Over the recent Christmas holiday, I got a chance to chat with my brother-in-law, Mark, about how things were going with the church he pastors in the Pacific Northwest. He told me about how he’s “deprogramming” his church and redirecting the congregation’s energy and resources into cell groups. He also told me about the difficulties the church is facing as they try to make those cell groups work as intergenerational bodies that both build up and reach out. He mentioned to me how he’s seeing less and less value in the church’s affiliation with one of the mainline denominations. But then he went on to speak with excitement about his efforts to encourage other local clergy to join the “city church” movement, which seeks to restore the New Testament practice of all the Christian congregations within a city working together as different local manifestations of a single universal church.

Do you see in Mark’s struggles the simultaneous urges to make his church both “smaller” and “larger,” to break it into friendly little pieces and also to link it meaningfully with other congregations? Although like many people he’s leery of anything with the “postmodern” label attached to it, I told him that the changes he’s seeking could not be any more postmodern. His church—like countless others—is a microcosm of what’s happening to the structure of the worldwide Christian church in this difficult yet exciting period of transition from modernism to postmodernism. Squabbles over hymns versus praise choruses. Decisions about small groups versus Sunday school. These kinds of debates going on in established churches across the land today are not merely the result of differing preferences between older and younger Christians; they are symptoms of a systemic change taking place in the form of Christ’s church on earth. What’s it all leading to?

I believe that the structure of the Christian church, ever since its inception nearly 2,000 years ago, has tended to mirror that of the political realm. This is not because Christian leaders are capable of nothing more than aping secular authorities; rather, I believe, it is because both state and church are responding to the metaparadigm that reigns in each era of history. They naturally wind up similar. And so, to get an idea of how the church will be structured in the postmodern era, all we have to do is look to the changes taking place in the political and social organization of our world today. That’s the purpose of this article, and it sounds simple enough. But now I have to warn you of something: I have a regrettable tendency to philosophize, and the next section of this article represents an indulgence of that tendency. If you don’t mind working your way through my historical and theoretical formulations, at the end of the article you’ll find a few thoughts on the postmodern organization of the church that you may find useful.

The Path to Here

In my view, postmodernism is the latest of at least four identifiable cultural-intellectual eras in the history of Western civilization. The earliest of these four was classicism, which began about 500 b.c. with the flowering of Athens’s Golden Age and ended about a.d. 500 with the withering of the Roman Empire. (The dates I provide for this and other eras are very general and rounded off for convenience.) Classicism was followed by premodernism, running from about 500 until about 1500 - the long, slow crawl of the Middle Ages. Then came modernism, which extended from about 1500 (the Reformation and the Renaissance) till about this very year, 2000. It’s anybody’s guess how long postmodernism, the newest era, might last.

I furthermore believe that, when it comes to these cultural-intellectual eras, there is a pattern of oscillation between what I call the Apollonian type (order, symmetry, mind) and the Dionysian type (freedom, asymmetry, heart). Classicism and modernism were Apollonian; premodernism was Dionysian, and so is postmodernism. (Like the rounding off of the dates, these categories are very general.)

According to my scheme, Christianity was birthed at the midpoint of classicism, a period when Greco-Roman civilization was dominant. The Roman Empire, which controlled the Mediterranean basin at the time of the New Testament events, was highly bureaucratic and centralized. Did the Christian church mirror the empire’s form? Well, it tried to. As you read the church fathers, you see how they were attempting to set up a system in which the church was unified through obedience to the bishops, each of whom led the congregations in a particular city. But due to the recurrent persecution of the Christians, the church was time after time driven underground. And so in reality it tended to have a more decentralized, ad hoc structure. Thus in this first era the organization of the Christian church largely ran counter to the model provided by secular government, making it the exception to my rule. (Incidentally, I’m inclined to think it was a good thing that the church failed to fully develop the bishop system in this period, since historians tell us that the church grew at an average rate of—now get this—40 percent per decade for the first four centuries of its existence.)

As the Roman Empire crumbled, the Christian church was the only institution left standing that was big enough and strong enough to unify Western civilization. And so now, as the West entered its next era—what we call premodernism—the church was finally able to complete its centralization with a headquarters in Rome, capital of the vanished empire. This hierarchical organization was something of an anachronism. And yet, as the Middle Ages proceeded, there was far more creativity and far less uniformity in the church than the brochure advertised. The monastic movement, in particular, created new subcategories of Christian devotion that brought diversity into the greater Catholic body. Local church practices and beliefs tended to diverge widely around the continent of Europe, for good and for ill. And thus, while the political organization was one of feudalism, the church mirrored that form by having only a loose centralization with a great many different loyalties operating in practice.

Things began to change again when the Renaissance pushed Europe into its first heady, “humanist” phase of modernism in the 1500s. This was followed by the “rationalist” phase of modernism that began in the 1600s. Beginning with this second phase, the preferred social organization of the modernist era was the nation-state, an entity with hard borders and centralized power. The new Protestant branch of the church immediately began to mirror the nation-states with its state churches in the Old World and its denominations in the New World. These were competing, heavily structured organizations. And just as citizens of nation-states were expected to be obedient to their monarch or elected officials, so members of state churches and denominations tended to very closely identify themselves with their own particular slice of the Protestant pie. 

But as we saw in the case of my brother-in-law, one of the clearest trends in the church today is the decline in loyalty to denominations. This signals a change from one organization of the church to another as we pass from modernism to postmodernism.

What’s Taking Shape

The competition among nation-states in the modern period reached its apotheosis with the Cold War, when fundamental differences of viewpoint and oppositions of power numbered only two and were about as clear-cut as they could possibly be. The Cold War was intensely scary, but in retrospect we recognize that it had a kind of comforting simplicity to it. At least everyone knew where everyone stood, knew what had to be done. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 symbolized not only the closing down of the Cold War but also the opening up of a new and far more complex set of political realities.

Some people fear that we’re entering a period when a new tribalism will fissure the earth’s human population. Others go in the opposite direction and worry about a one-worldism in which all personal freedom and all cultural differences will be lost. Both groups are wrong—or at least partly wrong. The reality is that postmodern sociopolitics is a matrix of national, subnational, and supranational organizations; of overlapping jurisdictions; of governmental, religious, ethnic, humanitarian, business, and other kinds of alliances. Think of Serbian nationalism but think also of the European Union. Think of Quebec separatism but think also of NAFTA. Think of Chechnya. Think of Doctors Without Borders. Think of the pro-Maori movement in New Zealand. Think of the G-8. Think of the Sudanese civil war. Think of Internet commerce. Groups are all the time being born and evolving and dying. They jostle one another constantly, and yet somehow things seem to get done.

It is the same way in the church. The vision many in the church today seem to have for working together across congregational and denominational borders is like postmodern society’s tendency to combine forces, to cooperate rather than to compete, to “think globally.” Meanwhile, the small-group movement is one example in the church today of how we are reflecting society’s tendency to get small, to hook up, to “act locally.” It all bears more resemblance to the feudal model of the premodern era than it does to either the imperial model of the classical era or the nation-state model of the modern era. And so you see that my brother-in-law is doing what an aware young pastor ought to be doing in this day: postmodernizing his church.

But I urge you not to take my word for it about how church organization is changing. Look for yourself and see if you notice trends like the following:

          • Innovative new alliances in missions, social service, and every other kind of Christian work

          • A heightened respect for “Christian entrepreneurship”

          • Not the death of denominations but their sinking to the level of other kinds of church associations

          • A growing recognition in the church that small is not necessarily bad and that temporary isn’t necessarily bad

          • Unprecedented cooperation among Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox believers but no formal union of their branches of Christendom

          • Without an abandonment of cross-cultural missions, an increased emphasis on evangelism of a people group by believers within that group

         • A decreasing inclination of people to get exercised over secondary theological differences

          • The growth of indigenous Christian movements that are dynamic yet in some respects make other Christians uncomfortable

          • A tendency of individuals to attend two or more local churches

          • A growth in “niche churches”

          • Experiments in cyberchurching

        • Lots of talk about when to act generationally and when to act intergenerationally

          • A growth in the number of single-issue, nonsectarian Christian conferences

          • A growth in the number of churches that find they can do without a building or can share a building with another congregation

          • Worldwide mobilization in defense of religious freedom

        • An almost universal recognition of the small group as the  fundamental unit of a congregation, like the family is the fundamental unit of society

Broken down and linked together—both at the same time and in all sorts of surprising ways. Global and neighborly. reaching out and huddled. A matrix of networked centers of Jesus worshipers. Unless I am mistaken, that is the organization of the church to expect in the postmodern age.

But just like other organizational models in previous eras, the matrix model of the postmodern era has both advantages and disadvantages. One upside is a flexibility to respond to changing circumstances, while a downside is the difficulty of any single organization to bring about really big changes. No doubt we will discover many more advantages and disadvantages as we move further into the postmodern era. Let us pray for wisdom so that the kinds of decentralization and networking we choose are ones that will make Christ manifest in the world.