Congregational Network Analysis

It shows that joining is overwhelmingly relational: people are recruited through pre-existing ties to friends, relatives, and acquaintances who are already members, rather than being persuaded in isolation by doctrine. Everton documents that recruitment and conversion follow social networks, so a person's probability of joining rises with the number and strength of their ties to insiders. This explains why movements grow along existing social lines and why outreach to socially isolated strangers is far less effective than mobilization through members' own networks.

Centrality measures locate the structurally important members. Degree centrality highlights the well-connected; betweenness centrality highlights brokers who lie on the paths between others and thus control the flow of information, resources, and recruitment. In a congregation these brokers are often leaders or key recruiters whose removal would fragment the community or stem its growth. Mapping centrality therefore identifies who holds the community together and who channels newcomers and ideas across its boundaries.

Yes - that duality is the organizing theme of Everton's framework. Dense, cohesive internal ties bind members and build the community up, but the relational structure also has loosening and tearing-down dynamics: bridging ties to outsiders can pull members away, and fault lines in the network can become lines of schism. Whether ties bind or loose depends on their configuration, so the same analytical toolkit explains both the formation and the fracturing of religious communities.