Over this past weekend, countless organizations—from banks to hospitals to airlines—were brought to a standstill because of a bug in the software of one company, Crowd Strike.

In the Atlantic, writer Brian Klaas discusses the pain and peril of living in such a connected world. Yet, disconcertingly so, he argues that this shouldn’t be a surprise to us. He notes, “the devastation was the inevitable outcome of modern social systems that have been designed for hyperconnected optimization, not decentralized resilience.”¹

The globalized world we find ourselves in now certainly has it’s benefits. Channeling the minds and resources of the best and brightest from around the world have brought about tremendous technological advancement. At the same time, doing so has created a fragile system in which “localized error can cause global crisis.”²

The primary tradeoff that we have made, Klaas argues, is optimization in place of resilience.

For all its benefits, an optimized, global system has simultaneously created a catastrophically fragile one. Klaas writes, “Globalization enables large efficiency gains, as with just-in-time manufacturing, where a product can be assembled from carefully managed links in the global supply chain. But those systems lack resilience. Every link must fit together perfectly; the system falls apart if even one chain breaks.”³

This quest for optimization impacts every facet of life, because as Jacque Ellul noted in the 1950’s, technique has a mind of its own, and it cannot be halted once it overtakes a sphere of life.⁴

The Crowd Strike debacle reminded me that the Evangelical Church is yet another sphere of life, by and large, that has fallen under the spell of optimization and technique.

The industrialized (read optimized) churches of today are built and structured in such a way to most efficiently make the most converts (or empower the most people) and run the most programs. Optimization and efficiency are almost always geared towards one end: growth.

Just like Klaas’ observation of the social systems of today, interweaved with one another through a smaller and smaller pool of gigantic technological firms, churches are building their systems around fewer and fewer people. Building the church around one charismatic, gifted leader is actually the most optimize step a church can take. Yet, optimizing around one person and one system of production (think Sunday Services), the modern Evangelical Church is as fragile as ever.

Just in the last month, the mega church pastor Robert Morris, resigned for not fully disclosing past sexual misconduct with a minor. His church boasts 100,000 attendees across campuses throughout the U.S. and his television broadcast reaches people around the globe every year. Global reach isn’t a bad thing, per se; but as Klaas noticed with Crowd Strike, “localized errors can cause global crisis.”

Optimization is usually a faster means of growth in the short-term. The often calamitous fallouts that come about due to the fragility of our systems makes you wonder if optimization is really the right side of the road to veer towards.

Resilience though much slower, and sometimes much more boring, seems to be the better choice in the long-term. But in a world enraptured with short-termism, it makes the battle for building resilient churches all the more difficult. Yet, this seems to be the way forward in the uncertain and turbulent times ahead.

Klaas, thinking about society writ large proposes that “our complex, interconnected societies simply demand that we sacrifice a bit of efficiency in order to allow a little extra slack. In doing so, we can engineer our social systems to survive even when mistakes are made or one node breaks down.”⁵

For the church, this might mean budgeting slack into your annual budget each year, not out of fear, but out of wise stewardship. It might mean rather than launching new ministries and then asking the already spread-to-thin volunteers to add more to their plate, we trust God’s provision with the volunteers and ministries that we have right now; perhaps doing the right things for a really long time might actually lead to healthier fruit in the long-term. For the church, this might mean giving more sermons to the “B team”, even if a handful of emails will come in demanding that the superstar pastor handle the whole load.

Slack in the church is not a sign of laziness, or fearfulness, nor does building fragile systems does mean we are being more faithful. In fact, I would argue the opposite; oftentimes in our quest for optimization and quick growth, we get out ahead of God…and even ourselves.

As Klaas warned for our technological society: “The Crowd Strike debacle is a clear warning that the modern world is fragile by design.”

I think it’s fair to say that the last decade of church scandals could lead us to say the same thing: the modern church is fragile by design.

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1. Klaas, Brian. 2024. “The CrowdStrike Failure Was a Warning.” The Atlantic. July 21, 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/07/crowdstrike-failure-warning-solutions/679174/.‌ ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Ibid. ↩︎
4. Ellul writes, “Technique has progressively master all the elements of civilization…man himself is overpowered by technique and become its object.” Ellul, Jacques. 1967. The Technological Society. New York: Vintage Books, 127.
   ‌ ↩︎
5. Klass, Brian. ↩︎