Organic Church Conference 2

January 27th, 2007

Alan Hirsch - Jesus Made Me Do It
- Christianity minus Christ = Religion
- Christians domesticate Jesus. Jesus does not fare well in religious systems.

Alternative Ways we Domesticate Jesus
- Spooky Jesus - not quite human Jesus. Find this image in many churches.
- Buddy Jesus - “Jesus is my Homey”. Find this in prosperity gospel. Takes out all of his diety.
- Sunday School Jesus - Use Jesus to teach kids to be nice. The gospel is full of subversive text. Jesus won’t teach kids to be good middle class citizens.
- Jesus is my Boyfriend. Romanticized Jesus - Running in the fields with Jesus. What the Bible says of love isn’t what our songs say about love.

- The Jesus we encounter in the Bible is a very disturbing person.
- If Jesus showed up to many of our churches we’d probably kill him. Religious people do not like Jesus (the Pharisees)

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Ori Brafman - Starfish Organizations
People are fundamentally good. If you give people a chance, they will give their best effort.
- The single biggest thing that Craig from Craigslist did is to trust.

The biggest danger to starfish organizations is when a leader’s power changes from symbolic to authoritative power. The organizations become centralized.

Starfish Organization Glue
- Shared Values
- Circles - everyone is a peer
- Catalyst - The leader lets the community go with trust
- The Secret Sauce
- Pre-existing network
- The Champion

Implications
- Knowledge resides at the edge - people on the ground have the best knowledge of what is going on
- Power o Circles
- Circles function on trust
- Starfish are well hidden

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Neil Cole - Breaking Free
- 50% of Christian leaders will not finish well
- Leaders become career oriented, and spiritually handicapped.
- Leaders become comfortable/dependent on the institution.
- Some well meaning leaders are holding back the church
- There will be a cost to break free. Power, Position, Profession.
- You will find greater power and freedom when you let go

The Kingdom of God is upside down
The way we naturally think is upside down. We’ve been learning to do church from the business world. We will reproduce the world not the Kingdom of God.

The world’s authority flows hierarchically down the chain of command. The Kingdom of God’s authority is distributed rather than delegated.

There is a dysfunctional codependency in churches. Leaders take the responsibility to “serve God” and the saints prefer to defer responsibility to the leaders. Leaders need to step down and no longer lead positionally, but rather lead relationally and Spiritually.

The shortcomming of multi-generational disciple-making is like maing a copy of a copy. It gets diluted. Leaders need to get out of the way and make everyone a disciple of Christ rather than making disciples of themselves. Get rid of middle management.

Embracing a theology of death
In America we have bought into a theoloy of what is safe. Instead we need a theology of death:
Die daily to who you ae
Empowerment of others is our life
Acceptance of risk as normative
Theology is not just knowledge it is practice
Hold on to Christ, open hands with all else

The one way to ensure something of God will live is to kill it. If it is of God it will be reborn over and over again.

Q&A
The problem of heresy is a non-issue with flat organizations. With a vertical organiation heresy can infest downward from the top, but in a flat organization heresy stops with only a few at most.

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My Thoughts/Observations
- Must beware of being reactive (bitter/disillusuonment).