Avoiding a Church Split
The article I will be referring to throughout this post can be found here.
A quick summary of this article: The Archbishop of the Canterbury church is trying to avoid a permanent split in the 80-million-member worldwide Angelican community by instead recreating the church’s hierarchy to be a less tightly coupled church, in which disagreeing sectors of it can have their own rules and beliefs while still identifying itself as part of the overall “mother” church. His strategy is to have the mother church (in Canterbury) act as a link to all of the national churches, and that national churches are no longer have to communicate or associate themselves with other national churches. Since there are hard differences between some of the national churches, particularly liberal-conservative rifts, (example, if gay marriage or gay clergy is welcomed) severing hostile relationships while preserving only the ties to the mother church would be ideal.
This strategy ties into our studies of Networks because it is very similar to the karate club split we talked about in class. In the karate club, roughly half of the students knew one member well, and the other half knew another member well, but the two popular members themselves had no connection. The karate club ended up splitting because the two popular members had different karate philosophies and started separate clubs.
The Angelican churches have a similar problem. Though this is a generalization, we can condense the different sides into two camps: liberal and conservative. In this situation, instead of each camp having its own specified leader, they all have strong ties to the Canterbury “mother” church, which is one of the few things strong enough to possibly keep them together as one organization. One can imagine that without the mother church acting as a central node, or mutual contact, between these two camps, they would most surely split in a matter of time.
If in the karate club example, the two popular people were in fact one person, that person could possibly employ a similar strategy to keep the club together, by possibly forming an A Team and a B Team, or holding different practice times.
The church’s strategy works well because if the central Canterbury church has only strong connections to the other national churches, it implies that every national church can develop a weak connection to the other churches due to the Strong Triadic Closure (STC) property. If the reorganization of the church’s hierarchy works to clear or reset the bad relationships formed between the national churches over the years, as long as they keep strong ties to the mother church, it is hopeful that over time these relationships can be rebuilt.