What Nobody Tells You About Spiritual Organizations

Here's something that took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out: spiritual organizations are still organizations.

I know. Groundbreaking insight. Someone give this man a book deal.

But stay with me, because this obvious fact has non-obvious implications that most people inside these communities never quite see. I certainly didn't — not for years.

When you join a spiritual group, you're usually thinking about enlightenment, or peace, or purpose, or escaping the particular flavor of suffering that brought you there. What you're not thinking about is organizational behavior. Budget meetings. Power structures. The politics of who gets access to the teacher.

And yet, all of that exists. It has to. The moment two or more people gather with a shared purpose, you have the beginnings of an organization. Add a few dozen more, and you have meetings, hierarchies, and someone deciding who gets to sit in the front row.

The question isn't whether spiritual organizations have these dynamics. They all do.

The question is whether anyone acknowledges it.

The Paradox at the Center

Here's the tension that nobody talks about:

Spirituality is often about dissolving ego, surrendering control, releasing attachment to outcomes. The path, in many traditions, leads toward freedom from hierarchical thinking — toward seeing everyone as fundamentally equal expressions of the same consciousness, or whatever language your particular tradition uses.

Organizations need the opposite. They need structure. Defined roles. Someone to make decisions. Someone to be accountable. Someone to say "we're doing it this way" when fifty people have fifty different ideas.

So you end up with this strange situation: a group of people practicing ego dissolution inside a structure that requires ego to function. People learning to release attachment while the organization becomes increasingly attached to its own survival. Teachers pointing toward freedom while sitting atop hierarchies that constrain it.

I've watched this play out in two different traditions over thirty years. The tension never fully resolves. It just gets managed — sometimes skillfully, sometimes disastrously.

"Spiritual organizations are like water trying to organize itself. The moment it takes shape, it stops being what it was."

How Organizations Drift

Let me tell you what I've seen happen, again and again, in spiritual communities I've been part of or observed closely.

Stage one: The early days. A teacher has something genuine to offer. A small group gathers. Everything is informal, personal, direct. The teacher knows everyone's name. Decisions happen through conversation. The teaching is the point.

Stage two: Growth. More people come. The informality can't scale. Someone needs to organize logistics. Someone needs to handle money. Someone needs to coordinate schedules. Roles emerge, not because anyone planned them, but because necessity demands them.

Stage three: Institutionalization. The organization develops formal structures. There are now official positions, official processes, official ways of doing things. The people in these positions have influence — over access to the teacher, over resources, over how things work. Organizational psychology research calls this "structural differentiation" — the natural process by which growing organizations develop specialized roles and hierarchies.¹

Stage four: Mission drift. Somewhere in here, often without anyone noticing, a subtle shift occurs. The organization was created to serve the teaching. Increasingly, the organization exists to serve itself. Meetings that used to be about practice become meetings about the organization. Energy that used to go toward growth goes toward maintenance. The structure becomes the point.

I'm not describing pathology here. This is just what organizations do. It's so common that researchers have given it a name: "goal displacement" — when the means of achieving a goal become the goal itself.²

The question is whether anyone inside the organization can see it happening.

What I Saw (And Didn't See)

In my first spiritual community — the one I spent seven years in during my twenties — I had a front-row seat to organizational drift. I just didn't know what I was watching.

The early years were genuine. The teacher was available. The practice was central. The community felt like a group of seekers helping each other along.

By year six, something had shifted. I was on an "inner team" — which sounds impressive until you realize it mostly meant doing administrative work and being available for whatever needed doing. The research and development we'd been recruited for quietly gave way to logistics and labor.

I remember a moment — I've written about this before — when half of us finished our assigned work early, and instead of returning to meaningful projects, the teacher spent considerable effort finding busywork for the remaining half. Not because the tasks mattered, but because we needed to be occupied.

At the time, I felt vaguely uncomfortable but couldn't articulate why. Now I see it clearly: the organization had become the point. Keeping people busy served the structure, not the teaching.

Looking back, I don't blame the teacher — at least not entirely. I think he was caught in the same drift, probably without seeing it himself. Organizations do this to the people inside them. The structure shapes the behavior, and the behavior reinforces the structure.

"I spent years thinking I was on a spiritual path. Turns out I was mostly on a conference call. An enlightened conference call, but still."

The Hierarchy Problem

Here's where it gets complicated.

Hierarchies aren't inherently bad. Research on group effectiveness shows that some structure actually helps — it reduces ambiguity, clarifies responsibilities, enables coordination.³ A flat organization where everyone has equal input sounds democratic, but in practice it often means endless meetings where nothing gets decided.

The problem isn't hierarchy itself. The problem is unacknowledged hierarchy.

In many spiritual organizations, there's an official teaching about equality — we're all on the path together, we're all equally valuable, the teacher is just a fellow seeker who happens to be further along. And then there's the unofficial reality: some people have more access, more influence, more power than others. The inner circle exists, whether or not anyone admits it.

This gap between official story and lived reality creates a peculiar kind of dissonance. You're told everyone is equal while watching some people get treatment that others don't. You're told the teacher is just a guide while seeing them make unilateral decisions that affect everyone. You're told the community is about growth while noticing that questioning the organization is subtly discouraged.

I'm not suggesting conspiracy here. Most of the time, the people perpetuating these dynamics genuinely believe the official story. They don't see the gap because seeing it would be uncomfortable. The organization has taught them not to look.

What Actually Works

After thirty years in organized spirituality — some of it genuinely helpful, some of it genuinely not — here's what I've noticed about communities that seem to work:

They acknowledge what they are. The healthy organizations I've seen are honest about being organizations. They talk openly about structure, power, decision-making. They don't pretend the hierarchy doesn't exist while benefiting from it. This transparency doesn't solve all problems, but it makes them discussable.

They distinguish teaching from administration. The best setup I've encountered clearly separates spiritual guidance from organizational management. The teacher teaches. Someone else handles logistics, finances, scheduling. This isn't always possible — especially in smaller groups — but it prevents a specific failure mode: the teacher becoming more administrator than guide.

They encourage questions. This sounds obvious, but it's surprisingly rare. In many spiritual communities, there's a subtle (or not so subtle) pressure to be grateful, to be positive, to not rock the boat. The healthier ones actively invite critique — not just about the teaching, but about the organization itself. They treat questions as data, not threats.

They have exit routes. This is a big one. In unhealthy organizations, leaving is treated as failure. You "couldn't handle it." You "weren't ready." You're subtly (or overtly) discouraged from maintaining relationships with people who leave. Healthy organizations make leaving normal. People come, people grow, people move on. That's not failure — that's life.

They hold structure loosely. The best communities I've seen treat organizational forms as tools, not truths. They're willing to restructure when something stops working. They don't confuse the vehicle with the destination.

What Doesn't Work

And here's what I've watched fail, repeatedly:

Conflating organizational loyalty with spiritual development. "True devotion means serving the community" is fine as far as it goes. But when questioning the organization becomes evidence of insufficient development, something has gone wrong. Spiritual growth and organizational compliance are not the same thing.

Creating insider/outsider dynamics. The inner circle. The initiated. The ones who "really get it." Every time I've seen this dynamic, it's corrosive. It creates competition for access, breeds resentment, and inevitably becomes about status rather than practice.

Making the teacher irreplaceable. If the entire organization depends on one person — if their absence would cause collapse — that's not a community, it's a personality cult. The healthiest traditions I've seen actively prepare for succession, sometimes for decades. The unhealthy ones treat the question as sacrilege.

Treating growth as a threat. Organizations naturally resist change. But spiritual communities that can't evolve become museums — preserving something that might have been alive once but isn't anymore. The traditions that thrive are the ones that can hold their core teachings while adapting their forms.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here's what I wish someone had told me when I was twenty-three and joining my first spiritual community:

The organization is not the teaching.

This seems simple, but it's easy to forget. The meditation practice that transforms your life and the committee meeting that plans the annual retreat are not the same thing. The insight that changes how you see reality and the schedule that determines when you have access to the teacher are not the same thing.

You can learn genuine things from organizations that are structurally problematic. You can receive nothing from organizations that are structurally sound. The teaching and the container are separate variables.

I stayed too long in my first community partly because I confused them. The teaching had been valuable, so I assumed the organization must be healthy. By the time I saw the drift, I'd invested years.

"The organization is like the restaurant. It matters, but you don't come for the decor. You come for the food. And sometimes the food is excellent even when the management is a mess."

What I'd Ask Now

If I were joining a spiritual community today — something I'd approach with considerably more caution than I did at twenty-three — here are the questions I'd want answered:

How are decisions made here? Who has power over what?

What happens to people who leave? How are they talked about?

Can I question the organization, not just the teaching?

Is there anyone who would tell the teacher they're wrong? Has it happened?

What's the succession plan? What happens when the teacher can't teach?

How much of my time, energy, and money is expected? What happens if I give less?

Not every community will have perfect answers. But how they respond to the questions tells you something. Defensiveness, evasion, appeals to trust — these are data. So is openness, acknowledgment of imperfection, willingness to sit with discomfort.

For You

If you're in a spiritual organization — or considering joining one — I want you to know: the dynamics I've described aren't reasons to avoid community entirely.

Community matters. Having fellow travelers matters. Being part of something larger than your individual practice matters.

But community requires clear eyes.

The organization that helps you grow and the organization that exists primarily to perpetuate itself can look identical from the outside. Sometimes from the inside too. The only way to tell the difference is to watch — over time, with attention, without abandoning your own judgment.

You can belong deeply and still see clearly. You can participate fully and still ask questions. You can respect a teacher and still notice when the structure around them has drifted from its purpose.

These aren't contradictions. They're what mature engagement with any community looks like.

The teaching might be exactly what you need.

The organization is just the container.

Don't confuse them.

~ Soren Ross

Notes & References

¹ Mintzberg, H. (1979). The Structuring of Organizations. Prentice Hall. Mintzberg's work on organizational structure shows how growth naturally creates differentiation and hierarchy, regardless of the organization's stated values.

² Merton, R.K. (1957). Social Theory and Social Structure. Free Press. Merton's concept of "goal displacement" describes how organizations often shift focus from their original mission to maintaining their own structures.

³ Hackman, J.R. (2002). Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances. Harvard Business School Press. Research on team effectiveness shows that appropriate structure actually improves performance; the key is matching structure to purpose.