Innovation isn't the Solution for Church Health
The starting point isn't our technical ability.
I’m a quote guy. I collect them. I use a pretty robust digital tool for any online or digital reading (Readwise). I also have a massive analog Zettelkasten, collecting my analog reading, as well as other thoughts. Currently, it is numbering around 2000 4x6 index cards. For me, my quote habit is a reflection of Greg Satell’s belief that innovation happens by connecting what appear to be initially unrelated things into a practical pathway for change.
So, on with a few quotes influencing an idea in my work as a congregational developer.
One of the things I am working through currently is the belief that churches need to be chasing whatever the next technological change is to help find stability. For many of them, this is investing thousands of dollars in live streams, marketing, or other ways of chasing the big church down the street. These are churches of a couple of dozen trying to keep up with a church of thousands.
But it doesn’t work.
A quote line on how I am working out this problem
If cosmic history is simply the deterministic or probabilistic unfolding of the laws of physics, there is no gift to be experienced here.
Richard Beck - Hunting Magic Eels.
What Beck does is a great job of reflecting on the framework popularized by Charles Taylor of a world that was once transcendent, but it is now immanent. In short, the previous time was filled with the beauty and mystery of God. Things we didn’t understand were explained as mystery. Not just religious ideas, but many experiences of life and the world.
Church transformation is often a matter of plugging in a program. Need more people? Do this. Can’t retain or integrate new people? Do this.
Very deterministic.
Altogether there seems to be a very drastic change in what it means today to be human — what it means to be a woman, a child, a man; to be rich or poor; to be an insider or an outsider — compared with what all this meant in the past.
Ursula Franklin - The Real World of Technology
Franklin’s whole book is about realizing our technological world isn’t just gadgets, but the power of manipulation and control. Where things were once a mystery, we are now forming our lives around the power to make things happen and explain anything we might want.
This thought brings in a larger concept of Alan Roxburgh, he calls “Modernities Wager”, the belief that humanity can create a life well lived without God. Wrapped up inside of Modernities Wager is the same concept of control and influence.
The reality of modernities wager remains the most powerful, defiant characterizing systems of church life.
Alan Roxburgh - Joining God in the Great Unraveling
The church has bought into this cultural condition. We have moved into the imminent space of 100% awareness, explanation, and control. It influences both our spiritual life and our organizational design.
The outstanding feature of recent history is an enormous widening of human knowledge, which has gone hand in hand with such perfecting of the instrument of investigation that scarcely any limits can be assigned to future progress in the material realm.
J. Gresham Machen - Christianity and Liberalism
While it is a coded word today, Liberalism outside of political and religious conversation is a sociological idea wrapped around Western Culture. It is one of ultimate knowing, focused on the belief that we can create a better future. It is modernities wager.
This is where the church development line starts making sense (to me at least).
We drive so deeply into the technical knowledge and ability to manipulate nearly everything that we lose our sense of transcendence. For Church, it’s all about the tactics, and we end up losing the hope that belongs only to God and the reliance on the Spirit. Slowly, we get to the point where we can imagine that any future is created by us and our work. We remove the action of God.
…but this happened that we might not rely on ourselves, but on God, who raises the dead. 2 Corinthians 1:9
The Church, in any of its work, must rely on Jesus. It all begins there. Much of modernities wager has consisted in a distortion of the supernatural work of the Gospel. Too often, our work begins not in Jesus but in the power of ourselves. To both recognize and make this shift in church leadership is essential. There is a necessary deconstruction of modernities wager in the future church.
I’ve been writing a book on church growth for over a year. It will focus on those churches that know they need to grow or die. While there are several reasons this book hasn’t been finished yet, the last (and most recent) is that I am trying to write a pretty thick chapter on the spiritual qualities necessary for revitalization. I haven’t found a way to talk about it yet. Sure - it’s been outlined. I have tons of cards pulled for the chapter and have the content…but I couldn’t figure out the entrance. The whole book is about the technical skills, that very thing this quote line is critiquing.
But I figured it out.
All it took was a series of what appear to be unrelated quotes, all talking about the tension I felt in my own soul. These tensions come primarily because I am a technical skills guy. I build systems, I iterate, measure, and experiment. The church I started a decade ago was full of strategies and systems. I am 100% complicit in the belief you can make happen what you need to make happen. Some of the past two years have been an existential crisis of admitting that it isn’t the starting point.
Everything starts with Jesus.
The work of the church must proceed only from that. Not our own ability and unique knowledge. Not money or other resources. This belief that the gospel unleashes the Kingdom and the Kingdom isn’t a place of control, but of trust. I leave you with another quote that encapsulates the urgency of church work. Yes - it is one still influenced by modernities wager, but also focused on the supremacy of the power of Christ.
We must work like there is no such thing as prayer, and pray like there is no such thing as work.
Dwight Moody
About a year and a half ago, I realized that my little urban church, marked by decades of decline, assumed that this here charismatic personality and ideas might save them. To disabuse of them if this notion, I started saying on the regular, “God always gets the first verbs. We get all the responsive verbs.”
Since then, we have developed a values statement that articulates this: The Christ in me received the Christ in you; the Christ in me responds to the Christ in you; the Christ in us transforms the world.”
"the Kingdom isn’t a place of control, but of trust."
I feel this deep.
We're in a place where we're too often looking to the horizon and searching for old answers. Leading people into a deeper spirituality (not just one performed by the paid professionals in the church) feels right yet incredibly risky. "When will we actually DO something, though?" is the pushback I hear most often.
Helping the church trust in Mary's right path is difficult when we've (pastors more than any) convinced ourselves of the value of Martha's work ethic.