In the real world, when things work the way they should, subcultures are the birthplaces of organizations. People get in the habit of meeting certain friends on certain occasions, and make certain commitments. Eventually, they've spent enough time together on shared objectives that they've found to be of great enough interest, that they formalize what they have informally done to this point and create an organization to provide an orderly forum in which to meet, continue (and expand on) past efforts. It is a mistake, however, that ignores the realities of how people interact, to imagine that the establishment of a formal organization eliminates the need for those informal networks, or that one can fully understand the working of an organization without understanding their nature.

A key point to be made is that a viable organization is not so much a thing that is created, as something that one day we realize has happened, and then try to define, in order to preserve it. But one has to have a social context in which it is to arise for this to happen.

In Pagandom, though, we've seen the rise of a very strange idea. Instead of building the subculture and then meeting within it, to find out what we need in the way of organizations and then tend after them as they evolve into life, people have tried to do the process in reverse, first creating the organization, and then using it to create the subculture. Some go as far as to write a mission statement and maybe a constitution, put out a sign up sheet, and decide that they're done. That has never worked and it never will.

People don't work together well until they feel comfortable with each other. If you throw a group of complete strangers together, human nature being what it is, they're going to start out by feeling uncomfortable. Introducing a constitution and mission statement which have been set formally in stone, thus undermining the spontaneity of interaction at a moment when spontaneity will be hard to come by, is not going to make them feel more comfortable. These informal or semi-formal networks give people a chance to get to know each other well enough for those uneasy feelings to go away.

But it isn't "hip" to admit that one isn't instantly at ease with everyone, is it? And there is so much "hipness" around that maturity and common sense barely have a chance to be heard over the posturing. No wonder that social isolation has become the problem that it is.

Even after organizations form, those informal, and semi-formal networks remain essential. They provide a newcomer with comfortable entry into a community where he does not yet know many people. Let us never forget that community is not created once, but is eternally being renewed. Thus, we must always keep the conditions alive that allowed for our initial act of gradual creation, that first brought our organizations into life.

There are then, those networks that feed members and visitors into an organization. Classical example, somebody is hanging out in one of the graduate student lounges, with all of the unspoken rules and customs in place, and meets one of the friends events have brought him to. He hears about this place called Mensa and what went on in one of the special interest groups (SIGs). He gets interested and goes with some of the friends. Or, at least, such used to be the case, reportedly, in late antiquity (the 1970s). In our own era, this stopped happening for a variety of reasons, and recruitment and retention have suffered notoriously since. This is what happens when those outside networks that lead into an organization, go away.

Among the members of a viable organization, there will also be informal networks or semi-formal ones, like the one we're creating here at the Shrine. (The term "semi-order" has been coined for this sort of intermediate, not-quite-organization, but not-quite-disordered collection of individuals). They give the members places where they can come together and discuss the direction the organization is taking, in a forum that the leadership can not structure to its own advantage, either consciously or subconsciously. They also provide the members with places where they can gather, truly breath free, and renew the friendships that they are building. There's a good reason why dormitories and apartment buildings used to have lounges. One might say that the semi-order does for the all-too-structured world of the formal organization, what the lounge did for our living spaces: they provide needed public space.

Lose these and there will be no sense of community in the organization. The healthy organization, then, is not structured like a pyramid, with the leadership making all decisions and then answering to the membership during the periodic elections, if at all. There are, instead, multiple layers of structure. There is the official constitutional structure and then there are the networks that exist under the simplistic facade of the organization, that bring it to life.

Given this, we should not be amazed that there seem to be more Pagan organizations than actual involved Pagans. People don't want to wait. They want to skip all of the steps in between, the coaxing, and the negotiations, and the reverses, and. mostly importantly, the reconception of their original ideas. They want to take a short cut to the final, pre-conceived result. The product of such an effort is predictably lifeless. Its' founders are as the builder who refused to waste time by putting up scaffolding as he put up a cathedral, and then wondered why it collapsed before even the baptistry was standing.

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