Lumpers and splitters: why five practices, and not three or twelve?

Notebook · Published 2026-10-25

Bookshops are full of numbered lists: seven habits, twelve steps, three secrets. Church resources are no exception. Every such list raises the same question: why this number? Congregational life is endlessly complicated. Why should it reduce to five practices rather than three, or nine, or twenty-seven? The question is worth asking, because the answer says something about what frameworks are for.

Lumpers and splitters

Biologists have long used a pair of nicknames for two temperaments in classification. "Lumpers" prefer broad categories and group similar things together; "splitters" draw finer distinctions and create more categories. Charles Darwin used the terms in an 1857 letter to the botanist Joseph Hooker, noting that it is good to have both kinds of people. The distinction has since spread to linguistics, history and medicine. Neither temperament is right. Lumping reveals patterns; splitting reveals differences that matter.

Any framework for congregational life is the result of lumping and splitting decisions. One could lump everything a church does into two categories, loving God and loving neighbor, following Jesus' summary of the law. Or into three, as in the classic description of the church's tasks as worship, fellowship and service. Or one could split them into dozens of ministries, each with its own committee. The five practices sit in between: broad enough to cover almost everything, narrow enough to be distinct.

Lists with a long history

Christian communities have always lived by short lists. Acts 2:42 describes the first believers devoting themselves to four things: the apostles' teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers. Medieval catechesis organized faith around the creed, the commandments and the Lord's Prayer. In 1743 John Wesley issued the General Rules of the United Societies, which asked Methodists to show their desire for salvation in three ways: by doing no harm, by doing good, and by attending upon the ordinances of God, meaning worship, Scripture, prayer, the Lord's Supper and fasting. Those three rules were simple enough to memorize and demanding enough to shape a life. They remain part of United Methodist doctrine, and a modern paraphrase, "do no harm, do good, stay in love with God", became popular in the 2000s.

The five practices belong to this tradition of memorable summary. Their author has explained that the adjectives were chosen to raise expectations: anyone can claim to practise hospitality, but "radical" hospitality is harder to claim without evidence.

Why a number helps

Psychologists have long noted the limits of working memory; George Miller's famous 1956 paper on "the magical number seven, plus or minus two" is still cited, even if later research suggests the real limit for meaningful chunks is closer to four. Whatever the exact figure, a list that people can recall without looking it up has practical advantages:

Shared language. When a council, a youth group and a preacher use the same five words, conversations connect.
Balance. A short list makes neglect visible. A church strong in worship and weak in service can see the gap.
Priority. A list says what matters most, and implicitly what matters less.
Teachability. Newcomers can learn the shape of congregational life quickly.

Why a number can mislead

Lists also have costs. They can suggest that the categories are tidy when real life is tangled: a meal for neighbors is hospitality, service and generosity at once. They can make things that do not fit invisible: pastoral care for the dying, music for its own sake, the slow work of reconciliation after a church conflict. And they can become checklists, where a congregation scores itself on each item and mistakes the score for faithfulness.

Readers of any framework sometimes ask whether something is missing. Some ask about evangelism or witness as a distinct practice; others about justice, sacraments or prayer. Defenders of the five practices answer that these run through all five, for example that witness belongs both to hospitality and to service. Critics answer that what is everywhere can end up nowhere. In 2008, as it happens, The United Methodist Church added "witness" to the promises members make, alongside prayers, presence, gifts and service, partly in response to that concern.

Lumping and splitting in your own congregation

A helpful exercise is to ask a leadership team to sort its actual ministries into the five practices, and then to look at three things: what fits in more than one category, what fits in none, and which categories are nearly empty. The overlaps show where the practices reinforce one another. The misfits show what the framework might be missing in your setting. The empty categories show where to begin.

The lesson is not that five is the correct number. It is that any framework is a tool for seeing, and that a congregation should use it to notice what it would otherwise overlook, not to stop noticing everything else. For the companion question of why these are called "practices" at all, see our essay on the word. For how they relate to the four priorities United Methodist leaders adopted the following year, see the five practices and the four areas of focus.

Sources and further reading

Charles Darwin to J. D. Hooker, 1857, Darwin Correspondence Project, University of Cambridge.
John Wesley, The Nature, Design, and General Rules of the United Societies (1743), as printed in "The General Rules of the Methodist Church", umc.org.
George A. Miller, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two", Psychological Review 63 (1956): 81–97.
UM News, "United Methodists will pledge to 'witness'", 2008.
Lewis Center for Church Leadership, "An Interview with Bishop Robert Schnase", July 2007.

Lumpers and splitters: why five practices, and not three or twelve?