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Snyder is convinced that church structures either help or hinder the mission of the church. ("Structures, though purely functional, do reinforce values and worldview assumptions.") Churches may successfully carry out God's mission in spite of bad structures, but why not lay aside every weight to run with patience the race?

None of Snyder's DNA factors automatically yield better ways of structuring churches. That takes godly experimentation in community. Thus Snyder's coauthor Daniel Runyon strings a running narrative through Decoding the Church: a tale about "Heartland Church," its pastor, and key lay leaders. The storytelling is neither Salinger nor Steinbeck, but it effectively portrays the necessarily serpentine process of self-discovery. In these narratives, the pastor does not go to a megachurch conference and come back with a winning formula. Instead, the parties work their way through life crises while listening to Scripture. Ultimately, the people and their church are transformed.

Snyder lists three places not to look for helpful structures—megachurches, microchurches (house churches), and business models. He calls them "dead ends, or worse." Yet even at his most negative, Snyder is not a thundering Savanarola, but a Saint Paul showing a more excellent way. And he shows his balance by pointing to exceptions and possibilities. For example, Snyder says, large urban African American churches often do not share the typical problems of other large churches. And, Snyder admits, " 'dead' structures" have historically been "the incubators of fresh forms of renewal."

Snyder reserves his strongest antipathy for hierarchical thinking about the church. Hierarchy "seeped into biblical interpretation and ecclesiastical practice and overwhelmed the more radical, subversive New Testament teaching," he writes. Snyder makes Aquinas the heavy, citing Colin Gunton: "Aquinas implies … that the hierarchy of the church—[consisting of] an ontological grading of persons—is modeled on that of heaven." Then he calls hierarchy "an instrument of oppression," which supported "social inequality and privileged interest." The Bible, he says, "gives many examples of hierarchy, but it never teaches that hierarchy is normative for society or church."

Before readers can reach for their Bibles to prooftext him into a corner, Snyder makes several defensive moves. First, he defines hierarchy narrowly in ontological terms (hierarchy implies inherent degrees of value and perfection). Second, he distinguishes such hierarchies of being from the functional and relational authority proper to family, church, and other social groupings. Parents' authority over their children is a matter of responsible loving, not of higher value. Third, in discussing the medieval concept of the Great Chain of Being (an "inadequate principle of coherence"), he allows that it is "attractive," primarily for its "instinct of connectedness" and because it guards the truth of "ordered relatedness."

For Snyder, "ordered relatedness" finds better expression in ecological thinking, in seeing the natural world, the church, the family, and society as interdependent systems of complex organisms. The philosophical intuition that follows on the empirical observation of such systems is: "Everything is significant simply because it connects with everything else— even if we don't yet understand the connection."

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November (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46