Why A Centralized Church Still Makes Bad Decisions

Summary: The answer to communication breakdowns in decentralized networks is not to centralize. It’s to improve information-sharing processes. Creating a centralizing church creates levels of importance and saps the potential wisdom right out it.

I previously wrote a whole series of posts on God’s design for the church that focused on its nature as a decentralized network of individuals and cells. In it, I pointed out that…

Western culture is learning that decentralization unlocks more strength, more resiliency, and more wisdom; while the Church is learning that it ultimately unlocks God’s design for itself.  Within a decentralized form, leadership is persuasive, but not coercive.  Decisions are made all over the place.  Everyone is free to choose for themselves.  Organization is driven by a group’s common commitment to their tribe and its common purpose.

We think centralization is safer

So, if churches were designed to operate like this, then why do the vast majority of them centralize information, power, control, decision-making, etc.?

The short answer is because they’ve bought into the idea that centralized organization is safer – a protection against the mistakes that disorganization and loss of control can result in.

As James Surowiecki points out in his book The Wisdom of Crowds…

When things go wrong, people tend to want to centralize.  This way someone can take charge and make sure the same things don’t happen again.

It’s true.  Decentralized groups are vulnerable to disorganization, making mistakes and having conflict because it takes a high level of intentional effort to communicate and aggregate information from all parts of the network well.  If this doesn’t occur, then centralization probably is the better solution. Ultimately, this is the direction most groups tend to go.

We stink at sharing information

Surowiecki points out that this is what happened after 9/11.

Up until 9/11, the U.S. intelligence community was a collection of virtually anonymous, decentralized groups, all working toward the same broad goal – keeping the United States safe from attack – but in very different ways.  But then 9/11 happened.

Upon investigation after that day, it was uncovered that there were missed opportunities to disrupt the 9/11 plot because the intelligence community failed to capitalize on relevant information.

Congress concluded that better processes would have produced a better result.  In particular, it stressed the lack of “information sharing” between the various agencies. Instead of producing a coherent picture of the threats the United States faced, the various agencies produced a lot of localized snapshots.

The conclusion from this observation was that decentralization has led the U.S. astray and that centralization would put things right.

Centralizing sacrifices wisdom

But here’s the problem…centralizing information, power and control saps the potential wisdom right out of a group.

By centralizing in a church, you’ll surely feel more organized and like things are under control, but you will sacrifice wisdom.  Not only that, you will fundamentally violate each Christian’s identity in Christ.

That seems like a drastic thing to say, doesn’t it? 

But all throughout the New Testament, what are we taught? We’re taught that each individual Christian is a priest unto God (Revelation 1:6), that they’re seated with Christ in the heavenly realms (Ephesians 2:6), they are co-heirs with him (Romans 8:17), God does not show favoritism (Romans 2:11) and Christ is the firstborn among many brothers and sisters (Romans 8:29). 

Centralizing creates levels of importance

All of these communicate positions of importance.  Basically, we’re taught that every Christian has the same position of importance.

In fact, the apostle Paul even goes as far as saying that a group of Christians should actually be intentional about preferring the members of a church that we think are less honorable in I Corinthians 12…

…those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor.  And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment.  But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its part should have equal concern for each other.”

So when it comes to decision-making, a healthy church will embed this importance of each Christian into its processes.  If the process somehow leaves some members of the church out or makes them feel less important, a healthy church will realize this and change their processes.

This is the basic issue with centralization.  It creates levels of importance by “organizing,” but it does so at the expense of the conditions a church actually needs to be wise (as well as generally operate by its designed nature).

Advantages of decentralization in decision-making

Decentralization, on the other hand, gives a group or network of people a ton of advantages. But when it comes to decision-making, it specifically offers a couple.

First, it allows people to specialize.  When you centralize, 20% of the people end up doing 80% of the work, contributing the bulk of the information, and holding the bulk of the power.  In turn, specialization is lost, and when that happens, you lose the diversity and possibilities that come from each person.

This specialization is exactly what’s communicated in every blurb throughout the New Testament when the authors talk about spiritual gifts and the church as a body.

Second, it allows solutions to come from those that are closest to the problem like they should.  In general, the closer someone is to a problem, the more likely they’ll have a good solution to it.

Putting our judgments together

But the biggest weakness that decentralization can create if allowed to is the lack of flow of information.  Without a good process of communicating and aggregating information, a group or network won’t be consistently wise.

Surowiecki says…

If a network of individuals or groups tries to solve a problem without any means of putting their judgments together, then the best solution they can hope for is the solution that the smartest person in the group produces, and there’s no guarantee they’ll get that.  If that same group, though, has a means of aggregating all those different opinions, the group’s collective solution may well be smarter than even the smartest person’s solution.  What we need is collective decisions made by decentralized agents.

So essentially, more mature people shouldn’t be making decisions.  They should be helping with the aggregating of decisions. 

Great, so how might that look in how churches go about the process of making decisions?

I’d suggest reversing the process that we typically find.  Typically, one or a few “expert Christians” make decisions and then disseminate that information out to churches.  Instead, every decision should start with a question that gets dealt with by every member the decision involves or who will be holding the responsibility of the outcome – what should we do about {blank}? 

Each individual and group within the church or church network then discusses, dissents, and debates in an effort to get all the information out on the table, so to speak.  Then, we take all of the diverse, independent information and aggregate it into collective wisdom on each matter. 

This is the kind of process I can see a consistently wise church using.

Will it require humility by those that might be apt to seize power and control for themselves? Yep. Is this a more difficult process? Yep. Are the results a more glorious experience of church life how God designed it to be for each individual involved? You betcha.

The rest of the posts in the Consistently Wise series are here.