ABSTRACT
This chapter recognises the growing significance of networks as a form of social coordination and to acknowledge that the church in its blurred encounters' with society will need to engage with them. Churches and faith-based organisations typically adopt a hybrid organisational form, the voluntary agency, which blurs the rationales of bureaucracy and association. The chapter discusses why the institution is declining in favour of the network. However, in a society where the relationship between the individual and society is so often mediated by organisations, the chapter argues that it is a language worth learning if the church is to describe the power dynamics of its own institutional arrangements with precision and respond prophetically to its context. The chapter concludes that networks blur the rationales of institution and market in that they enable actors to pursue a common task but there is no overarching source of authority to which actors can appeal.
