Beauty So Ancient and So New: 7 Part Series: Part 2: What I Mean When I Say Anarchist Church

I know what you did when you read that phrase.

Some of you leaned in. Some of you got suspicious. Some of you started composing a response before you finished the sentence. That’s fair. The word carries stuff with it; images of black flags, broken windows, and a general hostility to anything resembling order. I understand the hesitation. But I’m asking you to set it down for a moment, not because the word doesn’t mean anything, rather because it means something more precise than the popular cultural image suggests, and that precision is exactly what I need.

Let me tell you what I don’t mean.

I don’t mean chaos. I don’t mean the absence of structure, the rejection of leadership, or every man doing what is right in his own eyes with a tambourine and a theology degree. I don’t mean a church without elders or without the Eucharist or without the creed. I don’t mean a church that has confused informality with authenticity or spontaneity with the movement of the Spirit. I have been in those churches. They are not what I am describing.

I also don’t mean a political position. This is not a baptized version of left-anarchism, not an attempt to smuggle a particular theory of the state into ecclesiology through the back door. The anarchist church I am describing is not interested in dismantling governments. It is interested in being the kind of community that makes visible a different politics. The politics of the Kingdom, which has been running in the opposite direction from every human theory of power since the night Jesus wrapped a towel around his waist and knelt on the floor.

That image is where I want to start. Because that image is the definition.

The Basin and the Towel

The night before he died, Jesus knew that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God. John makes sure we understand this before he tells us what Jesus did next. He knew who he was. He knew where he had come from and where he was going. He was not confused about his authority or his identity or his power.

And he got up from the table, took off his outer garments, tied a towel around his waist, poured water into a basin, and began to wash his disciples’ feet. (John 13:3-5)

This is not a leadership illustration. It is not a model for servant leadership in the contemporary organizational sense, where you learn to listen well and empower your team and occasionally do something visibly humble to demonstrate accessibility. It is something far more radical than that. It is the one who holds all authority in his hands using those hands to clean the dirt from the feet of the people who are about to abandon him. It is power expressing itself as service so completely that Peter cannot bear to watch it.

Jesus then says: you call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you. (John 13:13-15)

He is not suggesting a posture. Rather, He is describing a political order. A community in which the one with the most authority uses it most completely in service of others. A community in which greatness runs in the opposite direction from every human instinct about power. A community in which the measure of leadership is not platform or influence or institutional position but the willingness to kneel.

That is the anarchist church. Not the absence of authority but the radical reorientation of it.

What Jesus Actually Said About Power

Mark 10 is the text I keep returning to. James and John have just asked Jesus for the best seats in the Kingdom, one on his right, one on his left, which in the context of what Jesus has been saying about his death means they have understood almost nothing. The other ten disciples are indignant, which probably means they wanted the seats too and are annoyed someone asked first.

Jesus gathers them and says: You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Mark 10:42-45)

Notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say: the Gentiles have a bad leadership style that you should improve on. He doesn’t say: their power structures are fine but need to be run with more humility. He says: it shall not be so among you. The community gathered around him operates by a different logic entirely. Not a better version of the Gentile logic. A different one. One that runs in the opposite direction.

This is the anarchist claim in its most precise form: the church is not supposed to be organized by the logic of power. It is supposed to be organized by the logic of the cross. Which is the logic of self-giving, of authority expressed as service, of the first becoming last, and the last becoming first. This isn’t  an aspiration or a value statement, but the actual operating principle of the community.

Every time the church has forgotten this, and it has forgotten it many times, in many ways, across many centuries, it has become something other than what Christ called it to be. More imperial. More institutional. More interested in its own continuation than in the Kingdom it was called to announce.

What the Early Church Understood

The pre-Nicene church, the church before Constantine handed it a palace, was not perfect. But it understood something about power that the post-Constantinian church has struggled to hold onto.

Its leaders were recognizable by their suffering before they were recognizable by their titles. Ignatius of Antioch, writing on his way to be martyred in Rome around 110 AD, speaks of his own authority with a kind of restrained tenderness, he will not command, he says, like Peter or Paul. He is still learning. He will speak as a fellow learner, not as a lord. This from a bishop, one of the earliest we have clear evidence of, on his way to die for the faith he is urging others to hold.

Irenaeus of Lyon insisted that the apostolic succession, the chain of teaching from the apostles through recognized bishops… mattered. But he also insisted that a simple elder who actually lives the faith is worth more than a bishop with impeccable credentials and a dead heart. The authority of office was real. But it was always subordinate to the authority of the Spirit. And the Spirit, as he kept saying, is where the church is; and the church is where the Spirit is. Not where the institution is or where the credentials are. Where the living God actually dwells.

The Didache (did-uh-kee) is our earliest church manual, probably written within living memory of the apostles and it assumes that authority is dispersed. Prophets travel. The Spirit moves through people you don’t know yet. Local leaders are elected by the community that recognizes the gifts the Spirit has already given them. There is no central office adjudicating this. There is a community, a rule of life, and the assumption that the Spirit-filled people of God are capable of discernment if they are paying attention.

This is the anarchist church. Not a church without structure, but a church whose structure serves the body rather than ruling it. A church whose leaders are servants before they are anything else. A church whose authority is dispersed through the whole community because the Spirit distributes gifts through the whole community and no institution gets to put a fence around that.

Why the Word Matters

I could have called this something safer. Ancient-future church. Retrieval church. Participatory church. All of these capture something true and none of them would make anyone nervous.

But I chose anarchist deliberately. Because the safe words let us off too easily. They let us nod at the idea without feeling the gravity of what it actually costs. They let us affirm the concept while quietly keeping the structures of lordship intact, just with better language about servant leadership.

Anarchist is a word with an edge on it. It names the thing the institution is most afraid of. The possibility that its authority is not finally legitimate, that the Spirit is not actually bound by its structures, that the community of Christ answers to Christ and not to the machinery built in his name. That edge is not accidental. It is the point I am trying to make.

Because the church in our moment does not need a better version of what it already has. It does not need improved production values or more authentic branding or a senior pastor who is visibly humble in a more convincing way. It needs to recover something it has largely lost. What its lost is the conviction that Christ is the head of this body, that the Spirit moves through the whole community, that authority is cruciform, that the basin and the towel are not a leadership metaphor but a political manifesto.

The anarchist church is not a new idea. It is the oldest one. It is what the community around Jesus looked like before anyone had figured out how to institutionalize it. It is what Irenaeus was defending, what Basil was building, what the Didache was describing, and what the desert fathers were fleeing toward when they left the compromised church for the silence.

It is creedal. It holds the faith once delivered to the saints without embarrassment and without negotiation. It is Spirit-filled. It expects the one it confesses to actually show up and do things. It is beautiful and if you remember, beauty is the energy underneath all of this, the thing that makes it move, the reason it compels rather than merely argues.

And it is anarchist. In the precise sense. In the Mark 10 sense. In the basin-and-towel sense. The cruciform sense.

The reality isn't in a formulated chaos with an absence of structure. It is the radical reorientation of power toward the one who knelt on the floor the night before he died and showed us what authority looks like when it is fully itself.

That is what I mean. That is what we are building toward.

The windows are open. Come and see.

Part 3: The Church Was Never Supposed to Be This, next.