Counting Jelly Beans

This article from Neil Powell was first published on The London Project launch publication and on Redeemer City to City blog.

Here is a jar of jelly beans.

How many jelly beans do you think are in the jar?

Oxford Professor Marcus du Sautoy asked 160 office workers the same question. What he discovered was both remarkable and significant: “nobody guessed correctly and yet everybody got it right.”

Unsurprisingly, given the task at hand, the answers ranged widely. One worker suggested just 400, another as many as 50,000. Working it out for themselves, only four out of 160 people got even close to the actual answer of 4,510.

But strikingly, when all 160 answers were added together, the average came out to an unbelievably accurate answer of 4,515.  

What does Du Sautoy suggest we can learn from the experiment? He remarks, “As individuals, the guesses are just that—guesses. But when you take them collectively, they become something else entirely. The accuracy of the group is far greater than the individual. We call this the wisdom of the crowd.” All of this suggests that, provided our group is big enough, errors in our thinking can be overcome as they are cancelled out by the crowd. A collective mind is better at solving difficult questions. Perhaps it really is possible for everyone to be wrong and yet together be right.

A COMPLEX CHALLENGE

Here’s a second question. This one is for the church: which is easier, to count the number of jelly beans in a jar or to find ways to reach cities like London, Moscow, and Madrid with the gospel?

We instinctively know that some questions are just too big and too difficult to tackle on our own. And our default option is therefore to leave them well alone. But what if the question we’ve been asked to answer is not just big, but important? Guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar doesn’t exactly matter at the end of the day. You might win a prize, but you lose nothing if you get it wrong—even very wrong. But what about reaching a city for Christ? That’s not a game. It’s a question of a different order. It’s not just big; it’s also important—and urgent!

What if we applied Du Sautoy’s wisdom to the church in a city? What if we accept that there really are important, unavoidable questions that are not easy to answer, but might be resolved together through the wisdom of the church? If complex problem solving requires a complex strategy, maybe we need the collected wisdom of the church. Your perspective along with mine will give us all better answers.

And cities really do require the wisdom of the crowd, for cities epitomise our world of complexity. Growing global cities belong to a category of what are called complex systems.

Let me explain with the idea of a stunningly beautiful Swiss watch. It’s yours for around £100,000—and for a good reason. It’s not only beautifully crafted from an intricate design, but has around 200 moving parts all working together. As awesome as it is, it’s still a simple system: a machine that is purposefully both accurate and totally predictable. We find simple systems everywhere. We learned to tell the time and navigate the world by one—the entirely predictable movement of the stars in the sky. 

Cities, however, are not simple systems like the stars. They are complex because they constantly change, more like living things than machines. They are full of interconnected parts like a Swiss watch, but the parts evolve and change over time. This change is self-generated and often unpredictable. A city, we could say, has a dynamic life and mind of its own.

David Batty of University College London comments, “Cities are more like organisms than they are like machines. In this sense, they are the product of countless individual and group decisions that do not conform to any grand plan.”

One of the great challenges for the church is how to minister the never-changing gospel of Christ in an ever-changing city, a city where the future is essentially unpredictable and the pace of change leaves us breathless as we try to keep up.

*Loving the City Conference 2021

To meet the challenge of complexity, we need the wisdom of the church. And it starts by recognising that we need one another to serve our city. No one individual nor any one tribe or denomination has all that is needed to love a city.  

How do we meet the challenge of rising inequality, climate change, racial injustice, and violent crime in our communities? How do we speak the words of the gospel into evermore diverse cities where secularism and religions go toe-to-toe?

Knowing how to lead a church in a city can feel a bit like guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar. Because our perspective is inevitably incomplete, it results in partial answers at best and conflicting solutions to others in the city at worst. But join the crowd, put your best answers together, and the wisdom of the whole really is greater than the sum of the parts. We see the city in a better light and come closer to more meaningful answers.

The Apostle Paul once wrote to a church divided along party lines, where each had a preferred apostle and yet all served the same city, Corinth. His challenge to them? He reminded them that they were the body of Christ, and each one of them was a part of it. Sadly, we often do what the Corinthians did and choose to work only with leaders who see the city as we do. But sticking with our own tribe only reinforces our limited perspective and cuts us off from the collective wisdom of the church.

COLLABORATIVE WISDOM

To love and reach our city, we need to do it together. That’s why the London Project exists—to serve the church by facilitating collaboration between churches and agencies. We call it a city movement, a system within the system.

With a city consciousness, driven by a desire for better answers, we want to help bring the crowd together. We intentionally seek out the wisdom offered by the greatest possible diversity of gospel churches so that we not only recognise different perspectives, but actually enjoy them because we see that the greater the diversity, the greater the wisdom. The London Project wants to catalyse these interactions through initiatives such as City Labs, church planter Incubators, church leader accelerators, and city impact initiatives.

There will always be a special place in our hearts and ministry for our own denominations and networks. It would be quite strange if we didn’t enjoy being with those who share our particular DNA. But even as we value and prioritise our tribe, we have a city to reach and must make time to discover the wisdom needed to complete our task. These types of movements, we suggest, must play a part in this endeavor because they can uniquely respond to and even thrive in a world of complexity.

Some of the wisdom we seek is available to us almost immediately—someone shares a great idea with you at a City Lab, shows you how you might do it for yourself, and new opportunities for ministry in your church open up. You’re off and running. But sometimes the collective mind discovers more meaningful answers only as they emerge over time, and through the strength of relationships. Maybe a leader in London you’ve yet to meet will prove to be your unexpected source of answers on reaching your community. Who knows?

Regardless, it takes the wisdom of the church together to address the problems of the city. We want to foster these relationships and at the same time give quieter voices the opportunity to be heard.

I’m excited to think what God might do through a church that comes together to seek his wisdom—and excited to learn from new perspectives of people and churches in the city that I’ve yet to connect with. If the gospel is the hope for the world, then movements of the gospel in the cities of the world must be part of the answer. For there, together, we find the very best ways for the gospel to reach those without hope and without Christ in this world.