Notes from Vox: Moving Beyond Line Drawing

Embracing Centered-Set Church Dynamics (Unified Series)

Mike Erre / Tim Stafford Link to the Episode

This episode sets up Centered Set Churches, which is a book by Mark Baker. This isn’t even close to in order of the podcast, it’s from 6 years later or something, but I started reading that book and found it confusing. Having someone talk about it (there are 5 episodes in this series) I thought would help me understand.

The definitions that Mike and Tim set up are important to understand. Something he doens’t say explicitly, but that helped me is that this conversation about bounded, fuzzy, and centered is about communities.

Bounded sets - clear boundaries of who is in/out, provides clarity, security, and superiority. Boundaries, used in this way turn unity into uniformity, but bounded isn’t the same as boundaries, and further bounded is not always wrong or hurting, but is when applied to church.

Fuzzy sets - these communities exist in reaction to bounded sets is to have a non-defined group, they try to erase all lines. Think of the opposite of a pharisee

This is the most important thing to note: both fuzzy and bounded are on the line continuum and line focused.

Centered sets - inclusion in the group is based on the individual’s relationship to the center and relationship to others who are oriented towards the center. If you are invited to soccer and show up and impede the others in the group from playing soccer, the group will draw a line. The only “line” is that you’re trying to do the thing that everyone else is doing.

There is clarity, we are playing soccer.

But there isn’t security (you don’t know who else is going to show up and you don’t know how good they will be).

And there isn’t superiority because the invitation is for everyone, you didn’t earn your right to be there.

To apply this to a centered set Christian church, if you show up and don’t agree that Jesus is God, you can still be there. Ideally, you’d be accepted and encouraged to find out who the Jesus is that this church is preaching, you’re still invited and can be (and should be) welcomed, a part of the community, loved by folks there, but if you attempt to preach a different gospel (play rugby) there may be a line drawn.

The first thing that came up when I searched for centered set theology was a conservative Christian’s criticism to it. The problem with the criticism is that they were criticizing something other than what Mark Baker’s was saying, they weren’t criticizing centered set churches. Mark Baker is not talking about who is in / out of salvation, but who is in/out of your church.

I don’t know how Mark would talk about how close you have to be to the center in order to be saved but my guess is he would leave that up to Jesus. How much did the thief on the cross understand? He probably wasn’t baptized. I’m guessing he didn’t take communion.

I didn’t have this complete of an understanding from reading the book so far. I’m hoping that as I continue both listening to Mike and Tim talk about it as well as read the actual book, I’ll be able to apply this kind of thinking to my life, in order to love people well.