The Most Important Church Planting Book I’ve Read (Isn’t About The Church)
In May of 2007 I was on campus at Fuller for a two-week seminar with my cohort when I overheard one of my classmates recommend The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. For some reason - despite the fact I had a stack of books to read over those two weeks – I found it at a local bookstore and read it that night (it’s a small book).
By the next morning I knew I was going to plant a church.
I’d been fighting this impulse for years and the books I’d been reading on church planting didn’t help. They all basically boiled down to, “10 easy steps for building a high-revenue, over-bloated, top-heavy, pastor-dependent bureaucracy.” I just wasn’t interested. But Brafman and Beckstrom were able to catalyze my imagination where a dozen church planting books had failed.
The authors claim that in the emerging world of the Internet-driven thinking decentralization – that is, the diminishing of hierarchical structure and formal leadership – has become a major asset. The authors call this a “starfish” organization, taking their cues from the decentralized biology of this curious echinoderm, and contrast it with “spider” organization which may look superficially like starfish, but are still essentially command-and-control driven.
There are several features of “leaderless organizations” that give them a major advantage: When attacked they tend to become even more decentralized making them difficult to kill; they spread their intelligence or authority throughout the system, making them easily adaptable to different contexts; and this adaptability makes them exponentially subversive, a dangerous factor in business since starfish organizations tend to decrease profitability. The authors take the reader on an entertaining and fascinating tour of various starfish organizations from the Apache Tribe, to Napster, to Al Qaeda, making a compelling case along the way.
Perhaps most interesting, according to Brafman leadership in a decentralized organization isn’t absent, it’s just earned rather than entitled. Authenticity is the only real qualification for leadership – good news for an institutional church whose leaders often fail staggeringly, and publicly for lack of character.
There are some obvious applications to ecclesiology, not least of which is how these kinds of organizations tend to empower people at the grass roots level and redefine leadership in terms of catalyzing and nurturing rather than dominating and controlling. This is where I found my sense of calling coming alive in response to this book. For me, reading it from a church perspective was both thrilling and terrifying. By and large, churches are clearly spiders: centralized, top-heavy, and leader-dependent.
Perhaps most challenging and frightening to Church institutions (and professional clergy like me!) is that in a world moving toward decentralization, the very institutional nature of the church is threatened, along with the institutionally protected artifacts…like professionalism itself.
So, some question for discussion:
- How have you navigated the tension between centralization and decentralization as a leader?
- What books have most influenced you as a church planter?
- Do you think decentralization is a technology driven fad or a genuine cultural progression?
God’s wisdom is hidden in plain sight. Read ten books on church planting and you come away with nada. Read one book about organic models of organizations and the Spirit calls you.
First of all, I’m happy for you, Jason. Second, your question regarding the book that has most influenced me. I can’t remember the title but how vividly I recall the key phrase: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave – just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Oh yeah, I remember the book–it’s Matthew 20: 25 – 28.
North American church models have drunk deep of the church-as-a-business model. Is it any surprise that we find the church a lifeless organization instead of a life-giving organism? The most decentralized model I can think of is the picture of a grain of wheat falling into the ground, into death, and eventually re-emerging full of life. I believe church planters/leaders exist to encourage and release others into their destiny, a destiny imagined deep in the Father’s heart. Good luck to you!