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Here’s An Interesting NEW Way To Think About The Church
“Bounded Set” Church vs “Centred Set” Church
In this post, I want to discuss a model which I find helpful — one which I came across quite a few years ago when I took a sabbatical and spent much of those three months exploring new models of what it means to “be church” for our world today.
Introducing “Bounded Set” and “Centred Set”
What? Well, this idea originates in Mathematics.
No — don’t “switch off”. I’ll explain it as simply as I can…
Consider a bounded set such as “All whole numbers fewer than ten.”
Deciding whether ANY number is part of that bounded set is easy.
Seven is part of that set. And so is four.
But fourteen is not — and never can be — part of a set defined as “Whole numbers less than ten.”
Still with me? OK, let’s switch to the centred set. In this set, we define numbers by their relationship to a fixed point.
Let’s say that our fixed point is 100.
Every other number can then be defined by its relationship to 100.
So, 95 is minus 5, 117 is plus 17 and 25358 is +25258.
Some numbers will be close to the centre — like 99 and 102 — and others will be more distant, like -6 or 1.2 million. But ALL numbers are related to the centre, and none are defined outside some artificial border.
We can apply this thinking to churches.
The first book to propose this was Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues by Paul Hiebert (1994). It became more prominent in the brilliant book The Shaping of Things to Come (2001) by Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost.
Frost and Hirsch discuss centred and bounded sets with an analogy of fences and wells.
Imagine you are a farmer with a large ranch. You can build a fence to keep your cattle inside and other animals out. This would be a…
