by David Dixon
Eastern PA District Team
Every living organism needs the right ecosystem to thrive. Every church has an ecosystem. What does that ecosystem produce?
An ecosystem is not just the structures or environments, it’s the way that the living organisms interact with one another in the structures or environments around them that contribute to life. (Sir Arthur Tansley, later refined by Manuel Molles, defined an ecosystem as “a community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment, interacting as a system in a particular area.”)
For example, it’s not just that plants need carbon dioxides, sunlight, and rain to grow, it’s also that other living organisms, like humans, are needed as a part of the process to convert oxygen into carbon dioxide in order for plants to grow.
This example is an oversimplification of an ecosystem, but it demonstrates that there are living (human/plants) and physical, or structural, aspects (sun/soil/rain) of an ecosystem.
In each and every church, there is an ecosystem that is made up of living and structural aspects as well. The living aspect of an ecosystem is made up of the various ways that we interact with God and with others. Examples could include how people pursue knowing Jesus together, treat one another, talk to each other about the Gospel, interact with new people, care for the people they live near, or how they pray for one another.
The structural aspects of the ecosystem include the elements that are intentional or systematic. They are the things that we think through to formulate the environment. Examples of this can include how we train people to pursue God through the Bible and prayer, how we develop people to lead others and follow Jesus, the way that we organize our people for discipleship, what we call people to give their time and energy to, what we include in a larger gathering or what we do not, or how we define missions.
In a healthy ecosystem, the living organisms are healthy because they interact in a proper way within the right environmental structure. The same is true in the church: the people are healthy when they interact with Jesus and others in a proper way within the right environment.
You need both healthy people AND the right environment. You can have unhealthy people and a right environment, and they will take from the environment instead of contributing to it. Or you could have healthy people and the wrong environment, and often those people will either leave or become unhealthy because there is no life around them. In our churches it can be easy to put more emphasis on one or the other or even to blame people for a bad structure or vice versa.
In your church, what is the ecosystem like? What are the living and structural components like? How do they interact together? Does the ecosystem of your church produce life, death, or some stagnant in-between?
The good news is that no matter what your ecosystem is like, Jesus is ready, willing, and able to continue his transforming work in your church. It would be a good exercise to look at some of the different living and structural aspects of your church’s ecosystem and ask, “What does Jesus think, feel, or have to say about this?”
If you look at your church and you see that grumbling and complaining is a big part of how your people interact with one another, the Scriptures show us that Jesus has some particular feelings about that (James 5:9, Ephesians 4:29) So perhaps in order to help to shift the ecosystem, a set of personal conversations with key leaders, a specific sermon series, or call to repentance in this area might be in order.
When it comes to the structures, you can do the same. Think about discipleship: how we show others how to follow Jesus, be changed by Jesus, and be committed to the mission of Jesus (Matt. 4:19). In the discipleship structures of our churches, have we gone back and looked at how Jesus made disciples? Jesus was clearly about making disciples that made disciples and not more followers. This means that if we look at the structures of our church and we are not regularly, or at least with some consistency, producing disciples who are able to make more disciples, then we need to change our environment (perhaps in a significant way) so that people are getting what they need to be a disciple maker.
It’s time for each of us to take a hard look at the ecosystem of our church and ask, “What is my church producing?” If you find the answer is less than what you would like it to be, please don’t be too discouraged. The answer to creating a healthy ecosystem was never meant to be squarely on your shoulders. Instead as a leader or member of a local church, we must all look to Jesus as the Creator, Author, and Head of our church to work through our leadership and participation to craft the ecosystem of our church to be all that He designed it to become.
For more about building a healthy church ecosystem, be sure to check out the Essentials podcast. In our episodes about a Gospel saturated community, we discuss more about what a healthy ecosystem can look like.