Notes from Vox: From Boundaries to the Center

Embracing Centered Churches for Authentic Faith (Unified Series)

Mike Erre / Tim Stafford Link to the Episode

This is a second episode in the centered set churches series.

Mike and Tim talk more about the differences between centered set churches and bounded set churches.

Moral superiority of bounded set churches is a feature, not a bug. Likewise, bounded set churches often make enemies of excluded people. Something particularly damning was that bounded set churches condemn other churches, I’ve been in churches where that happens and agreed with them.

In a bounded church unity and conformity are synonymous. You can’t be authentic in a bounded set group about the lines. Lines are what allow you to feel superior to others on the outside of the group.

An important point about bounded versus fuzzy is that they are both focused on the lines AND fuzzy tends to gravitate towards bounded. Bounded does not mean conservative, you can have progressive bounded sets and conservative.

He told a story about how in certain para-church organizations that it didn’t really matter if you actually believed or behaved in a certain way, but you had to sign that you did. It was sometimes an open secret that people didn’t actually live up to the papers they were publicly signing.

In centered set churches, instead of using doctrine to decide whether people are in or out it is used to define what is in the center, what everyone is aiming at.

I’m struggling with these concepts, about how to apply them to real life, to my church. Especially when I’ve been so damaged by someone who decided where a line was and was abusive in his defense of it.

My wife and I talked about a difficult experience with someone in our church and they were very harsh, unkind, and misogynistic in a small group and no one stood up to him. This went on for months. At some point she and I had enough and we did (I don’t remember who first spoke out). He got really loud and angry and it was a horrible experience. We left that night, she crying and left that small group and didn’t rejoin any small group until almost 2 years later. I didn’t realize until tonight, but there was still so much pain in that.

Church only on Sunday mornings is an easy thing to feel very distant from.

Continuing to be in community with him was not something we were willing to do. And it hurt that he continued to to go to that small group, even though he was the one who caused the pain. We tried to meet together, but he didn’t see he had done anything wrong. He’s effectively in hospice now. This is the difficulty I have, “how do I love people who are assholes like me?”

My problems are palatable to me, but theirs aren’t.