"... the typical human being can only have 150 friends. One hundred fifty people in the tribe. After that, we just aren't cognitively organized to handle and track new people easily. That's why, without external forces, human tribes tend to split in two after they reach this size ... you can't effectively engage at a tribal level with a thousand people. You get the politician's glassy-eyed gaze or the celebrity's empty stare. And then the nature of the relationship is changed."
Simple sociology, yet much of God's tribe, the church, doesn't get it. Once you move past this line, there occurs a natural shift from organic tribal mode built on relationship to mechanical organizational mode built on programs.
This may bring some light to one reason why those radical Christians that are into the deeper Christian life won't go to the institutional church and why the leaders of these organizations enter into (although they may not want to) a politician/celebrity relationship with the congregation. Say what you want and do what you will; this is how we were made. No matter how much you fight it, structure still determines function.
Based on this observation, we can say that a church should not be bigger than its individuals ability to connect at a tribal level (intimate, shared life) with every other member.
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Great word.
Posted by: Sam | October 26, 2009 at 03:36 PM
That's interesting; I've never heard Dunbar's number connected to churches. I've heard of it in reference to online communities, but never to religious communities. It seems like for a church/religious community to be truly effective, the numbers would have to be kept fairly low. However, do you think the entire church needs to be less than 150 members? What about different mass times or smaller groups (prayer groups, choirs, teen groups etc)? There's still some good connection on that level.
Posted by: Matt | October 26, 2009 at 05:38 PM
Good application -- I drew the same conclusion a couple of years ago when I wrote about The Rule of 150 & The Mission of the Church. This is also the reason why new converts don't have any non-Christian friends anymore after a couple of years.
Posted by: Brother Maynard | October 27, 2009 at 12:26 AM
Matt-
I don't think so. We could go down this path for a while, but I'll give a general answer.
For example, the church in Jerusalem in Acts grew to about 20,000 members before it was scattered because of persecution. BUT, their regular church life did not consist of meeting with all 20,000 on a regular basis. In fact, the average size of a shared-life community was about 30-35 and then they would meet in bigger groups as the life of the church dictated.
The problem occurs when most of an individual Christian's community life consists of attending services with massive amounts of people and they never live in a shared-life, close-knit community as the New Testament envisions.
When this is the case, the relationships change (as Seth mentioned) so that the other members of the congregation are just people that like the same style of church and same doctrine that you do. It becomes political instead of relational.
Posted by: 2nd man united | October 27, 2009 at 10:11 AM