From the new book by Joseph R. Myers
It is not true that an artist is someone who manufactures art. An artist is someone who enables art to emerge from a canvas””someone who has the strengths, competencies, and patience to bring that miracle into being.
An artist is someone who enables art to emerge from a canvas.
Art is not formulaic, like a paint by numbers kit. It has life. It is viewed and appreciated. It moves and inspires. It invites participation, intermingling its own story with those of its observers.
When it comes to our own lives, we want to be works of art””individually created and unique. We are living beings, and living beings cannot be manufactured on an assembly line, like a paint by numbers kit. Our souls long to be nourished with the life that emerges from becoming.
Shaping an environment where people naturally connect is more like creating art than manufacturing a product. It marks a major shift: from programming community (i.e., following a master plan) to using principles of organic order to develop an environment where community can emerge.
Organic community has the human complexities that promote artistry over mechanics. In our worship of “how-to” pragmatism, we have in some cases treated the church as an object and programmed the life out of it. It would do us well to remember that our job is to help people with their lives rather than build infrastructures that help institutions stay alive. Sometimes we focus so much on building a “healthy church” that we forget to tend to the health of people.
Healthy environments are vital””alive. They are not inanimate””dead. When places encourage community to emerge spontaneously, they have motion, emotion, and a living spirit. The goal is not to manufacture community, nor is the goal to build programs. The hope is to watch living community emerge naturally and to collaborate with its environment in helpful, healthy ways.
The difference between a paint by numbers kit and the blank canvas of an artist is the difference between master plan and organic order. In short, master plan tries to manufacture life, whereas organic order is an invitation to live.
Master Plan: Community Based on Programming
By “master plan,” I mean a specific kind of plan. I”m not suggesting we throw out plans or planning, just master planning. Master plans describe a specific color and numbering system and then instruct you to paint inside the lines. Master plans intend to control the future. Master plans provide specific answers to future questions that have not yet been asked””that may never be asked. A master plan does not allow for flexibility, uncertainty, or serendipity””ingredients of the “aha” moment.
A master plan is an adopted instrument of policy intended to control individual acts. Architect Christopher Alexander and his colleagues, in their landmark book The Oregon Experiment, describe the master plan of a city in this way: it is “intended to coordinate the many hundreds of otherwise independent acts of building.”1 It is an attempt to infuse an environment with a controlled system.
As such, a master plan is often a welcome friend.
With a master plan, the future seems safe, less messy, less chaotic. People settle in and obey the master plan, trusting that it will bring a future unburdened by anxieties and complexities. They are often disappointed.
Those developing the master plan freeze their hopes for the future in the plan. This is not a vicious act. Indeed, those developing the master plan are likely to see it as a generous act””the gift of passing on their team”s wisdom, spirit, and hope.
However, the plan was created in the present, which will soon become the past, and so the plan straitjackets those who will use it in the future. Master plans might work if we had the ability to foresee the future, but we do not. We barely know what we know today, let alone tomorrow.
A master plan “can create a totality, but not a whole. It can create totalitarian order, but not organic order,” write the authors of The Oregon Experiment.2 Master plans “are too rigid; they cannot easily adapt to the natural and unpredictable changes that inevitably arise in the life of a community.”3 Master plans and “totalitarian order” may be appropriate when it comes to manufacturing cars, refrigerators, and other inanimate objects. Vehicles produced by master plans are more economical, easier to maintain, and less expensive to repair than an exotic, hand-built one-off.
But developing something with life, such as community, requires the flexibility of organic order.
Living things yearn for wholeness, not for totality.
Organic Order: Community Based on Environment
Essentially, master plans are maps that mix things that already exist with things that “ought” to exist. Master plans use the language of “ought” and “should,” language that points to the future in a rigid, predetermined way. The problem is that “ought” and “should” are often interpreted to mean “must!” This future””the plan””must he protected and preserved.
Master plans embalm embryos; they are a form of cryogenics.
Organic order, on the other hand, does not use a language of “oughts” and “shoulds.” It presents a language of possibilities.
When people are planning a new initiative (at church, for example), they often start with the question “Where are we headed?” This question prompts a point-to-point totalitarian master plan of the future. The question “Where are we headed?” is always answered with some form of “There!”
From this question we develop a plan that is both too precise and not precise enough.4 It is too precise because it describes the future in specific detail, as a point or place. Our plan says, “This is what the future will look like, and this is where we will end up if we follow this plan.” At the same time, the plan is not precise enough because it cannot deliver the guidance necessary to answer questions as yet unasked, but which inevitably will arise.
When we plan, it is helpful to begin with a horizon in view instead of a specific point. This is a more organic concept of planning for the future. It is not very helpful to speak in terms of going from “here” to “there,” because we as living creatures need the freedom to end up somewhere else.
Besides, in my experience, there is hardly ever better than here.
“Begin with the end in mind,” we hear people say. This is totalitarian fantasy. How many times have you arrived at the place you planned to go only to find an uncertainty you did not expect?
Take Kip, for example. He is in every way a conspicuous success. Married to his high school sweetheart for 30 years, Kip retired at 55, and he and his wife have seen much of the world. Their two boys finished near the top of their classes at Ivy League schools; one is a physician and the other is a lawyer. Kip followed his plan””he made it.
And yet there he sat, in my office, bewildered and asking questions””big questions.
“What do you say to a man,” Kip asked, “who has everything he wants except the one thing he wants most.”
As we puzzled through his question, it became clear that Kip knew where he was going, but it never occurred to him that this “where” may not deliver the “what” he was looking for. Kip had found totality but not wholeness.
When planning a new initiative, I prefer to ask, “What are we hoping for?” Your answer to this question, whatever it might be, will serve as an organic guide. Most likely, the answer will allow enough flexibility to deal with future questions as they emerge and the guiding principles to answer those questions more effectively.
“Where are we headed?” is a destination-based question. “Where” necessitates that we respond with a place or point. “What are we hoping for?” is a journey-based question. “What” asks for an answer that will help with the journey””where-ever it may take us. “What” also helps us recognize the substance of the journey, not merely the direction or destination of the direction. We journey. We often have little control over precise direction. We do have some control over the substance of the journey.
In golf, when learning to putt well, you first concentrate on how fast and how far the ball travels (the journey) when you strike it with the putter. Direction and destination are secondary to getting a feel for the speed and distance of a putt. You have some control over how hard you hit the ball. You don”t have precise control over the ball”s direction or destination. There are too many variables: the grain of the grass, footprints from other players, minute clumps of sand, undetected undulation in the surface of the green, wind, and so on.
When you understand speed and distance, your understanding of direction and destination will follow. Even then, an excellent putt does not always go into the cup. Tiger Woods has commented many times that he was putting well, but “they just didn”t go in the hole.”
Our focus should be on the journey, not the destination. When planning for organic community, the question that will move us forward is “What are we hoping for?” not “Where are we headed?”
It is a search for wholeness, not for totalitarian order.
This is not a call for “come what may” leadership and ministry. There is a difference between being organic and seeking organic order. It is the difference between an infant”s response to her body”s need to release waste and her father”s need to do the same. If her father were to respond to this need in a strictly organic way, he too would need diapers. Thankfully he has developed an order for an organic process.
“Eliminating the [master] plan is not a call for chaos,” writes Christopher Alexander and his collaborators. “Rather it is an attempt to overcome the difficulties inherent in this way of ordering the environment: the impossibility of making accurate predictions about the future needs and resources, the ignorance of the more minute relationships between places [and people] which are not prescribed in the plan; the insensitivity of the plan to the ongoing needs of users; and the alienating quality of the plan as an administrative device.”5
It is not enough to simply become more organic. Seek organic order.
For example, I”m not asking you to dismantle your small-group program. I am asking you to rethink using small groups as the master plan for people”s lives. As I explain in The Search to Belong, I like small groups. I question, however, the manner in which they are promoted and structured. At their best, small groups supply an organic-ordered environment for some people in some seasons of their lives to grow their sense of healthy community and belonging. At their worst, small groups deliver a manufactured environment that is promoted for all people and for every season of life.
Alexander writes the following about architectural master plans, but the same is true for people: “The master plan seems to suggest that the buildings [people] which fill in the slots can have any shape at all. It does not specify the critical relationships which buildings [people] must have in common, to make them functioning members of the same family.”6
In my book The Search to Belong, I call for practitioners to make the shift from programmer (master planner) to environmentalist (one who follows the principles of organic order to create and shape environments). I have spoken with many who are intrigued by this call, but questions emerge: “What guidelines can you use as an environmentalist?” “How do you measure success?” This book, Organic Community, provides a framework for a mental and practical shift. It is intended for those who daringly make the move to environmentalist.
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1Christopher Alexander and others, The Oregon Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 5.
2Ibid., 10.
3Ibid., 18.
4Ibid., 23.
5Ibid., 27. The bracketed phrases are Myers”s and are meant to relate this quote about architecture and buildings to community and people. The same is true for the next quote.
6Ibid., 22, 23.
This article is excerpted, with permission, from Organic Community: Creating a Place Where People Naturally Connect, by Joseph R. Myers, published by Baker Books, a division of the Baker Publishing Group, ©2007 by Joseph R. Myers.
Joe Myers is an entrepreneur, speaker, writer, and owner of FrontPorch, a consulting firm that helps churches, businesses, and other organizations promote and develop community. Author of The Search to Belong, Myers is also a founding partner of the communications arts group settingPace, based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
RELATED ARTICLES:
CREATING ENVIRONMENTS, a review of Organic Community, written by Myron Williams, Southland Christian Church, Lexington, Kentucky.
DISCUSSING AND DISCOVERING COMMUNITY, a review of Organic Community, written by Jon Zabrocki, Parkview Christian Church, Orland Park, Illinois.
SEEING GOD’S WORK, a review of Organic Community, written by Bill Search, Southeast Christian Church, Louisville, Kentucky.
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