Customer Reviews

Organic Community: Creating a Place Where People Naturally Connect (mersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

While I was intrigued by what Myers wrote in his first book (The Search to Belong) I had some bones to pick with him about assumptions he made about small group-based churches and how people relate to one another in those churches.

However, Myers really hits the nail on the head in this second book and I can see he's grown as a writer.

His comments on why people get involved in a church and small group are fascinating and insightful. While I would have liked to see more sources sited for his comments in this area, I believe he's dead-on with what he wrote.

I did not give the book five stars for one simple reason. In a some chapters, he gives excellent practical application for the chapter's content. However, in other chapters, he provides nothing and for that reason, those chapters left me wanting.

I also enjoyed Myers frank and to-the-point writing style and the fact that the book was a page turner that I read in one sitting. This book has some deep content within, but is not a hard read...which should make it a stronger selling book. Joe, you've done a good job of keeping all the cookies on the lower shelf for readers like me and I appreciate it.

You know a book is going to be good when you find yourself underlining stuff in the forward. After reading "Search to Belong" and "Organic Community," I think I would be willing to plop down money for just about anything that Joseph Myers writes. Like most of my favorite authors, he drives me crazy. I tried really hard to not like him. I wanted to brand him as anti-small groups. I tried to zoom in and focus only on the areas where I disagreed with him. But I just can't. Joseph is writing from lots of a experience and from a heart that truly desires to see people grow in real, authentic community. Anyone who works with small groups, discipleship, or community needs to read this book. Like me, you may find yourself disagreeing with certain things or getting defensive, but you still need to wrestle with it.

"Organic Community" challenges us to create environments where true Biblical community can flourish. It is not a step-by-step master plan or some new model for ministry. Rather, Joseph presents nine ideas that we need to consider when designing community experiences that allow community to "emerge" instead of being fabricated. He gives principles for going green and becoming an environmentalist instead of a master planner. I found two chapters particularly helpful. The chapter on "Patterns" helps the reader identify how and why people connect. The chapter on "Partners" challenges our ideas about accountability and encourages a new approach of editability. I have lots of good, constructive questions after reading this book. For instance, what are we measuring and why? Are we measuring the right things? What are we really trying to accomplish in the small group environment?

"Organic Community" is easy to read, and the tone is straightforward. I still have some bones to pick with the author about certain issues lingering from Search to Belong, but that's a good thing.

If you have not read "The Search to Belong: Rethinking Intimacy, Community, and Small Groups," I would recommend reading that first. If you are interested in reading more about community, I would also recommend John Ortberg's Everybody's Normal Till You Get to Know Them

This book might or might not be useful to readers. Having complained in a recent review that another practical theology book was far too programmatic, I was refreshed to perceive the anti-prescriptive bias of Organic Community (by the way, the title of the book has nothing to do with growing fruits and vegetables or hemp, etc.).

Myers relies heavily on antonyms and antithetical word pairs to convey his ideas. One example is the pair of cooperation and collaboration, which he views as describing a prescriptive plan on one hand (cooperation) and organic participation on the other (collaboration).

I could only give the book two stars because I don't think there's much new and interesting material here. Many readers no doubt will have heard the mantra already. Yes, our society is postmodern. No one likes rules and plans and programs anymore. We have rejected most top-down models in favor of bottom-up experiential ones. Statements like these have been made repeatedly by the vanguards of postmodern Christianity and church. Additionally, I was surprised by the business-like feel of the book.

What is valuable in Organic Community, I believe, is some keen analysis of wording and models of leadership/social interaction. I think that all readers can carry such analyses forward to understand and to participate in their various church settings amidst shifting cultural and social conditions.

For those who are interested in this book but uncertain, I would like to recommend two books in the same vein that I found more useful and insightful. The first is Glenn McDonald's The Disciple Making Church: From Dry Bones to Spiritual Vitality and the second is Randy Frazee's The Connecting Church. I hope that my review is helpful to all of you. Do not shy away from reading this book if the topic interests you. Just remember that it is not Gospel - the Gospel transforms, and the best this book can do is to inform.

Joe's first book changed the way I look at community and how people belong in my community.

Joe's second book continued to help me do that by giving some very helpful, effective and "common sense" approaches to leadership of this kind of community.

I have found that many pastors who read Joe's books find themselves uncomfortable with the ideas he presents. But, I have found that many "lay people" (for lack of better word) read his stuff and say, "yeah, duh. isn't that the way its supposed to be" or "man, I wish I could find a church that gave me the freedom to live like this."

The ideas and thoughts he writes about often made me say "duh, why have i never realized that." And you truly let them sink in and try take them seriously you realize they can radically change the way you look at not only Church but life in general.

A theme that I have found resonates through each book is that we leaders need to have more trust in the people in our communities. And just because they don't fit in our models of what a correct participant in our communities looks like, doesn't mean they are not living faithfully and compassionately as followers of Jesus...

I'd recommend this book to anyone... in fact, I already have to a bunch of people and pastors.

I aquired Organic Communities a couple of weeks ago. I finally got around to reading it yesterday while sitting under my patio umbrella. I am not sure how long it took me to read it but no longer than a couple of hours which is an endorsement of Myers' writing style. Despite being a quick read, it had a lot of good stuff in it and made me rethink some ideas about some organizations I am apart of and I have several pages of notes and ideas that I took from the book and want to put into practice.

While in Search to Belong, Joe deconstructed the thinking that goes into small groups and gatherings in the church, he expands his thinking and looks at the impact of sacred cows like "vision casting" and planning have on church communities and how a change in the questions we ask can change the results. In the end, Myers is describing a community centric vision of a church (or business) rather an a heirarchical centric generated vision of the church which demands conformity with the vision about all else. By using real world examples from the church and his own business, SETTINGPACE, Myers shows that it is not only plausible theory but is happening in practice. It was a good book that I will definately return to over the next couple of years.

Myers' first book, "The Search to Belong" was simply fantastic. This book, though good, is not as good.

Myers explains that one of the failures of church leaders is their tendency (actually, its everyone's tendency) to see what works in other congregations and assume that such an effective "pattern" will work everywhere. This makes the pattern "prescriptive." As Myers puts it:

"Prescriptive patterns rarely start out as such. They are usually rooted in descriptive patterns. We see or experience a pattern that "works," and then we assume that if we repeat the pattern exactly, we can manufacture the same result. This works almost well enough often enough to convince us that it could work all the time" (40).

Hence, this book meticulously tries to avoid giving its readers a "pattern" or "Master Plan" of creating community. Instead, Myers provides his readers with organizational "tools," helping them to see how such tools work in the context of a "master plan" as well as in the context of "organic order" (which is what we are really trying to achieve).

One of the most useful observations he makes regards the role of measurement. Myers explains,

* We measure that which we perceive to be important.
* That which we measure will become important and will guide our process.
* That which we do not measure will become less important.

"Measurement has dynamic power over the journey and the results. It is not neutral. The measurement is the message."

In other words, if a church is going to carefully measure attendance and cash flow, and make this measurement part of the pastor's annual review, then the pastor will start to focus heavily on simply getting a bunch of people to attend the church, and to get big offerings every Sunday. This will leave the process of discipleship neglected. And this is an excellent observation of Myers'.

Another useful highlight of the book is the discussion on growth. Myers uses the example of a young couple (Matt and Angie) that is about to purchase a house:

The decision Matt and Angie make will affect their future financial growth. Should they choose the newer home at the top of their price range, they will have to carefully watch what they spend. The bulk of their housing dollar will go toward the mortgage. There will be very little left over to replace the water heater in five years or upgrade the plumbing in twenty.
When these maintenance issues arise, Matt and Angie's budget will be strained, and they may have to reduce the amount of money they direct toward their retirement or college savings plans for the kids.
Should they choose the older home in the median of their price range, they will have some breathing room. When something breaks down in the house, there may be less stress about finding money to make the repair. Their retirement savings will likely not be jeopardized, and Matt and Angie's plans for funding their children's education will probably remain intact. (85-87)

The analogy here is obvious. If a church puts all of its resources into getting a particular program up an running, it will end up consuming resources that are normally applied to other things. And by "resources" Myers does not simply mean money, he means time and emotional energy. For example, Mike (a small groups pastor) has invested all of the church's resources into his small groups program:

Mike had not anticipated that those who met in the Wednesday night small groups would then limit their involvement in other groups, Even though the other groupings--women's ministries, Bible studies, choir, the church volleyball league--didn't meet on Wednesday nights, ministry leaders began to see a dramatic dip in attendance. Michelle, the youth pastor, complained that key adult sponsors had quit and she couldn't find replacement because people's primary obligation was now to their small groups. The choir lost half its embers. George [the pastor] had his hands full with all the complaining about Mike's small group program. (88)


These are some of the more helpful aspects of the book. And for this reason I really do recommend it. But I have two serious complaints:

1. Myers needs to provide clear examples of some of the principles he describes. Much of the time he simply describes things in abstraction, and you really have no way to grasp what he is saying.
2. I cannot, for the life of me, figured out what has happened to Joseph Myers. His old website ([...]) has not been updated for years. He hasn't written a blog entry for 2 or 3 years now. His other company ([...]) appears to be out of business. I found what their website used to be by using the Internet Archive ("wayback machine"). It hasn't been on the Internet since 2008. Why is this important to me? For this reason: If this guy is going to be credible to me, if he is going to really seem like a good authority on understanding how organization and community function, then it would be nice to know that he is successfully implementing all of these principles somewhere. But, to all appearances, it looks as though his companies and organizations have shut down. I have no clue as to his whereabouts. And I even tried calling the phone numbers that appeared on his old web pages just to see if his company was still in business. I simply got the usual "this number has been disconnected" message. So, the mystery continues . . .

I have read dozens of books on how to do church, but each one seems to assume that if you will only submit to a particular church model and recreate those circumstances, similar success will come. But this is not so. Organic Community helps you to chill out with master planning and begin identifying what God has given you so that a unique church model can naturally arise. Great, great read. Don't agree with everything, but hugely influential to me.

Mr. Myers deconstructs a top-down "master plan" approach to encouraging (or, more accurately, forcing) community, and urges readers to foster community organically with nine practical tools. This book will expand your imagination, challenge your thinking, and help you create spaces where community naturally happens. A church resource, but also good reading for leaders of any stripe. See Myers' website at http://www.languageofbelonging.com/

I soak-up most of the emergent writings because, like many others, I'm hungry to help create life-giving, sustainable, organic communities of faith. Meyer's books is a helpful nudge in that direction, but like so much of the emergent literature on the market today, this book is loaded with false dichotomies in an apparent effort to distinquish itself as a radical alternative to the exisiting church. I continually found myself asking, "Would these arguments even hold up if actual antonyms were consistently juxtaposed against each other instead of the word-pairings Meyers chose?" Hmmmm. Probably in some cases, but maybe not in others.

This book is Myers' attempt to provide practical direction for church leaders seeking to create spaces within their community in which relationships can flourish naturally, unforced, and organically. This book is an excellent follow up to The Search to Belong. The material presented here provides a platform for conversation and thought which could be helpful to any church pondering the health of their environment. Though Myers overstates the case at times concerning the way church programming and organization has been conducted in the past, I consider this book a helpful resource with many ideas that could enable church communities to be more effective in ministry.