Starfish and Spider Reflections

If I could name one book that has challenged and transformed my thinking in the last 6 months, it would be the book The Starfish and the Spider. Written by two men in Southern California, it presents a detailed study of how organizations across the world are moving toward decentralization, and how decentralization is the "way of the future".

As one looks at the progress of history, one sees a slow progression away of hierarchy and centralized power. The Reformation destroyed the idea of one centralized religious power in the Western World, and began a domino effect of religious splinters which led to more and more local interpretation of mission and practice of one's faith. The rise of nation-states signaled that the same of political power, followed by the rise of democracy in the United States and France. The rise of the printing press decentralized knowledge of all kinds to the masses. As the communist USSR began to splinter, we began to see a reemergence of tribal culture in Europe unparalled since the Dark Ages.

With the advent of the internet, we have begun to see the acceleration of decentralization of organizations and institutions at an exponential rate. And, as a result, the way we do government, education, business, church, and much more will radically change.

Government
Nearly 8 years ago, George W. Bush ran for president as a "compassionate conservative". After 7 years, it became clear that he was neither.

This becomes especially evident as one looks at the size of government, and the expansion of government power under the Bush Administration. With the Patriot Act, the phone spying inititiative, the effort to build walls on our southern border, and more their has been a huge effort by the military to combat threats by centralizing power and government. In the long run, this is not going to work.

As a part of this centralizing power, we are attempting to fight a traditional war in Iraq in a context that is decentralized, postmodern (the Islamic fundamentalist version of it though), and tribal. Thus, although I believe our casualities are minimal considering other military ventures, we are failing to make progress, and come to any positive resolution. This is because terrorism operates like a starfish, and we are trying to kill it like we kill a spider.

The authors describe how spiders are much easier to eradicate than a starfish. A spider has a centralized nervous system and a centralized body structure. You cut off a spiders' leg, like a human it is without a leg forever. If you try and kill a starfish by cutting it into one or more pieces, that starfish will regenerate itself into multiple starfish. A starfish's DNA is decentralized, while a spider is centralized.

Thus, the terrorists tried to destroy the giant spider of America by attempting to attack the center of its power (the Pentagon (military), the World Trade Center (economic), and the White House/Capitol Building (seat of government). We have tried to cut the terrorist cells into all sorts of pieces, but like a starfish our attacking and cutting apart Islamic fundamentalist movement has only made terrorism more powerful and more of a threat.

Part of the challenge of the future is working to decentralize our government to a hybrid organization that is both nimble enough to function without centralized structure, yet stable enough to protect our safety and economy. It is a daunting task, and has us looking at a scarier future than we anticipate in relation to international conflict.

Education
Last night I was visiting with my mother about how education had changed during the last 20 years as a public school teacher. (What follows is my opinion, not hers) Part of the changes that my mother is dealing with is the centralization of standards of education, and how that centralization of controls leads to a centralization of political and economic power within our education system. Thus, teachers are often in a catch 22. Our therapeutic culture demands that teachers teach each student as an individual and cater to their individual needs, often because parents are either too busy or too neglectful to take the responsibility for their children's education than they did a generation ago. At the same time, the no child left behind initiative forces teachers to stifle their creativity and their initiative to care for individual in order to carry out orders to teach narrowly standardized curriculum, with narrow pedagogical techniques permitted, in order to get the schools to pass standardized tests. Furthermore, the standardization mandates certain curriculum publishers and systems, which means that educational administration is becoming more and more enmeshed with a big business culture.

This whole project is in many ways doomed for failure, unless it finds a way to mandate some basic standards, while at the same time decentralizing control. There is much more to say about this, but for now lets just say that in many ways NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND is failing and losing some of its best prospects because it is going the way of spider instead of the starfish.

Business
The book does a better job of explaining the business implications of the starfish and the spider than I ever could. It uses several examples of decentralized economic power through the internet. In particular, it cites the music industry as a spider organization grasping for power in a world full of music sharing and CD burning technology. And, the more powerfully the music industry tries to control music copyright, the more difficult an enemy they have to fight because the enemies become more numerous and adapt to copyright sanctions.

The book spends most of its time speaking about economic phenomena, and you really need to read the book to understand what they are saying fully. All in all though, it is better to think of our economic structures in the future as webs of relationships instead of ladders of coorperate power.

In a more sinister way, a lot of identity theft functions in "starfish" ways. By having loosely structured, decentralized, multinational organizations structured (now under the government protection of Iran) to steal credit card identities to obtain monies, identity theft is almost impossible to track and to defeat.

Church
For most of my ministerial career, I have served in a mainline denomination that bemoans people's lack of denominational loyalties, as well as former congregants lack of commitment to spiritual community in general. The reason, I believe, may be that we are trying to maintain "spider-like" churches in a starfish world.

It has always seemed interesting to me that churches can have amazing diversity of opinion on issues such as predestination/free will, homosexuality, modes of baptism, ways of interpreting scripture, types of music that are sung, and much more, but when it comes to tithing nearly all church leadership clings to a narrow, fundamental interpretation of primarily Old Testament biblical texts. Why? Although they want freedoms in several ways, they still want the centralized power and control of financial resources. (This result is not necessarily a bad thing in that it allows united mission and care of a congregation(s) when done ethically).

Also interesting is the search for the universally magic program and method. Your church may be struggling, pastors are told, but if you do a Purpose-Driven Life program your church will thrive just like Saddleback Church with its 20,000+ people a week in Southern California. Instead of the starfish-like method of having a missional approach of going out and forming networks of relationships, we look for a magic bullet that will have people come in. When the big programs work, like it has to a certain extent in our church, it is because the DNA of the church has been shared with more and more of the congregation, thus allowing it to grow and muliply itself in each persons life.

The "starfish and spider" way of looking at the world is why I see the future of many churches tied to shared leadership, the letting go of control from the top of church and faith-based organizations, and the development of healthy small groups within congregations.

I also think the way churches share Christ with others is dramatically affected by this transition in our world and global culture. This is best illustrated with my transition from a traditional small town in Montana to a suburban/city culture in a culture in Colorado saturated with evangelical Christianity.

The small town in Montana had centralized places where you could connect with a lot of people all at once. Whether it was school activities, or community functions, I could go to certain functions and make contact with 10 church families, visit with folks I did not know in a non-threatening way, and be a visible presence of God's grace to hundreds of people in a very short time.

Colorado is quite different. There are very few places where large amounts of students are both visible and are open to forming relationships. When there are a lot of youth gathered in one place, they are not as open to getting to know and build relationships with strange adults (Their are several good reasons for this...if you doubt me watch TO CATCH A PREDATOR on MSNBC). Ministry is essentially tribal here. This means if you get connected with a tribe of students, you have the possibility of having a ministry with that tribe of people.

When we grow at FBCCS, whether with youth or adults, it is because we have built a relationship with a person who is connected to a tribe or tribes of people. Also unique to Colorado Springs is the saturation of evangelical christianity, which muliplies the suspicion and animosity of people not connected with a spiritual community.

Even without that dynamic, we are challenged to look at doing more and more ministry in decentralized ways. This means less big box advertising and marketing, and more ministry like what my friend Ken is doing with Coffee Tunes. Coffee Tunes is creating an online meeting space on our church website for a community of people (coffee shop owners, performers, and customers) that did not exist in our community. We then plan to have a "best of" performance in our church once a month. By building relationships without playing the power games of mass marketing we may be able to make a big difference.

Ministry like Montana is more and more of an anachronism. Ministry like Colorado is more and more of the challenge that churches face in the future no matter where their location.

There is much more I could say on this...but this is already my longest post of all time.