Ben Sternke

Field notes on life and mission with God after Christendom

Innovation

Why We Don’t Make Disciples

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A few days ago Mike Breen posted a series on his blog that essentially asked the question, “Why does most ‘innovation’ in the church revolve around technology instead of discipleship?” In other words, why do we spend so much intellectual and creative capital tinkering with technological niftyness instead of investing that capital in finding out how to make disciples well?

Most of the possible reasons he offered revolved around the fact that discipleship is difficult, and therefore left untried (like that great G.K. Chesteron quote, “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”) While I think there’s an element of truth in that, I think that the real issue lies much deeper, and has to do with how our unspoken theological assumptions invariably guide our lives. And everyone has theological assumptions. You can’t live without them. But if they remain unexamined and un-articulated they could lead you to waste your life tinkering with things that don’t really matter in the long run.

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Failure / Risk / Church / Mission

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Found this little video via marko:

As I think about my own life, some of the most formative, important times have been those where there was a huge risk of failure, when the outcome was far from guaranteed, when I actually was pretty horrible at it the first few times I tried it.

I might go so far as to say that none of us grow spiritually unless we risk. Spiritual formation = risk. Also, to step out as a missional church is going to take some huge risks. We’re never going to get where we need to go if we always need to guarantee certain results. Missional church = risk. Being the church isn’t like joining a tennis club, it’s more like joining up with a revolutionary community on a risky journey. It’s an adventure. Like one of my mentors has said, "We’re called to tend the fire, not polish the stove."

Safety is overrated anyway. Let’s move into what God is calling us to.

We probably need both

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Card1530

(from this gem of a blog)

Yes, we need innovation. We need surprising solutions from unlikely sources, we need creativity and a culture of play in order to venture out into new areas.

But we also need inspection. We need to hone processes so they are actually "producing fruit" (to use a biblical metaphor). We need to do good work, not just innovative work.

And we’ll probably need some innovation to come up with solutions to the problems that inspection discovers. Just because inspection doesn’t have any solutions doesn’t mean the problems aren’t real.

Inspection without innovation leads to soul-crushing bureaucracy and death-by-inertia. But innovation without inspection leads to burn-out, waste, and ineffectiveness. We need both.

How NOT to have a paradigm shift

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Here’s a list of "paradigm stabilizier" – what to do to make sure you never have those pesky "paradigm shifts" where everything you thought you knew about the world gets turned upside down… (from the summer 2007 issue of geez magazine)

1. Keep busy.

2. Keep moving: travel as much as possible, and when you do, find familiar restaurants.

3. Find the most efficient route to work, to school. Then don’t stray from your patterns.

4. Mingle with like-minded people; avoid cross-cultural, inter-racial, trans-class encounters.

5. Make smart financial decisions; consider market forces natural.

6. Don’t do anything foolish; avoid awkward situations; avoid danger. Get various alarm systems.

7. Avoid people who talk to themselves.

8. Think nasty thoughts about SUV drivers.

9. Watch TV, movies; migrate to four-cornered screens of any kind.

10. Like the average North American, spend 90 percent of your time indoors.

Paradigm shifts can be painful, don’t let them happen to you!

(ht)

Imagination is more important than skill

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I had a really engaging talk with my friend Joe the other day, and one of the things he mentioned was how important imagination was in the kingdom. In the world that is emerging, including the world of church leadership, I think imagination and creativity are more important than knowledge and skill. In fact, I think new "knowledge" leaders need is imagination, the new "skill" is creativity. It isn’t just knowing about something anymore, it’s about being able to think beyond what is, and imagine what could be. It isn’t about simply being skilled at a task anymore, it’s about being skilled at adapting to new challenges: being skilled at  knowing what new skills I need to learn.

Imagination is the ability to envision something that isn’t there (yet). Because of the rapid of culture change, we need leaders who can imagine new ways of being and doing "church" that resonate in postmodern culture, and then in whatever comes after that. Their ideas will seem "wacky" to people that are used to the status quo, but it’s those kind of wacky ideas that we need to get us thinking in the right direction.

Whenever you catch yourself assuming that you need X or Y to "have church" or "do ministry" (a building, money, paid staff, a sermon, a worship band, a sound system), you’re killing your ability to imagine and create anything new. Any time you catch yourself saying, "But I just can’t imagine doing it any other way," you’re one step away from being irrelevant.

Stay imaginative, stay creative. Ask absurd questions, be open to wacky ideas, don’t censor crazy ideas just because they’re crazy. Follow the implications in your imagination and just see if you can’t dream up a better world. Because if you can’t imagine it, you can’t create it.