organic vs. organization

In a few weeks at the Foursquare Church’s annual convention, I get to help present a seminar on the topic of Mobilizing Our People for Ministry and Mission. I think this is a pretty important topic (if you read the rest of my blog posts, you can tell), so I’m excited to be a part of the conversation.

One of the things I’ll talk about is the relative importance of structure for mission. I say relative because structure can’t be more important than organic ministry. Too often, church leaders try to create plans and processes for systems and structures that will support ministry or mission which doesn’t really exist. They think if they can just create the skeleton, life will show up.

I love what the miracle of the dry bones (Ezekiel 37) represents, and believe God to prophetically breathe new life into things long dead. But I don’t think this passage is encouraging us to build dead things and then wait for them to be miraculously animated. Our starting place is always with the life of God and the breath of the Holy Spirit. Working to build structure apart from Spirit is an exercise in unmitigated futility.

Ministry is a living thing; our mission is alive. But everything organic, from the largest living expression to the smallest micro-organism is supported by some kind of structure. My body and my life is not composed of a skeleton; but I could not exist without one.

Too often when we talk about the difference between organism and organization in ministry we treat them like they are completely different things—as if one could survive without the other. My early ministry years were spent bucking organization, thinking that it was all about the “organic”, until I realized that everything organic must be organized.

Organic and organization are more than just symbiotic properties; like two sides of the same coin, they make no sense unless they are together.

As a leader, when I want to encourage, equip and engage people to mission, I have to be intentional about how they get from point “A” to point “B”. The mission will be alive and the ministry will thrive when it is supernaturally shaped by the Spirit, and that shape will take a particular form for a season—that is the structure.

Let me put it a different way: If Jesus and His disciples seem to you like a great example of freewheeling organic ministry as they aimlessly wandered about the Holy Land looking for opportunities to do ministry and miracles, you are missing something important. Jesus engaged His disciples in an intense three year process of intentional development. The structure (teaching, handing off ministry, sending out, debriefing, distributed authority, etc…) fully supported what the Spirit was leading Jesus to do; and what the Spirit would lead the disciples to do after the birth of the Church.

Ministry/Mission. Structure/Spirit. Organic/Organization. These words are not opposites, they are mutually supportive, almost to the point of being indistinguishable sometimes—if we are doing them right. Embracing a system to develop disciples for ministry to each other and for carrying out God’s mission to the world is not only acceptable, it’s responsible to the model and mandate that Jesus provided.