Learning to understand human communities (and in our case, congregations) as systems has been an ongoing learning process for the past several decades for family therapists, organizational development consultants and social scientists....

No one fact says more about a group of human beings than its size. Dan Hotchkiss shares some of the differences in dynamics.

When thinking about needed or wanted change, congregations can sometimes feel stymied. And, let’s face it, human systems like religious communities don’t tend to like to change. In a way, we need to trick the system in order to allow in energy and creativity.

I spent several days hiking in the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia for my vacation. (It was a good opportunity to get away from the technology that is my constant companion during the rest of the year, since there are few cell phone towers in those mountains.) Many of the trails we...