Home > Emmanuel Research Review > Issue No. 4
 

Emmanuel Research Review
Resources for the urban pastor and community leader
published by Emmanuel Gospel Center, Boston
Issue No. 4 — July 6, 2004

about | contact | subscribe/unsubscribe

Welcome to the fourth edition of the Emmanuel Research Review, a publication of the Emmanuel Gospel Center. The Review features articles, papers, resources and information that we believe are helpful and relevant to urban pastors, leaders, and community members in their efforts to effectively serve their communities.

We value your input! Let us know how we can be of service to you. And please feel free to send us your comments, suggestions for topics to be discussed, as well as ideas for further discussion about any of the information presented here. Our hope is to facilitate dialogue about these important topics to increase mutual understanding and support fruitful collaboration.

Rev. Jay Broadnax
Director of Applied Research

In this issue:

It's A Small World. This month, EGC's senior researcher, Rudy Mitchell, asks how social science's "Small World Network Theory" may impact our thinking about evangelism.

For those wanting to dig deeper, he has compiled a number of web links and a bibliography of key works on small world network theory.

Christianity and Small World Network Theory

by Rudy Mitchell
Senior Researcher
Emmanuel Gospel Center

When we meet a stranger, we are often surprised to find a mutual connection through a common acquaintance or relative. We might say, “It’s a small world.” In fact, studies do support the idea that the world of social relationship networks is a “smaller” world than we would expect. The number of friendship or kinship links it takes to connect to another person is called the “degree of separation.” Since a Stanley Milgram experiment in the 1960s, many people have been intrigued by the theory that any two people on earth are, on average, only six degrees of separation apart.

In 1998, two Cornell researchers came up with a mathematical explanation of small world networks. This discovery stimulated a new surge in research studying the meaning and applications of these small world networks as a part of the larger study of complex systems. Because the structure of social networks affects the spread of ideas, understanding small world network theory has important applications in understanding the growth of Christianity, the growth of churches, and the spread of the Gospel. Creating relational links across cultural, denominational, geographical, and other boundaries results in small world networks through which the Gospel and Christian ideas can spread much more effectively because the degree of separation between people is greatly reduced.

Three Kinds of Social Networks. A “fully ordered” social network is one in which each person is linked to only a few of his or her closest neighbors. This network has no “long-distance links” which bridge cultural, professional, geographical, or class boundaries. In a fully ordered network, messages, ideas or influences can spread only in short steps. If enough obstacles block the movement of information (or other influences), the movement can die out in a network with no long-distance links. This can be good if you are trying to stop the spread of disease through a network, but it can be bad if you would like to see the spread of the Gospel to new groups and areas.

 

The opposite type of network would be one with totally random social links. In a random network of people in the world, you would be just as likely to know someone on the opposite side of the globe as your next-door neighbor. While the degree of separation between any two people is low because it is easy to reach people in different parts of the world in a few steps, there is little local clustering or community among near neighbors. Urban churches which draw people from all over a metropolitan area are becoming more like random networks in a geographic sense. Sometimes, very few people are clustered in local relational ties near the church or in any other single geographic area. This can make it difficult to maintain a strong sense of community or to have an impact on a local neighborhood.

 

Between these two forms of network structure is the small world network. It has strong local clustering with many links between near neighbors (geographic, cultural, etc.), but also has a significant number of long-distance links that tie the network members together across cultural, geographic or other boundaries. If you start with a fully ordered network and add just a small percentage of long-distance links, it becomes dramatically easier to reach some distant part of the network in only a few steps. Therefore, tightly clustered groups of Christians could remain strong local communities, but still give and receive vital ideas, strategies and the message of the Gospel throughout the world by intentionally developing cross-cultural partnerships. These cross-cultural partnerships are analogous to the long-distance links in a small world network. The local fellowships are similar to the strong local clustering links in a small world network. The structure of small world networks facilitates the effective movement of ideas and influence from any point in a worldwide network to any other point.

First Century Networks. If Paul and the other apostles had tried to spread the Christian message to the ends of the world by speaking just to their close neighbors in Jerusalem and asking those people to tell their nearby friends and neighbors, it would have taken many, many steps for the Gospel to reach Rome and every part of the known world. However, the Spirit led them to travel beyond the local areas on long-distance missionary journeys. By this means they created long-distance links to new cultures and groups of people. Clusters or local networks of people developed into Christian communities in far-flung parts of the Roman world. These long-distance links to Asia Minor, Greece, Rome and other places dramatically reduced the number of steps for the Gospel to reach any person in the world. God had prepared the world at that time in a unique way. Michael Green says, “Probably no period in the history of the world was better suited to receive the infant Church than the first century A.D.” [1]

This preparation included the presence of Roman peace and a system of roads for travel, which would not be equaled again until modern times. It also included a widespread use of a single common language, Greek. The wide dispersion of Jewish people in communities throughout the empire also facilitated the spread of the Gospel. [2] At that time, cities also were important hubs of communication and influence. “Paul’s strategy was urban. He made for the centers from which his gospel could sound out into the surrounding area, as it did from Thessalonica and Ephesus.” [3] Paul and his coworkers used all of these factors to spread Christianity rapidly in what became a small world network. A map of Paul’s journeys and other Christian leaders’ missionary travels would be very similar to a diagram of a small world network (adding in the fully-ordered local relationships among clusters of people).

Revival Networks. The rapid growth of Methodism in England and America between 1780 and 1816 also was a movement of God that made use of small world networking. Both John Wesley and Francis Asbury were connectors who traveled tirelessly by horseback, building and linking local groups of Christians into a small world network. [4] Asbury traveled 300,000 miles and “knew more of the American countryside than any other person of his generation. In turn, he may have been known by more North Americans than any of his contemporaries.” [5] Local clustering among Methodists consisted of small groups as well as local churches. Long distance links were produced not only by Wesley and Asbury, but also on a smaller scale by circuit-riding pastors, migration, and camp meeting revivals.

Twenty-First Century Networks. In more recent times, global immigration and travel from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America to North America and Europe has created new Christian small world networks that link the vibrant Christianity in many developing countries to urban centers where immigrants have settled. This has facilitated the rapid growth of new churches in cities like Boston and London, creating what we call Quiet Revivals. While many of these long-distance links are still within single cultural groups, they have the potential to bridge across language and cultural barriers to spread the vitality of Christianity further. The strength of local clusters of immigrant Christians in America also provides the potential of sending resources and new ideas back through the long-distance links of the small world network to home countries through “Diaspora” ministries. With the current trends of increased global interaction and movement, God has provided social network structures that make it increasingly feasible to reach any person in the world with the Gospel or with ministry resources through a few relational steps.

______________________

illustrations: Mark Buchanan, Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002).

1. Michael Green, Evangelism in the Early Church (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1970), 13.
2. Ibid., 13-28.
3. Ibid., 262.
4. Malcom Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2000), 172-73.
5. Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), 171.

up†top

Research Resources on the Web

Where is the Architect by Rick Pressley, a book review of Nexus by Mark Buchanan. The review reflects on the book’s implications for God’s creation by intelligent design. “Buchanan hints that there is a deeper architecture at work in the universe that explains the fundamental structure of everything from basic chemistry to economic principles. While he never hints at an Intelligent Design behind this near-universal architecture, the book provides a very good case for it.”
http://www.creationequation.com/archives/WherestheArchitect.htm

Small World Project at Columbia University. The small world project is an online experiment to test the idea that any two people in the world can be connected via “six degrees of separation.” More than 60,000 participants from 166 countries attempted to reach 18 target persons in 13 countries. Results so far show that social searches can reach their targets in a median of five to seven steps. Success of searches depends on adequate incentives, however.
http://smallworld.columbia.edu/

Duncan Watts’ Brief History of the Small World Problem at the Thought Leader Forum. Duncan Watts is one of the key people studying this area. This simple and well-illustrated presentation explains Small World Networks and why they matter. Includes creatively illustrated concept cards to explain key ideas.
http://www.csfb.com/thoughtleaderforum/2002/watts_sidecolumn.shtml

up†top

Print Resources

Buchanan, Mark. Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002.

Gladwell, Malcom. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 2000.

Granovetter, Mark. “The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited.” Sociological Theory 1 (1983): 203-233.

Green, Michael. Evangelism in the Early Church. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1970.

Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Milgram, Stanley. “The Small World Problem.” Psychology Today 1 (1967): 60-67.

Noll, Mark. A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992.

Strogatz, Steven. Synch: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. New York: Hyperion, 2003.

Watts, Duncan J. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. New York: Norton, 2003.

Watts, Duncan J. Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Watts, Duncan J., and Steven H. Strogatz. “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks.” Nature 393 (1998): 440-442.

  up†top


The Emmanuel Research Institute

Who we are:

The mission of the Emmanuel Research Institute (ERI), an applied research and consulting service of the Emmanuel Gospel Center in Boston, is to make information available that builds the capacity of urban churches and organizations to make decisions for effective action. Through research, training, and consulting, we equip urban churches and the organizations that support their work to better understand their urban community systems and serve them more effectively.

The Emmanuel Research Institute offers:

ERI is working to strengthen and enhance its capacity to provide the following categories of products and services, some of which are already available and some of which are in development:

We look forward to working with your church or organization. Please contact us if you have specific questions, if you wish to discuss a project proposal, or if you need information.  up†top

Emmanuel Research Review, copyright ©2004, Emmanuel Gospel Center. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint any or all of this newsletter, contact Rudy Mitchell by email or write:

Emmanuel Gospel Center
2 San Juan Street
PO Box 180245
Boston MA 02118-0994

Send your ideas and comments to:

To subscribe or unsubscribe: