Andrew Jones is starting to recount some of his American travels, and he mentions a third alternative to bounded or centered sets, as suggested by Doug Pagitt: Networked Sets. Jones says, “Doug offered a third alternative – a “networked set” with a more distributed structure. This model has Christ located in his body as well as a distant point and will probably challenge the previous two models of bounded and centered.”

The name alone causes me to think perhaps he’s onto something, and immediately reminds me of an early article I wrote on this, “An Appeal for a Measure of Anarchy in the Church,” which essentially looks to the structure of the Internet as a potential model for structuring a new-wineskin church. I do like the idea of church as network, for this is what we’re suggesting… and as a network, the addition of a single node or person enriches the whole. “Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a network equals approximately the square of the number of users of the system (n2).”

Not quite sure yet how one would diagram a networked set as it applies to a church context (though see the diagrams in the Wikipedia article) but this may take a bit more reflection. I like the direction so far…