Through years of discussions about organic church and viral church we find ourselves wanting something that is living and dynamic and believe that this is, at its core, the very nature of church. Yet we continue to throw up obstacles to this very thing: As Roland Allen says in “The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church:”
But if we, toiling under the burden of our organizations, sigh for that spontaneous freedom of expanding life, it is because we see in it something divine, something in its very nature profoundly efficient, something which we would gladly recover, something which the elaboration of our modern machinery obscures and deadens and kills.
We don’t like facing that, in missions and church life (even missional communities as expressions of church life), we continue to function in a way that shows we do not fully believe in the living power of God’s church. We continue to plan and control as our primary modus operandi for the spread of the Gospel rather than facilitate the life that is in the seed.
Allen goes on to say: “but the moment that we think of churches in the apostolic sense of the word, we see at once that the spontaneous activity of the individual members of such churches might very speedily result in the multiplication of churches all over the country.”