Neotheologue, the distinction between ‘attitudinal’ and ‘structural’ principles is a good one, but perhaps we can take it a bit further. Let me suggest three types of boundary:

i) There are the ‘attitudinal’ boundaries, which we transgress when, for example, leadership becomes a matter of self-aggrandizement, empire-building, etc.

ii) There are ‘formal’ boundaries which define official positions within the church (the pastor, elder, etc.) to which people are appointed. Here transgression takes the form of not adhering to certain prescribed patterns of governance: apostolic leadership, papal leadership, male leadership, presbyterian leadership, or whatever.

iii) There are also ‘functional’ boundaries, which define types of activity that should take place within a church: pastoring, teaching, prophesying, leading, etc. In principle these functions could be carried out without the presence of formally defined role. We transgress these boundaries when, for example, we teach falsely or neglect to prophesy.

I suspect that many within the emerging church will be especially wary of the formal definitions of leadership/ministry. A couple of points may be made. First, distrust of official patterns of leadership arises to a large extent because there has been a failure of both ‘attitude’ and ‘function’. Secondly, in my view it is appropriate to draw the formal boundaries from the culture within which the church is operating (rather than from the culture in which the church used to operate). I made this point earlier in this thread:

I would be inclined to say that we need to look not at biblical forms of leadership and authority but at the process or principles underlying the forms that appear in the New Testament texts. So, for example, if we suppose that the pattern of leadership that we see in the early churches was borrowed from analogous non-Christian institutions (synagogue, civic councils, etc.), we might want to say that the most effective way to maintain the purpose and identity of a postmodern church would be to consider how analogous secular communities manage themselves today.

So we would be asking ourselves, in effect, how would a postmodern community most naturally or instinctively organize itself in order to preserve the attitudinal and functional boundaries. Perhaps this approach offers a good illustration of your metaphor of biblical truth being focused through the lens of culture.