If Robin Dunbar is right then this answers a question I've mused on in odd moments. For a number of years I've been familiar with the idea in church growth research/opinion that there is a church size threshhold at 150 or 175 or thereabouts. It has tended to be justified by the notion that around 150 is the maximum number of people we can really relate to. This would appear to be grounded in the kind of research Dunbar is in touch with. For example here: Robin Dunbar: We can only ever have 150 friends at most… | Technology | The Observer: "within the primates there is a general relationship between the size of the brain and the size of the social group. We fit in a pattern. There are social circles beyond it and layers within – but there is a natural grouping of 150. This is the number of people you can have a relationship with involving trust and obligation – there's some personal history, not just names and faces."
My question has been whether this figure is and absolute related to the individual or relative to any particular social context, iow whether an individual can have several networks of up to 150 people. Robin Dunbar seems to say it is the former.
This being so, it means that there is a problem with using the 150-relationships per individual as an explanation for a church size boundary. This is because an individual within the church 'comes' with a certain number of relationships already in place: family, extended family, friends, colleagues etc. Some of these, at least, will be significant relationships in terms of Dunbar's research. Therefore, any individual in church will have capacity for less, perhaps significantly less than 150.
Of course, it may be that something about the way that figures aggregate may still give 150, but I'm skeptical about that. (Anyone able to do the maths on that one?). So I think we need to look elsewhere to explain the 150 or 175 threshold.
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3 comments:
There was a thing called the Human Footprint that said that the average Brit knew 1750 people in their lifetime.
I've been trying to list all the people I've known, and I'm up to about 800.
And then there's Facebook.
Steve Croft reckons that churches which are structured around a traditional model, where everyone has a personal relationship with the vicar, plateau at around 100, because that's the limit of the number of people the vicar can maintain relationships with. If you add in an assistant you can increase it slightly (I think he said adding a curate put it up to 120), but not massively, because although the curate can develop relationships with some people the vicar doesn't know, they have to have relationships with a lot of the same core members that the vicar already does.
Now those numbers seem to me to tie in to a base 150 relationships total, because they allow for the vicar to already have a good number of relationships they bring with them when they arrive.
Thanks both for the comments. I've a suspicion, having slept on it a few times, that it we need to conceive of church as a network of networks of relationships. One of the important things about that would then be to make sure that church itself wasn't organised in such away as to soak up all the available 'potential relationship slots' of its members.
Noting Steve Croft's thing about 100 people is helpful. It was something I did once know but had lost from active memory and links to a strategy I now recall by a colleague a few years back where he conceived of aiming to have networks of churches of around a hundred people. However, I suspect that this plan would require some reflection in terms of financing. Given that we really should be thinking about 4-self principles in church strategising, then self-financing is important to bear in mind. Given what you say Mark, I think that a congregation of around a hundred requires a full-time vicar if that model is maintained. Of course changing the ministry model would help (eg cell-church) but does require a culture change which may be fairly hard to pull off given how deeply seated it is in English folk and cultural memory (reinforced in all sorts of cultural 'texts').
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