Affinity Networks

By Robin G. Jordan

“Affinity network” may sound like the latest ecclesiastical buzz-phrase. It describes a way of organizing groups of churches for mutual assistance and support, the recruitment, training, ordination, licensing and supervision of pastors and other gospel workers, and the advancement of the gospel, based upon affinity rather than geographic proximity. In an affinity network a group of churches may have similar approaches to ministry and mission. They may share common doctrinal positions on key issues. They may resemble each other in other ways. Because they do have so much in common, they usually enjoy good relations with each other and readily collaborate together on projects in which they have a common interest. A growing number of churches are moving in this direction, networking with other churches with which they share an affinity.

In a territory-based judicatory a group of churches generally have only three things in common. They are located in the same region. They have the same church polity and the same denominational affiliation. One church may be very conservative; another church, very liberal. One may be charismatic in its style of worship and ministry; another, traditionalist, and so on. It is not uncommon to find the congregations and clergy in the judicatory divided into two or more camps on a variety of issues and vying with each other to determine the official position that the judicatory takes on a particular issue. One camp may dominate the decision-making machinery in the judicatory and the other camps may have a peripheral role. Each camp may have staked out its own turf in the judicatory and woe to the members of another camp who invade that turf or even wander into it by accident. The atmosphere found in the territory-based judicatory is often competitive, rather than cooperative, and adversarial, rather than collegial. These factors can negate any perceived advantages of a territory-based judicatory, namely the relatively close geographic proximity of the churches forming the judicatory and the ease of travel between the churches.

Most support for the territory-based judicatory falls into the category of “That’s how we’ve always done things.” Anglican provinces have dioceses because the Church of England has dioceses. The Church of England had dioceses because the pre-Reformation English Church had dioceses. The pre-Reformation English Church had dioceses because the Anglo-Saxon Church adopted the organizational structure of the Roman Church and not the Celtic Church. The Roman Church was organized into dioceses because the Roman Empire had been formed into dioceses. The diocesan structure was the organizational structure with which the Roman Church was most familiar.

The Celtic Church had been formed along monastic lines, that is to say, into monasteries. Each monastery had links to a particular area and the Celtic tribe that lived in that area. It also had links to other monasteries that could trace their origin directly or indirectly to the same monastery. Monks from one monastery would start several new monasteries. Or monks from one monastery would start a second monastery and monks from the second monastery would start a third monastery and so on. Celtic monasteries were not the cloistered monasteries of the Middle Ages, in which the monks lived in seclusion from the world. They were basically communities of Christians. A Celtic monastery might include both men and women. Some monks were celibate; others, married. Monks and nuns might live in the same monastery. The kinds of links that Celtic monasteries had with each other made them one of the earliest forms of an affinity network.

Among the chief reasons that Roman Christianity appealed to the Anglo-Saxons was that it was worldlier than Celtic Christianity. Celtic bishops took a vow of poverty and had few worldly possessions. They lived austere lives of self-denial and they dressed in simple threadbare garb. Roman bishops were wealthy. They possessed lands, large houses, serfs, and slaves. The food that was served at their table rivaled that served at the table of a Saxon prince or earl and they wore sumptuous robes. The outcome of Council of Whitby had nothing to do with the superiority of the Roman method of calculating Easter or Bishop of Rome’s claim to be the successor to the apostle Peter and therefore the prince of the Church. The Saxon prince who ruled in favor of the Roman Church had made up his mind before the solemn conclave met. The Council was window dressing.

The Celtic Church’s organizational structure of Christian communities linked together by affinity is more effective in two area critical to the future of Christianity in North America—church planting and evangelism. The reason for its effectiveness is simple. Among the most common affinities that a group of the churches forming an affinity network are likely to share with each other are beliefs, values, and vision. An old adage is “Birds of a feather flock together.” Churches with a strong commitment to church planting and evangelicalism are attracted to similar churches. They learn from each other. They develop resources that each other can use. They direct each other to resources that other churches like themselves have developed or are using. They recognize the benefits of being formally or informally networked with other churches that share their commitment to planting new churches and reaching the spiritually disconnected and the unchurched.

The ineffectiveness of the territory-based judicatory in these two areas was brought home to me in the Decade of Evangelism in the 1990s. Like most dioceses of the Episcopal Church the Diocese of Louisiana is divided into deaneries. In the 1990s the deaneries were responsible for any new church planting initiative in their respective areas. St. Tammany, the parish, Louisiana’s equivalent of a county, in which I lived was most rapidly growing area of the state. It lay within the North Shore Deanery. Its potential for successful new church plants was high. Its need for new churches was higher. In surveying the parish, I identified a number of potential sites for a new church--one in the east end of the parish, a second in the middle of the parish, and a third in the parish’s west end. New families were moving into these communities. Housing construction was booming. New subdivisions were opening. The population growth was necessitating the construction of new schools. Other denominations were planting new churches and these new church plants were flourishing. What was the North Shore Deanery doing in the midst of this population explosion? Nada. Nothing! None of the clergy in the deanery showed even a modicum of interest in planting a new church.

As for evangelism, it was something Episcopalians would tell you that Baptists did but not Episcopalians. The Episcopal parish at the east end of St. Tammany took the view that if any one wanted an Episcopal church, they could look in the Yellow Pages. It did not bother to run ads in the local newspaper or post “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You” signs at major intersections with directions to the church. It was an invisible church, located on a side street and off the beaten track. Unless newcomers to the community chanced to drive through the older residential neighborhood in which it was located, they would never know that it was there. When the new bishop announced a diocesan-wide initiative to plant new churches, the vestry of this church begged him not to start a new church in their community, fearing that it would not only attract new families moving to the community but also draw its own church members.

My own church had been planted in the mid-1980s. We were one of the rare churches that had an evangelism outreach committee. I served on that committee. The same attitude toward evangelism prevailed in the committee as prevailed elsewhere in the deanery. We became bogged down in endless wrangling over what we should do and consequently we did nothing! What do you do with people whose idea of evangelism is having a living nativity at Christmas? As I recollect the chairperson of the committee was one of those Episcopalians who believes that religious beliefs are a private matter and if we share our own beliefs with other people we are not respecting their privacy. While I favor a low pressure, high grace approach to evangelism, it does involve at some point talking with the non-believer about Jesus. We cannot just love people into the kingdom. It does not work that way.

A drawback of an affinity network is often that the group of churches forming a particular network may be physically some distance from each other. For face-to-face meetings church leaders and church members may have a several hours’ journey to the location of the meeting. Tele-conferencing, scype, twitter, and other forms of electronic communication, however, reduce the distance that separates the churches in the network.

For Anglo-Catholics affinity networks may seem to give the churches in an affinity network a degree of independency with which they are not comfortable. However, the role of a bishop is not to micro-manage the affairs of the churches under his oversight. The degree of independence that the affinity network affords may be desirable.

In an affinity network under episcopal oversight the role of a bishop would be the episcopal role described in Mark Burkhill’s Better Bishops. His ministry would not differ essentially from that of a pastor but the sphere in which he exercises his ministry would be different. He would be responsible for pastoring the ministers of the churches in the affinity network. He would provide support and encouragement to those facing difficulties. He would also be the primary means of exercising loving scriptural discipline when such discipline is necessary. The bishop would have a supervisory role in the selection, training and ordination of new ministers. He would not take on all this work himself but his pastoral wisdom and experience would be key when it comes to making final decisions about who is suitable for ministry and how they should be prepared for this work. The bishop would have a role as a spokesman for the affinity network and the Christian community in relation to the wider world.

In order that the bishop could not avoid his basic preaching/teaching role, he would exercise a proportion of his ministry from a base within one of the churches in the affinity network. This would mean that he would also be the senior minister or pastor of one of the network’s churches. He would not be required to relinquish this role on his election as the network’s bishop. While the network might budget funds for the operation of his office and travel expenses, the bishop would receive no stipend or other remuneration from the network. His role would not be administrative or prelatical. Any ecclesiastical authority that he exercised, he would share with a council of pastors and lay representatives from the network churches.

While a number of existing affinity networks are national and even international in scope, most such networks are regional. An affinity network may link together a group of churches that are located in several different states but in the same region, for example, the Upper South. It may, as in the case of a house church network, link together a group of churches in the same city or county. This is helpful to bear in mind since a common objection to affinity networks is related to the physical distance between the churches in an affinity network. This distance often prompts the following questions.

What does a church do when its pastor is ill or goes on vacation? Who supplies the pulpit?

When a congregation does not expect a weekly celebration of the Holy Communion and the church has an assistant pastor and/or one or more apprentice pastors or pastors-in-formation and/or one or more lay preachers, lay readers, or pastoral assistants, the absence of the pastor should not present a challenge. Even small membership churches should have at least one or more members of the congregation that can pinch-hit for the pastor in his absence. Churches organized into affinity networks generally place greater emphasis upon leadership development at the level of the local congregation.

For a growing number of churches a weekly celebration of Holy Communion, while it may desirable, is an unrealistic expectation. It is also not absolutely necessary to the spiritual life of a church. The proclamation and exposition of God’s Word, however, is.

How does an affinity network provide summer camp for the young people? Do affinity groups operate their own conferences centers like a diocese?

Some affinity networks may jointly operate a regional conference center with other groups of churches. However, owning and maintaining a conference center is become increasingly expensive and a number of judicatories have been forced to sell their conference centers. The church with which I am sojourning sends its children to a summer camp that is operated by a parachurch organization at several different locations during the summer. The specialty of this parachurch organization is summer camps. Parent volunteers accompany the children. The staff and volunteers are carefully screened. The church helps parents to raise money for the summer camp fees and offers scholarships for children who need them. The church orchestrates transportation to the summer camps.

Does not the organization of denominations into affinity networks emphasize or highlight the divisions in a denomination rather than remedy them?

If any lesson can be learned from the last twenty years is that the organization of denominations into territory-based judicatories has not served the cause of denominational unity. Rather it has tended to exacerbate divisions in the denomination. The organization of a denomination into affinity networks bring divisions out into the open and seeks to work within divisions rather than pretending that they do not exist. It makes positive use of affinity dynamics rather than allowing them to become a source of constant tension within the denomination and to disrupt its common life.

Affinity networks are not new or radical. As I previously noted, the informal networks of monasteries in the Celtic Church were an early form of an affinity network. The Roman Catholic Church has for several hundred years had affinity networks in the form of personal prelatures. The personal ordinariates for former Anglo-Catholics that the Roman Catholic Church is erecting are affinity networks. The Methodist “circuits” on the western frontier in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were affinity networks.

Affinity networks do not comprise a barrier to intra-denominational or interdenominational cooperation. They may actually foster such cooperation. They do not prevent churches from collaborating with each other on projects of common interest.

The Anglican Church in North America is an example of a “mixed-type” denomination that has both territory-based judicatories and affinity networks. The constitutions and canons of a number of the territory-based judicatories make provision for congregations and clergy outside of territorial limits of the judicatory to unite with the judicatory, blending together a territory-based judicatory and an affinity network. While some members of this denomination are promoting its organization into exclusively territory-based judicatories, such a move would replicate within the ACNA the same kind of conditions that exist in the Anglican Church of Canada and The Episcopal Church. They would prevent the denomination from becoming genuinely comprehensive, open to the full range of theologically conservative Anglicans, and would foster the type of power struggles and theological disputes that have beset the AC of C and TEC. Rather than eliminating its affinity networks in favor of territory-based judicatories, the ACNA needs to be organizing more groups of churches into affinity networks and receiving more groups of churches organized into such networks.

Recommended Reading: Lyle E. Schaller, From Geography to Affinity: How Congregations Can Learn from One Another , (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007)

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