Dwight Friesen is a local church planter and freakin’-genius ecclesiologist who is completing his doctorate at George Fox University under Stanley Grenz and Len Sweet. He came over one time, and what Cleave says about him is true. But these are not props for props’ sake. I say all this to convince you to read Dwight’s essay Scale-Free Networks as a Structural Hermeneutic for Relational Ecclesiology, which Cleave linked to recently. If you don’t read it for yourself, here’s my executive summary (which ended up being pretty long itself), with some of my thoughts.

Dwight starts by explaining scale-free network theory, in which relationships are not random, but still full of unlikely connections. Not all points have equal numbers of connections; some have many, and these highly-placed points are known as nodes (think Instapundit in the blogging world, or Coop in the emerging church blogosphere). Random network theory, in contrast, says networks have hierarchichal relationships starting with any given point. You know a certain number of people, and each of them knows a certain number of people, and so forth. In a random network, all nodes are equal, and the linking rate goes down as the total number of nodes increases (e.g. you are a small fish in an ever-growing sea). With scale-free networks, the nodes are of varying sizes, and the larger nodes are much better linked.

He then applies scale-free networks to the Kingdom of God:

To understand churches as Christ-clusters is to be immersed in a radical fluidity. Churches can no longer be seen as ?once for all? organizational structures to which people come, attend or join in any formal sense. In this new paradigm, they become co-created relational networks centered in Jesus Christ. These Christ-clusters come and go over time and they will be indigenous to the participating nodes.

This echoes the sentiments of Pete Ward’s Liquid Church, in which people don’t belong to just one church in the traditional sense, but move through a web of relationships in which Christ is communicated.

Next, Dwight briefly describes how weak links are important to networks of all kinds, including relationships in the church:

If a person begins to follow Christ and is discipled by one close friend ? with no other support, no other resources, no organizational structures ? and then tragedy strikes, severing that link, what is likely to happen to the new disciple?

Instead of a single, deep relationship, this theory implies that it’s better (in purely pragmatic terms) to have a larger network of weak ties than a small network of extremely tight ties. You hear this a lot in stories about how people got their jobs through a friend of a friend.

Dwight then moves to leadership, the killer topic in the emerging church:

Whereas leadership within the institutional church relied in part, on titles, positions and hierarchy to maintain its authority, the scale-free kingdom self-organizes around hubs that give away their authority. Christ-clusters are formed around hubs which provide nodes with the connections they crave.

Leadership literally emerges. People “cluster” around the leaders they find the most value in - as Dwight says, a very democratic process. People vote with their feet. This has always been true in solid church, but will take on new meaning in a liquid environment in which churches are not competing for members, but seeking to increase the reign of God among everyone who connects with them in this network.

So what’s the role of “heavy church”? Dwight says it’s to provide a “commons,” a “meeting place which can encourage Christ-clustering.” But the institutional church’s structures are not the living church:

Throughout the history of the people of God, prophetic voices, reformers, mystics and theologians have challenged the human propensity toward faux structures of authority and strength, calling God?s people to incarnate a Holy Spirit communion.

Undoubtedly, the institutional church has been a rock for the Christ-follower. But just as water is ultimately stronger than rock and as rapid flow of modern life turns the boulders of yesterday into the sand of tomorrow, so the solid institutional church structures are showing the erosive signs of Christ?s ever flowing clusters.

He ends by drawing an analogy between the emerging church and water:

Trapped between order and chaos [the random movement of a gas, and the rigid structure of a crystal], water molecules participate in a majestic dance in which some molecules come together, form small and somewhat ordered groups, move together, and in no time break apart to join other molecules forming yet other groups.

This is a great paper, and you might as well read it if you’ve followed me this far. Hopefully Dwight won’t mind my extensive quotations of his work, as I am increasing his “hubbiness” by mentioning the essay here :).

The part that intrigues me most is about leadership as hubs that form naturally because they offer something people want. They don’t offer it, though, the way a megachurch or a Wal-Mart Supercenter does. They offer something that they themselves do not have - in essence, they offer links, just like a good blog that gives you something meaty and original, while recognizing that most of the good stuff is elsewhere, and providing the links to get you there. Paul captured this idea well in his phrase “Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ. (1 Cor 11:1)”

Web site consultants used to say to never link to an external site, because it will drive visitors away from your site. Scale-free network theory, as I undertand it now, says that sites (and leaders) become important and respected by linking outside, by driving traffic away into what they are looking for. Google does this to great effect. So did Paul’s teaching about Christ, which prompted the Bereans to look outside of Paul to find if the Jewish scriptures supported what he was saying.

So how does this understanding shape the process of developing contextualized ecclesiologies? (And aren’t big words cool?)