Christians are incredible organizers. As Zack Exley describes in a recent (and long) article on Alternet, the latest to emerge from this group is the house church:

"..where small numbers of people [sometimes up to 15] come together in a home for Bible study, fellowship, mutual support and as a launching point for outreach into the community...

According to the Barna Group, nine percent of Americans attend house churches (up from one percent 10 years ago). And tens of thousands of churches are de facto community centers, serving and supporting virtually all aspects of their members' lives, usually with a significant percentage of members acting as volunteers. In this way, churches have left progressives in the dust in terms of serving and engaging people directly. The union hall is the left's nearest equivalent, but not only is it dying, it rarely attempts to serve anywhere near as many of the needs -- spiritual and practical -- as churches do."

Again, the need to find physical and emotional space to organize is critical to the success of social change movements. The All-Ages Movement Project is an example of how space is being used to build leadership and civic participation, but we need more of this.

C3 Lab is developing an idea for how a store can serve some of these functions--community aggregator, earned income generator, identity reinforcer...More on this in the coming months.

PS>> Here is one more gem from the article that speaks to the idea of building a really flat movement (in terms of hierarchy), where there are many--in this case thousands--of leaders:

"This high-density leadership organizing model stands in stark contrast to anything I've ever seen working in unions, progressive organizations and Democratic political campaigns. On the left, recruiting and mobilizing leaders has become devalued work that is typically left to inexperienced recent college graduates. The pastors at this conference, however, saw recruiting and inspiring leaders as one of their central callings."

I read a long article called Darwin's God in the NY Times magazine recently that reminded me of some of the work and thinking we do on cultural organizing. The article itself is about the evolution of religion in human development. But the parts that spoke to our work were parts that I imagined in a more general, less religious sense:

"Whatever the specifics, certain beliefs can be found in all religions. Those that prevail, according to the byproduct theorists, are those that fit most comfortably with our mental architecture. Psychologists have shown, for instance, that people attend to, and remember, things that are unfamiliar and strange, but not so strange as to be impossible to assimilate. Ideas about God or other supernatural agents tend to fit these criteria. They are what Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist and psychologist, called “minimally counterintuitive”: weird enough to get your attention and lodge in your memory but not so weird that you reject them altogether. A tree that talks is minimally counterintuitive, and you might believe it as a supernatural agent. A tree that talks and flies and time-travels is maximally counterintuitive, and you are more likely to reject it...It is not enough for an agent to be minimally counterintuitive for it to earn a spot in people’s belief systems. An emotional component is often needed, too, if belief is to take hold."

"Rituals are a way of signaling a sincere commitment to the religion’s core beliefs, thereby earning loyalty from others in the group."