Leveraging the metaphor Ori popularized in his NYT best-selling book, The Starfish and the Spider, Ori Brafman shows why the distributed structures of starfish organizations are uniquely fit to the church. They can function without a rigid central authority, and their regenerative abilities make them nimbler in reacting to external forces. Seeding starfish networks inside todays churches will prepare the church of tomorrow to be agile while still maintaining the necessary accountability to be effective. Brafman emphasizes the advantages of adapting the structure and order inherent in a spider organization toward a hybrid model. The Starfish and the Spirit is about creating a culture where church leaders view themselves as curators of a community on mission, not the source of certainty for every question and project. It is about creating a team of humble leaders "in the middle" of the church, not at the top – leaders who naturally reproduce multiple generations of leaders, from the middle out on mission.