Yesterday Dan and I were talking about pagan groups and organizations. I still hold to my belief that human interaction is optimal within small groups. We build large ones because we need them, because we have developed into a society that needs them, but they never do work all that well.
I'm not bashing the big groups (heck, I belong to three, although I'm not all that active in all of them)--I like them, and what they are good at, they are very good at. Generally speaking, the groups I'm familiar with (ADF, The Troth, Hellenion) are great for networking and for providing information on their respective religions, for educating members, and for training clergy. All the big-picture stuff.
What you can't get out of a large organization is spiritual experience and group identity/cohesiveness/that sense of "family." For that, you need a smaller group. And the large organizations recognize this--ADF is made up of solitaries and of groves, and, honestly, there is a lot that a sol is not going to get out of ADF because they lack the grove experience. Same with Hellenion, I suspect. Both of those groups are designed around the concept of group worship, and provide for the formation of official groups--groups that are a part of the larger organization, and that fact is underlined by whatever requirements the larger organization puts on them (public rituals, reporting requirements, particular holidays that must be celebrated, etc.). The Troth does it a little differently; there are Troth-affiliated groups but as far as I know The Troth does not attempt to control what these groups do in any strong sense--and it seems to be more a matter of existing groups choosing to affiliate with the larger organization rather than smaller groups originating as a group of the larger organization.
My personal feeling these days is that, while I find my as-an-individual memberships in these groups rewarding, I am really not interested in affiliating as a group with any large organization. I like being autonomous--I like it that the only considerations as to what to do and how to do it are the preferences of our group. I just don't see any benefits to joining a larger organization as a group that would override the advantages of being a single unit, not at this point, at least.
But I know I could be thinking this because of having been part of a failed ADF protogrove--which is to say, the group stopped being a part of ADF. We existed for several years before then, and we are still going strong, several years later. Over time, we changed. I don't foresee any substantive changes in the future because we seem to have reached our home base as a heathen kindred. And the particular group of people was/is more important than any identification with a particular organization could be. What was important was finding a way that we-as-a-group could work together to honor the gods.
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