Not All Churches Have Coordination Problems. Are the Problems Still Real?

Not everyone will have had a negative experience with large, centralized faith communities. Let me acknowledge some limits to my critique. My concern is with mid- to large-sized churches, where most Protestants in the U.S. worship, where outside threats of violence are low. That may not be you, and my critique might not (or not yet) hit home.

I’m suggesting that when a community centralizes its moral discernment, it suffers from coordination problems. These are the same kinds of problems that arise in economies, political systems, and other large groups of people trying to get on the same page about what they value. How do all those people communicate with each other? Coordination problems happen when information does not move accurately or quickly.

Coordination problems don’t show up in every group of people. If groups are small enough, new enough, full of similar people, or under outside pressure, determining their group’s purposes may be easy.

Small groups.

Coordination problems get worse with size, and they don’t show up in groups that are small enough. Imagine you are a visitor in group of people or households – say, a hundred and fifty. You strike up a conversation with one person at random. It’s entirely possible that this random group member knows all the others, well enough to tell you what they prefer and how they act.

In this kind of small group, it might make sense to choose a handful of people to make reflective statements about the community’s goals. While some members might be more talented for this work, any member is likely to have access to most of the necessary information.

This job gets easier for a group of fifty than a hundred and fifty. But, each new member brings his or her own background, and creates tons of potential for new relationships.

So, perhaps there is an ideal size for faith communities, and maybe it’s less than one hundred and fifty people.

Problematic, if true. In the U.S., anyway, the bigger a Protestant church is, the more likely it is to grow. And the critical threshold is at least two hundred and fifty. Most churches are small, but most Christians go to big churches.

Groups under pressure.

Outside pressures could simplify and sharpen the values of a community’s members. Moral discernment is easier if the community values are compelled from an external crisis.

For people to coordinate a response to an outside pressure, the pressure has to be recognizable, and the right response needs to be obvious. Most people have to conclude the same thing.

Arguably, Anglo Protestant churches do face many outside pressures. Anecdotally, those don’t seem to be helping simplify or sharpen our churchmembers’ values. If this U.S. election week is any indication, churches are confused and divided.

Present success.

A community of many people could find that their moral values converge easily for other reasons. Maybe a few people with a shared moral conviction got together and started a movement. Each new member comes into the movement because of the shared moral purpose.

But it’s almost a proverb that movements become institutions. Institutions can carry on elements of a movement, but they have different needs.

Change happens, and time is no friend to initial conditions. Just because 3,000 people get together for a great cause today, there is no reason to believe they will all be working on that same cause in five years. Odds are much better that some will institutionalize, and the rest will move on.

Nested groups.

My own sense of what to do is to shrink the group size as much as possible. That is, engage as many individual community members as possible in moral discernment, while shrinking the role of central vision casting as much as possible.

Maybe a community of 1,000 people could discover its values by structuring itself as 20 communities of 50 people each. Then they meet in representatives.

The main risk of this approach is that you actually end up with 20 groups of 50 people, and not one group of 1,000! If people or values don’t move between the groups, then each group’s representatives become the central group, and they have all the leadership problems of running a group of 1,000.

There is no smaller group than a group of one. If each community member is keeping a healthy relationship with his or her conscience, knowing his or her own heart, then each member is equipped to be part of many different groups within groups. In my mind, that health is a church’s best defense against authoritarianism.

Final thoughts.

You may have a fantastic experience in a faith community with a clear vision and healthy batch of shared moral purposes. That is a great blessing. But I doubt it’s the norm.

The worst of it is, if your community suffers from a discernment problem, and if you are close to the central group, you are the least likely to be aware of the problem.

On the other hand, you are acutely aware of the problem when your questions or concerns go unanswered. Again, coordination problems happen when information is not moving accurately or quickly. If you have a good relationship with the central group – or if you are in the central group! – then you will be the last to hear dissent. When it does come through, it will come through garbled.