the Glocal Trekker Blog

I was recently in LA with several of my friends at a board meeting. We were working on an "organization" to help facilitate "movements" meeting at a Disney hotel that has a "cult-like" culture and it got me to thinking a lot about the differences between all 3, how they relate and how they are different and how they also can compliment and conflict with each other.

To grow an organization, you don't need holiness, integrity, or spiritual maturity. Skill sets, branding, and organizational savvy are all you need--religious work included. I've discovered you can grow a church or religious organization without God. Business is business.

To grow a movement, holiness, integrity, spiritual maturity and disciplines are not optional but critical. Skill sets, branding and organizational savvy are generally not real high, but in time get bigger as it moves from a band of guys/gals to a broader constituency. Organization becomes a result of the movement. Organization can also facilitate "movements" but not make them happen.

Business books talk about cult-like cultures that make some businesses explode. It's what people in the organization feel and think about what they're doing. Organic movements often, but not always, start with a "cult-like" leader that is on the fringes. Often these leaders and movements are exclusive, antagonistic, and isolationist feeling they have the one true way. If that movement, however, ever infects the broader culture, it always moves from isolationism in the broader culture to engagement. At stake is the question of scale and scope of the movment--will it be a self-contained movement or a broader one impacting the whole. If it's self-contained, there is no need in networking. If the movement is to impact the broader culture, it has to network with other entities. The early days of communism, civil rights, women's suffrage, and now the environmental movement are all examples of this. Edwin O. Wilson, an athiest, zoologist and environmentalist (whom I read) is reaching out to Evangelicals who want to see a "greener" earth.

In the past thirty years, there have been countries where there were multiple small movements that were initially very cult-like. When the Gospel really began to explode in those countries, a gradual shift took place because no one movement could capture all that was happening. The result was many of those movements began to network and work together--not always merging--but always leveraging off one another where it was beneficial. It wasn't a huggy sort of let's all pray and come together and do something. It was more guys in the trenches already doing stuff realizing they didn't have the whole package and by leveraging with each other, they could get a lot more done. Sweat not hugs was the glue and is the glue.

I'm convinced this is what we have to learn to do in the states. So far we have networks that are emerging (are they real movements?) with lots of growth in many of them, but no one network will ever become a movement in and of itself that engages the whole of a nation. To see a legitimate move of God that encompasses a whole nation, leaders cannot live in isolation or you wind up with antagonism and fighting. I don't know of any movement birthed out of that.

So, how might we see a legitimate "Jesus movement" in America? Not "cult-like" but Apostalic leaders with emerging networks, knowing their strengths and weaknesses begin to partner and leverage one another for a bigger picture realizing there has to be ways we are brought together to facilitate something much bigger. This is where I'm spending a lot of my thought time these days. Too many questions, too few answers, but much to evaluate, ponder, reflect, and deliberate over.