The weight of top down, disempowering, highly centralized leadership is crushing the church, burning out leaders, and increasing the cynicism of those outside the faith.
Learn the 5 points of multiplication in a genuine movement.
Family trees, not organizational charts.
Be one. Make one. Start a movement.
The Spiderfish - leaning toward centralization
— Hugh Halter, author of The Tangible Kingdom, FLESH, and Happy Hour
“This book is a game changer. Get this down, and church multiplication becomes easy. My advice: Read The Starfish and the Spirit in concert with your key leaders to unlock a Great Commission future for your team.”
— RALPH MOORE, founding pastor of Hope Chapel
“If you want to learn the ways of decentralized disciple-making, then this is the book for you. In this manifesto on multiplication, Rob and Lance have laid the ground work for how to see movement happen. Rob and Lance have proven track records as practitioners. If you want to grow, be challenged, and practice unleashing the potential of raising up leaders, then pick up a copy of The Starfish and the Spirit.”
— Myron Pierce, author, lead pastor of Mission Church, founder and president of Every Inner City
— Emma Jeffery, regional director of NewThing Western Europe, Soulcity Church, United Kingdom
“It’s been nearly fifteen years since the release of The Starfish and the Spider, a groundbreaking book on the genius of decentralized systems and the limitations of hierarchical command-and-control structures. Now Lance Ford and Rob Wegner take that prism for understanding the patterns and potential of self-organizing systems and apply it to apostolic movements to brilliant effect. I kept asking myself, Why hasn’t anyone done this before? But I’m glad no one has. I can’t imagine anyone doing it better than these guys.”
— Michael Frost, Morling College, Sydney
— DAVE FERGUSON, lead visionary of NewThing, author of Hero Maker
IS YOUR CHURCH A SPIDER OR A STARFISH?
If you cut the head off a spider, you kill the entire organism. But if you cut a starfish in half and fling each half to opposite ends of the world, you get two starfish. A starfish has in each of its cells all that it needs to completely regenerate a whole new starfish.
Leveraging this metaphor, popularized by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom in their NYT bestselling book The Starfish and the Spider, Lance Ford, Rob Wegner, and Alan Hirsch show how the distributed structures of starfish networks will prepare today’s churches for the challenges of tomorrow. The Starfish and the Spirit is about creating a culture where church leaders view themselves as curators of a community on mission, not as the source of certainty for every question and project. Imagine a church led by a team whose gifts and talents are completely unleashed, enabling everyone to show up and step up with all they are. What would it be like to see this kind of healthy leadership reproduced for generations?