“..What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth..” 1Cor3v5-6
❓ What indeed? And what is Phil? The question is, in part, rhetorical, and the punchline is that both Paul and Apollos are secondary compared to God who gives the growth. But. There is also a non-trivial difference between Paul and Apollos. It is necessary to say God’s growth is primary, but it is not sufficient.
✂️ The ambition here is to address division in the church. Division emerges easily out of diversity, and the problem of the one-and-the-many and the limited means we have for coordinating variety and of calibrating the utility of other others. So 1Cor12 at length - many different gifts, one body - and so all parts should be validated and affirmed, and swept into the mysterious whole that is the mission of diverse church.
🍃🍂 In season. Here, however, we see different gifts, one body, different seasons. There is a chronology to the life of a believer and there are stages of development in the life of a believing community. Different seasons lend themselves differently to the leadership of differently gifted leaders. In the variation of seasons there is a danger of total breakdown as a former rubric for unity becomes obsolete.
🍂🍃 Seasonal change. The inevitability of change over time (change in the shape, number, purpose or circumstances of a group) demands an adaptive capacity in the community’s framework for how it incorporates diverse giftings. To adapt, a community needs a self-awareness and a context-awareness which is attuned of the spirit of a moment, so that it can call on relevant, timely, specific gifts of certain leaders suited to manage the risks and exploit the opportunities of that season.
👨🎨👨⚕️🤴 See also Prophets, Priests and Kings as modes of leading in seasons.
Paul. I speculate, was their first love - full of erotic novelty. Out-of-nowhere, Paul brought the unprecedented and revolutionary message that changed everything. So in that first flush of excitement and adrenaline, everything that now is was catalysed. Paul had the world-facing apostolic contentious contending charisma to deftly dialogue. I pine to regress to that shock of the new and that thrill of the unknown, the grass was greener back in that nascent emergent stage full of experimental promise and expedient make-shift pop-up church. We had enough. We were a band of brothers. We must get back to Paul’s early church, the primordial simplicity of authentic small church.
Apollos. I can imagine he faces the difficulty of succession planning following Paul, the danger of comparative praise, the need for long-term steady state and commensurate systems. Apollos serves up non-reductive solid food to a church that has now had some time to grapple with Christianity 101 and needs now real meat to address complex issues and to synthesise divergence on solutions. Apollos carries the baggage of a community’s past injury, growing pains, schismatic hangovers, inertia and boredom. Apollos, equally, is placed to achieve new and civically ambitious modes of churching that were impossible for the fledgling gaggle. Apollos has been given much so much is expected.
🥀 Biology metaphors. Just as the antidote to church division over gifts is found in body-metaphors, so too here, the metaphors consider biological growth stages. So, consider the birds, consider the lilies. Not just as the image or ideal of a thing. Consider them and the way they are sustained over time. Consider the way the garb themselves, and the process of the unfolding emergence. The morphogenesis of a lily, the budding shoot of a seed. In stages.
💦 Watering What is watering? Much is made of church-planters, with their accompanying training schools and literature and networks and recruitment and slogans.. What of the church waterers? What even is this water? See God brings the actual growth, but there is a watering. Drawn from a source and piped to the soil, neither over- nor under-watering..
🌱 Which season am I in - seeding or watering?
👨🌾 What sort of leadership suits that season?
🥇 How to do that well?
♾️ Ecocyle It occurs to me that the liberating structure Ecocycle forces the question well, and for a church, to consider what it is, and what manner of leadership is needed on a given project or endeavour by a church.