The Chaotic Mission of God

Sometimes when we look around us we see a world that appears in chaos. Reflecting on my work with communities and churches it often feels as if I am working with organisations which always to seem to some degree to have an inbuilt tendency for chaos.  

This for many people is deeply unsettling and we react by attempting to establish our own order on the world, which feels like trying to push mud uphill or control the wind. 

However I wonder, if there is perhaps a different way to look at this.

One of the most successful church initiatives in recent years, which has drawn people in to the life of churches, is Messy Church.

Messy Church is a way of being church for families involving fun; it is found across the world, and is Christ-centred, for all ages, based on creativity, hospitality and celebration.

As Lucy Moore the original visionary of Messy Church says:

“Messy church is fundamentally about people, just coming in all their mess with their messy lives and messy families just coming to God as they are and seeing what a Christian community is all about”.

This acknowledgment that we live messy lives and that things are not perfectly ordered I sure helps people feel accepted as being part of the church community. 

What’s more Messy Church gatherings, although structured, allow space for creativity and spontaneity, which to some degree is always a bit messy.  For example the creative activities that form part of the engagement process are often activities such as painting and craft activities, which are inherently messy.

Perhaps there is a deeper parallel here in that the creative and redemptive out working of the character of God is in itself messy or chaotic. This may sound like heresy but let me explain.

Some of the analogies given for the work of the Holy Spirit endorse this; for example in the very first act of creation in Genesis 1 the passage implies that God created a watery environment without form over which his spirit hovered.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

Later in verse 11 and 12 we have God causing nature to flourish and this flourishing of Nature was seen by God as being good.

And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

This flourishing of vegetation sounds very much like a tropical forest or wilderness. Despite what some people seem to feel about wilderness. “That they are places that requires order to be brought to bear on them” God’s view of the flourishing of wilderness is seen as being good.

If we think for a moment that what is created often exhibits the character of the creator, then the abundant flourishing and sprouting of natural life is exhibiting the character of God whose very nature is about the abundant flourishing of life.

We may see this as a chaotic process just as we perhaps see the waves on the sea as being chaotic. Yet science and maths see chaos in a slightly different way for although the processes we observe in nature may seem chaotic, they are obeying complex natural laws and inbuilt genetic codes and if we look close enough we see the replications of patterns which are in themselves incredible beautiful such as the beauty of a snow flake or the leaves of a tree.

This difficulty for our imaginations is that chaos theory deals with nonlinear phenomena, which are impossible to predict or control, like the weather, air turbulence or our own state of mind.

Although we do know factors may influence them like temperature pressure or the amount of alcohol we consume or stress we do not know exactly what will occur due to the complexities involved.

The thought of connecting God and Chaos brings us back to the influence of the Holy Spirit, who is compared in a number of examples in the bible with nonlinear phenomena such as: the wind, breath, fire and water. 

John 3:8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

In fact the word given to the study of the Holy Spirit is “Pneumatology” from the Greek word for “Breath or Sprit”

If we are to look for or search for the work of the Holy Spirit and God in our communities and the world, we perhaps should be open to the idea that we will find God at work not by looking for organisations and structures and institutions but in rather by looking for the results of where the “Wind” or “Pneuma” of God is having an effect.

Just as John the Baptist sent his disciples to Jesus to inquire of Jesus as to who he was.

 “John the Baptist has sent us to you, saying, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?

Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. Luke 7: 20-23

i.e. to identify where God is at work we should look for signs of healing and cleansing.

As God is ahead of us in mission and his spirit is blowing where he wills we can expect to find the effects of his influence in the most unlikely of places and that he uses the most unlikely of people.  Jesus emphasized this by telling the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25-37

This implies a challenge to us in following his call on our lives, to follow him and to join in with what he is doing in the world; in proclaiming good news to the poor, recovering of sight to the blind, liberty to those who are oppressed and in proclaiming the year of the Lord's favour.” That in doing this we may find ourselves working with people we least expect or on project that we would never have imagined we would be working on. 

It perhaps also means that the process of following God's call is more akin to sailing a boat on a rough and changeable ocean, where we have to trim our sails to an ever changing wind direction in choppy water containing strong currents rather than following a rigid plan.

I also believe that if we are more concerned with order and structures the likelihood  is that we in effect are trying to control what God is doing rather than in the words of a popular hymn, allowing ourselves to be directed by the wind of Jesus in our lives; the chorus of the Hymn by Robin Mark. Jesus Be the Centre. Invites us to ask the Holy Spirit to:

Be the fire in my heart
Be the wind in these sails
Be the reason that I live

Perhaps if churches followed this approach the illustration of this would be one that resembles a shoal of fish or a murmuration of starlings where the collective knowledge responds to the stimuli around it, i.e. the relationships within in are fluid, responsive and flexible to the directing of the wind of God rather than rigid and hierarchical.

For more information on Chaos Theory see Fractal Foundations