Circle of Hope

Our assumptions about the church are biotic. “Biotic” is something that relates to, is produced by, or is caused by living organisms. The church is a living organism, created the same way God called humans into existence and created everything else.

So biologists often have something to teach us about how to be the church. The scientists who study cells can really enlighten us, since the basic building blocks of our church are cells and it’s all biotic. One of the things we have been thinking about is old cells. A cell that has been together for more than nine or ten months is getting kind of old. Some of our cells have been basically the same for even longer than that. Some old cells recently died and their members have yet to re-engage. What do we do?

Bring in the scientists. Researchers have been pondering whether old cells can be rejuvenated. They know it can happen, but how? One way to do it is to introduce new cells who have an impact on the old. But they have also discovered that old cells have the capacity to rejuvenate, themselves. Here’s the quote from The Scientist magazine:

“Old cells may regain a youthful phenotype when exposed to a young cell environment, say researchers in Nature this week. The results, say the authors, indicate that aged satellite cells have an intrinsic ability to regenerate.

We know old tissue repairs poorly, but it’s not because there aren’t stem cells ready to do the repair,” coauthor Thomas Rando told The Scientist. “The problem is, with age, the environment the stem cells hit changes, [and] it makes them less responsive.”…

We don’t know what the factors are [that control cell proliferation]… It may be as important, if not more important, to remove inhibitory factors from old serum than it is to add positive factors from young serum.”

We’re not an old church, but cells and cell leaders don’t necessarily have that long to live if they don’t consider how to regenerate. One way to stay “young” is to introduce new people. Cells gain “positive factors” when “young serum” is introduced. Another way to stay “young” is when the people who are already part of the cell are activated by God’s Spirit. Cells can revive when “inhibitory factors” are removed.

Have any ideas of what are the inhibitory factors making your “old” cell deteriorate? If they are removed, you might flourish. It is not an exact science, but you could try some things.

Let me get you started on listing some common inhibitory factors and you can complete your own list:

• Maybe you won’t talk over the problems you have with or about someone and you talked to someone else about them instead – that’s a sure killer, usually. Remove the “anti- Matthew-18-factor.”
• Maybe you only show up part time. Remove the “ambivalence-factor.” If you are “taking a break,” remove the “I’ll-get-back-to-you-when-I-have-time-to-care-factor.”
• Maybe God is not obviously welcomed. The Lord is hardly impolite enough to crash your party. Remove the “I’m-controlling-this-factor.”

You get the idea. Warm up those test tubes! Let’s figure out what is going on before something deadly happens, or one of our cell dies of natural causes.