The uses of chaos

Chaotic Order: The Postmodern Christian Leadership Secret Danielle Strickland. Credo Press, 2006.

Danielle Strickland, the Salvation Army officer who preached so powerfully to the delegates at Gathering 2006 in Calgary, has written a provocative book about God’s creation of chaos in our lives as the first step in accomplishing his purposes in and through us.

As I read the book, I found it helpful to recall that the writer is the mother of a young child who feels called by God to live in Vancouver’s seedy downtown Eastside and to found a church in that neighbourhood. The book is illustrated with stories from her experiences there.

Strickland suggests that both chaos and order are neutral – both can be destructive and both are used by God. Her thesis is that God’s chosen starting point, in creating the universe and in creating his will in our lives, is chaos.

God created chaos, then created order out of it, then used chaos (the flood) to judge the earth. “Our best laid plans,” she writes, “our most orderly desires, must often be overturned by chaos in order to make room for Divine Order.”

Strickland contrasts modernity’s pursuit of order with postmodernity’s “dismembering of order.” She suggests that “order simply doesn’t make societies function better,” citing communism and atheism as examples of ordered movements that failed. “The obsolete atheistic worldview of reason is superseded by a deep spiritual hunger for things out of this world.”

These thoughts create a mix of emotions in me. They are very unsettling to a task-oriented mind like mine, which needs order and structure in order to function. But they also ring true when I think back to the way I’ve experienced God’s working in my life, as well as in the lives of those around me. I’m compelled to agree that if God can use chaos, “we need to let go of our control.”

In the final chapters, Strickland becomes disturbingly practical. She suggests that the incarnation requires that evangelism happen in, and out of, community. She holds up the Trinity as a model of chaotic leadership for Christians; leadership, that is, in community rather than by hierarchy.

The book includes 19 pages of discussion questions, where the writer gives us the benefit of her own soul-searching replies. I found these pages very helpful.

This is a book I plan to return to again, to be stimulated and challenged.

Marvin Dyck is pastor at Crossroads Mennonite Brethren Church, Winnipeg.