Structuring meetings in an anarchist church

So yesterday at home we were talking about the practical organisation of meetings in an anarchist church. If it's all a circle and belongs to everyone, how would anything actually get done?

This is what I imagine.

In any given act of worship, I envisage the inclusion of the following elements:

1. Prayer — adorational, intercessory, petitionary and prayer of thanksgiving and response.
2. Ministry of the Word — reading and exposition of the Scriptures, and teaching of the faith.
3. Music — hymns and songs, sometimes instrumental music to listen to, maybe music and dance.
4. Ministry — the exercise of gifts of the Spirit in healing, words of knowledge and wisdom, prophecy, tongues and interpretation.
5. Participation — discussion, open prayer, creative activity of various kinds (eg making things, action songs, dance, performed music, enacted prayers and dramatisation of scripture)

How I imagine an anarchist church coming about is a seed initiative by a small motivated group of mature Christians, gradually establishing and accumulating further members who integrate with and add to the existing group so that the whole enlarges organically (rather than being manufactured/planted/set up).

I imagine such a congregation would begin with, say, half a dozen like-minded souls through whom a pattern of worship and organisation would emerge by exploration, discussion, experimentation, listening and prayer. 

Perhaps it would then grow to a group of about twenty or thirty members. At that point, it would become unwieldy for everyone to discuss everything. So then the organisation of worship could be done through a rota of sub-groups. All the people would be allocated to a group — if there were twenty members in all, perhaps a rota of four groups containing five people, responsible for  preparing the acts of worship. They would be populated according to different gifting — e.g., a musician in each group, someone with scriptural knowledge or teaching ability in each group, and a mix of more and less mature Christians.

The sub-group with responsibility for worship would get everything needful ready; and also receive the participatory elements, sifting and ordering them appropriately.

In the 1980s, when I belonged to an inter-church group call the Ashburnham Stable Family, it was the responsibility of every person belonging to the meeting to listen carefully to the Spirit to discern what their participation would be in each passing week. Some choreographed a dance. Some composed a piece of music. Some believed they heard from the Lord in wisdom, or prophecy, or a direction to speak in tongues, or to announce healing. All these people would let those responsible for the meeting know, in advance, so their contribution could be integrated into an act of worship that flowed well and fitted the time frame.

Now, suppose one week you had five people who had all written a new hymn. That might be too much for one act of worship, so the sub-group on the rota would chose perhaps two of the proposed hymns — ones that well-fitted the theme or mood, or just the first two suggested — then pass the rest on to the next week's organisers for consideration. 

And suppose you had Susan with yet another vision of a rainbow, you could include it because what's the harm? But suppose you had Tracey with a word from the Lord to buy sub-automatic weapons and mow down the children of the infidel, the organising group for the week would sift that out as inadmissible before it got to the meeting.

Thus the elements of the meeting would be structured into a flow, and participation would be both encouraged and monitored. The scriptural focus could be agreed by the whole group ("Let's study Romans/Micah over the next six weeks") or follow the circle of the church year. The organisers for the week would be responsible for seeing that all the agreed elements for an act of worship were included, either through participatory contribution, or by being put there by the organisers themselves. If the group as a whole had only one musician, or only one gifted teacher, then that person would be primed by the organisers, as well as listening to the Spirit him/herself.

Every so often — perhaps annually — the groups could be re-mixed to create teams with a different combination of skills and a different dynamic of personalities. This would decrease the likelihood of factions developing, and allow new combinations to allow new and sometimes surprising aspects of creativity and insight to emerge.

That's how I imagine it working.

One of us raised the question, what would happen about the Lord's Supper. Well, I think there's a lot to be said for having a familiar rhythm to at least some aspects of worship, so I think a few patterns could be worked out to become favourites. Not too wordy and heavy, because this would be an all-age group. Responsibility for preparation and for presidency would rest with whichever organising sub-group had their turn on the rota. It's not very difficult to celebrate the Lord's Supper without an institutionally accredited person; we have a good precedent after all, in the first time it ever happened.