Defragging the Church

If you have a laptop or desk model personal computer, it has a hard drive. That’s the place where what you save is stored and where the information that makes your programs run is stored.

If you save a picture, or a music file, or a letter or other document, the hard drive spins through its list of unused space, and records the thousands or billions of bits of your information in a stream of coded marks. When you erase or delete a file, the hard drive marks an appropriate number of bits of space as blank.

Very importantly: if you then save another file, the hard drive fills in the space left open when you deleted something earlier. If the new file is smaller than the space, the hard drive makes a note of how much of the space is still blank. If the new file is larger than the space, the drive will fill the space, then move to the next blank space or spaces it finds to store the rest of the file. If this happens, the saved file is now fragmented.

The more your data becomes fragmented by saving / deleting / saving data, the slower your hard drive is in working with those files. You can “defrag” the drive, reading all of the fragmented files and then rewriting them in complete blocks. I think that the Head of the Church is going to do some of that in His Church.

I believe that He is aligning people regarding their ministry relationships, and that those relationships are what He understands to be the shape and system interaction of His Body. As people begin to develop the work relationships, they will realize that they don’t have much life without the work relationships being family relationships. The development of relationships that are family / work / purpose / mission will realign the identity of the Church into Ekklesia – groups that work together with purpose, rather than continuing to be wrestling with other congregations for resources, and chaining sheep to their barns.

The Ekklesia will be glorious. The world will know we are His by the way we love each other. We will be built up to the full measure of the stature of Christ by what every joint supplies.

I hate to wait!