Living Metaphor

The way we lead can be powerfully influenced by the metaphors that shape how we understand the communities that we lead. These metaphors are usually shared by whole generations of leaders who seldom, if ever, pause to think about them.
For most of its history church leaders viewed the church through the metaphor of the supernatural. Everything observed was seen as evidence of the actions of invisible, intentional beings. That is how people could be more afraid of witches and demons than they were of germs. That is why leaders of churches tried to solve their problems by dealing with witches instead of germs. It is why John could write to the angels of the seven churches and it is why healing was treated as primarily a matter of casting out demons. It matters what our metaphors are.
During the Enlightenment a very mechanistic metaphor began to supersede the super-naturalistic metaphor that had preceded it. As the industrial revolution reinforced this mechanistic metaphor people began to see the world and their churches as more and more “machine-like.” Leaders began to behave as though their churches were things that could be “built,” “maintained,” and “repaired.”
For many decades we have understood the church more and more as a kind of elaborate machine. We understand the relationships in a church through flow charts and organizational diagrams that resemble schematic diagrams. We elect leaders to limited terms and assume that they should rotate through various offices as though leaders are like interchangeable parts in a great machine. We describe the purpose of the church in terms of its output (for the purpose of any machine is the production of something else – the product). If a church is not “functioning” then it requires “fixing.”
I would like to argue that we are in a time when a more accurate and powerful metaphor is growing. It is the metaphor of the ecosystem. This metaphor says that a community of people is more like a living being than it is like a machine, but that it is even more like an ecosystem – a whole community of living beings that live interdependently in a web of complex relationships.
Ecosystems are made up of many living species and individuals. Each of these species has its own particular role in the ecosystem as a whole. Each of the individuals has its own personal intentions and purposes, but they also fit into the whole in ways that transcend their own particular purposes. Even while ecosystems may produce something that is meaningful or useful somewhere else they must also be providing for the various organisms within them. The purpose of an ecosystem cannot be divided into what it does for itself and what it does beyond itself. These two functions – internal life and external product – are inseparably linked. To focus on one only is, ultimately, to destroy the ecosystem.
Churches are ecosystems, not machines. Churches are living entities, and their development (or history or story) is dependent upon the complex interactions between all their parts, each with its own little will and necessity. Leaders who understand the church through this metaphor will behave more like foresters or ranchers than they will like engineers or mechanics.
This ecosystem metaphor is, in some ways, more like the super-natural one that the first Christians lived within. It focuses, as they did, more on intention and on meaning than the mechanistic metaphor does. It also shares the conviction that the relationships between the parts matter at least as much as the parts do.
But it shares with the mechanistic metaphor the idea that what we observe and what we do are important. In the machine image we are in control of the machine (we have dominion!), so we are responsible. In the ecosystem we are still responsible, but we are also part of the ecosystem, the way a forester or rancher lives in the forest or on the ranch. In the church as ecosystem we leaders are part of it and our life depends on its life.
In coming weeks I will share with you some stories of the woods behind my house and about church leadership that are intended to help you begin to appreciate the power of this way of understanding the church and our role as church leaders.

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