Cell vs Base

I'm not very good at keeping this blog up to date but life has been very hectic recently. Now that the Pursuing Excellence project has finished I may have some more time.

I've been thinking about cell groups and base ecclesial communities. Both offer a fresh expression of church but each has a different orientation. I guess that this is partly because of their background. Cell seems focused on growth while base majors on service. This dichotomy doesn't seem very biblical. When I hear, as I did recently, an evangelical minister say that we must remember that we are not here to offer a social services programme I get worried. Church growth is required by the great commission but not at the expense of living a kingdom life. There is a temptation to simply combine base & cell to provide a more holistic form of small group. The fact that this hasn't been done suggests that it's not quite that simple so I will resist the temptation to offer simplistic suggestions - for the time being at least.

There is another key difference between cell & base: the way that leadership is exercised. Cell replicates a hierarchical leader/led status model while base has a collaborative role-based model. The collaborative model seems more postmodern and more congenial to me at the moment. But I do not want to assert that it is superior or more biblical because I believe that we see both forms of leadership offered there.

An advantage of the status model is that a leader may be better equipped to hold the vision and manage the boundaries than collaborative leadership. On the other hand, cells often fail because they cannot grow leaders fast enough; perhaps a collaborative model could cope better with multiplication by division. Yet base groups do not seem to have a desire to grow.

I do get a sense that a dialogue between the two approaches should be fruitful. Has this happened? Can it happen in my head? I will continue to explore and try to get a sense of what might emerge from such a dialogue.