fractured or networked?

Jonny Baker:

fractured or networked - depends on the lens you look through!

one of the most thoughtful mission thinkers out there in the blogosphere in relation to mission and the emerging culture is mark sayers who i really enjoyed meeting last year. he has just posted a piece that i have been thinking about for the last 24 hours:

 the emerging missional church fractures into mini movements.

 initially i thought he was writing as though this was a problem but on re-read i'm not exactly sure. maybe he is just trying to map something...

here's my thought on this. if you look at this through an old lens - denominational or tribal - it looks like a problem. but if you look at it through a network lens it's exactly what we should both expect and hope for (though i wouldn't use the word fractured as that sounds very negative). i blogged previously about small world theory which i don't want to go over at length again. but to recap a couple of points. people can only hold a certain number of meaningful relationships, most people are locally focused (in their small world), it only needs one or two people in any small world to be connectors to other small worlds and suddenly the insights across the various small worlds (or movements as mark calls them) can flow around the network.

the key point therefore for any movement is having a particular edge and practice, connecting with others but then encouraging some to focus externally so that that movement isn't insular