The Starfish and the Spider: Introduction Part II
Yesterday I spent some time looking at the introduction to “The Starfish and the Spider,” an organizational book written by Ori Braffman and Rod Beckstrom. It’s a book full of stories of decentralized, messy movements that are more resilient than top-down organizations. The goal is to draw some insights from each chapter that we can apply to the church in order to make her more resilient and reproducible.
The point of the introduction is to expose us to the idea that seemingly chaotic ordering has a wisdom to it. The brain is our first example. Memories stored across different cells and not in a file-cabinent-like manner help protect memories from being eliminated. While the process is not organized by our standards, the storage method is incredibly resilient.
“This book,” write the authors, “is about what happens when no one is in charge.” I’d like to turn that phrase on its head a bit for the sake of our study in relationship to the church. This study is about what happens when Jesus is in charge–not just in name only, but when we actually live as if He is the true leader of our churches. We’re not advocating anarchy in the church. We’re advocating a true submission to Jesus that works its way out through the whole body…resulting in a healthier, more resilient church.
Last year I had the chance to read a book called “Anti-Fragile.” In almost all respects, it’s not a Christian book. It defines three types of people, systems, and organisms. Some of them are fragile. They break in the face of adversity. Some of them are robust, meaning they hold up under adversity. But there is a third category that isn’t robust or fragile, but anti-fragile. Anti-fragile things not only weather adversity but they grow stronger because of it. Starfish churches–churches that are lead by Jesus and not by hierarchy–are anti-fragile. They not only survive pressure, they thrive and grow under it. It not only makes them hard to kill but easy to replicate.
Our goal in understanding the “starfish-shaped church” is just that–to understand how to structure the church to grow and thrive even under pressure. The days ahead will require it in ways that we’re not prepared for. Our job is to prepare now for those days that are coming.
Thursday, we’ll take a look at Chapter 1: “MGM’s Mistake and the Apache Mystery.”
The Starfish and The Spider: Introduction
The church that Jesus built was simple, reproducible, and flexible. You could kill one of its leaders and more would pop up in his or her place. Often times the persecution that came against the church would serve to strengthen it instead of kill it. This strengthening happened because in the way the church was structured, it was more like a starfish– You can rip of the arm of the starfish and not only would the arm grow back, but the starfish’s ripped arm would become a starfish of its own. There was power in being a simply structured organism that others fail to see.
This is where the book “The Starfish and the Spider” comes in. The authors begin the book detailing the quest to find the “Grandma Cell.” The quest for the Grandma Cell was one scientists went on to find which cells stored certain memories in the brain. They believed they would find that the memory of your grandma would be stored in every brain in a very specific place in multiple people’s brains. But what they found shocked them. Instead of the Grandma cell being stored in one place, they found memories stored in chains of cells distributed haphazardly across the brain. Not only were memories stored in more than one place, but more than one type of memory was stored in the same cell. It was a mess. The question was, “Why?”
The answer, as it turned out, was resiliency. Storing memories across different brain cells seemed inefficient in light of how we build computers, but memories stored this way across the brain protect it from memory loss. There’s not just one cell in the brain you could eliminate to take away someone’s memory of Grandma. You’d have to eliminate all the cells in the pattern. We think there is great safety in hierarchy, but sometimes simple, flat, even messy structures are the wise way to build something.
The book “The Starfish and the Spider” is about what happens when no one is in charge. Often times the hierarchy we think protects us makes us more vulnerable. It takes a look at a broad range of businesses, movements, and organisms that have no formal leadership structure and looks at how they succeed, even though no one believes that they will. As we’ll see, the things the authors learn as they go on their journey will have broad implications for how we “do” church.
More on that tomorrow…
Recently I’ve been writing about the book of Acts and Christianity’s tendency to treat it like a history book and not a roadmap. A brother stopped by and asked a great question: How has the book of Acts informed how you live your life? It’s a really important question because we can spend so much time talking about the book but not really living out what it’s instructing us. On Friday, I wrote about how Acts convinced me that God’s power is for today and how Acts has helped me understand apostolic passion. Today I want to take a look at a couple more ways Acts has helped me and our house churches.
Acts Informs My Evangelism- It’s hard to read the book of Acts without understanding the primary goal of the church was to carry the Gospel to every man, woman, and child they could. Jesus starts the book by commanding the apostles to take the gospel to Jerusalem, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the Earth after they’ve been filled with the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit comes, the apostles take the Gospel first to Jerusalem (Acts 1-7), then to Samaria (Acts 8), and then begin the process of taking the Gospel to the ends of the Earth. Once the Holy Spirit indwelt the church, moving the Gospel from one place to the next became the priority of Peter, James, Stephen, Phillip, Barnabas, Paul, Silas, Timothy, and many others. They were intentional. They were committed. They were unapologetic about the message of Jesus and His claims, even to the point of being threatened with death and killed.
While I am not the world’s leading expert on evangelism, I can tell you that Acts has informed the way I approach evangelism and the way in which I train others to approach it. We are following a resurrected Jesus that has been given all authority over Heaven and Earth and has commanded us to go and make disciples. The degree to which the apostles were willing to lay down their life for the Gospel speaks to the critical nature of it reaching people. We’re not apologizing for bringing our message or trying to hide the fact we want people to know about Jesus. We follow the examples of the apostles who were lovingly forward about the Gospel because they believed it changed men and women now and saved them for eternity.
Acts Informs My Church Planting- Ever since a faithful friend of mine in college challenged me to build a church planting strategy out of the book of Acts I’ve been mining my strategy (at least in part) from this book. Almost every single page is full of churches getting started and then being supported by the apostles. Peter preaches the Gospel in Acts 2 and a thriving church is born. Phillip shares the Gospel with Samaritans and a new church is born. Every city Paul walks into almost inevitably has a church started because lost people have come to Christ. While there are definitely other parts of Scripture that tell us what the church should look like (Ephesians, 1 Timothy and Titus spring to mind) Acts shows us how the apostles planted and watered the churches in real life, not just in theory.
Because of the book of Acts, our practice here in our house churches has been to see church planting happening in the context of men and women turning to Christ. This is the reason church planting is needed–churches are birthed where people are born again. Any other type of church planting is just moving existing Christians from one meeting to a new one. We don’t plant churches for new believers to come to. We lead people to Jesus and start churches when they do. When new churches are started, we follow the methods of discipleship and church formation we find in the book: We teach them to devote themselves to the Gospel, to fellowship together, to eat together, and to pray. We don’t always set up elders immediately for every church, but we do believe shared eldership is necessary. We try to maintain a healthy balance between serving the body and proclaiming the Gospel. Though we’re not great at it yet, we have a high value for continuing to move and plant new churches, believing that the harvest is plentiful and we need more laborers. If the moving the Gospel is the priority of the church, how we start churches should be impacted by that priority.
These are just a few of the ways Acts has impacted how we live out our lives on mission. I could write for days about how Acts has informed what we do. But what about you? How has Acts impacted how you do what you do?
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 