# Structurelessness Relocates Power Rather Than Removing It ## Claim A group with no charter, roster, or leader still has power and still makes decisions, but nothing inside it can be held responsible for either. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ## Scope & conditions - Holds for any body organized by voluntary affiliation rather than formal membership — informal movements, loose online communities, ungoverned open-source projects. - The tell: responsibility can always be relocated to individuals, while individuals can always disclaim the label. - Breaks where reputational or funding dependencies create de facto accountability, or where a group voluntarily adopts norms it can be measured against. ## Evidence Wagner presents the NAR's "relational structure" — voluntary alignment with an apostle, no legal tie — as a design virtue, and it plainly is one for flexibility and growth. But he also uses the same structure elsewhere in the piece to reject every specific-affiliation claim journalists make, since no one can say who is or isn't in. > [!quote] > whereas denominations are legal structures, the NAR is a relational structure. Everyone is related to, or aligned, with an apostle or apostles. This alignment is voluntary. There is no legal tie that binds it. ## Links - [[NAR and Charismatic Authority Critique MOC]] — why the absence of a charter or roster hides authority rather than dissolving it - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Concentrated Authority Without Accountability Produces the Same Failure Patterns Across Religious and Software Ecosystems]] — because contrasts; that note tracks the opposite structural failure — one figure holding concentrated authority — while this is diffuse, voluntary non-structure. Both land on the same absence of an accountability mechanism. - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Defining a Term to Exclude the Objection Is Not Answering It]] — because applies-in; a second move from the same document that survives contact on a first read - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Expected Outcomes Shape Behavior More Than Stated Positions Do]] — because evidence-for; the companion source's account of the same movement's combatant posture, produced by structure that has no one to answer to - [[3. Resources/MOCs/Open Source Governance MOC]] — because applies-in; the governance-artifact absence (no charter, no code of ethics, no annual meeting) is directly transferable to informal open-source projects ## Tests / falsifiers - Ask whether the group can ever be shown, in principle, to have violated a stated norm. If no norm exists to violate, the claim holds; if written norms exist and are enforced, it doesn't apply. - Watch what happens when the group is credited with growth versus blamed for harm — if affiliation is claimed expansively in the first case and denied narrowly in the second, that is the mechanism operating. ## Maintenance - Last tended: 2026-08-16 - Next review: 2026-11-16 ## Source - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/The New Apostolic Reformation Is Not a Cult]] — C. Peter Wagner, Charisma magazine, 2011.