Church for Every Context. Michael Moynagh
giving way to inward-looking family and friendship ties.
Others think that new large-scale forms of solidarity are emerging. Mass movements can be organized on the Internet, while local action becomes easier when arranged online. In support of this second view, there is some evidence that the Internet has expanded individuals’ circles of friends and contacts, while the number of close confidants has shrunk.10 It is conceivable that as people live busier lives, they have less time to make intimate friends, but the Internet partly compensates by enabling them to have more acquaintances.
This extension of ‘weak’ ties (as against ‘strong’ ones between close friends) may be good for building social capital and mobilizing people. Information can race along connections to more individuals faster. A number of examples could be cited, such as the ‘Arab spring’ in 2011. A striking one occurred on Monday 27 March 2006 when, after a weekend of immigrant protests, tens of thousands of American teenagers walked out of class for their own protest. Many were responding to messages on Myspace.11
Percy works with a particular assumption about what ‘thick’ church is like. He ignores the potential for church of the network society. If the space of flows makes local and wider collaboration easier than before, the key question becomes: how can the church – inherited as well as emerging – use this new space to promote the well-being of society and strengthen the whole ecclesial body?
Networks and emergence
Castells claims that networks are becoming the preferred way of organizing in almost all spheres of life. Although his definition of networks is annoyingly wide – for example, ‘a network is a set of interconnected nodes’ (Castells, 2009, p. 19) – his discussion of them brings out what is new. They are very different to hierarchical organizations, which are communication-poor. In these traditional organizations, individuals follow rules and execute orders. Structures are sufficiently simple for managers to insist that procedures are followed in the prescribed way (Stalder, 2006, p. 182–3).
However, when tasks and organizations become too complex for procedures to be determined in advance and enforced from the top, the network form of organizing becomes more effective. Networks are communication-rich. Under their influence, workers increasingly relate not person to machine but person to person. In the past notices would appear, ‘Less talk, more work!’ but in many cases today talk is the work. A number of studies (for example, Felstead, Gallie and Green, 2002, pp. 123–6; Johnson, Manyika and Yee, 2005, pp. 25–6) have shown the growing importance of human interactive skills within network enterprises – ‘companies thrive on good company’ (Starkey and Tempest, 2005, p. 152). From this, it is not much of a step to view organizations as the sum of the conversations within them (for example, Shaw, 2002).
These conversations give rise to processes with emergent properties. Stalder maintains that ‘Castells substantiates, by way of standard empirical research methods and a rather traditionalist terminology, some of the core arguments advanced speculatively by the new complexity-oriented social theory’ (Stalder, 2006, p. 185). In conversations, for example, ideas may be combined in novel ways, which can lead to new types of action, which spark new conversations, leading to further novel combinations.
Leadership in particular acquires a bottom-up quality. It is a feature of networks that they have no internal authority able to dictate what happens. Networks and their tasks are too complex for command and control. Top-down orders get reinterpreted or ignored in the conversations that make organizing possible, while people in authority lack the time or knowledge to enforce their instructions. This has contributed to the end of deference, which extends to small, simpler networks where in theory the top can exercise control.
Leadership gets dispersed as different actors take the lead at different times in the conversations to which they contribute (Lichtenstein and Plowman, 2009, pp. 2–3). This means that the appointed leader must foster conditions that will encourage conversations to be fruitful. Coming to terms with this dispersed leadership, however, is difficult when senior management has responsibility for meeting stakeholders’ objectives and ensuring that legal requirements are met. As we have noted, management continues to seek new forms of control to secure regulatory compliance and improved performance. Thus emergent processes tend to co-exist awkwardly with top-down regulation. Tension lies between the two.
Bottom-up emergence produces effects at higher levels. The interactions of lower-level agents generate the level above. But these higher levels are largely beyond the control of lower-level agents, they exhibit properties not revealed at lower levels and they influence levels below through downward causation. Networked financial markets, for example, are like a ‘mighty whirlwind’. They take on a life of their own. They are beyond the control of agents within them, but have an impact upon them. Governments work within national frames of reference to develop strategies for interacting at a global level. But these interactions create international bureaucracies that have their independent logics. These logics then constrain the actions of governments that brought them into being (Stalder, 2006, pp. 190–2).
In the network society, new contextual churches will have emergent properties. Focused churches will give rise to networks at a higher level, and these networks will exert downward causation on the levels below. The structure of ‘temples, synagogues and tents’ described in the last chapter can be understood in these terms. Assuming momentum gathers pace, it will bring about a reconfiguration of the church. In addition, if leadership is dispersed and emerges through conversations, it becomes vital that church leaders attend carefully to the minutiae of conversations and help others to do so too – a theme taken up in Chapter 16.
The economic and social turn
The logic of combining scale and specialization creates opportunities for focused churches that are well connected.
The space of flows opens doors to network churches that exist alongside geographical ones. It fragments localities, which challenges the church to draw these fragments together. It provides new opportunities for churches to work together to serve society.
The proliferation of networks makes society more conversational, and conversations give rise to processes with emergent properties. These processes are shaping the cultural context of the church.
Conclusion
Some people, such as Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank (2010), believe that there is no need for new types of church. At its best, inherited church is well engaged with local communities. Clergy are known in schools, youth centres and by the police. They coordinate the local response to racism, lobby about the drains and support local voluntary groups. They encourage the laity to be involved in residents associations, local politics and in the pub darts team. The church meets people at times of crisis and celebration. Evangelism often permeates all these activities.
If this was the whole story, there would be no need to explain the church’s decline in much of the global North. Secularization theory exists because the church has contracted. This shrinkage questions any claim that the existing church alone can meet today’s missional challenge. As society disengages further from the church, why should more of the same solve a problem that was created by more of the same? The church needs to adapt.
Against many of the secularization writers, however, it is premature to pen the church’s obituary. Decline seems to stem from the