In January of 2023, Classis Grand Rapids East of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) reported that they were committing $5,000 to a group within the CRC called Better Together, A Third Way. This group seeks to help churches build unity even when they disagree on issues. Then in January of 2024, Better Together announced that they had received a significant grant from the Lilly Endowment (almost 1.25 million was given to Calvin CRC for this endeavor according to the Lilly website) to launch a project that would create networks of churches to transcend polarities that divide.1 This project, known as The Better Together Project, is described in the announcement as a “centered-set network” of churches rather than a “bounded-set” one.
These terms are not new. They were pioneered by missiologist Paul Hiebert decades ago.2 More recently, Mark D. Baker has published a book called Centered-Set Church that describes what Hiebert taught and applies it more specifically to the church.3 Given that this paradigm is being used today, it is worth exploring this centered-set approach to see if it is compatible with confessional churches.
Heibert and Baker both make use of three different paradigms that were adopted from mathematical set theory to explore how churches can determine who belongs—bounded, fuzzy, and centered sets. The first paradigm, bounded sets, have clear boundary lines that allow for a uniform definition of those who are within the group. The line defines who belongs and who is excluded, and what the correct beliefs and behaviors are. I am assuming that Baker would label confessional churches as bounded because of the clear way they ask members and officers to adhere to their confessional beliefs. Bounded churches are like ranchers who build and maintain fences to contain cattle on their land.4 Baker believes that bounded churches foment judgmentalism and a superiority toward those who are excluded.5 He describes the unity found in the bounded church as superficial because of the shame and lack of grace that is found there.6
The second paradigm of fuzzy churches means that the boundary line is either removed or is less clear. Here there is no sharp boundary between Christians and non-Christians. These churches would tolerate a wide diversity of beliefs and practices, including non-Christian ones.7 These churches stress “dialogue and education as the means of evangelism.”8 Baker critiques fuzzy churches for being all about tolerance, individualism, and relativism.9 People in these churches can be reluctant to talk about the need for personal transformation and repentance, and because of this, they “impede profound and life-changing love.”10
Centered sets, on the other hand, reflect a completely different paradigm, a third-way.11 Rather than categorizing membership according to intrinsic characteristics (their essential nature), centered sets are described with extrinsic ones (how they relate to other things).12 Centered sets use the image not of fences but of wells that are dug. Even though a ranch covers a large area, the cattle will remain centered around the well.13 Instead of a line that identifies people’s common characteristics, centered churches have more to do with the direction the person is going. Centered churches still distinguish between those who belong to the group and those who do not, but the focus is on direction and relationship. Those who are moving towards the center belong to the group. That means that there can be “space for differences not possible in a bounded church.” 14
According to Baker, while centered-set churches emphasize relationship, bounded churches tend to “contribute to anemic discipleship.” Once people meet certain requirements, they are “in,” but then they “remain indifferent to other ways that members’ lives might not align with the ways of Jesus.”15 Baker says that “bounded churches tend to emphasize clearly defined rules that are achievable, rather than talking about character qualities, such as patience, love, and unselfishness, which are harder to achieve or measure.”16 In light of this, confessional churches do well to continue ongoing discipleship even beyond catechizing our youth. We certainly should not ignore the believer’s relationship to Christ and our own godly obedience.
Where I believe the centered-set model falls short, however, is how it attempts to chart a middle path between bounded and fuzzy churches. Baker claims that centered churches do not neglect the call for conversion and repentance. The center does not erase all boundaries and standards because it maintains a well-defined center.17 Centered churches are not as universally inclusive as fuzzy churches are, because one’s relationship with Christ as the center matters.18 These churches continue to “have boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate behavior or beliefs” including theological and ethical ones.19 The problem is, Baker does not attempt to define the core convictions at the center, but leaves that up to each individual church. His goal instead is to “focus on how to belong to one another and journey together toward the center as defined by your church or ministry organization.”20 What is unclear to me is how these undefined convictions of centered churches distinguish them from the relativism of fuzzy churches.
How is this model distinct from the confessional church? First, it is more helpful to use the word confessional rather than bounded. Wholehearted agreement with our confessions is not meant to “demand conformity to dead tradition” or “prioritize the pronouncement of rules” as centered proponents describe it—rather its purpose is to unify us around a set of propositional beliefs.21 When office-bearers of confessional churches subscribe and when members assent to the doctrines confessed, it is both binding and freeing. The church is given the keys not only to close but also to open the kingdom of heaven (Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 31). Though confessions might seem stifling, they remind us that the word of God is not bound (2 Tim 2:9). There is a profound beauty in seeing the unity of “the faith” that these churches confess in a “common salvation” that is “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3). This word of faith that we proclaim is the word we also confess together and believe in our hearts (Rom 10:8–10).
Second, the confessional church differs from the centered church on its understanding of church discipline, or what Baker prefers to call “intervention.”22 He believes that bounded churches focus on the line, which leads to shaming, punishment, and exclusion, whereas centered churches have “the goal of restoring the person to relationship with Jesus, the center, and with the community.”23 Yet the goal of church discipline in confessional churches has never been to shame, but to restore for the sake of “maintaining the body of the church” and to “maintain harmony and unity and to keep all in obedience to God” (Belgic Confession [BC] 32). The centered church model believes that “line-drawing exclusion is sinful and harmful.” 24 They see less of a need to “exclude those not truly Christian from fellowship in the church.”25 On the other hand, in confessional churches members who are “bending their necks under the yoke of Jesus Christ” are not self-serving. They submit to the churches’ discipline “by serving to build up one another.” The confessional church maintains that believers should “separate themselves from those who do not belong to the church, in order to join this assembly wherever God has established it” (BC 28).
Finally, while centered-set churches are defined by whether or not a person is a follower of Jesus, confessional churches are defined more specifically by wholehearted agreement with the distinctive doctrinal beliefs of the confessions. Centered churches do not exclude members with differing theological views.26 Christians are defined as “followers of the Jesus Christ of the Bible, and those who make him the center or Lord of their lives.”27 The danger in this kind of language is that it puts the burden on the action of the believer to be a follower of Jesus rather than someone who is declared righteous on the basis of Christ’s work. It also ignores the teaching of the rest of scripture with an exclusive focus on the “red letters” of Christ and his example. Centered churches allow the “space to affirm that someone is heading toward but is not necessarily in total agreement with all the beliefs at the center” while confessional churches heartily believe the doctrines of the church to be true.28
Many today, such as the Better Together Project in the CRC, are calling for churches to engage in this centered-set posture. They maintain that our confessions are more like guideposts and signs that help direct us instead of defining us.29 Yet adopting a centered church approach goes against everything that confessional churches have historically sought to maintain. When the Scriptures close, they hold a clear distinction between those who have their names written in the book of life and those who do not. The one who conquers will have this heritage, and nothing unclean will ever enter the city (Rev 21:7–8, 27). The purpose is not primarily to draw a boundary and to exclude, but to marvel that God will welcome the people he calls his own, who bear his name (Rev 22:4).
Notes
- “For Immediate Release: Grant Funding Awarded for The Better Together Project from the Lilly Endowment’s Thriving Congregations Initiative,” Better Together, February 1, 2024; “Thriving Congregations Initiative,” Lilly Endowment, November 2023.
- Paul G. Hiebert, Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1994).
- Mark D. Baker, Centered-Set Church (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2021).
- Baker, Centered-Set, 39.
- Baker, 25.
- Baker, 32.
- Hiebert, Anthropological Reflections, 121.
- Hiebert, 122.
- Baker, Centered-Set, 36.
- Baker, 35.
- Baker, 23.
- Hiebert, Anthropological Reflections, 122.
- Baker, Centered-Set, 39.
- Baker, 26–28.
- Baker, 212.
- Baker, 43.
- Baker, 39.
- Baker, 47.
- Baker, 50, 57.
- Baker, 57.
- Hiebert, Anthropological Reflections, 128; Baker, Centered-Set, 164.
- Baker, Centered-Set, 153.
- Baker, 157.
- Baker, 172.
- Heibert, Anthropological Reflections, 129.
- Hiebert, 128.
- Hebert, 125.
- “Form for the Profession of Faith (1932),” Christian Reformed Church.
- Better Together: A Third Way, “Centered Set Posture rather than Bounded Set,” YouTube, March 26, 2024. See comment about confessions as guideposts at 8:03 in.
©Josh Christoffels. All Rights Reserved.
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Josh Christoffels
Rev. Josh Christoffels is an alumnus of Westminster Seminary California (2014). He has taught English to university students in China, served as a pastor in Chandler, MN, and currently serves as the pastor of the Hammond Christian Reformed Church in Hammond, IN.
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Josh, thank you for suggesting a confessional alternative to the all-too-simple options of a centered- or bounded-set understanding of the church. My undergraduate degrees in math and physics led me to analyze very complex functions using tools like divergence and curl in advanced algebra, matrix analysis in linear algebra, and calculus in differential equations. These tools can help me normalize a wave function in quantum mechanics or analyze patterns in metadata. But persons and churches are so much more complex than those functions. I believe the tools designed for math and physics need to be VERY carefully applied in the social sciences. As you and your commenters note, even the most basic images in Scripture — a family, a flock, a body — must contain elements of both centered-ness and bounded-ness. I like confessional as a way to describe being directed to a “center” by the Word of God and bounded by shared understanding of the essentials. And I’m so glad I never had to graph fuzzy-ness in multivariate differential equations.
Getting something off my chest (and I think this blog performs that useful service for a lot of us!) …
I really appreciate the author’s willingness here to critique terms imposed on church life as though they were sufficient descriptive categories. This seems to occur with increasing frequency (or it is just annoying me more as I now can’t seem to un-see it on Amazon, etc.). This or that latest pop-description promises to reveal what is “really” happening, to expose the “secret” of Christian life or growth (as though the Apostolic declaration of Christianity really DID happen “in a corner”), or to provide a “fresh” account of biblical Christianity. I know it is the latest iteration of a cycle that has gone on with varying emphases since the Lord’s ascension. I think of certain misguided expressions of experience, of criticisms of “enthusiasm” and of the “anxious bench” in our own America, and of the other excellent examples Dr. Clark raises in RECOVERING THE REFORMED CONFESSIONS.
It is a problem of allowing biblical words and phrases to at once (1) stand for too much in modern society and church life; and (2) not stand for enough. “Discipleship,” for example, is frequently butchered in the cottage industry of books purporting to define it… often according to sociologies of religion, and Barna-style self-reported data, rather than according to the Bible and redemptive-historical understandings of words like “comfort,” “rest,” “tribulation,” and even “experience.” Mike Horton has been a valuable sherpa to me in BOTH the need to pour full-orbed biblical content into labels like “justification,” but ALSO for Christians to be self-consciously content with those labels that Scripture gives us, and to not endlessly feel it necessary to cook up new ones. (Among others, I’m thinking of his books ORDINARY, CHRISTLESS CHRISTIANITY, and IN THE FACE OF GOD, but there are others).
It is one thing to repurpose biblical words and phrases (like “born from above” or “propitiation”), and argue from original contexts what they imply for modern church life. But importing alien labels and categories is, while not completely illegitimate as description, tricky. I think I recall Carl Trueman making helpful qualifications with Aaron Renn’s taxonomy “Positive world,” “Neutral world,” “Negative world”—useful to a point when historically informed and culturally nuanced. But not dispositive. If Hiebert and Baker were doing that kind of nuance in employing “bounded-set” and “centered-set” to describe non-mathematical realities, then good for them in doing so. I haven’t read their analysis, and may appreciate their points more if I did. But pastor Christoffels’ helpful review is another reminder to me that the in-vogue categories seem to change year to year… yesterday’s “seeker” is today’s “unchurched,” and yesterday’s “attractional” model is today’s “centered-set.” But we already have divinely inspired words for these ideas. By contrast, and Dr. Duguid’s really helpful comments below prompt me to ask, could our congregants explain the meaning and rich soil from which Jesus invoked the term “flock,” or what Paul meant by “building,” or “family,” or “body?” These would be the better points of departure.
When attempting to describe the identity of and relationship between professing Christians on the one hand, and between the identity of and relationship between Church and the world on the other, we have words and phrases like “sheep,” “goats,” “wolves,” “seed of the serpent,” “seed of the woman,” “weeds,” “wheat,” “preach,” “love,” “Jesus is Lord,” (which has always been far more than a “guidepost”), “in Adam,” “in Christ,” “warfare,” “armor,” “take up his cross,” and many, many others. The cascade of popular, historically myopic books on church life and growth really contributes to this problem of drifting categories. To be sure, it is necessary to explain (AKA “contextualize”) biblical categories in every era. But when we begin adopting new words and phrases, and even entirely new categories as functional replacements to describe realities that God already describes in His preferred words and categories, it is concerning. For just one of numerous consequences in doing this: we waste limited, even zero-sum discipleship energy on para-church and extra-biblical paradigms that bleed off a Christ-centered focus on the nourishing word of God. Thanks for posting this really helpful review and interaction.
I would probably place myself somewhere between centered and bounded. I am much more concerned with how individuals behave–are they reflecting Jesus in their lives, than whether they have all their theological ducks in order. What we are seeing today with the upcoming election in the U.S. are individuals who profess Christ, undoubtedly subscribe to creeds, confessions, canons, and catechisms but disply little of the image of God in which they were created. So I would offer up the question: What is more important, our lips or our lives? I think scripture answers this quite well.
Ron,
Must we choose and why?
The notions of centered-set, bounded-set, and fuzzy-set organizations are helpful in order to warn against potential dangers for churches. A church that is entirely focused on patrolling the boundaries is likely to be unhealthy. If the focus is too much upon “us” vs “them” and making sure that the sheep stay inside the fence without a commensurate focus on the center (feeding the sheep with the whole counsel of God), the sheep are likely to be unhealthy. However, a center-focused church whose attention is only on what binds us together is equally unhealthy. Shepherds are called to watch over the flock, which assumes that they have some notion of who is inside and who is outside that flock. If there are no fences (no clear definition of truth and error, no membership), then the flock is not properly being shepherded.
In fact, the clue is in the Biblical images for the church of flock, family, and body. These are all images that have clear boundaries: ancient flocks had no fences, but they knew the voice of their shepherd, and the shepherd knew precisely how many sheep were under his care; families can add people through birth, adoption or marriage, and lose people through death, divorce, or disinheritance, but they are not fuzzy sets; a body that has no definition to its limits is dead and decomposing. Equally, healthy flocks, families and bodies don’t spend all their time checking their limits: they are focused on building the health of the various members. So too the healthy church is both center-focused and edge bounded.
The function of confessions in the “centered set” model reads much like their function in the PCUSA in, say, 1960. And how did that work out?
What determines a confessional/bounded Church as it pertains to subscription/conformity to confessional standards of the membership. For instance, might we say that the PCA, which requires a varying level presbytery by presbytery by its officers and no subscription by its membership, as “centered” rather than “bounded”?
William I’m not as familiar with the PCA but the membership vows include:
Do you acknowledge yourselves to be sinners in the sight of God, justly deserving His displeasure, and without hope save in His sovereign mercy?
Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and Savior of sinners, and do you receive and rest upon Him alone for salvation as He is offered in the Gospel?
Do you now resolve and promise, in humble reliance upon the grace of the Holy Spirit, that you will endeavor to live as becomes the followers of Christ?
Do you promise to support the Church in its worship and work to the best of your ability?
Do you submit yourselves to the government and discipline of the Church, and promise to study its purity and peace?
(BCO 57-5).
The last question is especially pertinent. I would think that part of fulfilling the vow to submit to the government and discipline of the church includes a belief in the confessions.
I’m a PCA teaching elder–we don’t require members to subscribe to the Westminster Standards, nor do we consider the final membership vow to entail belief in them. I don’t think that’s generally required by Presbyterians of other denominations, either; I’m under the impression that’s more a feature of Continental Reformed churches. Rather, when I teach submission to the church, I teach that members ought not take disagreements lightly but ought to have strong biblical reasons for doing so, and ought not stir up division based on their disagreement (which would include trying to persuade others in the church to adopt their beliefs). But actual subscription to the Standards is only required of officers.
That said, I don’t think that Confessional subscription among members is required for a denomination to be a bounded set. I think the PCA still leans toward being a bounded set–most of the doctrines in the Standards are not up for grabs in any presbytery. But we’ve made the boundaries a little fuzzy (too fuzzy for my comfort, personally) with the way we practice subscription.