Decentralized church

1 we want to get to disciples - people who follow/love/obey Jesus, people who love one another, people who spread the kingdom

2 a variety of structures have been tried to reach this objective. Structures and processes sometimes get confused with the church

3 the church is the collection of believers. How they work - the precise balance of decentralization and top down control - varies from tradition to tradition, denomination to denomination, congregation to congregation, collection instance to instance.

4 in every collection there will be nominals and passionate, the professing and the secretive, the obedient and the less so, the good and the bad. Bad christ followers are still followers. Peter denied Jesus. Peter and Paul quarreled. Paul and Mark had a falling out. It need not get to the point of Ananias and Sapphira. Just look at some of Paul’s letters and the book of Revelation.

5 no system will be a perfect discipler. Some will be worse than others. Some may be better but slower. There are trade offs in everything and no story is finished - everything can be improved without wholesale abandonment of a system.

6 movements may be better disciple-making systems than traditional churches. They do not appear to be worse. The main advantage of movements is the power to scale to higher orders more easily than typical denominations.