Interesting:

Fortunately, something is known both empirically and scientifically about the influence exerted by size on groups and the effect of size on how the groups perform. Research with business groups, athletic teams, and even armies around the world has revealed there is an ideal size for a working group. This ideal size is between eight and twelve individuals. This is natural, because man evolved as a primate while living in small groups…Eight to 12 persons can know each other well enough to maximize their talents. In groups beyond this size, the possible combinations of communication between individuals get too complex to handle; people are lumped into categories and begin the process of ceasing to exist as individuals. Tasks than can’t be handled by a group of eight to 12 are probably too complex and should be broken down further. Participation and commitment fall off in larger groups — mobility suffers; leadership doesn’t develop naturally but is manipulative and political.

The specifics can be debated (one commenter said the actual perfect group size is “7 +/- 2″, or from 5 to 9. Whatever. Let’s be inclusive and say the perfect size is between 5 and 12. The exact numbers don’t really matter.

What does matter is that this is further evidence against the monolithic hierarchical organization as the preferred metaphor. Small teams are the way to go, not command-and-control structures.

This has implications all over the place, not least of all the church. Does this mean house church is the way to go? Not necessarily. But this concept of groups of 5-12 points toward the validity of house churches as an option for the people of God.

It also points toward the necessity of larger groups (groups of 100 or 1000 or 10,000) breaking down into smaller sub-groups, and not just for relationship purposes but for vision and real decision-making purposes as well. Churches that say “we’re a church of small groups” but where all the decision-making happens at the full-time-staff or the board (deacons or elders) level are misleading themselves. One church we’re pretty familiar has each deacon assigned to shepherd around 10 families, and those 10 families seem to be the predominant units of the church. That’s a great way of doing things that both keeps coherence in the large group but also sends representative decision-making down to the lowest possible level.

The ideal group of 5-12 can exist as an independent group (a house church) or as an interdependent part of a larger entity.