First I described the mission in terms of being an open or closed system - which really should be a continuum rather than an either/or proposition. Then I used molecular cell function as a descriptive comparison to how I saw the mission functioning. In like manner, I'll consider open/closed system and try to find a comparative illustration that might be close to what I think might be a biblical system.
OPEN/CLOSED SYSTEM
I said that I thought the Vienna mission was an open system that wanted to be a closed one but had to maintain external ties that mandated at least a certain amount of openness. To set the stage for biblical church functioning, I'll start by quoting what I think are relevant Scriptural verses.
"But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God." (II Corinthians 4:2)
"Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed." (John 3:20)
14"You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; 15 nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house." (Matt. 5:14-15)
(Cp. John 3:20: Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.)
"Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed." (John 3:20)
14"You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; 15 nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house." (Matt. 5:14-15)
(Cp. John 3:20: Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.)
Based on these and other similar verses I think the Bible says the Church (and individual believers) should be transparent. But that's not exactly the same as "open", although that's enough right there to create doubt as to the biblical soundness of the Vienna mission's way of operating. Without quoting all the verses here, I'll just say that the church is to receive all new and weak believers and love fellow believers (Rom. 14:1, Room. 15: 7; Rom. 12:10). It also says that sometimes it is necessary to discipline recalcitrant believers by expelling him/her and not socializing with him/her (II Thess. 3:6, Matt. 18:15-17), but the church should accept him/her back if he/she repents of his/her waywardness (II Cor. 2:4-11). Furthermore, believers shouldn't be unequally yoked together with unbelievers (II Cor. 6:14).
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Okay, mom just called and I had a long conversation with her and it's getting late so I'll finish this in the morning (I was going to do the text discussion in the morning anyway). But before I leave off I just want to mention that the reason I'm bringing in all these issues in the "open/closed" aspect of churches as systems, is that these are all things that might affect where and how a church might be open or closed. I don't expect to have the definitive word on this subject, but I should provide a good starting point, anyway.
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I woke up feeling really tired and like I have a cold (again, despite taking 8,000 mg of vitamin c a day), but I'll try to pull my thoughts together well enough to finish this post. Hopefully the first 2,000 mg. of vitamin C will kick in soon.
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The issues and verses presented above should give us a fairly decent basis to help construct a biblical view of the openness / closedness of churches as systems.
First of all, there is the issue of standing before God and actions of the Church. The relationship of the church should mirror God's relationship to the individual, but it doesn't always because the church is made up of people affected by still living in the flesh and in a fallen world and they tend to give in to sin from time to time. Also, Christians may not always discern correctly who fits what criteria. So while I'm going to construct a "should be" model, I do so with the understanding that how close any given local church mirrors that model will vary.
The church is made up of born-again believers and so there is a clear demarcation as to who is "in" the system and who is "outside" of it. Nevertheless, moving into the system should be easy, in the sense that those inside the system should make every effort to bring in new members, both in crossing the external boundary of the system and also in helping the new member grow and become a fruitful member and part of the functioning Body. This said, the body should be discerning in accepting new members into its midst to avoid taking in new members that aren't really born again, or who might even be wolves in sheep's clothing. However, there is also the possibility of leaving the system by way of church discipline, but this should always be handled in such a way as to try to bring the erring one back into the fold.
So basically, the system should be transparent and fairly open, but firm in its relationship with erring insiders and discerning with those it accepts as new believers. And it also should not maintain (co-)dependent relationships with outsiders. The boundaries of such a system would be clearly demarcated, but passable as long as the appropriate criteria have been met (e.g., efficacious saving faith, but not a believer not living in sin).
How does this compare to the Vienna mission? Again, the Vienna mission was not a church per se, but the Bible doesn't really talk about mission agencies, so that's the best comparison I can make. And maybe the Bible would even consider the Vienna mission a church, for all I know. In any case, I think there is too much difference between these two systems to be acceptable from a biblical standpoint.
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The other systems issue I dealt with was that of a metaphor. The Bible does provide some metaphors for the Church, such as the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ, etc. But I think the most apt one vis a vis the Church and its relationship to the world, is that of a flock.
As a flock, one is either a member or not a member, but it is possible to enter and leave the flock under certain circumstances (e.g., the shepherd buys a new sheep / a new member is "redeemed"), and it is likewise to punish an errant member if needed, with the intention of correcting and reinstating said member. Also, the flock does not have a lot of hidden secrets, and nor is it hidden away in a cave or the like, but roams in search of good pastureland and water under the tutelage of the caring and watchful shepherd, who also serves the flock's protector.
Does this sound like the Vienna mission? Just saying...
Inevitably, of course, sympathetic (to the mission) readers will immediately conjure up a million excuses as to why the mission shouldn't be like these two systems I've described using biblical descriptors. I trust such readers, however, will also be able to produce adequate biblical grounding as to why the mission should have been different from what I've described here.
Major differences between the flock and the cell analogies include the stance toward new-comers and the stance towards those who might be made to leave. The flock analogy is more welcoming and only secondarily (I think) wary of potential false entrants, and in the flock analogy it is hoped that errant members will return to the flock. In the cell image, noew-comers, in contrast, are seen as potential "foreign substances" and are permanently spewed out if found to be such.
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The next section in this book chapter is titled "How the Self Gets into Action," and sub-titled "Routine Self-Verification".
In this section the author discusses how people usually spend most of their time with people they know and after describing a typical day of a cashier has this to say:
"What is striking about the cashier's activities is that all of them are structured around a rather small number of people, people who are more than likely ready and willing to recognize and legitimize her self-conceptions. This means that the bulk of the reactions she receives every day will, in a sense, be preprogrammed. Consequently, she will rarely need to demonstrate that she is knowledgeable, conscientious, and hates being patronized simply because most of her interaction partners are well aware of this." (p. 47).
Of course, when I arrived in Vienna I didn't have any of these kinds or relationship because I didn't know any of these people before, other than very cursory information about a few people, such as my new boss. But they didn't know me either, although I think they would have known more about me as an individual than I would have known about each of them as individuals, just because they would have had access to the various application-related information about me if nothing else.
And the mission accepted me to fill a certain need they had and then they had also, evidently, pre-constructed a lot of my life in their employ (how I should live, who I should hobnob with, etc.) prior to my arrival based on their need and on their pre-existing knowledge of me.
So here I was not knowing them (and soon coming to the shocking realization that I knew much less about them than I had thought) and them having an errant knowledge of me which served (in part at least) as a basis for their plans for me, which (the plans) involved more than just the job itself, and was apparently more or less a mandatory part of my relationship with them. If this isn't a recipe for failure, than I don't know what is.
In this way, it should be noted, I didn't have only to deal with my having a greatly distorted prior understanding of the mission but also with them having a distorted view of me as well. In this case, I'm not sure how realistically possible it would be to extricate these two issues from each other. For example, how could I know if a certain poorly understood (by me) action on their part was (mostly) because they just didn't know me correctly or (mostly) because of who they were, which is different than I had thought? The action might have been a result of their being surprised at my being different than they expected, but the action itself might only have been possible because of who they are. So if they had been different than they ended out being, they might have acted otherwise, even if they didn't understand me. In this way it gets all tangled up.
Ultimately, though, I think we were supposed to develop, more or less, a relationship like this made up cashier had in her daily interactions mostly with people she knew well. But in the Vienna mission context this, I think, would ideally need to be reached rather quickly - in a crash course kind of way, largely because of the security concerns. The longer the individual and mission didn't have this kind of relationship, the more difficult it would be to manage that person.
Also, if this is to be looked at as a two-way relationship, I'm not sure how important the mission viewed the individual understanding the mission. It was clearly important that the individual fit in and submit, but understanding might not have been so critical. In fact, understanding might have even been risky in some ways, and submission should be more or less unquestioning anyway, which would virtually abrogate all the thinking to the leadership of the mission. I think, certainly early on, the mission leadership didn't realize that I was such a thinker along these lines.
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The next sub-section is titled "Crisis Self-Verification."
"Another factor that will determine whether or not discrepant feedback initiates crisis self-verification is the potency of the feedback. Research concerned with issues other than self-verification has suggested that discrepant feedback will be potent to the extent that it is:
1. Delivered by a source who is competent and has a firm basis from which to make a judgment...
2. Sufficiently at odds with the individual's self-conception that it is perceived as self-discrepanct, yet not so farfetched that it is dismissed as ridiculous or absurd...
3. Relevant to an important, well-articulated dimension of the self-concept...
4. Directly related to the self-conception...
5. Delivered by a large rather than small number of people..." (p. 49)
In as much as the mission leadership had a different view of me (and it made sure everyone at the mission pretty much shared their view of me), it seems that I might have been a likely candidate for a "crisis self-verification." Instead, however, I think I experienced more of a "crisis mission-verification." That is, my self-concept remained pretty well the same throughout my time with the mission, but my view of the mission and by extension all (Evangelical) East European missions (after all there were 15 missions working together in Vienna, so the extension to other missions seems reasonable) underwent a major overhaul, and not for the good, either. That being said, my self esteem crashed towards the end of my stay with them and I spent a good chunk of the year after my departure picking myself off the floor, so to speak. But my values that made it impossible for me to concede to the mission have never changed to this day, in case you haven't noticed.
Next I'd like to deal with each of the 5 variables that might affect how one responds to feedback that is divergent from how one sees oneself.
1. In as much as the Vienna mission leaders could not have known me very well I didn't see them as competent nor "having a firm basis from which to make a judgment." Conceivably they could have been viewed as having sufficient understanding of character, by way of theological and psychological background, but that was mitigated in what I saw as their manipulative and self-interested actions towards me.
2. Their view did appear to be quite at odds with how I viewed myself, and I think towards the end of my time with them when they basically wore me down with 2 years of almost incessant efforts to manage me (in one way or another) I did begin to take on what I perceived to be their view of me (which may not have been their actual view of me, or only partially correct).
3. I suppose the mission's view of me could be thought of as relevant in as much as it affected my career, but I think I dismissed this as being based on inadequate or incorrect information about me. Also, I wasn't willing to limit myself to what I saw as a major curtailing of my gifts, abilities and interests. Early on I thought they would eventually realize this, and they might have to a certain extent (e.g, providing ministry trip opportunities), but that wasn't enough (in their view) to make up for the fact that I still would not submit to their ways of doing things, which was the most important thing of all there (or so it seemed to me at least).
4. It seemed to me that their view to me was so far off that it wasn't very directly related to how I viewed myself. Perhaps if it hadn't been so far off the mark I could have experienced more of a crisis of self-verification earlier on. But I think I got diverted from this issue, anyway, by trying to make sense of who they were (rather than who they thought I was). In this way, I suppose you could consider us to have been like 2 monkeys in the zoo ogling each other, trying to figure the other out.
5. At first everyone was just very friendly and welcoming, but when that started to subside and I was more around the people who I'd be working most closely with and my reference group (the secretaries), it did seem like there was a shared image of who I was and it was shared by everyone. So this criteria would have fit my situation, except that I didn't think these people knew me well enough to have a strong basis for their understanding, so I was able to dismiss it that way. Plus, I knew that other people in my life who knew me better saw me differently than the mission seemed to.
So, basically, I could have had a crisis of self-verification upon arriving in Vienna, except that 1) I didn't think they knew me well enough and other people who knew me better saw me otherwise, and 2) I was distracted from self-verification issues by my not understanding the mission and trying to make sense of them.
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That's all for this post. Have a nice day. I put in a call to get my new physical therapy set up, and hopefully they'll call me back later today.
