Micro Church Planting and Traffic Control
Posted by Tom Hackett in Mission and Church Planting at 6:11 am | 
Permanent Link
I recently came across an article on the online magazine Wired that talked about a guy who is a traffic engineer that believes that less regulation of traffic is better than more. It is an interesting article that I liked because it helped me grasp how less regulation on the church can be better than a lot of organizational and systems thinking (hierarchal and lineal) that has restricted the church for so long.
Here are some quotes from that article: (I highly recommend reading the entire article) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html
Roads Gone Wild:
No street signs. No crosswalks. No accidents. Surprise: Making driving seem more dangerous could make it safer.
By Tom McNichol
“Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn’t done his job. “The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something,” Monderman says. “To my mind, it’s much better to remove things.”
“Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can’t expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road.”
Today some of the most car-oriented areas in the US are rethinking their approaches to traffic, mainly because they have little choice. “The old way doesn’t work anymore,” (sound familiar?) says Gary Toth, director of project planning and development for the New Jersey Department of Transportation.
From a video (that I can no longer find) Monderman says…
“Chaos is an order we do not understand yet…Order is a chaos we put into logic later on…in my opinion chaos and order have a lot in common.�
• The goal: speed traffic and improve safety.
• Based on a system that has as few signs and regulations as possible in order to encourage as much personal responsibility as possible.
• He sights three rules:
Drive, ride and walk on the right.
Anyone on the right has the right of way.
Everyone in an intersection is equal.
• The system depends in part on a collective insecurity.
Hmm; what if we let the church go with less organizational and systems limits and encourage individual responsibility. Is what would look like chaos to us have a “Godly order�? If Jesus is the vine and His Father the gardener can we trust Him to oversee a church that is released to His care? Other than the Holy Spirit and the Word of God as our guide how much more structure or engineering do we need to add to the church?
I say; “Let the church go and let the chaos of God take over.�
16th of January, 2007 at 8:10 am
excellent post. thanks. it takes a few deaths on the intersection for the “new” rules to sink in.
18th of January, 2007 at 11:04 am
Not sure. Individual responsibility is the goal, but I don’t know that chaos gets you there?? God gave very detailed order to the universe so I don’t understand the comment “let the chaos of God take over.” What chaos??
21st of January, 2007 at 6:05 am
Martin Luther once said, “The two goals of my life are to get the Scripture into the language of every man and to get a hymnal into their hands. Set them loose and the flame will spread on its’ own.� I say, “Let the flames rage�.
21st of January, 2007 at 6:57 am
This morning I ran into a website with material that is
appropriate for this subject…
The Spontaneous Expansion of the Kingdom of God
By Neil Cole
We need to be willing to let go of the “ring� of power
and control if we want to be free and see God work.
Greater power is found walking in faith and freedom,
not in control. Human control and spontaneous
reproduction are not compatible.
I often ask church leaders, “Who was in control in
the book of Acts?� It wasn’t Peter. He had no desire
to bring the Gospel to Gentiles, but the Spirit of the
Lord did (Acts 10-11). It was not Paul who was in control.
He wanted to go to Asia, and the Spirit said “No.� Then
Paul started heading out to Bithynia, and again the Spirit
said no (Acts 16). It was the Holy Spirit that was in
control in Acts. We have misnamed the book by calling it
the Acts of the Apostles. The Holy Spirit is referred to at
least 57 times in 28 chapters. If we want to experience
the book of Acts today, we must yield control to the Holy
Spirit. I am not what people would call Pentecostal or
charismatic, but I want to walk in the Spirit, follow His
lead, and be Spirit-filled. This is not Pentecostal, it is
Biblical. I believe that when we unite the Spirit of God with
the Word of God in our hearts, we will see a spontaneous
movement that the world will have to take note of.
In his classic works Missionary Methods: St Paul’s or
Ours? and Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and the
Causes thatHinder It, Roland Allen sets for us all the high
bar of a spontaneous multiplication movement. We should
not be content with less. A true spontaneous
multiplication movement is unstoppable. In the latter book
Allen writes:
“By spontaneous expansion I mean something which we
cannot control…The great things of God are beyond our
control. Therein lies a vast hope. Spontaneous expansion
could fill the continents with the knowledge of Christ:
our control cannot reach as far as that. We constantly
bewail our limitations: open doors unentered; doors closed
to us as foreign missionaries; fields white to the harvest,
which we cannot reap. Spontaneous expansion could
enter open doors, force closed ones, and reap those white
fields. Our control cannot: it can only appeal pitifully for
more men to maintain control.�
Spontaneous expansion is true power. This is what we
all want deep in our hearts. This is also what our Lord
wants. Let’s have the faith in the Lord of the harvest
and in the seed of His word rather than in our methods
and strategies.
Out-of-control Order: Simple Structures for a Decentralized
Multiplication Movement
By Neil Cole
The core issue where all this becomes most difficult is
in giving up control. We are afraid of “all hell breaking
loose� but our insecurities and resulting control has
often kept “all heaven from breaking loose.� Can we
trust the Holy Spirit with the control issues and allow
the body to function in an orderly fashion apart from
human hierarchies? It is possible…but, is it desirable?
I hope so.
11th of February, 2007 at 7:39 pm
Dear Tom,
I totally agree. I think I have heard the term let go and let God. I think alot of the leadership like the control or position they hold. I think we need to understand that we need to have the servant heart. I believe in things like the one cleaning the santurary that prays over the pews. No reconition needed. I would like to know more about your mission and church planting.
Bro. in Christ
Eddie Medlin
24th of February, 2007 at 3:42 pm
I feel a hesitation to move towards so much freedom in what we call the “church” (but what is mainly an institutional organization). There are so many examples of individuals and groups taking “religious” freedom to extremes and straying from a firm Biblical foundation. My question is not should we move in the direction of empowering the Micro Church, because I think we must, but how do we encourage accountability and Biblical integrity without falling back into the same restrictions that hinder the current church. As a missionary in rural Mexico I used to view this whole subject as irrelevant to the place and culture that I work in, however, now I see that it has great value for us. We have to know that we are guiding our people toward complete and total dependence on Jesus, and not guiding them toward being committed to the hierarchy and authority of a particular church style. Because, honestly, it is easier to get people to comply with the tenants of the church doctrine than it is to impart to them a need and desire to follow the Spirit of God any way He chooses to lead.