The other day I was hanging out with my good friend Maggie, when the thought occurred to me, Maggie is a free range chicken. Now I know what you are thinking, I wish I was friends with Greg too, but seriously that is a great analogy for my friend. Why?
Well as I have spent time getting to know Maggie and helping her through the process of understanding her call. But, one of the concerns I have for her is that she is a free range chicken, and most denominations have no place for such people.
If you think about the process that churches, as institutions, use to create and form leaders and to create churches, often it is a lot like the process of raising chickens. For the record let me state that I am not crusading against chicken people. In fact, I have a deep appreciation for chickens. The worlds largest producer of chickens and protein solutions put my food on my wifes table growing up, paid for college, and continues to bring many blessings to my family. So yeah protein solution providers!
(In case you didn’t pick up on it, protein solutions is part of the insider slang they are using these days. I think that it helps us forget that protein comes from animals, but I digress)
We love efficient processes. We love to take something that works, make it duplicable, and mass produce it. Mr. Henry Ford helped us find our love for that! Unfortunately, this love has carried over to the church. We create processes that we believe lead to success. Whether it is growing leaders or building churches, we have processes. Processes can be good. Many of the patterns and beliefs emphasized through the institutionalization of the church have brought about great benefit. There becomes a problem, however, when we don’t make room for ideas, people, and churches that don’t fit our patterns.
This summer at Christ Church we started a new worship service called Green Chapel. More specifically, Maggie dreamt up the service, and we have helped her facilitate its creation. It has been a huge success. It has organically grown into a service where people, especially those in our immediate community, who otherwise might not feel comfortable entering our sanctuary, are gathering for worship and interacting with our church body. I preached there, outside under the beautiful (although hot) sun, and met at least 30 people I had never seen before. It has been a place of great encouragement. The immediate struggle, of course, with us as a Church staff, has been to take this free flowing, simple, and naturally growing and shaping service and to institutionalize it. We want to grab it and make it something duplicable and permanent. But, to do so would remove the very things that have made it successful.
That brings me to the problem of free range chickens. Many of the most important voices we have in the church right now belong to people who will lose their vitality, go crazy, and experience nothing but heartache if they are placed in a cage, pumped full of growth hormones, and put on the shelf next to all of the chickens. This makes us feel in control of the process of growing and using chickens, but it does not necessarily make for better chickens.
As the church we need to find room for prophets, entrepreneurs, mavericks, black sheep, free range chickens, visionaries, and contrarians. Why? Because without them we lose a vital voice for change and accountability within the church. We lose their innovative and transformational practices. We lose a part of the body, that while it may be messy and hard to control, and scary sometimes, it keeps us whole and healthy and headed in the right direction.
So this is a encouragement to Maggie, whom I deeply love and am inspired by, and all the other free range chickens out there. Don’t let them put you in a cage! Go, run, cluck, peck, lay eggs and be who God has called you to be. Most of us won’t get it. Most of us will be freaked out and scared by it. Most of us won’t understand how important you are. But, your life, lived into the abundant fullness of who God has called you to be, will ultimately help us figure out what it means to be the church.
August 13, 2008
Scripture and Discipleship