Wells and Fences
"It is important ... to distinguish between centered sets and bounded sets .... The attractional church is a bounded set. That is, it is a set of people clearly marked off from those who do not belong to it. Churches thus mark themselves in a variety of ways. Having a church membership roll is an obvious one. This mechanism determines who's in and who's out. The missional-incarnational church, though, is a centered set. This means that rather than drawing a border to determine who belongs and who doesn't, a centered set is defined by its core values, and people are not seen as in or out, but as closer or further away from the center. In that sense, everyone is in and no one is out. Though some people are close to the center and others far from it, everyone is potentially part of the community in its broadest sense.
"A useful illustration is to think of the difference between wells and fences. In some farming communities, the farmer might build fences around their properties to keep their livestock in and the livestock of neighboring farms out. This is a bounded set. But in rural communities where farms or ranches cover an enormous geographic area, fencing the property is out of the question. In our home of Australia, ranches (called stations) are so vast that fences are superfluous. Under these conditions a farmer has to sink a bore and create a well, a precious water supply in the Outback. It is assumed that livestock, though they will stray, will never roam too far from the well, lest they die. This is a centered set. As long as there is a supply of clean water, the livestock will remain close by.
"Churches that see themselves as a centered set recognize that the gospel is so precious, so refreshing that, like a well in the Australian Outback, lovers of Christ will not stray too far from it. It is then a truly Christ-centered model. Rather than seeing people as Christian or non-Christian, as in or out, we would see people by their degree of distance from the center, Christ. In this way, the missional-incarnational church sees people as Christian and not-yet-Christian. It acknowledges the contribution of all people."
-Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch in "The Shaping of Things to Come"
Comments
The fences are real, in a sense, but they truly only demarcate and impede for those who acknowledge them. Illusory fences are no barrier to those who aren't under the illusion.
I guess I think it's important because we all (yes, even those who are not-yet-Christians) imagine and construct these fences and I'm not sure that we can completely ignore them. In one sense it could be that that is precisely the goal, but perhaps we have to recognize that we're seeing an imaginary wall before we walk through it (or we have to recognize and even acknowledge our brother's imaginary wall before we can help him walk through it).
On the other hand, maybe we just need to realize "that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only [ourselves]."
Maybe I'm making too much of the fence metaphor but I feel that it can yield a lot of fruit.
Wow! You really have the ability to say a lot with only a few words. I'll attempt to reply to a couple things:
Absolutely! One of the things that wevre learned from the fall of modernity is that objective truth is extremely difficult for humanity to grasp. Even scientific truths are subject to the scientist's point of view. God's truth never changes, but humans' apprehension of it does.