Emergent Behavior and the Emerging Church
We are in a time of global systemic change, experiencing the fear and abuse that invariably arise in times of great uncertainty. The world has become smaller in the last 100 years through international trade, migration, and technology. My grandmother just turned 105 and scope of change she has witnessed is almost unfathomable. The pace of change only continues to increase. Technology and our interconnectedness serve to accelerate and broaden the impacts of change occurring on the other side of the planet. Things used to move much more slowly, and the adverse effects of immature leadership could be confined more easily.
Change is scary, and control feeds on fear. So change brings opportunities for fear mongerers and those willing to forgo all truth to gain power. But people continue to learn by experience that much of what their religious leaders taught them to fear holds no danger. Many in the United States have already left traditional churches, seeking spiritual experience and communities that reflect a multicultural society's lived realities.
The fears our religious leaders taught us to hold to so that they could control our behavior don’t play out in our new global reality. Once you’ve become friends, coworkers, and family with people from other cultures, religions, non-religions, and gender identities, you can no longer accept much of what the church taught about our differences. No amount of political pressure, authoritarianism, or bible thumping can put our shared experience back in the bottle.
We are interconnected. We are one. With one another, with God, with the earth. With creation. No one stands alone. We can now see ourselves from space, and concepts of us and them division no longer make sense to many of us.
As this great migration from divisive forms of organized religion continues, I am excited by what new creation may emerge from the disorganization and chaos. I’m also grieved by the pain and suffering those with power inflict on the powerless in their efforts to regain control.
Entire swaths of evangelical Christianity have aligned with financial, military, and political power—by the way, these are the issues the prophets had with Israel—to try to control society and return culture to some imaginary bygone era they see as perfect. Maybe it seemed ideal to them. Those with privilege never want to give it up. It’s only natural.
But history shows us that these efforts to resist change never succeed. They only cause suffering, war, death, and generational division. What if we were to grow up and skip that fallout this time? I’m not sure it’s avoidable, honestly. As humanity “falls upward”, maybe there is no way to skip over miserable failure so we can grow from great suffering and embrace great love. Humanity seems to be in an ongoing process of painfully working out its salvation.
As Christians, we hope for a new creation of justice, peace, and love. We have many questions about what it will look like and how to prepare ourselves to participate. But God has already provided a roadmap in nature—emergent behavior.
I first came across the concept of emergent behavior in the book Prey by Michael Crichton:
Mae was a good biologist, but she was a primate biologist. She was accustomed to studying small populations of highly intelligent animals that had dominance hierarchies and group leaders. She understood complex behavior to be the result of complex intelligence. And she had trouble grasping the sheer power of self-organized behavior within a very large population of dumb animals.
In any case, this was a deep human prejudice. Human beings expected to find a central command in any organization. States had governments. Corporations had CEOs. Schools had principals; armies had generals. Human beings tended to believe that without central command, chaos would overwhelm the organization and nothing significant could be accomplished.
From this standpoint, it was difficult to believe that extremely stupid creatures with brains smaller than pinheads were capable of construction projects more complicated than any human project. But, in fact, they were.
African termites were a classic example. These insects made earthen castle-like mounds a hundred feet in diameter and thrusting spires twenty feet into the air. To appreciate their accomplishment, you had to imagine that if termites were the size of people, these mounds would be skyscrapers one mile high and five miles in diameter. And like a skyscraper, the termite mound had an intricate internal architecture to provide fresh air, remove excess CO₂ and heat, and so on. Inside the structure were gardens to grow food, residences for royalty, and living space for as many as two million termites. No two mounds were exactly the same; each was individually constructed to suit the requirements and advantages of a particular site.
All this was accomplished with no architect, no foreman, no central authority. Nor was a blueprint for construction encoded in the termite genes. Instead, these huge creations were the result of relatively simple rules that the individual termites followed in relation to one another. (Rules like, “If you smell that another termite has been here, put a dirt pellet on this spot.”) Yet the outcome was arguably more complex than any human creation.
So, how does this apply to the emerging church? It applies when we realize that God laid the plan for the new creation from the very beginning. It’s instinctual. It’s the Imago Dei, the image of God, inherent in all of us. But to grow in our likeness of God requires us to function in such a way that frees God’s design—one we cannot fully comprehend—to emerge.
The problem is that we are in the way, trying to control, navigate, direct, and design a result that we are comfortable with and that reflects our specific image of God and self. But new creation comes about in uncontrolled and unpredictable ways. And none of us can comprehend God’s plan.
All of creation groans with anticipation to see the Kingdom of God fully revealed on the earth. If you’re honest with yourself, this is a deeply embedded desire. We all feel it. Paradoxically, this desire drives our behavior in ways that serve to hinder what we seek. We simply go about it all wrong.
We all want to end war, poverty, and social injustice. We all want freedom as we grow into our true selves. How quickly would that happen if we relinquish control and let God’s creation emerge? I don’t know how long it takes for African termites to build a mound. But if they are anything like the fire ants in my yard, it doesn't take long.
As described on Wikipedia.org, emergent structures are:
…patterns not created by a single event or rule. Nothing commands the system to form a pattern. Instead, the interaction of each part with its immediate surroundings causes a complex chain of processes leading to some order. Emergent structures are more than the sum of their parts because the emergent order will not arise if the various parts are simply coexisting; the interaction of these parts is central. Emergent structures can be found in many natural phenomena, from the physical to the biological domain. For example, the shape of weather phenomena such as hurricanes are emergent structures.
As part of creation, we don’t exist independently of God, the earth and all creation, or one another. And we cannot just coexist. We have to co-labor with God and one another. We have to co-labor for something we don’t even fully understand. We don’t know the plan or how it will turn out. I’ll admit it’s hard for me to grasp how anything productive happens without a plan. But creation emerges. Complex systems emerge from simple ones. This pattern is called growth, change, evolution, and transcendence. We have all sorts of names for this reality.
If we look to the termites as an example, they are simple creatures following simple rules. God has given us a lot of simple rules to live by, although it’s not easy to do. I guess termites don’t have feelings, emotions, pride, ambition, or any other hindrances we must deal with when making a simple decision.
Some of the rules I’ve come to believe matter are:
Love God
Love your neighbor
Practice God’s presence
Repent
Forgive
Believe
Encourage one another
Give
What can we do to get out of the way so that our emergent behavior—God’s very image designed into all of us—can create new life?
Keep it simple; it all comes down to love.
Focus on what’s in front of you—what is on your direct path now—and do what love demands.
Make decisions based on the simple rules in Jesus’ teaching, especially the Sermon on the Mount. If it was all the scripture we had, it’s more than enough.
Don’t interfere with others’ work. Let them be.
Realize that you don’t see the whole picture.
Release control.
“The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.”
To live out of a simple trust in God takes great faith. It’s a leap of faith to trust that God inherently designed us in a way that creates something more incredible than we can imagine—without our control. I’m not sure this kind of faith is possible unless you’ve personally experienced the love of God working itself out in the concreteness of your own small life. If you have, know that whatever is true for you is true for everyone else.
We must be humble, accept our interconnectedness, and do the work before us. We must be ready and willing to do our small part. We have to trust that God’s plan is better than ours. We can follow Jesus, who showed us the way, trusting God as He gave His life for love. We must realize that we need each other because God’s plan is for the whole—with all its parts—and emerges in our relationships rightly expressed.
Most of all, we must learn to love. We all know what love feels like but we create complex arguments to defend our lack of love. We call evil good and good evil. But that doesn’t make it so. The only measurement of goodness is the fruit of our actions. If the fruit is not loving, then the source is not love.
We see the rotten fruit of judgment, condemnation, and scapegoating of the marginalized, different, and oppressed. We know—if we’re honest—it’s not love. People leave churches when they can no longer listen to the contorted mental, theological, and scriptural gymnastics that many of their leaders offer up as validation for the abuse of others. This divisive thinking can no longer hold water. It certainly can’t hold holy new wine.
God loves us. All of us. Let’s love one another as Jesus taught us to.
References
Crichton, M. (2008). Prey. HarperCollins.
Lamott, A. (2005). Plan B: Further thoughts on faith. Thorndike Press.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (n.d.). Wikipedia.com. Retrieved November 18, 2014, from http://wikipedia.com