootstocks.
A mushroom is a node that grows out of rhizomic network. It appears suddenly overnight where no life was obvious, because the underground stock is flourishing. The thin and spidery web that supports this type of fungus can exist for tens of yards, without any surface manifestation. You walk in the evening and you see only green grass. The next morning you see the visible manifestation of the underground life. It flourishes for a day or two, then disappears as suddenly and mysteriously. Yet the hidden network remains, and may even be growing and expanding.
Is it possible that in focusing on particular visible manifestations of ecclesial life we have missed the importance and meaning of the underground network, that continues to live even when particular nodes disappear? We see a church community die and assume it is a death. But could it be that the temporary manifestation of life we call “church of xyz” is not the substance, but something like a “node.”
The structures that support organized life and ministry are fluid and change. The average life span of any local and organized church in 1st Temple or 2nd Baptist may be 20 years. That seems long to us, but in the ongoing life of the city or town it isn’t so great. So this node exists in a neighborhood and through its physical structures on the corner of Maple and Mars, it works and scatters seed, then disappears. It falls back into the soil from which it came, and the seed is scattered, reappearing in another node somewhere else with a new name and new leaders.
This is more than “the circulation of the saints.” Something much more is happening here. But it is obscured by other dynamics.
For these temporary local structures we usually hire leadership from out of town (and we wonder why sometimes never quite fit and never connect beyond the four walls they work within). They spend two or three years learning the ropes, two or three more years doing work, then move on. But the elders who are given to that location often remain when those hired leaders leave. The local leaders remain connected to the immediate work and to the underground network. If the node collapses entirely, they cycle into another work that pops up in the neighborhood or across town and flourishes for ten or twenty more years..
So what is more important? The visible node which may exist for twenty years –merely a blip in history– or the hidden network .. the living community.. that endures in a given location, perhaps for hundreds of years? What is more important, the hired leader who is so visible for five or ten years and who then moves to another context, or the men and women who are rooted in place and endure (we call “laity” but they may be nearer to the heart of the ongoing presence of God in a city than the leaders who come and go.)
In an interview some years ago Neil Cole commented on the way we measure success. Some of his thoughts are relevant to all this:
“The numbers of people can be deceptive. You can have many people and not be fruitful. You might just be putting on a better show than the guy around the corner. What we are looking for is fruitfulness.
“For instance we don’t care if our churches live a year, twenty years, or a hundred years. We care that while they live, they give birth. We may start a church that lasts a year, but while it lives, it births two daughter churches. That is a success. We think that if every church reproduces in that way, then the Kingdom of God will continue and grow.
“But if we think that every church has to last forever, we will try to do everything we can to keep it alive artificially, and that’s not good. We find fruitfulness most often in the small, not the large. Growing larger does not seem to be the key.” [“Growing God’s Kingdom from the Harvest” Interview with Neil Cole at Next Wave online, November, 2005]
Too much of our desire for assessment is related to the need for control. Rosemary Neave writes that, “This is where networks as a structure come into their own. They reflect a commitment to connect rather than to control; to share information rather than to ration it; to disperse power rather than gather it into the centre…”[Rosemary Neave, “Reimagining the Church.” Study Leave Report, Nov. 2006]
Note: rhizome is gaining currency in pedagogy and virtual learning environments and was also described by Karl Raschke in Globochrist.
