Abstract
The cell church consisting of cell groups has recently become a popular model of church in Christian world. A cell church usually encourages its members to participate in at least one of cell groups to obtain pastoral cares. The growth of cell churches is significantly faster than that of traditional non-cell churches. To explain this phenomenon, this dissertation tries to analyze the growth of church from the angle of effectively utilizing members’ knowledge to provide religious services. The framework of this dissertation is organized into three chapters. In the first chapter, I review the literature of economics of religion, and highlight the research trend to religious organizations. While the growth of religious organization has been widely investigated in literature, the role of knowledge management in religious organization has not been fully explored yet. Hence, this chapter further introduces the role of knowledge into the analysis of religious organization with reviewing the literature of knowledge management. The fast growth of cell church composed of cell groups can be regarded as a consequence of organizational innovation on managing tacit or specific knowledge among members of the cell church. The second chapter aims to investigate the historical development of cell churches from the sixteenth century to recent years. Both the operational principles and growth facts among cell churches are also shown in this chapter. Not only are the organizational differences between traditional non-cell churches and cell churches in the world (including Taiwan) illustrated first, but the differences between two major models of cell church –Yoido Full Gospel Church (YFGC)’s 5x5 model and International Charismatic Mission (ICM)’s G-12 model are also demonstrated later. The agency problem, free-rider problem, knowledge management and organizational structure in cell churches are discussed in this chapter. The concept of cost minimization in knowledge management is utilized to explain the growth of cell churches in the third chapter. Not only can the practice of cell-group mitigate free-rider problems, but it also can effectively utilize specific knowledge embedded in each member to provide pastoral cares by decentralizing the production of specific services and delegating pastoral leadership to each cell-group leader. Three hypotheses are empirically supported by employing the panel data of congregational level from an independent Christian denomination in Taiwan. The empirical results show that both the ratio of cell-group attendance to Sunday-celebration attendance and the growth rate of cell-group attendance have significantly positive influence on the growth of Sunday-celebration attendance. Moreover, both an optimal degree of organizational decentralization measured by ratio of cell membership for each congregation and an optimal size of membership for each cell-group do exist in nonlinear models. Besides, the increasing scale of congregation is unfavorable to the growth of congregation due to its upward total production cost of general and specific services.