The Space In Between: Striking the Balance of Structure

I once saw a video where someone (I’m pretty sure it was Hillsong’s guitar legend Nigel Hendroff) was talking about what makes a great guitar. I’ve tried to find this video, but to no avail. Thankfully, I’ve got the gist of what was said etched in my memory. Hendroff was talking about a conversation he had with Bob Taylor, the founder of Taylor guitars, arguably the best acoustic guitar brand in the world. Bob had said to Nigel that a great guitar needs to have just enough structure so that it doesn’t fall apart, and that the air can move around in the hollow body of the acoustic guitar. If the guitar has too much structure, it can squash the sound of the guitar, taking the depth out of the sound. The aim, so my memory tells me, was for the guitar to be just short of falling apart. It’s at that point where the best sound is.

What does this have to do with church? It turns out, quite a lot. A church needs enough structure so the whole thing doesn’t fall apart, but too much structure can squeeze the life out of the church. Let’s have a look at what each one looks like.

Not Enough Structure

When a church doesn’t have enough structure, chaos abounds. These kinds of churches haven’t sorted out the basics: Policies, procedures, governance etc. There’s no structure for discipleship, no strategy for leadership development, no way to help new people get integrated into the life of the church. This is normally the case when the church is young. And to be honest, when a church has just launched, a church can’t have all of these things in place. It’s a fun place to be, for now… but as the church grows, that early “we don’t know what we’re doing” energy soon drains. Les McKeown, in his excellent book Predictable Success, talks about the stages of “The Early Struggle” and “Fun”, but as soon as the church starts to grow beyond a certain size, complexity hits, that’s when the church hits “whitewater”, the dangerous waters where what worked in earlier stages doesn’t work now. What the church is crying out for is structure. But as with the guitar analogy, there’s a risk: Too much Structure.

Too Much Structure

A church that is overstructured has policies and procedures galore, but the policies run the church, not the other way around. In overly structured churches, the congregation are always in meetings: Sunday morning, Sunday night, Monday night, Wednesday night! It starts to squeeze the life out of the church. Suddenly you find that the church is “doing” lots of things just to keep the church running. McKeown calls this “treadmill” and he’s right, it’s like running on a treadmill… lots of work, very little progress. If you’re on this treadmill, you can work your way back to the sweet spot, Predictable Success, but it’s going to involve reigniting some of the earlier spark of creativity within the church. There is a warning however, if you don’t change, soon enough you’ll not want to change, and you’ll be unable to diagnose what’s even wrong. McKeown calls this “The Big Rut” and once you hit here, it will take a regime change to save the church. That regime change can be within your own heart, of course, we serve a God who is all about resurrection, so I’m not saying it is fatal, but unless you change, or more precisely, allow the Holy Spirit to change you, the church is heading towards inevitable decline and death.

The Space In Between

The ideal space is the space in between. A big revelation here is that with an acoustic guitar, the majority of the guitar is air. It’s the same with the church. Most of what the church is supposed to be should be happening outside of a formal setting. We all know and agree that the church isn’t the building, it’s the people, but when we are over-structured, we make it about the building, or better put, we make it about the organisation. The mistake we make is that we think of the church as an organisation when its not. There are organisational aspects about a church, of course, but that’s just like the body of the acoustic guitar, it’s the space in between that makes the sound. What do I mean by that? Real church happens outside of the meetings, it’s when people move from attending to being in community. When someone has a community of friends, most of the pastoral needs will be met within that community, rather than the “organisation” needing to step in to do pastoral care.

We often think that we need to find the perfect group structure so that we can facilitate relationships, but in reality, the true test of a friendship is whether it can survive outside of the meeting. Think about how many work friends you’ve kept once one of you have moved on. The test of community is whether it can happen outside of the formal structure.

So how do we help people make true, lasting friendships that thrive in the space in between? Well, it’s a delicate balance of enough structure, but not too much. We need enough structure so that people are growing in their faith and have the opportunity to make friends, but not too much structure that the meetings are the only place where that happens. That will mean different things in different contexts.

A 2018 study from the University of Kansas shows that it takes 40-60 hours for two people to become casual friends, 90-100 hours to be friends and 200+ hours to become good friends.  The good news is, the more time people spend together, the more time people want to spend together, so our church meetings shouldn’t be be where the 90-100 hours are racked up. If we can provide environments where people can meet others with similar interests, then friendships can form outside of that structure, as long as we’re not stealing their time by making them be in church meetings.

The Holy Spirit wants to make a beautiful sound through your church, but that sound will happen best when the church can strike the balance of structure.