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Institutions are anxious, Movements are prepared to take risks.
The ministry I have worked with for 20 years, Fusion, has prided itself on being a Kingdom movement rather than an organisation. We would often talk about the danger of becoming like the YMCA, which started with a clear Christian ethos and evolved to simply be a community service organisation. I am loving reading David Bosch’s book “Transforming Mission: Paradigm shifts in mission theology”. In it he says: “There are essential differences between an institution and a movement, says H.R. Neibur (following Bergson): the one is conservative, the other progressive; the one is more or less passive, yielding to influences from outside, the other is active, influencing rather than being…
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Movements change the world, organisations run it.
One way at looking at the difference between an organisation and a movement is that movements change the world and organisations run it. Whenever we human beings want to get something done we organise. We have been doing it for thousands of years. At one point we got so good at it that we thought we would build a tower that reached to heaven but God intervened. For many years I thought that the story of the tower of Babel showed that God was a bit vindictive. The reason He gave for breaking up the party was that “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” Does he really…
