Why don’t people reach out to people they don’t know?

@WorldTeamInternational, a good friend, tweets today:

Why don’t you reach out locally to homeless, professionals, person next to you at Starbucks? Answer and expose heart idols. #catalyst2011

Definitely, there are heart idols involved. But they may not be the ones we think.

"Reaching out" in a way that makes disciples requires long-term relationships.

This is not the number of Facebook friends you have! I’m talking about intimate, face-to-face, one-on-one conversations. Remember that most conversation is nonverbal—made up of body language and facial expressions—and you have to be face-to-face to read this. (Thus, discipleship can’t be done exclusively over the Net, really.)

Unfortunately, most of us face relational overload.

We think we can have more relationships by accumulating more Facebook connections, more Twitter followers, more people in our Google+ circles. But really, those aren’t relationships. They are are “data inputs” in a sense. They are your own customized news/humour sources: a highly niche-ified newspaper.

The reality is, no matter how much we want to deny it, a human can only have just so many intimate relationships. Here I am defining “intimate” as “I can see your face, read the totality of what you say, and I am willing to talk with you about it, even if it is uncomfortable.”

The mathematical equation for this is Dunbar’s Number. Here’s a good explanation (take 15 to 20 minutes to read it, it’s worth it, great abbreviation of about a half dozen books and even more studies). It’s based on studies in psychology and massively-multiplayer games (and yes, that does make sense: some MMOs have over 40,000 people playing in small teams and larger tribes, so it’s a good live-fire study). The upshot is:

• 15 close friendships
• smallest viable group 5-9
• group of 2 requires deep commitment due to lack of resources
• 3 suffers from “odd-man-out”
• 4 suffers from split votes
• 5 to 8: feeling of team begins
• 9 to 12: increasingly noisy
• 12 to 25 difficult: too large to be efficient, too small to have sub divisions
• “creative and technical groups” (e.g. associations, departments, etc) 25-80, optimal 45-50
• next tier is 80. filtering becomes essential here.
• 150 is about the limit of what any individual can keep tabs on, and know everyone in the group.
• beyond 150, parts of the org become “invisible” or “drop off the horizon.”

For someone to reach out and form a relationship with someone else requires them to make some choices. If you have room for about 15 close relationships (including family), and perhaps another 10 to 20 loose-but-close associations/work relationships beyond this, and you have all of those “slots” full, you’re either going to have to [a] see less of your current friends or [b] have less quality relationships.

I am married, have 4 children, and have living parents. That makes for 7 immediate slots out of my 15, full. I also have a number of work relationships and extended family relationships. My 15 close relationships are fairly used up. If I am going to disciple someone, I have a hard choice to make.

This is why long-term missions and short-term missions are “solutions” of a sort.

Short term mission is of limited duration, the team with you will be much smaller, you’ve left most of your creature comforts and time-sink obligations behind, and you have time and slots for relationship-building.

Long-term mission simply leaves behind most relationships, so you have lots of new slots open.

When we try to do cross-cultural mission where we are now, but without being willing to give up slots (as we would do if we went across the world), we run the risk of failure.

To be successful in local missions/disciple-making, mentors need to help people learn to view it as a mission, a commitment, a choice, that will require sacrifice and cost—in time spent with good friends.

“Shall I offer to God that which costs me nothing?”