Discerning the Spirit's Direction

One of the questions people often seem to struggle with is whether the church is an organism or an organisation. Some people want to assert that the church is primarily organic. To be successful, we need to let its life spontaneously emerge. It’s like a plant which will grow by itself, but if we handle the plant too much with human effort we’ll probably damage it. The emphasis here is on God’s sovereignty. “If God is at work, we must step back and let him do his thing,” say those who see the church in organic terms.

At the other end of the spectrum there are those who think of the church as an organisation and it needs lots of human attention and energy to improve the way it works. Like tending to a well oiled machine, we need lots of planning, lots of committees, lots of effort and lots of strategies to make the church achieve what it should.

So, what do you think? Should we see the church in organic terms, or as an organisation?

These two opinions seem to rarely meet in the middle, but I’d like to suggest that the church needs to be marked by both the spontaneity of organic life and the order of organisation.

When Jesus sat on a rooftop in Jerusalem late one night trying to explain to Nicodemus how God’s Spirit worked, he said, “It’s like he wind, you don’t know where it’s coming from or where it’s going to but you can feel its effect on your face and in the swaying of the trees.” God’s Spirit is like the wind.

So, the church needs to be a yacht. We need to be organic in the sense that we are powered by the wind of God’s Spirit, but we need to be organised enough to hoist our sails at the right time and set them in the appropriate way to make use of that wind.

If we’re too organic, allowing any old thing to happen at any time, we’ll be like a little dinghy, without oars or outboard motor, spontaneously bobbing on the waves, completely free, unfettered but generally going nowhere. Free to move but having no direction.

If we’re too organised, too structured, too fixed in traditions and plans and committees, then we’ll be more like an oil rig, highly ordered but fixed in the one spot. The wind can blow all it likes but an oil rig is not going anywhere.

But imagine if we could be a yacht: organised enough to hoist our sails, free enough to move with the wind of God’s Spirit.

The trouble is, though, sometimes we raise our sails but the wind is not blowing. So often in the church we hoist our sails with a good idea and then find there’s no wind, so what do we do? We start blowing ourselves, and when the yacht doesn’t go very far or very fast we blow harder. Before long we’re either exhausted or we’ve hyperventilated. What we need to do is have the courage to drop our sails when the Spirit’s wind is not blowing and to better tune ourselves into the prevailing breezes.