Everybody is Coming, and the Church Needs to Wake Up!

I've been on a reading spree recently, consuming as many books as I can on the interrelated topics of leaderless organizations, self-organization and the power of a bottom's up structure in the Church.  It began with The Starfish and The Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, then it was Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, and now I'm absolutely glued to Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky.

This is a great, great book.  Starfish and Spider just sort of scratch the surface.  Wikinomics is really focused on collaboration.  But this book does a wonderful job of looking at what I would call the science, art, and sociology of self-organizing.  The book weaves together great examples of self-organization, and Shirky really helps the reader understand the issue from various angles.

I have been thinking a lot about the Church recently and what I see as one of its major dilemmas.  It has a desire to pursue its mission, but it is often handcuffed to having to run an organization.  So here are a couple of sections of the book that really stood out to me.

Running an organization is difficult in and of itself, no matter what its goals.  Every transaction it undertakes—every contract, every agreement, every meeting—requires it to expend some limited resource: time, attention, or money.  Because of these transaction costs, some sources of value are too costly to take advantage of.  As a result, no institution can put all its energies into pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure simply to keep itself viable.  Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says.  The problems inherent in managing these transaction costs are on of the basic constraints shaping institutions of all kinds (pp. 29-30).

and then this,

The two basic organizational imperatives--acquire resources, and use them to pursue some goal or agenda--saddle every organization with the institutional dilemma, whether its goal is saving souls or selling soup.  The question that mass amateurization poses to traditional media is 'What happens when the costs of reproduction and distribution go away?  What happens when there's nothing unique about publishing anymore, because users can do it for themselves?'  We are now starting to see that question being answered.

This book will definitely have you thinking a lot about its application to the Church.  As new social technologies explode upon the scene with almost little or no cost, we are going to see those within the church begin to organize and carry out a mission (maybe even different than what the church staff has identified) without having the need or desire to go through traditional church hierarchies.

Comments

[Lon]

Hey Rhett, seems like we've been reading a lot of similar stuff... i really dug wikinomics... i think they mentioned the thing about transaction costs as well. this one sounds like a good follow on... was there anything constructive or applicable that you were able to draw from it?

did they talk about the critical elements in pulling this off? ie. is it a firm dna? sheer uniqueness? collective leadership value?

i'd really love to see the church embrace some of these principles we've been reading about...