Of Rabbits and Elephants

He stood before me with a question.

Elephant or rabbit?

He asked me if I’d read the book The Rabbit and the Elephant: Why Small is the New Big for Today’s Church by Tony & Felicity Dale, along with George Barna.

I have.

Though it was last year sometime. It’s probably on one my shelves in my office or in the bookstore storage room somewhere. It was a follow-up read to Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman. Both were fun and enlightening reads, as I recall (though I recall more of the Starfish book than I do of the Rabbit book).

So what is your take? he asks as we stand underneath the shadow of a fairly large elephant (in the bookstore of the relatively large church I call home). And thinking back on the book and the challenge posed by the title, thoughts were uncorked…

I am struck by the “and” in the title of the book. As I initially considered “rabbit” and “elephant” I do believe I had exchanged the word “or” for “and.” As if we either advocate the rabbit or the elephant. Organized (especially organized, larger, insitutional) church or organic (especially small, simple, unplanned, unorganized, serendipitous) church.

But it’s not “or” it’s “and.”

How deep run our dualistic propensities! How often our basic outlook in religion, in politics, in theology, in philosophy, in general, is either this or that. Now, surely, many things cannot be mixed: light and darkness, Christ and Belial, country music and my daughters; but, as demonstrated by Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, how often is reality in fact a creative combination of seeming incompatibles; strands of different colors and textures and consistencies are woven together to form one tapestry.

So it is with elephants and rabbits.

Elephants are big and fat and bulky. They eat a lot (300-400 lbs a day – though according to that veritable source of truth known as Wikipedia they only digest about 40% of what they consume). And oh how they poop. They can and do stick their big noses in all kinds of places – their trunk being sensitive enough to pick up a single blade of grass and strong enough to rip branches off a tree. They are highly intelligent – they have the largest brain of any land animal. And they can easily trample wee things below…like rabbits. Big churches can and do share many of these traits.

Rabbits are small. They live in groups. Their hind legs can carve you up when they feel threatened – not to mention those sharp teeth that can take off a knight’s head when they’re provoked. And, of course, they breed like crazy. They have quite the breeding turnaround (as opposed to the 22 month’s gestation period for elephants). Smaller expressions of “church” (small groups from a few people to a relative many) can share these same traits.

At this point rabbit people can smugly point out the superiority of being rabbits, the freedom of unofficial warrens, and the “free love” to breed and multiply as you please (spiritually speaking of course)…while the elephant people, trunks high in the air like a dandified Colonel Hathi, can look down their ample proboscis at these dirty little rabbits who will never accomplish anything, living in their little holes. But God has created both. Or perhaps, better, when it comes to big organized churches and small relatively unorganized ones, people create the social structures connected within each varied expression, but God authors and beautifies the fellowship and life that can be found in either.

And I can attest to the wonderful, creative, symbiotic relationship that can exist between elephant and rabbit. When a large church empowers people to freely “breed” in small gatherings of all shapes and sizes and configurations without trying to determine outcomes, control the diet or regulate the life processes involved, the explosion of life is amazing! Alone, rabbit people can isolate and can bite and kick the stuffing out of each other just as effectively as the stomping of any elephant church. Any elephant church can stomp out the spontaneity and life and breeding happening among the rabbit population underfoot.

What a blessing in this season for me to see the two not just existing side by side (as much as it’s possible for a rabbit to exist beside an elephant), but to see how the one empowers and enlivens the other; to witness God creating a partnership that historically is not all that common. Historically small groups have been subersive to the reigning elephant church in society – and many rabbits relish that role; in recent times some elephant churches have alternately tried to adopt the rabbits and their culture so as to control them or just utilize their energy for their own ends – but ultimately feel just as skittish about them as elephants do with any small creature underfoot. But how beautiful to see, at this moment, elephant and rabbit moving together to the same kingdom rhythms, and to see God in the midst.

Elephants and rabbits. God created them both.

It can be a beautiful thing.