By Rev. Cameron Trimble, CEO of Convergence
I’ve spent almost 25 years studying congregations. Most still use management ideas that date back to the Industrial Revolution. I mention this as a historical fact, not as a criticism.
In the last hundred years, churches have borrowed leadership practices from places like schools, hospitals, governments, and businesses. We created strategic plans, made organizational charts, set clear roles, and tracked things like attendance, budgets, and participation. Focusing on efficiency, growth, and sustainability has often helped congregations.
Now, I wonder if these old assumptions still fit our current leadership goals. In the last two years, our Futures Labs have brought me together with experts from many different fields. These areas used to seem unrelated, but now I see them coming together around a common idea.
Living systems act differently than organizations. This difference might seem clear, but it has big effects on how we lead congregations.
Ecologist and systems theorist Fritjof Capra writes that “life is a network of relationships.” The health of a forest cannot be understood by studying a single tree. A watershed cannot be understood by measuring a single stream. The vitality of the whole emerges through countless relationships that exchange energy, information, and resources over time.
Congregations work in much the same way. Because of this, many questions from organizational management may not be enough anymore. Leading living systems means we need to ask different questions.
1. Living systems cultivate conditions before they produce outcomes.
A defining characteristic of living systems is that they cannot be managed into growth.
A gardener can’t make tomatoes grow faster. A forester can’t order an oak tree to mature quickly. Living things react to their surroundings. Good soil, enough water, variety, sunlight, and time all help growth happen. Life comes from within the living thing itself.
Congregations often do the opposite, focusing first on results like attendance, donations, recruiting volunteers, or bringing in younger families. This makes sense, but it puts more attention on results than on the conditions that make those results possible.
What if we started leadership in a different place? What if we focused more on trust, curiosity, friendship, hospitality, beauty, shared spiritual practices, and honest conversations? These aren’t just “soft” qualities. They shape the environment where communities either grow or struggle.
The question shifts from how to increase engagement to what conditions allow people to become fully alive.
2. Living systems increase their capacity to learn.
My friend and colleague Dr. Margaret Wheatley has helped leaders by encouraging them to see organizations as living systems, not machines. This change in perspective has shaped my own work. When you start thinking this way, the purpose of a Futures Lab also changes.
Many people think a Futures Lab is just for making a strategic plan. It does help congregations set priorities and make decisions. But I now see its deeper purpose is to help a community become more self-aware.
As people listen to one another, patterns begin to emerge that no individual could have seen alone. Long-held assumptions become visible. Stories that have quietly shaped the congregation’s identity are named for the first time. Relationships that seemed disconnected reveal surprising connections. New possibilities begin to appear—not because someone introduced a brilliant idea, but because the system itself has learned to see more clearly.
This is a key trait of living systems. They adapt by learning. They respond to change by becoming more aware of themselves and their surroundings. The goal isn’t to predict the future perfectly, but to get better at noticing, understanding, and responding as things change.
Issues like climate change, artificial intelligence, political division, and declining trust in institutions can’t be solved once and for all. They are ongoing challenges that require us to keep learning. Congregations that build this habit will be better able to handle uncertainty than those who stick only to fixed plans or predictions.
3. Living systems distribute intelligence.
A key difference between organizations and living systems is the location of intelligence.
Organizations often assume leadership is concentrated at the top. Senior leaders hold the vision, decisions move through hierarchies, and information flows upward before direction returns downward.
Living systems work in a different way.
Biologist Lynn Margulis demonstrated that evolution depends on collaboration and exchange, not competition alone. Nora Bateson extends this insight to human communities, arguing that “the unit of survival is relationship.” Intelligence is distributed and emerges through interaction rather than command.
Congregations have extraordinary opportunities here. Consider how much wisdom within your community remains untapped. Reflect on how many individuals possess gifts that remain unrecognized because leadership is concentrated in too few places. Identify practices that would help make discernment more widely shared.
Healthy congregations still need pastors, teachers, and boards. But their job shifts from directing everything to creating the right conditions for wisdom to grow throughout the community.
4. Living systems measure vitality differently.
Most congregations know how many people came to worship last Sunday.
Far fewer can say if new friendships are forming.
Or if people are becoming more generous.
Or if trust is growing.
Or if members feel more able to handle conflict than they did five years ago.
These questions are much harder to answer, but they might be even more important.
Urban sociologist Eric Klinenberg reached a similar conclusion while studying neighborhoods recovering from disaster. In Palaces for the People, he found that communities with strong social infrastructure, such as libraries, parks, neighborhood organizations, and congregations, recovered more effectively because relationships already existed before crisis arrived. Physical infrastructure mattered. Social infrastructure saved lives.
Congregations should focus more on these signs of vitality. Attendance shows activity, but relationships show real life.
5. Living systems support the flourishing of the larger ecosystem.
Organizations naturally focus on sustaining themselves. Living systems contribute to something larger than themselves.
A healthy forest does not exist for the benefit of trees alone. It stabilizes soil, filters water, creates habitat, stores carbon, and supports countless forms of life beyond itself. Its health cannot be separated from the health of the larger ecosystem.
Congregations could gain a lot from asking themselves similar questions. The most important question may no longer be, How are we doing? It might become: How is our neighborhood more capable of flourishing because we are here?
This question moves our focus from just keeping the institution going to making a real difference in our environment. It also changes how we see strategic planning. Planning becomes less about survival and more about building the relationships, habits, and networks that help the whole community thrive.
Where This Leads
These are not final answers. They are working ideas from our Futures Labs and research across different fields, which don’t often show up together in conversations about congregational life.
For me, the question itself has become more important than any answer I have right now. If congregations are living systems, what would change? I think quite a lot would change.
The questions we ask shape the futures we can imagine. Organizational thinking has given congregations many helpful tools, and many are still useful. But thinking in terms of living systems pushes us to ask new questions about relationships, change, vitality, belonging, and how we contribute.
I plan to keep exploring these questions in future working papers. I have a feeling they may become some of the most important questions for congregational leaders in the years ahead.
If your congregation is looking for a consultant to explore your present and future as a congregation, please consider Convergence.
References
- The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911.
Historical foundation for twentieth-century management theory and organizational design. - The Web of Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1996.
Introduces living systems thinking and argues that life is fundamentally organized through networks of relationships. - Thinking in Systems: A Primer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.
Excellent introduction to systems thinking and the behavior of complex adaptive systems. - Palaces for the People. New York: Crown, 2018.
Introduces the concept of social infrastructure and demonstrates its importance for community resilience through empirical research. - Leadership and the New Science. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2006.
Explores leadership through complexity theory, quantum physics, and living systems. - Combining. Axminster, UK: Triarchy Press, 2023.
Develops the concept of warm data and argues that “the unit of survival is relationship.” - Resilience Thinking. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006.
Seminal introduction to resilience theory and adaptive capacity in ecological systems. - Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002.
Foundational work describing adaptive cycles and resilience across ecological and social systems. - Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Explores reciprocity, ecological relationship, and Indigenous understandings of living systems. - Hospicing Modernity. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2021.
Examines institutional transition, relational responsibility, and the limitations of modern organizational assumptions.
Suggested “Further Reading”
If you’d like readers to continue exploring these ideas:
- Bowling Alone
- Active Hope
- Who Do We Choose to Be?
- The Hidden Life of Trees (not rigorous ecology, but accessible and influential in helping people think relationally about forests)
- The Dawn of Everything (for thinking about alternative forms of social organization)