In the days before megachurches like Southeast Christian were a thing, there was a phenomenon that persists today but was more frequent back then, as Fundamentalists tended to congregate in much smaller clumps: the Church Split.
I heard my father speak of Church Splits often. On a macro scale, “church split” is how you’d describe what I shared immediately above, in “Our Nondenomination” - the entire Campbellite church, all umpteen hundred congregations, split into two Piano-Loving and Piano-Hating pieces. Certainly we’d describe that as a Church Split – a seismic one.
But Church Splits happen at the micro level far, far more frequently.
How do such splits traditionally work? Here’s a typical example:
Mayberry Christian Church has about 250 members, about 60% of whom attend on a regular basis. It has an amiable, unassuming pastor who gets along with everyone and a Board of Elders who are frugal and uncontentious. All is well, and has been well for years and years.
The Eighties happen, and the traditional hymns of the church give way to worship choruses. The Board of Elders wisely divines that some of the church’s membership will not be open to abandoning their beloved hymnals, so it is decided that the early worship service will remain traditional, while the 11am service will use the more modern worship choruses.
Over the next two years, the church experiences a serious uptick in membership – young families flock to the flock, drawn by the modern music. Before you know it, Mayberry Christian has over 350 members. Hooray!
But there’s a serpent creeping into this expanding Eden. You’d think it was the Old vs. New worship service formats, but nope! – it's not that; you’d think it was Older Members vs. New Young Families, but nope! - the older and newer members get along just fine, because they’re in different services and everybody’s getting what they want.
The influx of new members has caused the church to become somewhat cramped, with so many people, even with two services. There isn’t enough Sunday School space; the fellowship hall can’t handle more than 150.
There’s almost $100,000 in the church coffers. A proposal is made: use it to fund a new Sunday School wing, and expand the fellowship hall by cannibalizing four Sunday School rooms adjoining it.
No, that won’t do at all, come the protests! That $100,000 was meant for completely paving over our gravel parking lot, building access ramps and putting in central air, which we’ve desperately needed for years. The lack of those things makes it all worse if we expand and don’t have them in place.
Conflict arises in the congregation as folks choose sides; the Board is divided; the poor pastor is stressed out, as enmity grows. He is powerless to stop what happens next: a faction of more than 150 members, old and new, organizes and decides to go start its own church. In the process, rumors flow; words are exchanged; friendships end. There are board resignations. Some families, disgusted, leave the church altogether.
Seems ridiculous, doesn’t it? This sort of thing happens all the time, for the silliest of reasons. When I was growing up, I heard about Church Splits endlessly.
Now, here’s where I put my professional hat back on and address this from the chair I’m writing in, rather than the rosy past...
There’s a British evolutionary psychologist named Robin Dunbar. In the Nineties he determined Dunbar’s Number – a measure of how many stable social relationships a person is capable of. That seems remarkable, of course, but it’s really very simple.
Dunbar noticed that in different primates – monkeys, chimpanzees, gibbons – the average size of their social groups correlated with the ratio of neocortical tissue to overall brain volume. Put another way, the primates naturally formed groups that corresponded to the capacity of their social brains to handle stable relationships with their peers.
He applied the same math to the primates with the greatest percentage of neocortex relative to brain volume – human beings. The resulting number: 150.
Dunbar nailed it. The average size of traditional tribes and villages: 150. Splitting point of Hutterite settlements? 150. Roman army units? 150. Size of the average small company? 150.
When these groups are growing, and pass the 150 mark – especially significantly! - they are compelled to split. This needn’t be a conscious compulsion; growing unease from cognitive discomfort, a below-the-surface emotional stress that gradually increases, can motivate a subconscious urge to avoid the group or seek to separate.
This explains why such groups (not just Evangelical churches!) will split at the slightest provocation, for the most inane reasons: when you’re devoting all your social brainpower to staying in sync with that many people, an upward bump in the faces you have to know and understand brings an itch to be elsewhere.
You may then ask – why doesn’t the same thing happen in small Methodist and Lutheran and Catholic churches when they hit 150?
The answer is simple: those are less intimate environments. Those congregations don’t meet 3-5 times a week, as smaller Evangelical churches do; they don’t see each other 8-10 hours a day, five days a week, as colleagues in a small company do; they do not travel to a foreign land to fight for their country, as military units do. No, they devote less social brain space to their congregational fellows, because those denominations don’t make the same demands for social closeness as Evangelicals do. And the same can be said, of course, for megachurches, with 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 members: in crowds the size of small cities, it’s assumed when we walk through the door that we will devote true social energy to the barest handful of people we encounter.
Lo and behold, it happened to Woodland Heights; more than a decade after my family migrated back to Kentucky, a group started a more contemporary Campbellite church on the other side of town. The new church grew larger than the old one.
That’s our answer: the Church Split has nothing to do with theological differences or ideological divides or even internal politics (though these often present as convenient excuses); no, it’s about brain space – another of the realities of who we really are that I wish I’d learned decades earlier...
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