Dirk Verburg

Applying Mintzberg’s concept of Community Ships

Recently I interviewed Henry Mintzberg about his latest book ‘Understanding Organizations…Finally!: Structuring in Sevens’. Central in Henry Mintzberg’s work about organizations is the question how they organize themselves to get work done.

Although his research and examples largely originate from organizations in the private and public sector, in his latest book he also describes a special kind of organization that does not fit into one of these categories: ‘The Community Ship’.

According to Mintzberg, Community Ships have the following characteristics:

• Their culture forces the community to pull together
• Members of the community are considered to be more than employees
• The community is tightly knit and operates differently from other organizations in their environment (like a ship at sea).
• The community closes ranks to protect itself from influences from the outside world, or use its position for evangelism (‘to launch missives at whatever they want to change on shore’.)

Congregational church communities as Community Ships

In this post I apply Mintzberg’s concept of ‘Community Ships’ to congregational church communities.

There are two reasons for this. The first reason is that I know these communities intimately (I have been an active member of them for my entire adult life). The second reason is that their structure and governance are unique.

Contrary to for instance Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Episcopalian and Lutheran churches, congregational churches are governed by their local members. Although local congregational churches can belong to the same ‘denomination’ (e.g. ‘Presbyterian’, ‘Reformed’ or ‘Baptist’), they remain independent (just like most local Evangelical churches).

This means that there are no hierarchical layers on top of these local church communities, for instance in the form of bishops, cardinals, popes or patriarchs. Instead, in congregational church communities, members periodically elect members into the church council (the executive body of the local church). Additionally, most often the members are to vote directly on important decisions (e.g. the appointment of new vicars, annual budgets, or investments in church buildings).

Finally, local congregational churches can decide to either split themselves off from their current denomination and associate themselves with another denomination, or become independent. So-called ‘secessions’ happen for instance in case of serious disagreements about the interpretation of the Bible.

A quick word of warning though: since there are hundreds of different protestant congregational denominations, generalizations in terms of structure and governance are inevitable to keep this article readable and ’footnote free’.

What makes Community Ships special?

There are a number of characteristics that make Community Ships special compared to ‘other types of organizations’: the coordination of activities, governance, leadership, and expansion.

Coordination of activities

Activities in most organizations are coordinated by direct supervision (supervisors in department stores), work processes (assembly lines in car factories), outputs (sales for sales reps), or skills (hospitals). However, in Community Ships, work is coordinated on the basis of ‘norms’. Congregational church communities find these norms in God’s Word (the Bible). In the Bible, members read what is expected from them in terms of beliefs, behaviors, and activities, as well as how they should organize themselves.

Governance

On the one hand, Community Ships are extremely democratic. Once members have been accepted (in congregational churches usually after a verbal confession of their faith), they immediately receive the same rights as existing members.

At the same time, Community Ships are the most controlling of all types of organizations, ‘for here the standards capture people’s souls, not just direct their efforts’’ (Mintzberg). In extreme cases this can lead to feelings of depression of individuals (who feel they do not meet the norms on which the community is based), or social control, where members monitor, address, and sometimes even report on each other’s behavior.

Leadership

In Community Ships, leaders have two specific roles. First of all, they are expected to be true ‘servant leaders’, and are expected (‘called’) to serve their communities. However, more importantly, they are the interpreters of ‘the word’ (a term used by Mintzberg). In the case of congregational church communities, the word is the Bible. This ‘interpretation mandate’ can have a significant impact on the behaviors expected of the members. Examples include whether or not civil divorces are accepted or whether same sex relationships are permitted in the community.

Expansion

Once Community Ships grow beyond a certain size, they clone themselves. Many congregational church communities create new local churches (domestic, but also abroad), actively support them during their start-up, and subsequently make them independent. The term used to describe this phenomenon is ‘church planting’.

Three types of Community Ships

Depending on the relationship with their environment, there are three types of Community Ships: ‘Reformers’, ‘Converters’, and ‘Cloisters’.

Reformers

Reformers organize themselves because they want to change the world. As a consequence, they actively need to seek power to influence decision-making processes in the society in which they exist.

Contrary to secular movements like the Comintern (communism) and Extinction Rebellion (climate change), changing the society has never been the core reason to establish congregational churches. Having said that, many congregational church communities have been actively engaged in politics. Examples include for instance:

• The Quakers who actively pursued the abolition of slavery
• The Baptist Union (UK) who called for nuclear disarmament
• The Protestant Church in the Netherlands (PKN) taking a position about the Israel-Gaza Conflict

Converters

Converters seek to change the members they attract. Secular examples include for instance Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, attempting to free people from addiction.

Many congregational church communities consider it their mission to convert people into accepting Jesus Christ as their savior and adopt a christ-centred life. This means these communities actively need to engage with society to attract new members, or at least make them aware of their ‘Value Proposition’.

Cloisters

Cloisters isolate themselves from the world to pursue their chosen lifestyle. Well- known examples are the traditional Orthodox and Catholic cloisters andthe Amish .

Modern forms of cloisters include for instance conservative congregational churches in the Dutch Bible Belt. Although the individual members are more or less are fully integrated in society from a practical perspective (housing, education, work, taxes, etc.), they seek to preserve their lifestyle. This manifests itself for instance in dark clothes for men and hats for women during church services, having no television, a preference for marriages with partners from the same church denomination, and attending specific christian primary and secondary schools.

Well-known and telling phrases used in these communities include ‘In the world, but not from (i.e. ‘belonging to’) the world, and ‘Clothing, Facial Expression and Language’ (In Dutch this rhymes: Gewaad, Gelaat en Spraak’).

Challenges of Community Ships

Due to their uniqueness, Community Ships face three very specific challenges:

The relationship with their environment

According to Mintzberg ‘the Community Ship walks along a narrow ridge, advancing its mission between the danger of isolation on one side and that of assimilation on the other.’ This is a highy relevant challenge for local protestant church communities as well.

On the one hand, the exposed beliefs, behaviors and life style of the members of ‘cloisters’ can make it hard to engage with their environment (’the world’) and attract new members, especially in the form of missionary campaigns. The reason is that they might be considered unworldly by other members of society. Obviously this does not exclude an effective 1:1 approach.

On the other hand, many congregational church communities have become so assimilated with their environment in terms of their convictions and behaviors (‘worldly’), that they lose their ’raison d’être’.

An example are the local branches of liberal churches in the Netherlands. Liberal churches do not recognize a number of ‘core’ dogma’s, e.g. many do not believe in the physical resurrection of Christ, or even the belief in the existence of God. Therefore, they can only offer their members comforting, but (largely) meaningless rituals, and a ‘sense of community’, without a clear foundation where this community is built on. However, this threatens their very existence, because members can find ‘a sense of community’ in many other places as well (the Rotary, fraternities, political parties, Greenpeace, sport clubs, the freemasons, etc.).

Personal freedom

Although Community Ships can inspire people, we also have seen that they have the potential to control them. This control can be self-imposed through the internalization of the norms adhered to by the community, as well as externally, when members of church communities start to monitor, address or even report on the opinions and behaviors of their members.

Leadership

Community Ships almost always start as democracies, and local protestant church communities are no exceptions. They try to retain their democratic structure over time, for instance by not allowing professionals (e.g. vicars) to take executive positions in the organization, as well by circulating executive (council) roles across members. However, in due course many local protestant church communities evolve into oligarchies, which maintain themselves through cooptation. An example of such a cooptation mechanism is the right that most councils have to propose preferred candidates in council elections.

However, this has nothing to do with the specific nature of local congregational church communities, but is due to the fact that every organization is by definition susceptible to oligarchy. For this reason, sociologist Robert Michels formulated his ‘iron law of oligarchy’ :

‘It is organisation that gives birth to the domination of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organisation, says oligarchy’ – Robert Michels

Final thoughts

As a christian, there are three personal final thoughts I would like to offer:

• The place of the Church – I fully agree with German theologian and resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that the Church is where God wants to be, not where we want to have Him: “Then have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them.” – Exodus 25:8
• The purpose of the church – The church as an institution should not be a goal in itself, instead, Christians have a mission: “You are the light of the world…, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:14-16).
• The future of the institution – Our human institutions, and especially our churches, are temporary anyway until the Second Coming of Christ: “And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God’ ” (Revelation 21:2–3).

Curious what type of Community Ship your local church is?

Recently I conducted a workshop for a local protestant church community to establish what type of community they were and which challenges they faced.

Are you curious about what type of Community Ship your local protestant church community is and which challenges you face? Please drop me an email if you are interested. I would be happy to send you the materials!

(Picture: Tower Walloon Church The Hague – by the author)