A 1967 Psychology Today article first proposed the idea of six degrees of separation. In his experiment, Stanley Milgrim asked volunteers from Nebraska and Kansas to pass a package to two people in Massachusetts by passing the package to a social acquaintance that they believed were “closer” to the target. The participants received the name and a vague clue as to where the target person lived. Milgrim found that the packages arrived by passing through the hands of just five other people. Thus the term six degrees of separation—we are separated from anyone in the United States by just six people.
A study published in Science also demonstrated this connectedness. The study enlisted 61,000 participants in 166 countries for the experiment. The participants were to pass a message to one of 18 people. They were to use the Internet by contacting a social acquaintance of theirs that they thought might be “closer” to the target person. On average, it took about five to seven intermediate steps to reach the target. This phenomenon was dubbed the small world effect.
A study by Microsoft analyzed 30 billion instant messages sent by 240 million people in June of 2006. The study found that 6.6 steps linked these people, and a study done of Facebook found people there linked by only three degrees of separation.
God has given us the staggering task of taking the gospel to the whole world (Matthew 28:19-20, Mark 16:15). With a world population over seven billion it may seem overwhelming. The task challenges our faith.
God is wiser than we are. He knows that it is a smaller world than we might first think. Maybe if we with faith reach out to the people we know, and they in turn reach out to the people they know… Maybe everyone could hear the gospel if we live by faith. It’s an interconnected world.