The Power of Leaderless Churches
I recently read the book The Starfish and the Spider, and thought it provided some interesting lessons on leadership in organizations.
The concept of the book is based upon a simple observation:
If you cut off the leg of a spider, you will slow it down. It you cut its head, it will quickly die. Certain starfish are completely different. If you cut off the leg, that leg can grow itself into a new starfish. If you cut it into eight pieces, eight starfish can grow from the stumps.
This is the main metaphor that the authors use to compare different kinds of organizations.
Highly structured top-down companies like GE and MGM are compared to the spiders, where as companies like wikipedia, youtube, and grokster are compared to the starfish.
Concerning how this applies to church work, there are varied opinions. Lane Douglas feels that the best application of this principle means that decision-making should be a decentralized process. The pastor should have less power, and more decisions should be made on the ground level. Tod Bolsinger sees the spider as being large churches, where as “organic” house-churches are the starfish.
I’d like to point out a slightly different application that I see concerning small groups. I think the truest incarnation of the starfish model is the rise of cell-based holistic groups around the world. All of the top churches in the world are cell churches. They multiply rather quickly, are extremely decentralized, and could very easily survive the loss of many levels of leadership. Outside of the U.S., this is the predominant model that is thriving.
Within North America, though, this model has not caught much traction. There are several cell churches here in the U.S., but by far, the largest churches here seem to be using a system of affinity groups. These are groups that can be based on any number of different “affinities” or “interests” such as basket-weaving, studying biblical finances, dog-training, or football.
The genius of this method is that it truly decentralizes not only the structure, but also the topic and information. Cell groups only decentralize the structure, but the overall information is largely quite centralized, with many churches giving the outlines of what should be studied during the week. Whereas in an affinity-group based churches, people develop different kinds of small groups based upon their gifts, interests, and outreach opportunities.
We haven’t yet implemented the affinity-based model, but I believe we will be transitioning to that in a few months. We’ve tried the cell-group model, and it just didn’t seem like the most effective way to reach people and to meet the needs of people across the faith spectrum.
What have you tried concerning small groups? What’s working for you? What’s not working?
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are you one some kind of speed-reading plan that I don’t know about?
Hahaha….I have been reading a little more than I did in the past. This particular book I read a few weeks ago. But I was encouraged by a couple of guys. Bob Franquiz read about 90 books last year, while Nelson Searcy read over 200. They just set goals for themselves, and created space so they can accomplish it. I’ve just set a goal for myself to do a book a week. I devote one hour per day. You’d be surprised how much you can cover in an hour of focused reading. As far as reviews on the blog here, I only do reviews of books that I think directly apply to the main topic of the blog, leadership and technology in the context of outreach.