His seriousness pushes people into a bizarre mix of sociological theory, nerdom, and missional theology. And it works. It works well.

Others have tried, but the message always came in a divorced medium: the dryness of a how-to book can never capture the creative possibilities of technology. The old and new don’t mix well. Friesen puts his thoughts down in connective ways, with thought provoking quotes starting and ending his thoughts. This layout of the book is purposeful: Friesen is showing the links between his work and others work by ending bookending his ideas with quotes. The humility of the digital metaphor is evident: our communities must become democratic, a holy “endless chain of signifiers,” as Derrida would say.

The value of the author is only as good as the links to it, the connections, the networking. Friesen argues for this in terms of network ecology, a way of caring for networks. This is, in at it’s most simple, a re-imagining of the literal pastor, the shepherd. The job of the pastor is re-imaged as the network ecologist, a person whose job it is to care for the community like a shepherd takes care of the sheep.

Computers and networks scare people. Just mention TCP/IP or DNS servers and many will feel faint. Friesen guides the novice (whether technological, sociological, or theological) and carefully dips his or her head under water so that they can experience the bold vision of a kingdom connected.

Review Cross-posted from TheChristian Humanist Blog

I think I have a new favorite Emergent writer, or at least someone to join Scot McKnight at the top of my list. Although I have some concerns with some moves that this book makes (which is nothing new for my reviews, no?), I came away from this book with some new ideas to contemplate, some mental tools to try out on the relationships that constitute human existence, and a sense that I’d found someone who is asking the same sorts of questions that I’m asking but who has turned to different intellectual traditions to start forming answers.

Networks and the Basics of the Book

Friesen takes his vocabularies of networks, nodes, connections, and clusters from network theory, that hybrid of computer science and sociology that begins to some extent with existentialist philosophy and picks up serious steam as computer networks become one of the primary media and in some cases the main medium through which human beings in the developed world relate to one another. The main features of network thinking that set it apart from some of its rivals and predecessors are a focus on connection rather than being-in-itself, an insistence that any thing’s or person’s being is nothing less than the sum of her or his or its connections to other entities in the world; and a more focused attention on the ways in which human relationships within those networks differ from one another, this casual acquaintance neither flattened out to be equal with that intimate friendship nor one set in hierarchical preference over another, except in the thick description of this or that “cluster” moment. (I’ll write a bit more about clusters, one of my favorite parts of the book, later.)

The bad news here is that Friesen falls to the temptation so common to these sorts of books, namely to divide the course of Western history into three segments called pre-modern, modern, and postmodern, and as with most such attempts to chop history into chunks defined by the current power structures, it lacks nuance. The good news is that he does provide a selection of excerpts from thinkers as diverse as George Bernard Shaw, John Muir, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, and the Dalai Lama, each of which highlights the interconnectedness of reality and the sense in which no thing in itself means anything exclusively in itself. (As someone who studies and teaches 17th-century literature I was quite disappointed that John Donne’s “Meditation XVII” did not feature in the list, but I don’t expect seminary professors outside of the church history department to pay too much mind to folks before Hegel.) Moreover, he provides a nice argument against reductionist anti-Institutionalism, comparing it to Gnosticism’s nay-saying to embodied community (106).

Beyond those good things, Friesen also holds his own importance lightly, making fun of himself and his neologisims at one point and throughout the book insisting that whatever importance he holds is because of, yes, the good people with whom he’s connected over his years. He relates this conception of his place in the world as he explicates what he calls “the parable of Google” (83), a vision of authority within the Church that is “revealed, not held” (115), a conception that makes me worry, but I’ll get to that later.

Christ-Commons and Christ-Cluster

By far the most interesting set of ideas in the book (they’re interconnected, dig?) are what Friesen calls Christ-Commons and Christ-Cluster, and I do think that this constellation of relationships is as fine a way as I’ve seen to cut some of the Gordian knots that arise when folks like me (a Deacon in a relatively conservative Christian Churches congregation) and folks like many of my friends (who are parts of various Emergent cohorts, house churches, and other “EC” aggregations) run into when we talk ecclesiolgy. Rather than imagining such things as opposing entities of similar kind, Friesen locates them relative to each other as parts of a larger body of experience.

Christ-Commons refers to sustained traditions in Friesen’s picture of things. A venerable institution like the Catholic Church, an intellectual movement like Realism (in the medieval sense) or Calvinism, an Emergent cohort, and an evangelical megachurch’s small group all stand as Christ-Commons, relatively stable groups of connections that exist to serve a larger end but nonetheless exert some energy to sustain themselves. Friesen points to the genuine human goods like stability, responsibility, and patience that come from belonging to such while noting that they’re not the sum total of human experience, much less the Christian experience.

Christ-Clusters, on the other hand, are momentary happenings, things like the ad hoc outpourings of support that happen in the face of disaster and the seemingly spontaneous collaborations that often arise when online acquaintances put their heads together and launch into grand conversations about this or that topic. Friesen notes that much of what Paul writes about the movement of the Spirit in the letters to the Corinthians fits this pattern better than it does the more fixed organizations that he calls Christ-Commons, and he notes that Christ-Commons are helpful to facilitating Christ-Clusters precisely insofar as they encourage strong, intimate connections and less involved acquaintance among people with a common cause. The ad hoc character of a cluster, in other words, can derive great strength from prior and intentional communities that arise from the commons.

What causes frustration and sometimes even enmity, Friesen suggests, is that when some folks try to perpetuate those momentary and Spirit-initiated Christ-Cluster moments, they either remain blind to or become resentful of the fact that any network node that persists is going to become a Commons, losing the character of the Cluster when the moment that calls the Cluster into being has passed. In the case of blindness, the frustration comes from an anti-institutionalism simultaneous with the inevitable solidification of institution, and in the case of resentment, it’s likely to result in posts decrying “the death of Emergent” every three months or so.

Perhaps this relationship was more than obvious to everyone except for me, but since I took this book on, I’ve been thinking differently about relationships between the decline of mainline Protestantism, the rise and self-doubt that I’ve seen in Emergent, the pains that I’ve seen firsthand as evangelical congregations don’t keep up with the megachurch Joneses, and an array of other phenomena.

Friesen Exacerbates My Hangups with Trinity and Church

I honestly don’t know whether to attribute my first worry to my own theological timidity or to genuine problems with the book, but I’m almost certain that the second problem follows from the first.

As I noted in a post last week about the way that I do theology as someone who does more preaching than theological-book-publishing, I tend to make divine revelation the starting point for theological reflection, and more often than not, the form and content of that revelation is enough to fill the time generally designated for a homily, so I generally don’t go much farther. I certainly confess the Trinity, but I’ve studied just enough Church history that I suspect that any possible articulation of the nature of the Trinity beyond “Trinity? Yep.” is at least somewhat likely to fall into some council’s or theologian’s catalogue of heresies. Please understand that I don’t begrudge anyone else’s attempts to articulate the real nature of the ontological Trinity; I’d just prefer to stay safely on the economic side.

With that disposition in place, readers can certainly understand my unease when Friesen, establishing good reasons for using network theory in theology, refers to the Spirit as “the perichoretic relationship of the Father and the Son” (57, italics original). The implication with which Friesen wants to run is that “We is not simply a statement of relationship but actually suggests our relationships themselves are living beings reflective of the Triune God” (57-58). Friesen is duly careful not to elevate the status of human relationships to ontological equality with a Person of the Trinity, but the move still troubles me for a couple reasons. For one, there’s the third-man question that plagues Plato: if the Spirit is the relationship between the Father and the Son, then what or whom is Jesus promising to send exactly in the gospel of John, and what would be the name for the relationship between the Son and the relationship-between-the-Father-and-the-Son? And once we named that, would there be another name for the relationship between the Son and the relationship-between-the-Son-and-the-relationship-between-the-Father-and-the-Son? Certainly I don’t need to go farther than that: even if the assertion is compelling aesthetically, it makes no sense philosophically. My second hangup is that I’ve had people who actually do Trinitarian theology insist that the diminution of any Person of the Trinity from full Personhood is a bad thing, and although I’m not exactly sure what Personhood is, this move seems to diminish it.

All that said, remember that this criticism is from the cowardly lion who runs from his own tail when faced with the task of talking intelligently about the Trinity.

The implications of this picture of Trinity, of course, have directly to do with ecclesiology. If the Person of the Trinity is a relationship between prior personalities, it only makes sense for the authority granted by that Person to arise not from that person’s mysterious choosing of this person to heal and that one to speak in the tongues of angels and a third to exercise the office of teaching; on the contrary, as I noted before, in Friesen’s vision of the life of the Church, “Authority is revealed, not held” (115). I recognize that such a vision of the work of the Spirit is not prima facie incompatible with the text of Paul, but it would, I imagine, make certain sustained activities like oversight (what episkopoi do) or shepherding (what presbyteroi do) or teaching (what didaskoloi do) rather difficult. In Friesen’s vision, like others I’ve seen, the relatively chaotic gifting of the gospel of John and the letters to the Corinthians seem to take pride of place from the more orderly systems of the letters to Timothy and Titus. I’m not saying that I’ve ever seen an ecclesiology that balances those two in a way that compels everybody, but it is a concern that concerns me.

One more bit of philosophical trouble I had with the book has to do with its use of the words order and chaos. Friesen admits that he borrows his usage not from philosophical but from corporate-managerial vocabularies, but it still troubles me that he wrote a sentence (fragment) like “A time for chaos and a time for order” (96). If there is a time proper to one thing and a time proper to another thing, then it’s not chaos. I realize that this is a quibble, that a simple change from “order and chaos” to “conservation and innovation” or even “tradition and the individual talent” would easily enough make his point read more valid, but I figured I should note this and say as a larger point that part of Friesen’s charm, that he shifts so effortlessly from one vocabulary to another, is also a source of some fuzziness. For readers alright with a bit of fuzziness, that should not be too much of a problem.

Worth a Look

Overall, although at the end of the day I’m still uncomfortable with its vision of the Trinity and the resulting ecclesiology that flows from it, I think that Thy Kingdom Connected stands as a worthwhile book for contemplating in new terms some of the questions that have really troubled the Church in my own generation, and as with most books, I think that someone doing a different sort of Trinitarian theology (in other words, someone skirting another set of heresies) could easily enough adapt that understanding to Friesen’s philosophical and sociological insights. This is a book worth a look for a goodly range of readers, and I’m glad that Mike Morell sent it my way.

Studies everywhere are bemoaning Generation Y’s unprecedented exodus from not just the church, but of Christianity. They posit that kids these days are just fed up with the church’s hypocrisy, its close-mindedness, boring worship events, and the like. The truth is – that the church has been like that for generations! That may be their explicit reason for leaving church, but if church has always been just as mind-numbing, why is it that this generation in particular is dropping like flies?

With this question in mind, consider the unprecedented use of smart phones, Web 2.0 technology and social media. Think about it – the very thing that people “went to church” for in past generations now is at your finger tips! Facebook is “My Kingdom, Connected.” My photos, my status, my events, my “friends…”

And yet Dwight J. Friesen prepares us with new metaphors and language to connect us to a different kind of Kingdom. He plays in other fields of study, from biology, physics, mechanic, ecology…even knitting…and teases out rumors of God’s networked-Kingdom.

Missiologists and church planters could use new vocabulary to describe the fresh vision of God’s people in today’s world – and while Friesen’s language at times leaves you wondering if “there was a single English word in that last sentence…” he seems to invite his readers to explore a new landscape of metaphor and paradigm for living as a networked ecology of Christ.

I am an organic church advocate and practitioner, helping facilitate a network of faith communities meeting in homes, coffee shops, and other places life happens… I found great encouragement in Thy Kingdom Connected and found myself setting aside some of the metaphors and descriptors as a means of under-girding our theology and ecclesiology here in Chicago.

So often in theology and in church planting we pick apart models, theories, Scriptures, and just about everything else…leaving the issue just about as lifeless as a dissected frog in biology class. But Friesen takes a page from the “Science of Life” – asking the question, “What would it take to develop a theological vision that enhances life?” At the core of life-centered theology is one that cultivates life, rather than picks it apart – seeing theology and ecclesiology as inherently relational and therefore, not approachable as an “it” — as would have been done in the typical modern worldview — but as a “we” – and a dynamic, open-ended “we” at that. We are in the petri dish, we are in the linked network we are ourselves exploring.

In Friesen’s understanding of leadership, we are to engage our community the way Google engages its users. No one goes to Google for its own sake – it is a springboard to resources and information. Leaders too are a linking catalyst…a hub to the resources to the very best that God has to offer. This is more than having a big library – this is cultivating a culture (ecology) of a organic, spiritual system, fully connected as an “all-channel network” — meaning giving not only your resources but pointing to each other as resources to access for strengthening the links of a church network. This is the nature of leadership – influencing the people-system for catalytic transformation.

I disagreed with Friesen’s approach (not his content) regarding the Christ-Commons and Christ-Clusters. He seemed to say that Christ-Commons were regularly scheduled events whereas Clusters were serendipitous fly-by-night collections of Christians. I agree that there are both kinds of “groups” in the Church – The folks walking to Emmaus on Easter may be to him what is known as a “Christ-Cluster” – which is fine – but to call that “the soul of the church” is a little much if you ask me. Spontaneous engagements with community and the Spirit is simply a natural overflow of family life together – which can happen in a regularly scheduled program or in a weekend retreat. People grow from both “quality and quantity” time together and with the Spirit.

Our network in Christ extends beyond our little crew that meets in my living room – it is more than our network of organic churches in Chicago. It is broader than the global church in our day, and reaches further back than Pentecost and beyond the 2nd Coming of Christ. It is the Church Universal – it is the Bride to Be. Entangled in the Network of God, who was, is, and is to come. Thy, not My, Kingdom Connected!

http://godgrown.net/blog

To get a sense of where this conversation seems to be going, it might be helpful to know something of the author of Thy Kingdom Connected. Dwight Friesen is a youngish Emergent former pastor teaching practical theology at a rather new and upstart seminary in Seattle (Mars Hill Graduate School). He’s evangelical, but his evangelicalism seems to be open and generous. Oh, and I might add that he’s wearing an ear ring in the back cover picture. The author is technologically savvy, understands the new sciences, and is conversant with the latest trends in society. This background helps illuminate Friesen’s sense of vision. Unlike some of the Emergent and Missional works I’ve read, even though he is critical at points of the way things are going with institutions, he’s not overly anti-institutional. Rather than focus on the problems, he seeks to find clues that would help us move forward — especially forms of social media such as Facebook.

In Friesen’s vision, the Christian faith is akin to a conversation. It is relational, even as the triune God is relational. It is dynamic and creative. While Friesen is critical of religious institutions, he doesn’t seem interested in tilting at windmills or tossing out what exists. Instead he wants to offer a new paradigm, one that isn’t atomistic or static – as he correctly notes, is often true of our institutions. They are stymied by conflicting interests and concerns (consider our governmental systems for a moment).

In the new paradigm, the world is envisioned as an integrated whole. Those involved in leadership in this model are called to facilitate linkages and help create hubs that will connect people together. Again, as models to emulate, he points us to such internet staples as Facebook, Linked-In, and Twitter. Churches are not so much institutions as “Christ Commons” or “Christ-Clusters,” and pastors serve as network ecologists, helping to facilitate linkages to the hubs.

The book is composed of five clusters, which lead from “Seeing Connectively” to “Connective Practices.” He begins by inviting us to look at the world through a set of lenses, moves on to describe the kingdom in networking terms, shares how leadership functions in this new reality, and concludes with two sections, one dealing with the church and the other with missional practices. The goal is to help Christians and churches become connected, understand how they are linked, and understand that the church is called, as the body of Christ, to be part of God’s transformative work. We are, he says to be “And’ers,” linking others to Jesus and to the kingdom. He writes:

Missional linking is marked by a kingdom imagination that, when confronted with “otherness,” is able to see an And’ing in Christ; Jew and Gentile, slave and free, men and women, Republican and Democrat, modern and postmodern, left and right. The way of Christ is to become the And. God’s mission, if you choose to live into it, is to boldly link where no one has linked before; this is the Christ conjunction (p. 135).

Such a view would seem ideologically centrist, or perhaps a sense of pragmatism – trying to bridge the gaps in a very polarized society. But, his sense here is that the goal of the kingdom is reconciliation, “the linking together those who have been separated” (p. 134).

In the past, even in the biblical text, the church was envisioned as a lonely light house, shining its light into the darkness. Such an image is less useful today, and thus we might want to turn to the vision of a city, at night, its many lights centered around a hub, being our new image of the church. To get there we must move from a bounded set mentality to centered set one. Borrowing from anthropologist Paul Hiebert, Friesen suggests (rightly in my mind) that focusing on maintaining boundaries will not get us to where we want to be. Instead, we should focus on the center, that which binds us together. Moving toward Christ, we cluster together, and thus are bound together by the Holy Spirit.

The book is interesting and challenging. Those in the younger set will understand the language it is used. Those who are not as adept in social networking, especially clergy and church leaders over fifty might struggle. One thing that’s not dealt with very well in much of the literature (and that includes this book) is what we do with those who are not adept at social networking. How do we keep the older one’s from falling through the cracks? Now, I realize many over-seventy people are very active on the internet, but not to the degree that the younger set is. This is a question, that at least for now needs to be considered. It is one that I as a pastor of a long standing, rather traditional congregation, that desires to be missional, must keep in mind. Still, this is a book worth engaging with all due seriousness. Let us begin the conversation.

To do this, Friesen uses metaphors and illustrations from modern technology and network theory. At times, I found myself getting lost in the metaphors; but by the end of any one chapter, I was able to understand the connections that Friesen is making as he uses them. He does a good job of bringing together the metaphors and his vision of the church in God’s networked kingdom.

Friesen also uses numerous examples to illustrate what he is communicating. They are real-life stories that describe what Friesen means when he uses new terminology such as a “Christ-Commons” or “Christ-Clusters.” I appreciated these illustrations because they enabled me to get a vision of the reimagined church. And I liked the inventive, networked kingdom terminology that Friesen uses to describe the reimagined church.

As a minister in spiritual formation and a spiritual director, I found that Thy Kingdom Connected challenged me to rethink my own ministry and how it fits into the networked kingdom of God. In addition to the questions that Friesen poses at the end of each chapter, there were other questions that I was asking myself.

I began to imagine myself as part of a networked ministry. I wondered who were the “hubs” in my network. I thought about the sharing and receiving of information. I am considering the meaning of being a “missional and’er” and am trying to discern my links.

Although these new questions that arose from my reading challenge me to reimagine my ministry, Thy Kingdom Connected also affirmed for me some of the ideas that have been rolling around in my head for some time.

Thy Kingdom Connected is easy to read. For anyone wanting to be on the edge of missional church, I recommend reading this book.

Beyond the intended structure of this work, covering as it does the Kingdom, Leadership, Church & Spiritual Practice (all from the perspective of how these could be done differently if viewed from a network/connectivity paradigm), having finished reading it I was left with these abiding memories:

1. I found the comparison & study of ‘Christ Commons’ (institutional/formal churches, meetings or church meeting places) and ‘Christ Clusters’ (informal ad-hoc joinings as part of a living faith) a really useful dichotomy. To think of the church thus as having a body & a soul that both need to be preserved & nourished was a useful analogy. It also made sense of the twin desire I feel to both see progress within the local church body I am part of as well valuing the freedom to not have my outworking of my faith limited to one group or tradition. To me this whole section of the book also carefully avoided the excesses I have heard on both emerging & traditional sides of the debate about how we move forward.

2. The potential impact of our meetings with or even just lose connections with others was also very challenging. Using the much quoted analogy of the butterfly effect, it was sobering to think how even those ‘weak links’ I have in my social network (real world as well as online) could be important for what God is working to bring about. Thinking this way, which took a while to get my head around, also helped me reflect on how a number of social care projects that I am involved in (and are precious to me) came about because of these kind of connections. I was in fact reminded of an article I read many many years ago in a publication called Edification; about the potent importance of our meetings & conversations with others.

3. Some of the material on the ‘centred paradigm’ vs the ‘bounded paradigm’ reminded me of how much I agreed with this view when I read it in Brian McLaren’s “More Ready Than You Realize”. So, it was even more interesting to see the implications for my view of evangelism & fellowship of moving beyond both of them into a ‘networked paradigm’. The principle here reminded me of the point that Miroslav Volf is making in the academic but brilliant ‘Exclusion & Embrace’. But even though I have sited other authors I am not suggesting any plagarism; the points made here fitted absolutely in this context, they just resonated even more.

4. “Mission as And’ing” was a potent chapter. Covering the analogy of sneezing to move onto an almost viral marketing view of sharing the good news could have seemed like the next step of the church growth movement & too manipulative. Except it is presented as something to just let happen naturally and cooperate with the opportunities Holy Spirit gives you through your network. That was liberating and an encouraging way to see being sociable and friendly as building the kingdom as well as good works or giving testimony.

5. Being a somewhat ‘driver’ character type, I guess I would have preferred a more directive ending in the chapters on what such a connected reality means to how we could ‘do’ spiritual development or our personal spiritual life – but it was in keeping with the rest of this work to rather sow some seeds to leave you thinking and challenged to put your imagination in gear.

So, I would recommend this work. It covers material that will be useful to leaders, followers & those who are uncomfortable with either label. The section on connective leaders is very freeing for anyone struggling with formal leadership hierarchies and gives you a whole new vista on who the real ‘leaders’ in your community might be.

The main thing I would want to pass on is that this is not a shallow work. I was a little concerned by the subtitle: “What the church can learn from Facebook, the Internet and other Networks”. I dreaded that this might be some dreadfully trendy (i.e. dated once in print) or nerdy work that was overly fixated with the current technological vogue. But it really is not. You get to learn some interesting findings from networked theory and there is enough scripture and Christian wisdom within the work for you to realise that this really is a useful worldview to help bring alive a number of Jesus’ teaching & biblical injunctions that can sound strange to our individualistic modern ears.
Enjoy this book & don’t forget to gossip about it to your network. You might even share it!

Loffers

Despite the subtitle (What the Church Can Learn from Facebook, the Internet, and Other Networks), this is thankfully NOT a book on how to use social media to promote your church. Instead, it’s about relationships, and how the church can use its networks more effectively. Again, NOT social media networks — just the relationships between people and groups in the church and in the world.

So as far as language goes, it’s a very geeky book — lots of networking vocabulary and metaphors. That will be pleasing for people with technical knowledge, but it’s not too much for non-technical types, either.

Instead of trying to explain the book, I’d like to share some of my favorite quotes:

Once, while teaching a class, Friesen “invited the learners to collaborate in the creation of a network map of our collective journeys to the school.”

“By the time the whole class had finished, we discovered a clear hubbing pattern, and it was not what I’d expected to find … One of the most connective hubbing nodes was http://www.mhgs.edu (the school’s website), and the other was Brian McLaren.”

On connective leadership:

“The goal of connective leadership is not to gain more links to increase the scale of your own influence, but to help those connected to you make meaningful connections that will help them find fullness of life.”

I can’t categorize this, but I like it (emphasis mine):

“We exist to connect people with God, one another, and with creation in continuity with the capacious narrative of Scripture … Sometimes this may even mean helping people who are a vital part of your church connect to a different faith community or ministry even at great cost to your own ministry … The church doesn’t exist simply to propagate the church, rather the local church exists as a local expression of the reality of God’s networked kingdom.“

And there’s more. I bookmarked several other sections which are too long to include here, like the story of how an aging, traditional congregation welcomed and eventually transferred their entire facility to a young church plant, for the sake of God’s networked kingdom.

I recommend this book especially for Christian techies, but anyone who is interested in relational aspects of the church, and in getting beyond traditional church structures and routines, will enjoy it.

Original post: http://kevinstewart.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/thy-kingdom-connected/

I found Dwight J. Friesen’s Thy Kingdom Connected: What the Church Can Learn from Facebook, the Internet, and Other Networks (Grand Rapids, MI: BakerBooks. 2009) a most timely read as I am on my way to Malta to discuss facilitating partnerships among church workers in geographical regions and specific ethnic groups. As Friesen successfully elaborates, because God’s kingdom is connected, we can learn much from biology and contemporary high-tech networks to live out this connectivity. “The time has come for us to reflect on the complexity and the interdependency of all aspects of created life” (p. 22). We need to perceive the kingdom of God as a relational connectivity with God, others, and all of creation. I am attending the Malta summit because I want to serve as a hub, and link people together in God’s kingdom.

We find our meaning in relationships and ultimately in a relationship with God. Friesen unpacks Buber’s I & It and I & You relationships and moves into a we relationship. I & It relationships are safe—we control the encounter. Our society finds itself attracted to social networking websites because they provide the sense of an I & You encounter for the low cost of an I & It relationship. In Christ God opened Himself to a genuine encounter with humans, confronting humans in Jesus Christ in an I & You relationship. We can have a personal relationship with God because God-in-Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit establishes a genuine encounter with God.

What Friesen calls Christ-Commons provide an environment where people come together in Christ to bless others. Christ-Commons embody God’s networked kingdom. God’s networked kingdom expresses itself as people cluster together, centered on Christ. Christ-Commons provide a connective space, empowering people to live the good news. Christ-Clusters occur when Christ’s followers live the gospel. Christ-Clusters provide soul to the local church, the Christ-Commons.

I particularly appreciate Friesen’s handling of bounded vs. centered paradigms. Too often Christianity presents itself as bounded with effort primarily focusing on maintaining the boundaries. Centered paradigms, on the other hand, focus on the center. The issue with centered paradigms is whether we are moving toward or away from the center. We are constantly moving on one direction or the other. May we move with the Holy Spirit toward Christ. May this centered paradigm help free followers of Christ from rigid boundaries and help us to focus on Christ and His networked kingdom.

I thank God for His kingdom connected.

cf. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jc4jc/

The book is about Network theory and what the church can learn from it. I’m not sure exactly what I was getting when I chose the book. Maybe I expected more “practical” applications to Network theory. As a church planter I am looking for ways of using things like Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet to interact with people, get the word out about Veritas, and develop missional opportunities. After adjusting my expectations about a chapter into it, I began to connect with alot of what Friesen was getting at.

The three biggest connections that were helpful to me were the Bounded Set/Centered Set discussion, the chapter on Network Ecology, and the discussion about Christ Commons and Christ Clusters.

The discussion on Bounded and Center sets reminded me of the same theme in the book “The Shaping of Things to Come.” A Bounded set is all about boundaries. Therefore making it easy to determine who is in and who isn’t. Alot of the times with Bounded sets within the Christian community there are clearly defined lines of what makes a follower of Jesus, and alot of those things are, in my opinion, peripheral issues. Things like what political party you belong to, whether you smoke or drink, what you “look like”, etc.. A Centered set however is all about direction. It’s about orienting around a center or “hub”. It doesn’t matter how close to the center you are, it matters if you are moving toward the center. And so for the church, with Jesus as the center, or “hub” we need to be a centered set, encouragiing people to move toward the center.

Hopefully Veritas is the kind of place that lives out a centered set instead of a bounded set. He want to focus on the center (Jesus) and help people make their way towards the center. To orientate their life toward movement toward the center and not the other way. That is not to say that we don’t have ideas what makes a follower of Jesus. We just don’t focus on alot of external things that people can too often get hung up on.

This is what Friesen says about missional communities and centered sets, “The centered paradigm has some clear advantages for thinking about spiritual formation because it focuses on what is central while allowing for porous boundaries. The centered paradigm helps Christ followers orient themselves in terms of who God is as revealed in Christ. And the issue is not external boundaries but movement with the Holy Spirit toward Christ. The centered paradigm still maintains a distinction between being a Christian and not being a Christian, but its emphasis is not on maintaining the external boundaries in order to preserve personal purity in order to ensure that one is “in”. Rather, the distinction is for the sake of cluster identity. Centered paradigms also allow for and encourage variation among Christians. All are seen as being on different paths along their Christ-centered journeys, and that’s a good thing.”

Next time I’ll look at the chapter on Network ecology and the idea of being closed while at the same time being open. So this looks to be a 3 part blog on “Thy Kingdom Connected.” Hopefully I’ll do the next two blogs before I leave for Deep Creek Lake in Maryland for some Snowboarding on Thursday.

Originally posted on http://veritaspa.squarespace.com/blog/

More annoying than the subtitle is Friesen’s attempt to do what hundreds of religious writers working in the church leadership field have been doing since at least Augustine: develop a trendy model of the Church based upon a contemporary contextual phenomenon that is supposed to suddenly open the eyes of believers and pastors so that church can finally be what it’s supposed to be, as if anyone actually has an idea of what church “should” look like. I fully confess to stealing this next set of analogies from Nicholas Fearn’s excellent little book The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions, which everyone should read instead of the book under review. In his chapter on Minds and Machines, Fearn talks about the tendency of philosophers to use current, cultural or scientific models to describe the relationship between mind and body or to simply illustrate how the mind works. If we only go back 150 years, we’ll find the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, the telephone switchboard, and the currently dominant model, the computer. I can remember a half dozen analogies from books I read as a pastor or in college and grad school that were supposed to apply to the church: family, company, ranch, computer, Internet, and friendship. 

For Friesen, it comes down to networks, links, and nodes. As kindly as possible: I just don’t care. No model, however thorough the analogy, is a group of human beings trying to live together. If I produce a dozen presentations illustrating how links and nodes work, and then explain how that applies to people in pews, they will be no closer to acting like Christians than they were when I insisted that they were the software running on the hardware that was the church driven by the CPU that was the Holy Spirit. How does that help? If your church members are so daft that they need to be told they’re a node to actually do something charitable, you’ve failed as a pastor or they’ve failed as people. It matters little what the church is compared to analogously, nor does it matter what component of a network is analogous to a church member; this is not a football team, so knowing something about what kind of thing I am in the model of church helps very little. The instructions for everyone are pretty much the same: don’t be a dick, and beyond that, love people. Feed them. Clothe them. Suffer for goodness. Pursue justice. Got it, nodes?

Friesen could have taken a crack at the decentralized nature of networks, the lack of hierarchy, and the freedom to be as committed to the network as a “node” wants to be. If we follow his analogy though, it quickly becomes apparent that a centralized location wherein worship services take place, people make salaries, and bills must be paid is not a necessary component in a network. Let’s face it, this book is targeted at pastors and church leaders. No sense in saying to them, “hey, get a damn job,” when they already have one, even when dismantling the structures and hierarchies makes complete sense within the framework of the analogy. The problem with analogies, even good ones, is that the limits of extension are hard to determine; I can extend them as far as I want to make my point, while avoiding the undesirable conclusions the model also suggests. I can insist that this observation applies to that application with no functional rubric, allowing me to say unilaterally which parts of the analogy are important and relevant, and which are just detritus. This is made worse when new words are created, because we don’t have a mutually agreed upon definition of the word that was developed like every other piece of jargon–within the context and practices of a community of reference. Additionally, I can quickly move from analogy to allegory, which, in this case, is deadly for any idea of autonomy of action within a network. As soon as I’m told “this equals you,” my role is set and I’m no longer free to move within the relative freedom of the network.

I’m a little weary of saying this, but any model brought from outside the church to define what the church is supposed to be or do brings with it a whole set of assumptions related to a different community of reference and a different language game. These cannot be imported without importing the assumptions that gave them birth, nor can the words be stripped of their original meaning, sanitized, and then employed for the sake of church. At that point, just make up words, because if the words are being re-interpreted, they aren’t functioning as they were intended to function so the meaning is malleable to the point of ambiguity. What then is the point of importing them?
Enough for now. Next time, Christ-clusters and Friesen’s redefinition of personal entity.
Originally posted on http://theparish.typepad.com

Thy Kingdom Connected looks at the role social networks play within the life of the church. Rather than looking at the specifics of networking tools like Facebook and Twitter, Friesen, insightfully examines the “big picture” of Scale Free Networks and how they are applicable to the life of the church. Drawing upon theology, biology, and sociology, Friesen makes the case that we need to rethink our conception of the congregation and the missional implications that ensue from understanding our fundamental interconnectedness.

Theologically, Friesen asserts, the Christian conception of God is inherently relational. He writes, “…only Christianity has a vision of God who exists in relationship before time – a God whose ‘being,’ as Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas says, is ‘in communion’; a God who moves relationally toward creation, now away from it; a God who is personally and actively involved in human affairs, not just setting things in motion. And we don’t just stop there; we believe that God created all that is out of love and for relationship, and we understand the very mission of God, as seen through the capacious narrative of revealed Scripture, to be the reconciliation of all things relationally unto God” (pg. 56).

And when we begin to consider that we each have importance and a place in this relational/networked kingdom that God has created, the missional implications become apparent, as Friesen notes, “As we begin to understand our interconnectedness, we begin to take on a shared mission: the mission of kingdom connectors is to actively participate in the ending of suffering of all kinds. Kingdom connecters know that when one person suffers, we all suffer, and that to bless one has untold ripple effects” (pg. 70).

Using this idea of a networked kingdom, the local church becomes a resource center with the goal of developing relationships. Friesen notes that each church should maintain its unique identity (traditional, contemporary, house, small group etc.), but the larger goal should be about connecting people with God and with each other, so that the people might be equipped to serve Christ in the world. As he says, “The church exists in relationship, by relationship, and for relationship. We exist to connect people with God, one another, and with creation in continuity with the capacious narrative of Scripture. Sometimes this means connecting people with a narrative so big and so beautiful that their lives find new meaning, redemption and hope. Sometimes it might mean connecting with others whom you personally wouldn’t choose to connect with. Sometimes this may even mean helping people who are a vital part of your church connect to a different faith community or ministry even at great cost to your own ministry. And we can do this because every local Christ-Commons understands it is dynamically linked together in God’s connective kingdom. The church doesn’t exist simply to propagate the church, rather the local church exists as a local expression of the reality of God’s networked kingdom” (pg. 109).

In a networked system traditional hierarchies no longer work, authority isn’t derived through position or power but in the ability to connect. Using Google as an example, Frissen argues that the role of connective leadership is to help people connect and build meaningful relationships, building bridges and revealing God’s reconciling work. Leaders in the church are “network ecologists” who help foster the life of the community.

Overall, Frisesen’s book is a great read. It’s deep – I found myself wanting to put it down after reading through each two or three chapters just to process everything he presents, and at the end of each chapter he presents some great questions for reflection and discussion, but it never felt overwhelming. The one (minor) difficulty I had was that it felt, at times, a little too “theoretical” to me, there were points where I wished he would have pointed to examples or provided a specific picture of what his vision of what church or pastoral leadership looks like in the networked kingdom. But it is largely written in such a way (especially with the questions) that the reader can fill in those gaps on their own.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of Thy Kingdom Connected to review through Ooze Viral Bloggers.

Let me get right to the point: I like this book. Friesen writes well; by this I mean the thought progression is easy to follow and I did not get bogged down in sentence structure.

I also enjoyed this book for the same reason that I have enjoyed many of the better books I’ve read. It is truly a gift, I believe, for an author to be able to connect points the reader is likely already aware of in new and interesting ways.

For instance, Friesen devotes several pages to Martin Buber’s work I and Thou. Anyone with a liberal arts education in the past 80 years, I assume, will be at least rudimentarily familiar with Buber. In fact, from my early undergraduate days, “I and Thou” is what comes to mind when I hear of Buber.

Thinking of the Trinity in terms of relationship is nothing new; looking at relationships through Buber’s lens is old hat as well. Bringing these two together in the context of the social networking phenomenon is eye opening. Friesen opens eyes.

Friesen makes connections – which is really what this book is about. Most of the books he cites (that I haven’t already read), I have added to my listed. The author’s understanding of the power of connections, which he brings out clearly in the context of his passion for ministry, drew me forward through Thy Kingdom Connected.

If there is one phrase in the book that has grasped me more than any other, it is where, on page 135 he quotes David Weinberger: “Conversations subvert hierarchy.” (from Weinberger’s Cluetrain Manifesto)

Conversations subvert hierarchy. Let that sink in.

Jesus eschewed hierarchy; his Church may well be headed (should be headed) back in that direction after centuries of structure, hierarchy, and bureaucracy. Conversations are such a simple tool, yet stand as the most powerful tool any of us might have to be a part of reclaiming the Kingdom vision within and around the life of the church.

Thy Kingdom Connected is a worthy read for anyone interested in being part of what the church is going to look like 10 years from now.

I too was apprehensive on the value of the content when I read the words “Facebook”, “Internet” and “Networks” in the subtitle. However, I also understand that the inclusion of these buzzwords may spur some to give the text a chance. After reading, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the content was not a direct critique/defense of social networking nor a handbook for pastors on navigating social networking media to share Christ. What Friesen offers is a thought-provoking spark to how church leaders and members can work together to actualize a networked kingdom of God.

Unlike some of the reviews, I appreciated Friesen’s willingness to admit that this text was neither a comprehensive nor complete treatment of the subject and enjoyed exploring the links and suggested readings at the end of each chapter. It was like a treasure hunt, each turn leading one deeper into the individual points Friesen himself explored to make up the whole of the idea of the networked kingdom and connective leadership. I believe this lends credence to Friesen as a networker in that this is what great networkers do: point those who engage them to dig deeper and share the works of others to continue and deepen dialogue.

That being said, I can see why some would read Thy Kingdom Connected and claim that Friesen fails to offer a complete, comprehensive work . I believe that it must be read in the context of community to be truly appreciated. I found myself continually reading, digging deeper into the suggested readings, and bouncing the ideas and questions off of colleagues and close connections. Therefore it would be a text I would recommend as a small group study or discussion piece for a cohort or house church group rather than to a colleague for individual, personal reading. It is a text that begs connection and in that way, I believe Friesen accomplishes something that others who have written about the benefits/dangers of connective nature of social media networking technology fail to accomplish. Friesen gets us to actually connect.

Thy Kingdom Connected is written by Dwight Friesen, associate professor of practical theology at Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle. In it Friesen uses Network Theory to describe various theological implications, perspectives and applications pertaining to the kingdom of God. Friesen’s goal in writing the book is to shine light upon the inter-connectivity of creation and prepare readers for “living into the image of God” and “incarnating the mission of God.”
I Like This Book, But…

I was very excited when I learned about this book. Judging it by its cover (what? you don’t judge books by their covers?) it appeared to be about things that I am passionate about: the kingdom of God, advancing the Church, and social networking. All topics that I discuss regularly on this blog.

And I discovered upon reading the book that Friesen does address these things, more or less. But a better tagline would have been “What Theologians can learn from Network Theory”, because in my opinion, this book is more a theological exposition built upon the concept of networks than a discussion of practical applications of insights from social media.

That being said, the book is interesting and important for Christians today. Network Theory is an interesting field that has helped to advance the thinking in many fields. By applying this type of critical thinking to the different aspects of Christian faith can yield numerous benefits and help shape how individuals seek to live out their faith… which is Friesen’s goal for the book.

To achieve his goal, Friesen goes through a number of different implications of network thinking applied to areas like leadership, Christian community, missional strategy, and spiritual formation. For example, in the chapter on missional strategy, Friesen makes that case that if we understand the fact that we are meant to be connected to others and that God intends the establishing of connections to ultimately bring people into relationship with Him through Jesus Christ, we will intentionally seek to be relationships and practice hospitality so as to establish and strengthen such links connecting people to Him. Makes sense to me.
What to expect from the book

The book is 178 pages long but I must warn you: Friesen writes like a college professor. He makes his points through effective but burdensome use of specialist language and complex thought processes. I found myself reading and re-reading passages just to make sure I was understanding what he was saying. The book is conceptual and the little narrative that Friesen includes is only used to introduce concepts. As I was reading, I imagined I was sitting in a lecture hall… do with that what you want. Me, I enjoyed being a student.
Implications for a Kingdom Strategist

At it’s core, this book explores very important truths about the kingdom of God. It offers a different perspective and in the process highlights key implications that will shape the way you think about how to strategical advance the mission of Christian organizations. Network Theory focuses on visually depicting the relationships between elements of a system, as you think strategically about how to achieve the goals of your organization or church it is helpful to visualize how the different people involved are related. Not only that but it is valuable to incorporate relational elements into those kingdom goals.

Overall, Thy Kingdom Connected is a good book. The premise is interesting and the discourse is valuable. The readability is lacking and thus it requires commitment to draw the value out of the book. But in the end, the investment of your time and attention is worthwhile.

Visit Kingdom Strategist.

Of course, we know the answer is supposed to be [B]. [A] has often defined our functional reality. Dwight Friesen has written a book designed to expand our imaginations about the kingdom-shaped web of connections into which God is weaving His children.

In the hands of a less-insightful analyst, Thy Kingdom Connected: What the Church Can Learn from Facebook, the Internet, and Other Networks could have been a corny and derivative exercise. Friesen, an associate professor at Seattle’s Mars Hill Graduate School and pastor of an organic fellowship, instead gives us a thought-provoking exploration of how the body of Christ is wired. The “is” in the previous sentence is an important distinction of this book. Friesen is not spinning out ivory-tower theory though his writing reflects his academic bent. He’s not given to think-tank theorizing about the way he wishes the church would behave or could be structured if only they’d buy into his program.

He is determined to help us see the interrelationships that exist in our lives as the sinew and marrow of the kingdom. Here, discussing church leadership, Friesen disarms the oh-so-modern notion of “Big Dawg” management:

“If we are obsessed with control, we will never discover the wonder of participating in God’s connected kingdom. Leading connectively dethrones the tool of hierarchy and busts the control myth. Connective leaders serve as hubs, linking people to the very best of their resources and relationships unto God’s dream of fullness of life.”

Friesen clusters his chapters around the themes of seeing connectively, God’s networked kingdom, leading that connects, networked church and connective practices. Each cluster contains two or three chapters. Each chapter’s content includes a listing of additional resources as well as a few thoughtful discussion questions. Though Friesen uses computer-based networks as an organizing metaphor for the book, his purpose in writing is to help us see the web of relationships and connections our Papa-King has given to each one of us.

I do have one language quibble. Friesen avoids using the male pronoun for God, and ends up with a few tortured sentences like this: “This means that God does not just reveal Godself through a narrative but presents Godself to us in a person to be encountered.” Suffice it to say that every time I ran across one of these pronouns, my reading ground to a screeching halt. Mercifully, they’re few and far between.

Thy Kingdom Connected is a valuable read for anyone who cares about encouraging the Bride to be who she’s called to be. Recommended.

The book seeks to link together a number of thoughts and disciplines – ecclesiology, science, network theory, missiology, and spirituality, among others – to indicate the incredible interconnectedness in which we can live, and how that affects the way we think about leadership, theology, ministry, and the mission of God and the church in the world.

The subtitle is a little misleading, first of all. I don’t recall more than one or two mentions of Facebook, specifically, in the entire book. This is a wonderful thing, as far as I’m concerned, because Facebook is just one part, albeit a very large and influential part, of much broader things that are going on in culture. It is also just one manifestation of the larger discussion that Dwight brings to us of scale-free networks, of hubs and links and nodes of various sizes and connectedness, connecting everyone to everything.

A related observation: the book does not spend time telling us how to use Facebook, or Twitter, or any other specific networks. I think he assumes we can get this information elsewhere, or that we are already doing these things. This is one of the great strengths of the book, as most books that try to tell people how to use social networks are out of date by the time the print has dried. Thinking about networks theologically and thinking about the church through network theory is, in my opinion, far more valuable and can help us understand the implications of these core parts of culture.

This is the image that he gives us of the people of God – nodes of people connected through real relationships and encounters to other people. He also gives us this image of a connected, linking God, and reminds us of the perichoresis. God is not a lighthouse, standing afar off from us, but even in God’s essence there is linking, connecting, and relating in the Great Dance between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and we are invited into that Dance.

There are beautiful thoughts on leadership in the days of Google, which for me fit really well with the conversations that are happening around Theology After Google. The ideas being presented in the book remind us that people don’t come to us, as the church or as ministers or as individuals, giving us authority or asking us to give them information.

They come to us, and we can give away our authority by creating genuine connections. Connections with God and the reconciling work of Jesus in the world, and connections with others. This kind of image of the kingdom of God, then, is relational and always moving, and is thus chaotically unpredictable.

These images lead into specific practices, and specific ways of creating space for people to engage God and others. There are beautiful ideas on how leaders can creatively seek to create this kind of space in their networks, and how each network has to be in relation to other networks in order to thrive. This leads into discussions of missiology, and how we understand our encounters with people who are fully Other from us; whether or not we allow ourselves to be shaped by these encounters.

All of the images in the book move back to the mission of God in the world – creatively reconciling people to God and to each other, and understanding that mission in light of things we know about the world through computer networks, ecological systems, tapestries, and other intricately connected things. I’d highly recommend this one.

Dwight believes that the best way to be the church is by accessing our connections through our network. He likens this to social networking media. Through a few clicks, a few degrees of separation we can connect with “friends: from around the globe.

The paragraph that best sums up the idea is found in chapter 9:

Ecology is a focused study of learning how living systems work, so it holds tremendous insights for caring for our families, churches, and even out personal lives. Throughout They Kingdom Connected, we have seen that everything and everyone is interconnected fro the vantage point of interconnectedness, we understand live to be an eco system, meaning that what happens to one or to a cluster has ripple-like effects for all. Giving God’s networked ecokingdom, the question before us is: How do we steward our lives and our communities such that abundant life flourishes not just for you and me but for everyone and everything? Our hope should be to build and steward sustainable communities in which we can satisfy our needs and aspirations without diminishing the same for future generations.

They Kingdom Connected challenges the way we think and view church and drives us to act on those challenges to move toward a better version of being the Church for ourselves and fo future generations.

Dwight J. Friesen (DMin, George Fox University) is assistant professor of practical theology at Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle. He was the founding pastor of Quest: A Christ-Commons in Bellevue, Washington, and lives in Seattle, Washington, with his family.

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