Rethinking Church from the Ground Up by Xochitl Alvizo

In the last post about rethinking church communally, I ended with reference to the fact that those who do not identify with an organized religion – nearly 70% of the religiously unaffiliated – think that churches “focus too much on rules,” “are too concerned with money and power,” and “are too involved in politics.”

I found this to be the case also among participants of “Emerging Church” congregations, which I researched for my dissertation. Many participants of the congregations I visited had previous negative and damaging experiences of church – experiences that caused them to become unaffiliated from church and Christianity all together. But, when discovering or happening upon an “emerging” congregation, some were pleasantly surprised by the experience of an open, welcoming, and justice-oriented community of faith that was creative in form and ritual, and egalitarian in leadership.

It was my research with these congregations that eventually brought me back to consider the importance of polity and its significance for shaping and forming the church as the social, ethical, political, body inspired by the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. My research revealed for me the importance of reflecting intentionally about it because so much of what people experience of church comes down to the structural level and what it sets up for the community’s patterns of relating–how it fixes/orients the community internally and externally.

I came to see that one of the challenges the church faces today is due to its inability to think creatively about the ways in which it gathers, organizes, and structures itself. One of its biggest limitations is in the exclusivity of the circle of people who get to be involved and actively participate in its governance and decision-making. Figuring out how to bring more voices into the church’s decision-making processes, learning how to trust the collective wisdom of the whole body, and seeking concrete ways to do this in practice, are critical to a communally creative polity that is about more than just rules and hierarchies.

This is what captured my interest, of course, because polity does not have to be fixed in such a way (as my post on communion reflected). Church can also surprise the world with Good News and the practice of living into it.

Polity reflects the values that a collective are willing to commit themselves to in actual practice. And in turn, these practices reflect the church out to the world—they communicate, in embodied witness, the values of those who gather as church. The issue, as reflected by the conversation of the classmates in my theology class (in my last post), is that often polity becomes a rigid ordering of the collective cut off from the Good News it is meant to reflect. When polity fails to embody or to give witness to a kin-dom way of living and relating—when it becomes about the structures themselves and not the Good News that brings the church together in the first place—then it must be rethought, repaired, and restructured anew.

Creativity—the processes and energies that bring about something new—can be sparked as space is opened up and as the whole body is brought in to participate in fixing the Good News into the patterns of life that are shared. By “fixing” I mean “setting,” as in “putting in place” the Gospel so that it is the orienting force that shapes the patterns and habits of congregational life, in turn repairing the ways in which church polities have strayed from the Good News they are meant to reflect. For this to occur, however, the grip of those who hold to polity rigidly must be loosened and church structures must be held out in openness so that the movement of the Spirit may bring them to new life.

It is still a curious thing to me that when I think about church, I think about church structures, patterns of organizing, and decision-making processes. Yet, I think about these things because I see, increasingly, how these are often the things that strangle the life out of people and thwart the witness of the Gospel the church is called to offer the world.

I have also seen how these can be “fixed” at the very foundational level of church so that it can embody new, creative, and life-giving ways of living and relating that are practiced communally and that are experienced as good news. So as I think, study, and write about church and its many polities, I keep as my touchstone the beauty I encounter in the way of life Jesus shared in community with friends, enemies, and strangers alike (I especially like the Gospel of Mark). And, I try to think creatively with others about how best to bring that way of life into the patterns and habits of our shared ecclesial life. 

Figuring out how to bring more voices into the church’s decision-making processes, learning how to trust the collective wisdom of the whole body, and seeking concrete ways to do this in practice, are critical to a communally creative polity that is about more than rules and hierarchies.