Direct Democracy
For larger gatherings or for when decisions are likely to affect an entire congregation (e.g., moving locations), direct democracy with a simple majority rule is used as a way to make sure everyone is able to contribute and have a say. The most important thing about the direct democracy vote, however, is when it happens. Context specific decisions often involve a lot of dialogue and an effort must be made to ensure that everyone’s voice has been heard prior to the vote.

In the past three years, the people at Calvary have had to make several major decisions as it has gone from being a large church with its own building in a downtown location to a small house church, to finally dissolving as an official entity during the course of this research. For each one of these important decisions direct democracy was employed. A corporate gathering would be announced and the attendees would discuss the issues before ultimately voting. When I asked the pastor who would call the vote, he said that decisions would arise out of consensus and often there would be several meetings before a vote was taken, but that they were committed to this method. Cody, a congregant at Calvary for over 7 years pointed out how common voting was for major decisions.

And that was one of the things at Calvary was when the lease was up and we were broke, and that’s when we had two months left on the lease and we were broke and that’s when we became a house church. And you know it worked out. Somebody volunteered their house. And questions came up like should we even stay as a church. Should we even stay as an entity. We voted on it. Basically every decision we ever made we voted on. I can’t remember there ever being a decision without one. There would be opinions exchanged and discussion and then a vote…And then later, we had to leave that house and we had the whole conversation again, Do we stay as an entity? And we voted again, and decided to keep meeting together.

About a year after that move the congregation made the decision to stop meeting regularly and they voted to dissolve Calvary as a congregation. The decision to have the conversation and, ultimately the vote, about closing down came at the prompting of the pastor who had received some indication that people were only coming to Calvary to support him and his wife.

I met with the remaining core people individually and they were suggesting was the possibility that the remaining community loved me and my wife enough to support us and they didn’t have any other place to go. No other place with a strong community and lack of strong corporate mentality. And the more I thought about it I was like these are the same people that have been with us for a long time. This better not be about us. Because if this is about us, then I’m killing it. I’m killing it now. That’s my pastoral responsibility. That’s not church, that’s just a group of people who like our company. We were on our way to Olsteen fame (sarcasm). So one Sunday we [as a group] just said, “Okay, let’s take the next two weeks off and just pray about this then come back together and decide if we want to continue this.” Every time we’ve gone through one of these questioning seasons everyone has come back, one hundred percent, and said that we should stay. This time it was just the opposite. We voted and not one person had the heart to continue.

In this case, of course, the decision to have a vote about the future of the congregation was not prompted by some external force such as the funding problems or lack of meeting space that prompted the other discussions, and there was not a corporate discussion as had happened in the past. Instead the pastor called the vote out of “pastoral responsibility” and people were asked to pray. However, this process still yielded a vote in the end. The context of the decision as one derived from internal dissatisfaction rather than from external pressures caused a modification in the normal process for making major decisions, but in the end, the vote was still used as it had always been.

Additionally, although Jeff refers to his power to kill it, this power only exists if the church is indeed about him and his wife. This highlights one of the dangers of these kinds of organizations. One of the hallmarks of institutionalization is that the institutionalized position, process or idea exists apart from any one individual. The goal for a resistant organization, then, is to tie positions intimately to individuals. This means an individual can “kill” whatever his/her role is in an organization, something fundamentally impossible to do in an institutionalized organization. A pastor in a denominational church cannot dissolve the role of pastor because he/she is unhappy with the direction of the church. He/She might choose to leave, but there are typically processes and procedures in place to call and hire a new pastor. This becomes problematic when official positions such as “pastor” are intertwined with one individual.

Taken alone, neither of these decision making methods is revolutionary or even all that different. What makes these the decision process in these organizations unique is that these two strategies merely represent two choices in a very broad repertoire of possibilities any of which can and are employed depending on the situation at hand. For example, in each of the two congregations discussed above, I also witnessed several occasions of authoritarian control, where the leader of a particular group simply made a unilateral decision for the purposes of moving a discussion ahead. On more than one instance, this was met with immediate resistance from a group that wished to continue resolving an issue together, but other times, the group was content to allow the decision to be made in this way. The important point is that nobody knew beforehand how a particular issue would get resolved. It depended wholly upon the make-up of the particular gathering.

During my time in the field I witnessed numerous decisions being made, from the relatively small (e.g., what should worship look like this week) to the obviously large (e.g., how to allocate and spend money). My observations started me thinking that these congregations really avoid using a single, set procedure for making decisions, and this did not seem to be an accident. I found that the heavily institutionalized decision-making process exemplified by Robert’s Rules of Order that most churches utilize is anathema to a group of people who are trying to avoid institutionalization. Instead, my respondents typically embraced the unpredictability inherent in a process driven by dialogue and widespread, rather than representative, participation.

Rather than relying on a set list of procedures, the congregations in this study employed a more context specific decision-making process. A context specific process is one which takes into account not only what is being decided, but also who is making the decision. Thus, the way a decision is made is not determined a priori but rather on the spot, according to makeup of the participants and the specifics of the decision being made. That having been said, there are two modes of decision making that were common to every congregation I visited, open-consensus, and direct democracy.

Open Consensus

Open consensus means that decisions are made by a consensus involving anyone who shows up at a given discussion. Not surprisingly, this way of making context specific decisions is most effective in smaller group settings. The vast majority of meetings and gatherings at the congregations I visited were open to the entire congregation. People were actively encouraged to attend through both public announcements and individual, private conversations. The openness of these meetings was a frequent source of pride and strong point of identity with the people I interviewed and it was often described in opposition to the relatively closed process of church council meetings which dominate governance at so many mainline denominational churches they came from.

My experiences in the field confirmed the openness of these meetings, and it became clear that this open invitation was only able to be managed through a consensus process. A consensus process allows for the voice of the expert to carry more weight than in a simple, majority rules direct vote. This process privileges voices with experience and expertise by creating a more diverse environment than traditional bureaucratic structures. Often these experts are designated as such simply by their presence in the group or committee holding the meeting.

One of the key components that allows an open consensus decision-making process to work is the absence of parliamentary procedure or some other formal set of rules. Instead, discussions are held until everyone is satisfied that their viewpoint has been heard and taken into account. It is important to note that a process focused on consensus does not necessarily mean that everyone agrees with the decision in the end. What utilization of this procedure does ensure, however, is that people’s voices are heard and everyone has the ability to influence the final decision. It allows for the specific decision and makeup of the room to influence the process, because particular decisions will attract different groups of people.

Chris, from Incarnate Word, indicated that this way of making decisions was not uncommon at his church.

Interviewer: So how do decisions get made?
Chris: Well we pray about it and we talk about it. Like some people are talking about having worship outside one week and just do an outdoor thing, or who are we going to tithe to? Just we get different ideas from different people. Because we all value each other because we’re all peers. We just discuss things in dialogue until we come to some conclusion.

I had a chance to observe this process in action during one of the weekly gatherings as the group decided how to spend their outreach resources for the month. After the call for proposals by the person leading worship, Eric stood up from the congregation and said he hoped that the congregation could commit to supporting an overseas missionary from a nearby congregation who also attended their own services (Incarnate Word gatherings are held on Wednesday nights making dual attendance not only possible but also a reality for many of the people I talked with). Eric’s proposal launched a discussion of whether supporting an overseas missionary was the best thing for the low-income community where the church was located. After some conversation, a compromise was reached. The congregation agreed to support the missionary with funds and to devote time this month to a community organization which provided day care for children during the summer.

This process was subject to many of the traditional difficulties of a consensus decision-making process. It took a good amount of time, nearly twenty minutes of the hour long gathering, and the discussion privileged those which had more access to knowledge either in the form of advanced preparation or in the ability to formulate and mobilize arguments quickly. Eric appeared to have prepared arguments in advance to support his case, and a conversation with him afterward confirmed this. The group that was able to effectively argue for dividing time and monetary resources in order to devote time to the community were already volunteers at the community day care allowing them access to information others might not have had prior to the gathering.

While this differential influence is a problem for organizations which employ consensus decision-making as an alternative to democracy or authoritarian practices, these are not issues for groups which rely on a continually shifting structure. Allowing for the differential influence based on knowledge and experience that accompanies consensus decision-making helps to mitigate against the establishment of a routine system of governance.

I have received several emails asking questions about my research process and how I got interested in pursuing research with the Emerging Church in general.  My friend, Daniel Ehniss, a member of an Emerging community in Germany did an email interview with me the other day that is posted over at his English website.  Here’s the link if you’re interested.

The Unplanned Event

Additionally, the unplanned event is a structural way that these congregations were able to compel widespread participation in congregational activities. It is important that we not confuse “unplanned” with another term such as unscheduled or unprogrammed. An unplanned event is a regularly scheduled activity where people arrive knowing basically what to expect. However, these events are not planned out regarding exactly who is to do or say what. A good example of a deliberately unplanned event in many Emerging Churches is the weekly worship. In these services it is not uncommon for tasks, both repetitive and creative, to be carried out by a person who was unaware of the role he/she would be playing when he/she walked through the door. A good example of this is from Incarnate Word which has what they call “creative worship” where supplies are provided for drawing or painting and people are encouraged to journal or be creative in some way during the service. For some people that means actually sharing something with the rest of the congregation.

Of course, this corporate participation is made possible by the relatively small number of people in the congregation (25 on a given week). However, this same strategy of the unplanned event can be utilized in larger congregations as well. At Living Word they have a tremendous percentage of the congregation who participates in any given service. In each of the six services I attended, there were between 15 and 20 people participating in the worship and 100-120 people in the “audience.” My observations about the large participation were confirmed in the interviews with congregants. Megan pointed out that the lack of planning and indeed the lack of even the potential for planning due to a very small and underpaid staff, meant that most people come knowing that they need to participate in order for the service to happen.

“We need everybody to participate in order for this church to run and given that our paid staff is not paid to an extent to where they can be making everything happen and there’s not this huge support system there so if the community doesn’t do it then this church would not happen. Because it is such a small church and it’s such a grassroots thing you do feel very compelled to participate and help actually make the service happen I think because it is like If I don’t do it nobody is going to do it because it is such a small group. I mean I’ve met so many people who were like I went to Living Word three times and the fourth time I was serving communion. It’s a lot different playing in the band. It’s just a whole different level of engagement seeing what’s going on behind the scenes not that there’s a whole lot hidden, I mean it’s kind of like Do it Yourself church but it definitely makes me feel much more connected and much more engaged in the whole process and connected to the people there.”

The interesting thing to note about Megan’s comments are how she connects the way work is done to the kind of relationships that are formed. In her opinion, taking advantage of the unplanned event to compel the utilization of willing labor is a good thing because it promotes people feeling “engaged” and “connected.” It is the reliance on personal relationships which underlies nearly every effort to resist institutionalization. The only thing my respondents seemed to know for sure when they arrived was that they better be prepared to contribute in some way. The unplanned event compels people who might otherwise not have the time or inclination to be involved in the planning of an event to be a participant and offer his/her talents to the proceedings. The unpredictability created by this strategy makes it very difficult to institutionalize any official position (e.g., Greeter, Communion Server, etc.), and thus, the routines and procedures that develop along with these official positions in mainstream organizations are avoided while relationships are strengthened.

In the rational-bureaucracies which dominate the field of religion, labor is organized according to a complex scheme with specific tasks and duties assigned to a position in a hierarchy (known as a job description) regardless of individual desire at a particular moment. In the congregations I visited, however, labor tended to be organized according to personal inclination.

Activities and events were not organized or put on by the church staff for the congregants, but rather the congregants organized events and gatherings for themselves. A labor force of the willing consists of three distinct components. First, activities are initiated by the congregants. Second, the activity is maintained without interference from the official church staff. Finally, in order to avoid institutionalization, the activity is allowed to end or dissolve when there is no longer sufficient interest from the organizer. In other words, relying on a labor force of the willing means that programs are not continued because “that’s the way things have always been done.”

The first key component for organizing a willing labor force is that events and activities must initiated by the congregation rather than by the existing church staff. This bottom up, as opposed to top-down, approach has vast ramifications for how resources are developed and allocated and I discuss those in more detail in the next section. Letting the congregation bear the responsibility for initiating and organizing events is in sharp contrast to the church traditions many of my respondents come out of where the church staff create programs for the benefit of the congregation. Often these programs are developed with input from the congregation, but rarely is the congregation responsible for ensuring that an activity actually happens. Indeed, that is often precisely what the church staff exist to do. The congregations in this study operate in a much different way. Mark, a deacon at a self identified Emerging Church, described how it works in his congregation.

At our church the leaders aren’t going to go “Well, we’re going to put on the programs and bear all the responsibilities,” but they’ll go “Yes you really want to do that? You see that need? Then by all means man we’ll support you.”

This commitment to allowing activities to be initiated by the congregation runs throughout the organization. An interesting thing about Mark’s comment is that he makes it sound as though the leadership at Crossroads could put on a program and bear all the responsibilities when in fact, this is just structurally not possible. There is not a leadership staff position in charge of any particular activity. If a leader decided to start something then he/she would be acting structurally, though not, of course, functionally, as a regular congregant and these activities would be in addition to whatever his/her other, official, duties already entailed. My observations during the course of this research indicated that successful implementation of a willing labor force means to keep control of congregational activities in the hands of the individual congregants so that they cannot become incorporated into official church structure.

Existing organizational research would have us believe that this would come at the expense of resources as organizational actors are by and large reluctant to devote organizational resources to activities that fall beyond their control. One can reasonably expect that this effect would only be more exacerbated when the activity not only exists beyond the control of official organizational actors, but exists in such a space purposefully and indefinitely. However, I observed two strategies, a resource focused staff and the utilization of unplanned events, which ensured that organizational resources were continually available to support activities beyond the control of official organizational actors.

Resource Focused Staff

First, these congregations employ resource focused staff. Official staff positions are kept to a minimum and their job descriptions rarely place them in charge of a specific congregational activity or segment of the congregation. These congregations do not hire people to be youth ministers, family ministers, or Sunday school coordinators. Instead, the staff are focused on resource development. This involves creating and developing resources that people in the congregation can use, rather than programs that they can attend.

A good example of this is Harry, the building manager at Crossroads. I got an tour of Crossroads’s building from Harry who explained to me that the building currently hosts two open mic nights each week (one poetry, one music), an art gallery, a professional music and film editing studio, a coffee shop, a book store, second-hand clothing store, community office space as well as space for artists and classes all in addition to serving as office and gathering space for the congregation. Harry’s job as he explains it is “to make sure that people have what they need when they get here.” He does not do any planning of events. He does not target a specific audience. His job description does not require any screening to ensure that there is agreement in ideology. He simply works to make sure that the space is being used, fees (if any) are collected, and that the resources continue to evolve to meet the needs of the community. As Harry puts it, “I’m basically just here to make sure the space gets used as much as possible.”

Scheduling is done a first come, first served basis, but Harry knows the general rotation of groups (e.g., open mic night for poetry is the first Tuesday of every month.) However, Harry told me that they make a conscious effort to be an available space for spontaneous or relatively spur of the moment events: “Of course, some resources are in more demand than others in terms of space and equipment, but we also recognize the importance of just having space available for walk-ins even if we know we could schedule it out and use it more.” In one of my trips to the coffee shop to conduct an interview, I witnessed this exact thing happening. A man walked into the coffee shop and asked the barista what time the DJ was supposed to start. The barista indicated that she had no idea what he was talking about and that she was the only one working that night. However, the congregant I was interviewing told them both that the DJ was supposed to start at around 8:00. When I asked if there was a schedule of events, my interviewee, Jeremy, said,

“Well, yeah, but we just set this up earlier today…That’s one of the things I love about this place. Come up here and just listen to some poetry if you want or speak some or read your stuff. There’s all kinds of random stuff. A bunch of people the other night were upstairs watching a Star Trek marathon, just hanging out together, and that’s one of the good things that can happen here. It ended up with all the seats taken as word spread and people kept dropping by, and yet I’m know, from my experiences in other churches that if we, the ‘leadership’ had organized the event, it wouldn’t have been nearly so well attended.”

Changing the nature of church staff from people who’s primary duty is to consume resources to people who are charged with creating resources for others helps to encourage a labor of the willing and ensure that programs are not sustained simply because someone’s job, position, or prestige relies on the delivery of the program. When church staff are charged with providing programs and services for congregants there is much incentive for such programs to become institutionalized as quickly as possible in order to justify the staff person’s existence and/or status. Decoupling staff and programming effectively removes this incentive and instead places a high value on those people who can make resources as open, flexible and available as possible.

All of this must happen within constraints, however. As the example with Bob shows above, there is still some scheduling that must get done and some budgeting that must occur. The goal is not to provide a completely blank slate to begin each and every day, to abolish all planning, but rather to structure in disruptions to routine. No organization can be void of routine, but organizations can employ specific strategies aimed at making sure that the underlying reasons for engaging in an activity are always present. Rearticulating the role of church staff to focus on providing resources rather than providing programs is a key component of institutional resistance.

[pt. 2 will discuss the second key component of the Labor of the Willing]

You can find a summary of what I learned about the Emerging Church in a PDF, here. Additionally, I will use this space to periodically release more updates, discussions and key points from my research. I hope that this information can be as useful for others as it has been for me. I have enabled comments on this blog, so please feel free to contribute to the conversation. [NOTE: Due to some initial technical difficulties, many of you may be linked to the archive page. Please click to Research Blog link to the right or click here in order to access the blog.]