How does cultural and moral renewal actually happen? Two schools of thought emerge to answer this recurring question from the 2026 Understory festival. The first argues that critical mass is the key to social change, requiring enough people mobilized to tip institutions, policies, and norms. The second, based on John Paul Lederach’s theory of critical yeast, posits that culture change is rarely the size of a coalition but the quality and placement of small, leavening minorities operating in the right relationships at the right moments.
While the distinction may seem academic, it shapes how funders deploy capital, how organizers build, how pastors imagine their congregations, and how every person of conviction decides where to spend their finite life.
In this debate on tomorrow’s theory of change, Cherie Harder, The Trinity Forum president and longtime Comment collaborator, stewards four perspectives. Leadership coach and nonprofit executive Lisa Slayton reflects on the critical yeast change that occurs in Alcoholics Anonymous. Louis Kim, a former VP at Hewlett Packard and now a master of divinity student at Duke, addresses the hazards of critical yeast becoming a “cocoon of righteous irrelevance.” Ian DeWaard of the Christian Labor Association of Canada argues that while a small community can model dignity, it cannot on its own secure the kinds of societal changes that underlie that passion and those ideas. And David Bailey, founder of Arrabon, draws us back to the power of two-by-two ministry and what Jesus’s form of ministry teaches us about scaling.
