emergence

“The seemingly coordinated movement of a school of fish or a flock of birds is not controlled by any leader. Instead, it emerges naturally as each individual follows a few simple rules, such as go in the same direction as the other guy, don’t get too close, and flee any predators. This phenomenon, known as emergence, may someday help experts explain the origin of consciousness and even life itself.”  Nova Science Now website.  I was listening to radio labs on NPR yesterday when I heard them speak about emergence.  It is the phenomenon described above. For example: How does a leaderless ant colony of tiny, small-brained creatures accomplish such coordinated, organized efforts at colonization and sustainability?  Individual ants are not particularly interesting.  Two of them have been observed pulling the same twig back and forth for months.   But a colony of ants is a complex organism that can do many things; ants farm, they have livestock; they make gardens; they organize wars with generals and soldiers; they take slaves; they nurse young; they tunnel; they engineer and orchestrate massive public works projects.  How can so many tiny stupid creatures organize in such a way as to accomplish very complex tasks? This is the science of emergence.  I was fascinated by this idea.  If you take a jar of jelly beans and ask a group of people to guess how many beans are in the jar, do you know what will happen?  As a group, the average of all the guesses will be closest to the actual number.  That means, that as a group, the guessed amount will be closer than any individual’s guess.  Unless of course someone guesses the actual amount.  Nevertheless, when tested, a group’s estimate is typically closer to the actual amount than any individual.  What all of this means is that living things organize and that collectively we are smarter and better than we are individually.  In other words, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts-a saying attributed to Aristotle.  Since the 18^th century, we have seen and experienced the world in terms of its smallest parts.  Atoms and particles and the building blocks of energy, reducing life to its smallest component in order to discover its simplest or most elegant expression.   Biology, chemistry, and physics—the High School sciences, basically have a reductionistic approach to knowledge.  To understand something, separate it into its smallest parts. You may have heard of the God particle, the Higgs Boson, a tiny subatomic particle that scientists believe gives mass to the universe. This summer, physicists looking at the smallest micro level of existence seemed to discover a subatomic boson that slows down other particles and gives them mass.  Turning energy into mass is the building block for all matter, according to this theory.  And yet, there are things that happen at a macro level, like an ant colony or a city that cannot be understood by reducing it to a micro-level.  A single ant is nothing compared to the accomplishments of the colony. 

Enough with the science.  What’s the point?  We are better off when we organize into communities; when we share; when we work and think collectively; when we follow a rule of life that brings order and purpose to things.  We are not made for isolation, for personal independence.  Our society is more fragmented, individualistic, and reductionistic than ever before. Like two ants pulling a twig back and forth for months without purpose or progress, our political system is stalled by two parties at odds with one another; neither of which has the greater good as a primary objective.  Our religious life is fractured as congregations struggle to survive in a world where the individual consumer is replacing institutional values with self-interests.  The result is apathy toward others, selfish accumulation of things, political strife, violence, war.  Even the “United” States is reduced to red versus blue states.  We are not so much one nation as we are a loose collection of the many.  When we break everything down, everything breaks down.  Church ought not to mimic the brokenness of the world.    

What if church was a proposal to the world to live organically as a united body made up of individual members?  What if we were called to be a people living together with a unity of purpose? What if our mission was to participate in the flourishing and growth of life for all?   The fullness of God’s presence, complete shalom, the kingdom of God, the body of Christ cannot be reduced to a single person, a single congregation, or a single denomination.  It is always bigger than the sum of its parts. That is why I believe that an independent church is not church. It is why I believe we need to be a synod, and a catholic church.  The church gives dignity and value to every individual living thing by seeing it and cherishing it as part of the organic whole that is God’s creation. The triune God is one God with three distinct persons precisely because the very nature of things is a unity of diverse things.  Reconciliation, forgiveness, healing are all necessary for alienated persons to rejoin community. Jesus and his followers draw the marginalized and the vulnerable into community because they cannot flourish alone.  As church today, we are lacking this organic oneness, this organized communal expression that gives purpose and definition.  We will not survive like this.  Finding ways to come together, to share a common life, to worship the God who made us, to serve others and draw them into the bigger picture—that is the future of the church in Akron, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the U.S., the world.  The independent congregation must come to an end as the primary expression of the gospel (the gracious and loving presence of God found in Jesus Christ).  In its place?  An organic movement of believers gathered together  to accomplish God’s work of justice and peace for the sake of all living things.