We’ve all heard of the six degrees of separation. We’re all just six handshakes away from everyone on the planet. Nicholas Christakis talks about the three degrees of influence—our behaviors have impact on our friends, our friends’ friends, and our friends’ friends’ friends.

It’s technical at times but you’ll get the idea—the powerful influence of relational networks. Movements instinctively know how to harness the power of contagious relationships.

“Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives” (Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler)

HT: Glenda Farmer

Jay: So we have white-hot faith, commitment to a cause and I think your third characteristic of dynamic movements is contagious relationships?

Steve: Contagious relationships reminds us that we are all half a dozen handshakes away from everyone on the planet.

We can see this in Jesus’ ministry; he is recruiting disciples who bring their friends or their family, their workmates. Whenever you see the gospel expanding exponentially it’s expanding along networks of pre-existing relationships.

So the people most likely to come to faith are those who have seen someone close to them, seen their life change recently. That’s how movements grow, how they recruit workers, how they do evangelism. It’s why you see that rapid growth because those networks are already in place and the gospel continues to spread across them.

This works in the secular world, it works with the take up of new technology or it works with how fashion spreads or any fad or trend. It’s the way God has made us. You know the Internet is fine and you can see the contagious relationships on the Internet, but even more important are those face-to-face relational encounters where friends, family members and workmates gossip the gospel.

Until Jesus returns, this will remain the most important form of communicating the gospel.

Two conditions: (1) the person doing the communicating is a new believer, and (2) a friend or relative.

My wife’s grandparents were married for more than seventy-five years when they died. Grandpa was 105 and Grandma was 97. They left behind over 150 progeny. In their lifetime, they saw themselves forwarded into five generations!

Imagine holding a fifth-generation baby in your arms, knowing you and your spouse were the first cause. How effective a mother church is in forwarding itself via ensuing church starts reflects the issue of generational distance. Thus, great churches focus not so much on the churches they have spawned, as on the number of generations they have spawned. Great church planting counts the generations, not just the number of children it has fostered.

This is the stuff of multiplication.

For multiplication to occur, the first cause of new life must free itself from direct involvement. Great-grandparents do not give birth directly, but indirectly, to their great-grandchildren. Direct involvement is the vocabulary of addition; one church starting another church via direct influence.

Multiplication’s quality, however, lies in its indirection: one church setting its offspring free to procreate churches. Generational distance is an emphasis that has rarely occurred in our European setting; however, it is a key ingredient needed for multiplication to take place.

Everybody has their favourite size of church—small, medium or large. But that’s not the point. It’s healthy multiplication that counts. There is no other way to reach every corner of the planet with the gospel.

1. You lived in a port city.
2. You lived in a port city that was Greek in language and culture.
3. You lived in a port city that was Greek in language and culture and had a Jewish community.

Q. Why a port city?
A. Easy access.

Q. Why Greek?
A. More responsive to the gospel than Roman culture.

Q. Why Jewish?
A. Networks of relationships with existing Christians and more responsive to the gospel.

Paul’s mission was to reach the Gentiles. How did he do it? By reaching Jews in Gentile cities.

According to Rodney Stark, nearly all of his efforts took place within Diasporan Jewish communities. Except for Luke most of his entourage was Jewish. He was welcomed by Jews. He preached in Jewish homes and in the synagogues. And most of those greeted in his letters seem to have been Jews.

Hellenist Jews were the most responsive people in the empire to the gospel. They had tenuous ties to their traditional faith and were open to new ideas.

That’s why you find Paul in port cities, with a Greek culture, reaching Hellenistic Jews. They became the beachhead through whom the gospel spread in depth the wider population.

What was true for Paul was also true of the great mass of rank-and-file Christians who took the gospel to the empire. Social networks led Christians to missionize the Hellenized Jews of the Diasporia.

Stark again:

For missionaries headed out from Jerusalem, the pressing first questions were, Where should we go? Who would receive us? The answer seemed obvious. All across the Greco-Roman world were relatively well-to-do communities of people to whom the missionaries had ties—people who were relatives (even if very distant), or friends of friends.

Q. So where are the beachheads in the world/s you’re trying to reach?
A. [Fill in the blank]

“Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome” (Rodney Stark). 132-3.

1. No mission without monotheism
The Jews were the world’s first missionaries because Judaism was monotheistic. Paganism doesn’t produce missionary movements. Within a polytheistic framework, new gods are supplements not alternatives.

The Jews of the Diaspora were very successful in seeking converts. By the first century, Jews made up from 10-15% of the population of the Roman Empire, nearly 90% of them lived cities outside Palestine— that’s six to nine million people.

Christianity was even more successful in evangelism because Christians didn’t have to become ethnic Jews. Christianity offered the world monotheism stripped of ethnic encumbrances.

2. Conversion is adopting the faith of your friends
Conversion is primarily about bringing one’s religious behavior into alignment with that of one’s friends and relatives, not about encountering attractive doctrines. After conversion has occurred is when most people get more deeply involved in the doctrines of their new group.

Most conversions are not produced by professional missionaries conveying a new message, but by rank-and-file members who share their faith with their friends and relatives..

3. Why early Christianity grew
Only monotheism can generate the level of commitment to a particular faith sufficient to mobilize the rank-and-file to engage in missionizing activities.

In its expansion, early Christian mission followed the network of synagogues of the Jewish diaspora. Paul, Barnabas, Timothy, Silas, and all the others who took Christianity to the Roman Empire travelled along social networks that gave them entry to do so, and credibility within, the Hellenized Jewish communities.

Following Paul there was no organized or systematic program evangelism. Personal evangelising was the program. Once under way, this program allowed full-time missionaries such as Paul to assume the role of advisors and visiting supervisors of local churches built by, and sustained by, local ‘amateurs,’ as is fully evident in Paul’s letters.

There are the insights. What are the implications?

“Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome” (Rodney Stark)

So here’s a book every church planter and movement leader should take a look at:

“Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking” (Andy Sernovitz)

Sernovitz’s definition of WOMM:

“Giving people a reason to talk about your stuff *and* making it easier for that conversation to take place.”

Here’s what Garr Reynolds of PresentationZen says:

I loved it. If you are an entrepreneur, business student, business leader, or involved with marketing on any level, this is a must read.

Here’s four of Sernovitz twelve points in his WOMM Manifesto:

• Negative word of mouth is an opportunity. Listen and learn.
• People are already talking. Your only option is to join the conversation.
• Be interesting or be invisible.
• If it’s not worth talking about, it’s not worth doing.

Here’s Guy Kawasaki’s review.

I haven’t read it yet, but if you’re an early adopter or just plain desperate to learn—get a copy and tell me what you think.

Life is relationships.

Jesus knhow important relationships are in the spread of a movement. From the beginning, the movement he founded grew through the favourable reports that spread from family member to family member, from neighbour to neighbour, from workmate to workmate.

Jesus recruited his band of disciples through relational networks. John the Baptist, a relative of Jesus, connected his disciple Andrew to Jesus. Andrew found his brother Simon Peter. Jesus called Philip who was from Bethsaida, Andrew and Peter’s town. Philip recruited Nathanael. The first four disciples Jesus called were two sets of brothers who were in business together.

Jesus turned individual ministry encounters into opportunities to impact whole social networks. The Gerasenean demoniac begged Jesus to be allowed to join his band of disciples. Instead Jesus told him to go home to his family and town and tell them what God had done for him. The testimony of the Samaritan woman at the well resulted in many people in her hometown believing in Jesus. Soon after Levi became a follower of Jesus, we find Jesus and his disciples at Levi’s house eating a meal with the members of Levi’s social network described as “many tax collectors and ‘sinners’”.

When Jesus reached out to Zacchaeus. His ultimate aim was not just to convert Zacchaeus but to reach his family and social network. The meal in Zacchaeus’ home was both a powerful way of demonstrating grace to an outcast and of ministering grace to Zacchaeus’ family and friends. At the end of the encounter Jesus says, “Today salvation has come to this house. . .”

Insight: Movements spread like wildfire along networks of pre-existing relationships.

1. Nuclear: those explicitly and self-consciously concerned about subculture identity.
2. Fellow traveler: those to whom the subculture is a relatively important part of self-conscious identification;
3. Marginal: those who occasionally think of themselves as belonging to the subculture; and
4. Assimilated: those who explicitly exclude themselves from their subculture background.

Here’s his advice on how to respond to each group:

1. Nuclear: Apart from glowing in the dark they need their own church with their own language, culture and leadership.
2. Fellow travelers: You need a bilingual or bicultural church to reach them. You could set up a new congregation within an existing church.
3. Marginal: Adapt your style to help them fit in. Set up new ministries and new groups to connect with them.
4. Assimilated: They fit right in. Keep doing what you’re doing well.

Chaney’s model explains why there are some Cambodian Chinese who you must never invite to visit a Chinese church and others who can only be reached if you do. Why there are some street kids in your city who desperately need their own expression of church and others who need their own small group in your youth group. Why your church could reach some Somalians if it set up a new congregation in the same facility. But also needs to think about planting churches and groups within the Somalian neighbourhood.

Finally, if your church is both ethically and culturally diverse great news for you. But don’t forget about the people your model of ministry will never reach.

“Church Planting at the End of the Twentieth Century” (Charles L. Chaney)

When we were church planting in the 90s no matter how much we reached out, loved and served the single mums who came along they never really felt at home. Then Janine, a former single mum, set up a group within the church for them. It grew and prospered. Single mums started coming to know Christ. Why?

Charles Chaney has done some thinking about shaping your church planting strategy to reach differing groups within an ethnic subculture. I think it also works for social subcultures.

Here are the groups he has identified within a subculture:

1. Nuclear: those explicitly and self-consciously concerned about subculture identity.
2. Fellow traveler: those to whom the subculture is a relatively important part of self-conscious identification;
3. Marginal: those who occasionally think of themselves as belonging to the subculture; and
4. Assimilated: those who explicitly exclude themselves from their subculture background.

Here’s what it looks like visually. The size of each segment can vary depending on the subculture.

Have a think about how your strategy could vary in order to reach each of these groups.

In the next post I’ll let you know what Chaney suggests you do.