Leveraging the metaphor Ori Brafman popularized in his NYT best-selling book, The Starfish and the Spider, Rob Wegner, Lance Ford, and Alan Hirsch show why the distributed structures of starfish organizations are uniquely fit to the church. They can function without a rigid central authority, and their regenerative abilities make them nimbler in reacting to external forces. Seeding starfish networks inside today’s churches will prepare the church of tomorrow to be agile while still maintaining the necessary accountability to be effective.
Rather than advocating the adoption of a starfish structure in place of the hierarchy of the spider, Wegner, Ford, and Hirsch emphasize the advantages of adapting the structure and order inherent in a spider organization toward a hybrid model–either a Spiderfish approach (leaning toward centralization) or a Starder approach (leaning toward decentralization).
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