The Simple Way and the Wright Brothers

I Love Flying but I Hate Organized Aviation is an attempt at satire aimed at a recent viral video. I’m not sure it works too well for that (perhaps because the existing federal aviation system is doing its job better than the current church), but it is an interesting analogy that got me thinking about Shane Claiborne’s book The Irresistible Revolution: living as an ordinary radical.

The back-to-basics approach to church (and economy) he advocates shares both the advantages and disadvantages of do-it-yourself aviation. It’s new and exciting for the participants and by nature pure and innocent, but it seems like a terrible waste of effort to reinvent everything and even risk some seriously harmful crashes.

It’s an alluring impulse (if not quite irresistible) - to start over rather than carefully analyze what is wrong with the existing organization and work to improve it. In the book, written 10 years after the founding of The Simple Way, Shane acknowledges the naivete of not initially seeking more guidance from more experienced ordinary radicals like those in the Catholic Worker movement. Will that process of recognizing the wisdom of existing arrangements (e.g. the advantages of money over barter, which Shane earnestly advocates) continue in future decades until he leaves behind that ‘radical’ business altogether?

Or is church (and human community generally) just different from an aviation system in that a regular return to the roots and complete do-over is necessary for its health? Maybe the huge losses in efficiency are a cost worth bearing for the renewed emphasis on relationships and basic human needs it brings about. (The economist intuits that such a cost is not necessary, but is there empirical evidence that the fruits of The Simple Way are produced by more efficient trees?)