The Starfish and the Spider: On Napster and Apache Leadership
[Editor’s Note: If you’re just joining us, we are in the middle of reading through “The Starfish and the Spider” by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. Each Monday and Thursday I’ll summarize a few important principles from a chapter in the book. Each Tuesday and Friday, I’ll apply those principles to the starfish-shaped church I believe the Lord is building in the Earth.]
The first chapter “MGM’s mistake and the Apache Mystery” starts off the book describing a problem that started to plague the music industry around the turn of the century. Tired of paying for music and having to drive down the street to pick up the next movie, enterprising technologists began to develop peer to peer (P2P) sites that allowed users to trade music and movie files. This essentially allowed people acquire music or watch movies for free and it began to hit production companies hard. Compared to a company like MGM, these P2P sites were small potatoes, but they were responsible for a 25% loss of revenue to the recording industry.
So what did MGM and its other corporate counterparts do? They decided to sue. And they sued big time, taking their cases all the way up to the Supreme Court. They hired the best attorneys to pursue not just those who were pirating the music, but also the sites that were allowing the pirates to trade music between each other. The goal was to stop the practice altogether, but a curious thing happened–the more MGM won cases against the thieves and the P2P sites that operated on them, the more widespread the problem became.
Why? Brafman and Beckstrom find the answer in the history of the Spanish conquistadors. Hernando Cortez was sent to Mexico to acquire land and resources. When he came to Tenochtitlan, he met with the Emporer, killed him, and took over the Aztec nation. A similar conquest of the Inca’s was enacted several years later by Francisco Pizaro. This continued until 1680’s when the Spanish headed north and encountered the Apaches. Upon reaching the much-less-civilized-looking Apaches, the conquest of the continent stopped and remained at a stand still for hundreds of years.
The secret, according to Tom Nevins, an anthropologist who has lived among the Apaches, was the way in which their community was formed. Instead of a centralized government where power is held by very few people, the Apaches were lead by Nant’an. These were social and spiritual leaders who led by example. No one could be elected a Nant’an. Apaches would follow Nant’ans based on the wisdom they saw in their lifestyle. This made the Apaches incredibly hard for the Spanish to fight. There were no Emporers to kill to take over the Apaches. Kill one Nant’an and two or three more would rise in his place. The decentralization that characterized the Apaches made them immune from the attacks that worked so well in a centralized society. Surprisingly, not only did attacks on the Apaches not destroy them, but it made them stronger. The more they were attacked, the more decentralized they became.
And here is where our authors teach us the first major principle of decentralization: “When attacked, a decentralized organization tends to become even more open and more decentralized.” They go on to explain how this has happened within the music industry. MGM and other companies continue to sue P2P sites. Every time they win, the P2P site close down, but the community becomes more grass roots and more decentralized, effectively making them harder to track and bringing more attention to the “cause” of free music. While the music industry is winning court cases, they are shelling out massive amounts of money. The glory days of making the money they were once used to are over. Meanwhile, the P2P sites get more decentralized and harder to track down…
What does all of this mean for the church? Well, there are some profound implications that we’ll look at tomorrow…
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 