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Adapting to a Gift Economy
A Review Essay

Williams, John, 2020. 

Ecclesianarchy: Adaptive Ministry  
for a Post-Church Society
London: SCM Press

ISBN: 978–0334059806

Barrett, Al, and Ruth Harley, 2020. 

Being Interrupted: Reimagining 
Mission from the Outside, In
London: SCM Press

ISBN: 978–0334058625

Reviewed by Scott J. Hagley
Associate Professor of Missiology, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary 
shagley@pts.edu 



Scott J. Hagley—Adapting to a Gift Economy

153

In the American television comedy Community, a college 
student named Shirley recruits her friend Abed to make a film 
adaptation of the life of Christ. She wants him to make Jesus cool 
for young people. But Abed is suspicious. He (rightly) suspects 
Shirley’s evangelistic motives, and he thinks the “Jesus-film” genre 
has been done to death. But after staying up all night reading the 
gospels, Abed comes back to Shirley enthusiastic about the project. 
Jesus, he tells her, is way more interesting than Christians claim. 
It is time to make a Jesus film for the “post-postmodern world,” 
where Jesus is a filmmaker trying to find God with his camera, 
only to realize that he is being filmed by God’s camera, “like a mir-
ror in a mirror.” Shirley doesn’t like it; she no longer recognizes 
Jesus in Abed’s portrayal.

The Abed-Shirley dialogue should feel familiar for anyone 
who has worked at the edges of emergent, missional and church 
planting conversations over the past couple decades. Wrangling 
over relevance in changing Western contexts tends to leave enthu-
siasts for “postmodern” or “post-Christendom” ministry at odds 
with those who hope to stop the bleeding. On the one hand, we 
quote from well-known autopsies of Christendom and moder-
nity, account for the white supremacist, colonialist, patriarchal, 
and neoliberal narratives that formed and fueled white mainline 
churches of the West and assure one another that an important 
deconstructive work is taking place. We are being set free for God’s 
mission. 

On the other hand, we are also members of mainline church-
es, and live with the steady decline of resources and congregational 
members every day. And so we hope to sustain institutions and 
bear witness to the gospel in a faithful and trustworthy way. Like 
Shirley, we desire new tools to update church practice in the short 
term. But like Abed, we are caught in the liminal discourses of 
postmodernity. 

Two recent books, Ecclesianarchy: Adaptive Ministry for 
a Post-Church Society by John Williams and Being Interrupted: 
Reimaging the Church’s Ministry from the Outside, In by Al Barrett 
and Ruth Harley, wade into this ambiguity, balancing the need for 



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new ecclesial structures with pastoral concern for local congrega-
tions. Writing about the Church of England—though this analysis 
certainly holds for Mainline Churches in the US—both books 
show how inherited forms of church life prioritize hierarchical 
order at the expense of missional imagination, marginalizing 
possible sources of renewal in the process. Ecclesianarchy invites 
the Church into a “Post-Church” space, in which decentralized, 
flexible, adaptive and experimental forms of community are the 
new normal. Being Interrupted identifies the gift of neighbors and 
neighborhoods for calling the Church into a more humble and hu-
man participation in the mission of God. Both lean into an under-
standing of gift, in which the Church receives new life by attending 
to its context.

The term “ecclesianarchy” describes a flexible, fluid, bottom-
up approach to church organization. Williams argues that Church 
structures are not inherent in the being of God, but rather his-
torical and contingent. As a missional people, the Church thrives 
when it is adaptive to cultural contexts. The Church of England, 
Williams warns, ignores the anarchic nature of church life at its 
own peril. At present, it suffers from “an excess of ecclesiology,” in 
which church order is “warranted by a fundamental theological 
tradition” and unable to adjust to the post-Christendom, post-
Church realities of contemporary life (Williams, 2020: viii).

For a book that begins with anarchy, Williams’s argument un-
folds with a surprising amount of attention to the given ecclesial 
structures of the Anglican Church. After establishing the nature 
and scope of church decline in the UK, Williams turns toward the 
traditional divisions of ministerial labor. Drawing from a wide 
range of historical and ecumenical sources, Williams argues that a 
contextual understanding of deacons, presbyters, and bishops sug-
gests a more localized and laicized approach to ministry. Pentecos-
talism, chaplaincy and Fresh Expressions provide contemporary 
examples of such flexibility, though each falls short of Williams’s 
vision.

In the final chapters of the book, Williams offers his own 
missiology for ecclesial anarchy. In a post-Church society, where 



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religious expression has become deregulated and reduced to an-
other form of consumer choice, Christianity offers the impossibly 
good news of unmerited grace, or gift. Drawing from the “gift” 
discourses of postmodern philosophy, Williams suggests Chris-
tian life and practice should be characterized by “creative possibil-
ity” in which “dispossessive [anti]structures, dispersed leadership, 
decentred worship, and dis-illusioned ecclesiality” make possible 
an encounter with the Christian gospel (Williams, 2020: 164). The 
anarchic plurality that characterizes these features of Christian 
life witness to “the absurd but liberating truth that as Christianity 
is impossible, so is any ideal of ministry as being an exemplary 
Christian. In a post-church society, the subversive strategy of 
Christian presence is a communion of the broken and a fellowship 
of the failed, a shaft of divine illumination in a frantic world where 
motivating yourself to succeed is frequently the sole, but bogus, 
recipe for happiness on offer” (Williams, 2020: 196).

While Williams offers a moving picture of a decentred Church 
organized in response to the ways God makes Godself known in 
a postmodern setting, the anarchic proposal remains tethered to 
postmodern analyses in such a way that the innovations to minis-
try or structure that might emerge from Pentecostal movements, 
chaplaincy, or Fresh Expressions remains lost. In the end, Wil-
liams’s ecclesianarchy feels like it is in the analytical frame, with 
few concrete practices to offer Church leaders. While he points to 
several well-known emergent churches to provide examples, one is 
left wondering where or how one might begin to form such com-
munity in one’s own congregation. 

Being Interrupted shares with Ecclesianarchy a discomfort 
with the status quo and an analysis of post-church, post-Chris-
tendom Britain that suggests a more grounded, contextual, and 
pluralist approach to church ministry. However, rather than focus 
on internal church structures, Barrett and Harley situate congre-
gational renewal outside the institution. They begin the book with 
a list of crises the Church has been slow to address—Brexit, the 
Windrush scandal, the fire at Grenfell Tower, #MeToo and the 
climate crisis—and suggest a reappraisal of the ways in which the 



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Church thinks about and relates to its various contexts. Using the 
metaphor “economy,” they argue that most congregations in the 
Church of England operate within a “counting in” or “giving out” 
model of church. A “counting in” economy employs congrega-
tional resources for attracting people into the building, growing 
the congregation and the budget. It is a highly rational, efficient, 
and growth-oriented “McDonaldization of Church” (Barrett and 
Harley, 2020: 65). A Church operating in the “giving out” economy 
repurposes its resources for meeting needs in the neighborhood 
and world. It desires to share its many gifts with those outside the 
church to work for cultural and societal change. 

But neither approach addresses the current moment. A con-
gregation operating within a “counting in” economy can safely 
ignore the overlapping crises of structural racism, classism, socio-
economic inequality, patriarchy, and environmental degradation; 
the “giving out” economy can acknowledge these issues without 
wrestling with the Church’s complicity in them. Such crises, Bar-
rett and Harley insist, interrupt congregational life and invite the 
Church into a new economic reality: the gift of interruption.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is interrupted at several key 
moments. A woman who is bleeding touches his coat, a Syro-
Phonecian woman asks him to heal her daughter, a woman breaks 
into a dinner party to anoint Jesus with oil. Each woman redirects 
Jesus’ ministry and opens new possibilities for all parties. These 
stories form, for Barrett and Harley, the basis for the gift economy 
they call “being interrupted.” The Church in this economy lives 
with, among, and for its neighbors; it is “neither anxious for its 
survival and its scarce resources, nor overflowing in its God-given 
. . . abundance. Instead, it rejoices in its radical insufficiency—in 
its not wanting or needing to be everything—and in its role as a 
treasure-seeker” (Barrett and Harley, 2020: 130). Drawing from 
Asset Based Community Development strategies and their own 
ministries, Barrett and Harley end the book with a rich description 
of congregational transformation through relationships of mutual 
care and listening with one’s neighbors and neighborhood. 



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Ecclesianarchy and Being Interrupted help us see that, in a 
quest for relevant missional ministries in post-Christendom con-
texts, the high priests of postmodernism and the evangelists for 
outward-focused missional practices remain too tethered to the 
privileges that attend the Christendom Church. We need neither a 
new, post-postmodern Jesus nor a more approachable and activist 
one. We need, instead, to take our cue from the rich young ruler, 
shedding the “excess of ecclesiology” that Williams highlights and 
embracing the vulnerability that comes with joining the work of 
Christ in the world that God loves. For what is God’s mission in 
Christ Jesus through the Holy Spirit, if not an enduring, surpris-
ing, persevering economy of grace?


