I once read someone who claimed that St. Paul's was the most brilliant mind in the ancient world. So while we traditionalists read him to say that everything should be done decently and in order, there are some really hip dudes who've picked up on Paul's grasp of chaos theory.

Yah, really! Chaos theory and ecclesiology.

Go put on a clean tie-dyed t-shirt, hop in the Volkswagen bus and rattle over to the merry pranksters for some groovy thoughts on Anosov diffeomorphisms, strange attractors and church.

The evidence is in favor of leadership as an organic and communal enterprise. In a recent paper, Richard Ascough notes that Paul avoided hierarchical, externally imposed models of leadership in favor of promoting self-organizing, self-governing, adaptive groups. He comments that, "Paul's leadership style could thus be characterized as involving what modern scientists call ‘chaos theory.'" Chaos theory is a biological model that sees an organization as a living, self-organizing web of relationships.

Recently the buzzword has been teamwork. Unfortunately, we tend to understand teams in a secular corporate sense: a team is a group of people coordinated by a competent manager. Larry Crabb argues that we have a choice to make: we can be managers or mystics.

Furthermore, a team is not the same as a community. When five-fold gifting is functioning in a community environment, it can be very difficult to tell who is leading. Leaders may be invisible, encouraging, empowering, and equipping as they work alongside others sharing similar tasks.

This must come as good news to someone still wandering around Woodstock.