Churches, DAOs, and the Power of Disorganization
Hello again, brothers and sisters. It's time to cooperate 🤝
If you want to understand the flourishing of the DAO model in the exploding Web3 universe, you need to understand the historical growth of the Christian Church. What's a DAO? Like many things in the space, the practical meaning is much simpler than the jargon. Sometimes described as a "Discord server with a bank account," a Decentralized Autonomous Organization is an innovative and disruptive structure that allows cooperation towards a community's goals without layers of needless hierarchy. But is this structure really an unprecedented innovation? I think we will see that DAOs share much in common with the historical growth of Christian churches, and these similarities show us ways that both can grow into the future.
The DAOs I want to focus on are the fluid organizations that spring up around the creation and maintenance of applications for a blockchain. Let's take Ethereum as our example. There is no centralized Ethereum Boss that controls the development of the protocol, managing a growing collection of employees and directing the changes and looking out for the interests of its' shareholders. Instead, work happens by anyone with the commitment to the goals of Ethereum as a guiding idea diving in and cooperating with others. Anyone's work has to be checked by others and voted on by the stakeholders, and the final standard for what "is Ethereum" at any time is a public GitHub repository containing the protocol's source code. Anyone in the world can check out a copy, run a fullnode on their personal machine, and have total access to the truth of what transactions and processes are occurring on the network. And if any one of these nodes fails, its' impact on the overall network is all but negligible. And so, the network flourishes, guided not by any seen hand, but reaching forwards through many hands towards the goals of the protocol.
Now before we take the next step, a few explanations are needed. There are of course fundamental differences between these two systems, and all analogies suffer from less than 100% congruent mapping between ideas. Also you should not operate your hairdryer in your bathtub. Now that the disclaimers are out of the way, let's discuss our Big Idea.
The Christian Church, beginning from the first third of the first century A.D. and continuing through over 2 millennia to the present day, in many ways pioneered the distributed structure that we have been discussing. Christians also have a central, immutable protocol, a Canon of Scripture which can be traced in its current form back to approximately 100 A.D. through modern textual study. Christians believe (I believe, to be specific) that there is a supernatural force, God's Spirit Himself, guiding and protecting this entire process. Because of this, there is no single centralized hierarchy that all Christians recognize as the final authority in matters of faith and practice. Even the individual writers of Scripture simply added their inspired words to a chain of authority that extended before and after themselves. And they themselves were not the final arbiters of that chain. Study of history confirms that even the church councils that ratified the Canon referred back to the recognition, distributed across Christendom, that these documents were God's authoritative Word. Documents existed that also claimed this authority, but they did not receive broad ratification because the central motive force of the Church, the Holy Spirit, did not allow them to be recognized throughout the distributed authority structure. They were not added to the protocol, even though no-one had the centralized authority to stop them being written or even to totally stamp out their use in some aberrant congregations. But the protocol remained the central authority.
Yes, I am comparing the pseudepigrapha to abandoned altcoin projects.
This is one of the reasons why Christians often blink uncomprehendingly when well-meaning unbelievers ask why The Church Does This or That. We understand that the Church has been, almost from it's inception recorded in the Book of Acts, a distributed network. It is a continually branching web of congregations and denominations whose' only connection to each other is their mutual acceptance of the central authority of the Canon of Scripture. These separate units share much in common with a DAO structure (or to be chronologically accurate, a DAO borrows much of its philosophy and organization from them, knowingly or not). Some churches have nimble and flat organizational structures which allow quick decisions, while others have a ponderous authority hierarchy that makes change difficult. This creates resilient diversity: a huge variety of nonessential positions, influences, stances and emphases can exist and thrive, while all legitimate churches can still be recognized by their affirmation of Scripture and their acceptance of the central tenets of Christian faith.
This radical diversity of thought and practice within Christianity is often pointed out as preposterous and damaging. However, those same people look at the mycological proliferation of DAOs, an ecosystem of trustless and permissionless entities jostling with one another to create and thrive, and see beauty. What they fail to recognize is that the very distribution and lack of a central (human) authority in the structure of the Church has allowed it to survive, and this fact speaks to the truth of what the Church affirms. Even in the most centralized days of the medieval Catholic Church, there has never been a 100% quorum of Christians trusting a single human mind to make decisions. This is not a weakness. In fact, it means that no human or even group of humans has ever had the ability to totally influence, edit or alter the thought and beliefs of the Church. There has always been the ability for any individual to examine the Canon himself, come to differing conclusions, and check out a copy to create a hard fork. Some of these languish because time shows them to be aberrant attempts to innovate on essentials, and we call them cults. Some of them thrive and by thriving shows that their work is animated by the same Spirit that has driven the Church since the beginning. We call the most major hard fork of this kind a Reformation. In all cases, belief in Christianity does not require trusting the intentions or accepting the actions of all Christians historically, but only acceptance of the truth of the Canon and submission to God as the ultimate authority rather than man.
In many ways, the distributed entity of the Church has allowed for vastly more to be accomplished than if only one central person or group had retained control of the religious life of the faithful. And yes, this progress has been beneficial to untold billions. While no doubt the history of the Christian church contains abuse, injustice, and hypocrisy, the church has also brought about a moral revolution unparalleled in human history and continues to do so through each successive century. The concept of universal human rights, women and children being treated as equal human beings before the law, abolition of slavery, the belief in an objective reality that allows for the progress of scientific knowledge, the preservation of scientific knowledge after the collapse of the Roman Empire, the continuity of written language and recorded knowledge...all of these are thought technologies that we owe to the Christian church. None of them was the centralized project of any authority figure, but they flowed from the distributed energies of many Christians, collected and channeled through the overlapping structures of their individual churches. When one movement or structure failed, this did not mean the failure of Christianity. I would argue that this unprecedented story would have been impossible if the Church had been centralized into a structure where it was the job of any human mind to contain and control the mission worldwide.
Not only does this distributed structure describe the macro layer of the Church overall, it also extends down to the smallest scale in many cases. Many local churches operate with a surprising level of DAO-like permissionless freedom. For example, they may have no governing structure above the pastor at all, or they may be loosely connected to a broad fellowship of other independent churches. The day-to-day workings of the church are typically conducted by a self-forming group of volunteers. Led by the Holy Spirit, they either self-identify based on their ability and interest or are informally encouraged to step forward by a leader who sees their potential. Especially in small churches, it is these volunteers who come together to carry out tasks from taking out the garbage to auditing the church's finances to conducting worship services. Some churches even go as far as to embrace full-congregational voting on important matters of governance. Even in more hierarchical church structures, the local church acts as an independent unit in at least some ways, making decisions on how the mission of the Gospel will be locally instanced and carried out.
Now Pr0ph3t, you may be asking, what is the point of all this? We're a bit into esoteric territory now, talking about volunteer structures for congregational churches, aren't we? yes and no, my friend. Often the keys to insight are broken in two, hidden in seemingly unconnected places that it is up to us to discover. My theory is that there is much that churches and DAOs can learn from one another, since it seems to me that DAOs are a modern-day fork of the Church's model. Let's start with churches.
As the twenty-first century continues, many both within and outside of the Church call for radical change to the status quo. Innumerable solutions to innumerable perceived problems are presented and debated. I don't want to enter this debate here, but it is increasingly clear to me that church models which allow for the fewest layers of abstraction between the people and the Canon truth of Scripture, as well as provide opportunities for people to directly participate in the work of the congregation, are currently flourishing. Based on our understanding of the distributed roots of the Church this shouldn't surprise us at all. In my view, we should be looking for opportunities at every level to "onboard" those currently sitting in the church and encourage them with tangible ways to serve, build and work for the mission they believe in. Remember, for confessing churches this is not just an optional volunteerism drive for a social benefit. If I truly believe, and I do, that Christianity is true, then it is my duty to make sure that every member of my church can participate in the actual supernatural continuation of the work which started in the first century. Just as the DAO world is currently wrestling with the massive question of how to offer clear entry points for passionate people to get to work, we should expect this process to be challenging in the church. That should indicate to us how vital the issue is.
Meanwhile, in the DAO space, I think many builders and operators have yet to realize that the unbelievable success of DAOs over the past few years is due to their filling a church-shaped space in the lives of a number of Very Online people. The overwhelming bonding that many now share, the truth they imbue into code they build and imbibe from the movement they participate in, is an essentially spiritual impulse. DAOs retain so much of the cooperative action, ethereal and invisible driving force, and meta-human goals of Christianity that they seem poised to accidentally recreate a lesser facsimile of the congregation in the image of our current generation. In fact, I hope to gently suggest to those from this world that what they seek cannot be fully fulfilled through a community that, in the end, often exists to make money in a more efficient way, or to solve one or other social issue. By creating a church without a Holy Spirit, I believe they will fill the world with many beautiful things and create definite good. But I hope they will indulge me in suggesting that merely to change the financial system or even the fundamental foundations of a dying world is too small a goal. For humans to transcend the misery we see around us, exchanging email and org charts for Discord and decentralization will not be enough. We must be made anew first, and in order to do that, I return this Sunday to the only fountain that we have and drink again, deeply.
WGMI. 😎