I'm currently reading "The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations" and am enjoying every word of it. It's a leadership book, a genre I usually despise, but this one takes a look at things from such a fresh angle. It's not a "Christian" book (whatever that means), but I'm constantly left dreaming about how their thoughts could or would look in the Church.
The chapter I just finished reading, chapter three, was all about the benefits of decentralized organizations. It talked about things such as craigslist and wikipedia and about a festival in the Neveda desert called Burning Man. Each one of them is user driven, developed, and policed. Because of how they operate they end up giving the user more than a top down profit driven organization could ever give you. Here's a quote from the last paragraph of the chapter, "When you give people freedom, you get chaos, but you also get incredible creativity. Because everyone tries to contribute to the community, you get a great variety of expression."
As I read that I thought about Ben and Sarah who I'm a part of a church with. They are always dreaming about creative things they would like to do in the context of our lives together. This past fall they decided to have a harvest party. I think most of us who got invited thought it was a strange idea when we got invited and may have even made fun of the idea (I apologize). But when we showed up, in somewhat formal attire, for parlor games, old fashioned line dancing, and good food we all had a blast. Sarah even had a short, but profound, devotional about why we celebrate the harvest that I still think about months later.
What if church gave freedom for people to lead, create, and develop in this way. What if we all had the freedom to contribute in this way without having to go through a hiarchical structure first? A friend told me, "But Ben and Sarah are your friends, and friends always act in such a way." Exactly! What if as a church we adopted this for a model for how we lived life together? Where what Ben and Sarah did wasn't the exception, but the norm? Where it was understood that if no one is contributing then no one will receive anything? But this can't happen if the leader (me) expects everything to flow from him. This can only happen if everybody understands that everything flows from the leader (Jesus) who speaks to all, so all must be listened to and given the freedom to do new things.
A good friend once said, "Leadership in our context is someone taking the lead in a given area."
2 comments:
you're about caught up with me! I got a little sidetracked with Christmas and a new theology book! I'll get back to it. Keep updating us with your thoughts!
I read this book (did I tell you about this one?) and I like this book conceptually. I think starfish is a great model for the church, but I do see many larger national ministries and denominations being Spider or even some sort of hybrid.
My boss says our organization is becoming a spiderfish. The issue is he wants us to own more of the financial development (starfish), but he still wants to be mehind the decisions made with each program (spider).
So there is a learning curve and it's definitely something to shoot for, but I think for the church it's a concept that adapts well to various subcultures and communities.
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