July 19, 2004 at 11:11 am

Nodes, links, and...church?!

Jacob's Well Systems Theory #1 (This would be a good one for Steve Collins and Jonny Baker.)

Yesterday at church, Bill Wallenbeck led a great experiment on Network/Systems Theory. First he had our congregation split up into “nodes,” according to those we interacted with regularly (i.e., small groups, ministries, friends, etc.). Next, he had all of the people in the congregation who were considered “leaders” of some sort stand up on the pews. Last, we took a bunch of balls of yarn and tossed them around to those others who we knew. When we were finished, our church’s sanctuary looked like a bunch of interconnected clusters, tied together by links (the yarn). It was very cool.

During his sermon, Bill had told us that in trying to figure out what it was about Jacob’s Well that he was so drawn to when he first met us, he became stumped. He likened us to a number of metaphors, but all of them seemed much too static. Recently, though, Tim Keel, Bill, and a number of others from the Emergent community began a new think tank in order to concentrate on the Missional and Relational aspects of our churches. During one of their sessions, Dwight Frieson had mentioned his ideas about networks and Systems Theory. This is what sparked Bill’s idea for yesterday’s experiment: the fact that networks and systems are tied together yet in contant flux (think “internet” ). To Bill, this idea was a better metaphor for Jacob’s Well than any other he’d come up with.

(Click to enlarge.)

You can listen to Bill’s entire sermon, Scale-Free Networks and the Kingdom,” here.

The most amazing aspect to this study is that our network doesn’t end at our church. While we are trying to figure out how to live as followers of Jesus Christ, so too are others. Just today, I noticed that Karen Ward had talked about Church as ‘Relational’ Space back on June 24th (yeah, I’m a little behind in my Blog reading) in reference to her church’s new café, living:room. They are attempting to figure out how they can be missional and relational in their community. Lo and behold, Dwight Frieson had popped up in the comments of Karen’s post. It’s funny. I have never met Karen or Dwight, but through their Weblogs — and now through others I do know — I feel like we are all friends in some way; at the least, humans with common interests and mutual friends, nodes and links and all.