I’ve been working on a new version of the mixed ecology trellis.. it’s made me think about the personality of institutions and how elements of church relate to one another. one of the ways that plays out is the kind of love hate relationship between movements and institutions. Too often they are are opponents in a zero-sum game. It is an illusion the church returns to with remarkable consistency and one that plays out like the worst type of relational breakdown which repeatedly leaves both sides thinner than they imagine.

The truth is more demanding, and perhaps more beautiful, movements and institutions are not rivals. They are bound together in something closer to a romance. Drawn to one another, frustrated by one another, shaped by one another and, when at their best, quietly committed to one another’s flourishing. But inevitably like any enduring relationship, the question is not whether there is tension, but how that tension plays out.

From the beginning, the attraction is obvious. Movements carry life, energy, imagination, risk, the sense that God might be doing something new. Institutions carry depth, memory, stability, the wisdom of what has been tested and held over time. Each sees in the other something it does not possess, maybe the newness is the spark, maybe the need to held by something bigger.

Missiologists call it model and sodal forms of church. We first see the tension play out in Acts: the wild expansion of the early movement gradually held within emerging structures that allow it to remain coherent. We see it in monastic communities, offering renewal to a drifting church and then, over time, becoming part of the very fabric they once disrupted. We see it in the Reformers, in Wesley, in Pentecostalism: again and again, a movement arises that needs, eventually, the very forms it once resisted. These patterns fit what complexity theorists describe as emergence, self-organization, and co-evolution in adaptive systems.

However as the relationship matures like many human relationships what begins as attraction often turns, quite quickly, into irritation. The differences that once felt complementary begin to feel incompatible. Institutions experience movements as destabilising, unpredictable, unwilling to commit. Movements experience institutions as controlling, slow, overly concerned with preservation.

And so the romance cools into critique. Each begins to speak about the other as other rather than to one another. Each becomes more convinced of its own necessity, and less curious about what the other might offer. Organisational narcissism quietly takes root, which at its worst shows up saying we are not just part of the story we are the answer.

That is exactly the kind of closuring down, systems theory warns about. Open systems stay in exchange with their environment; closed systems protect themselves so tightly that they lose adaptive capacity. In complexity terms, closed systems may look more stable for a season, but they become brittle, less able to learn, less able to respond, and eventually less alive.

The sad thing is that what makes the institutional/movement relationship so vivid is also what can make both so dull. It is not a dispute over style but a revelation about the posture at the heart and an exposure of whether the church (movement or institution) will remain open enough to be changed, to give and receive love.

Edwin Friedman’s systems thinking is useful here, he suggests that “chronic anxiety is systemic” and names what happens when an organisation becomes trapped in self-protective reactivity rather than relationship. In that state, every difference becomes a threat, every challenge becomes a crisis, and every conversation becomes an attempt to manage rather than to learn. The result is closure or shutting the other out disguised as wisdom.

Bowen Family Systems Theory gives another key insight: differentiation is not distance; it is the ability to stay connected while remaining a self. That matters here because the mature relationship between institution and movement is not fusion and not severance. It is the capacity to remain in relationship without collapse, manipulation, or mimicry. I think Relational therapy sharpens this further. In relational approaches, healing depends on mutual influence, not one-way expertise. Change happens when both parties are real to one another, when each is willing to be affected, and when the relationship itself becomes the site of transformation. That is a powerful description of what the church needs between institutions and movements: not just cooperation, but mutuality.

This is where the romance metaphor becomes more than decoration. Healthy relationships are marked by the desire that the other thrives, not merely survives. A real desire that is not sentimental; but that it is the opposite of possession, a passionate desire for the other to become more fully itself, even when that costs you control.

Imagine institutions that truly desire movements to flourish, not as experiments to be contained or used to prop up our own failures, but as vital partners in the church’s future. Imagine movements that genuinely desire institutions to flourish, not as relics to be tolerated, but as carriers of memory, sacrament, and continuity.

Real love is powerful and real mutual desire might actually change the bankruptcy of the current system. It keeps the relationship open. It reduces the need for defensiveness. It makes learning possible. It lets each side receive from the other without humiliation.

This is why spaces like Fresh Expressions matter so much. They are not simply innovative church initiatives; they are collision spaces. Brave spaces. Places where inherited structures and emerging communities are brought together not to flatten their differences, but to let them speak. In a complex system, that kind of contact is how new patterns emerge.

We also need a dose of reality here because the modern world makes this unavoidable. Organisations, institutions, and movements are all complex adaptive systems, not machines. They evolve through feedback, interdependence, and adaptation, not through top-down certainty. That means the church cannot survive by shutting itself away in closed loops of self-reference,and movements can’t survive by thinking they are the answer, both must remain porous, relational, and open to what it does not yet know.

So the issue is not whether institution and movement can get along by agreeing on everything. The issue is whether they can remain open enough to one another to be changed by one another and love one another enough to mutually flourish even when that means letting go.