Yesterday we began thinking about why generational movements are difficult to sustain. We like to sit under teaching, but when it comes time to become teachers ourselves, some are reticent. Is the way we do church the problem?

I’m haunted by something I read in the business book The Starfish and The Spider: the Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. The metaphor is that if you cut an arm off a starfish, it just grows another arm. Some species are such that if you cut them in two, you end up with two starfish. On the other hand, you cut the head off of a spider, and it dies. The book opens with the story of Cortez raiding ancient Mexico. He kills Montezuma and conquers the Aztecs. However, when Cortez advances into New Mexico, he encounters the Apaches who have a distributed leadership organization. You kill an ad hoc Apache leader, and the Apaches keep going.

But as I’m reading this, I thought, “There are no Apaches in New Mexico today. What happened?” Answer: in the 1800s the U.S. Government located Apache leaders and…gave them cows. Cows? Yes. A resource that the leader could distribute or withhold at his discretion, thus giving the leader more power. The Apaches stopped reproducing new leaders, and eventually the U.S. government eliminated the Apaches.

Suppose you’re Satan, and you’re trying to stop the growing early church. You kill a few apostles and persecute others. The ordinary people just scatter “preaching the word” (see Acts 8). You destroy Jerusalem in 70 A.D., but no matter, the church has by that time spread out, and one of the main sending churches in Antioch. You kill most of the rest of the apostles. No matter, the word continues to spread. What to do?

You find existing church leaders and give them buildings.

With a building, the mode of ministry changes. One guy is the teacher. The building becomes the focal point of activity, most of it for the members. The Jesus movement loses momentum. This didn’t happen just in the 300s with Constantine.

The Navigators, an organization built on spiritual reproduction and multiplication, experienced the same phenomenon. On Navy ships during WW2, there were many groups of men gathering to study the bible together. When the group got too big, they would just divide since everyone knew how to do bible study. In some groups, however, there might be someone like me who seemed to know a lot about the Bible. “Bob, why don’t you teach us? You really know this stuff!” So the group changed from a participation activity to a spectator sport, and that branch of the movement stopped growing.

Something to think about. Paul certainly expected the Philippian believers to be active participants in the mission:

Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that whether I come and see you or am absent, I may hear of you that you are standing firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel, and not frightened in anything by your opponents. This is a clear sign to them of their destruction, but of your salvation, and that from God. For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake, engaged in the same conflict that you saw I had and now hear that I still have. (Philippians 1.27 – 30)

And Paul expected a growing cadre of teachers:

You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. (2 Timothy 2.1, 2, ESV)

Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. (Titus 2.3 – 5, ESV)

P.S. I don’t mean to imply that churches and their buildings aren’t doing a lot of good. They are. A large part of my ministry is helping church leaders build the generational piece back in.