We always felt like we stumbled upon something special together, especially when more people were interested in what we were doing and started to join us. But we were a group of reluctant leaders. None of us wanted the responsibility or could handle the power that came with real leadership. We only knew poor examples by experience and didn’t care to repeat those mistakes — especially in our new context. We had crossed paths with too many people who used their power for ill purposes despite their best intentions.

Fortunately for our future development, our slow and painful crawl into leadership helped us avoid the hierarchical and impersonal institutions we came from and established a new form of decentralized leadership we came to know as stewardship.

But before stewardship took root, a shift developed that would take us from thinking as a mechanical organization to a leaderless organism.

As a leaderless organism, each individual member takes ownership and responsibility for their role within the health of the whole living body.

For almost all living things, there seemed to be this same basic pattern. How does a flock of birds move? How does a herd of buffalo decide where to go? Or a school of fish? Or the cells in our body? How do living things move, collaborate and make decisions?

It turns out, they do it together.

Taking birds, for example, we discover there is no leader. Each member of the flock votes with each flap of its wings. As soon as the majority of birds are going one direction, all the other birds follow. This continues on for every movement, often looking like a choreographed dance — the group becomes a living organism which all others are a part. The same is true for almost any herd of animals (wolves, deer, geese, etc.). The power to move the group doesn’t come from leaders or alphas, instead, it comes from everybody else.

Community decisions are made collectively by every individual within the pack itself.

This was an extremely helpful discovery as it cleared up a lot of confusion when we tried to answer the question who are we? We often talked about this “we” as if it were a third person in the room and didn’t reflect the actual people in the room. It was strange to hear someone talk about our group and not have the we they were talking about feel like it included your experience of the group. The “we” we were most often talking about was just our own projections of what we thought the group should be, or our feelings of disappointment that the group didn’t meet, or who we sincerely wanted ourselves to be but didn’t really embody yet. The bottom line, we were playing pretend and it wasn’t helping us move forward.

Talking with “we” language allowed us to hide behind the group without fully immersing in the idea the group is you, you, you, you and me.

So we stoped talking about “us” and “we” and started talking more honestly about our individual perspectives. It allowed us more freedom to raise our voice, make our vote, to flap our wings without fear of it being out of step with the group. More individuals would chime in with a thoughtful and honest response and the group would move.

We cannot hide here, we can only participate.

• The use of “we” language can often distort our understanding of our community if it doesn’t actually apply to all of us.  Our group is made of specific individuals with specific viewpoints and it has become extremely helpful the more we speak from that perspective.

• In other words, our group does not exist as a third and separate person.  Our group is made up of individuals who have (or don’t have) real engaging individual relationships with one another.  It’s the quality of those relationships that define the health of our body together. We’ve understanding this for quite awhile before it become reflective in our language together.  It’s my belief that the more specific we are about our individual relationships with one another, the more realistic we will be in understanding our group as a whole. As Henri Nouwen points out, “The most personal is the most universal.”

From then on, we knew without a doubt we are greater than the sum of our parts. We were becoming a living body we each had a very little control over but an active and profound influence in shaping it and the direction we go. This taught us everyone belongs, we are all in this together, and we are completely interdependent upon one another.

This was a foundational stage of our development that allowed us to mature and grow into our current circle of rotating elders. But before we go there, the next chapter was learning the ebb and flow of our wonderful dance together.

The Archive

We are a group of families striving to live an authentic faith free from artificial social constructs. We do not go to church, rather, we are the church. For 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, we struggle with and how to grow in this reality. We are Liquid.