ben's blog

How to make sure nothing changes

I've been blogging some thoughts on church innovation, sparked by Tom Kelley's book The Ten Faces of Innovation. The subtitle of the book is "Strategies for beating the devil's advocate and driving creativity throughout your organization."

Well, Seth Godin has a scathing post up of actual quotes taken from blogs that illustrate how a devil's advocate can crush innovation and keep the status quo firmly in place. Some of my favorites:

• "That will never work."
• "Can you show me some research that demonstrates that this will work?"
• "Well, if you had some real-world experience, then you would understand."
• "Well, this might work for other people, but I think we'll stick with what we've got."
• "It's never been done before."
• "We'll get back to you on this.

Church 2.0: Full-featured Christianity

I find Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users blog to be one of the most consistently helpful reads for me in thinking through issues of church leadership. Which would seem odd, since the blog is about helping companies create people who are passionate about their products. But then maybe that's not so odd, because the church is all about making disciples of Jesus Christ who are passionate about seeing his kingdom come, seeing his will done on earth. Creating passionate users is a lot like creation passionate disciples, I guess.

Kathy wonders if your users are stuck in "P" mode.

From the article:

Several weeks' back I took a one-night Digital SLR class, and at the beginning the teacher asked us each to say why we were there. All 18 of us said the same thing, one after the other: "I know I have an SLR that can do so many things, but I'm still stuck in "P"--Program Mode--and I don't know how to use anything else." In other words, we were all using our pricey bazillion-megapixel cameras like point-and-shoot disposables.

Here we are with all this power and flexibility, and we can't get past AUTOMATIC.

So here's what I'm wondering: are the people in your church stuck in "P" mode, only understanding the very basic uses of their new life in Christ? Are people tapping into the power and creativity and vitality of the new kind of life God has given them through the Holy Spirit, or is their ability to live Christianly perhaps very limited? Do they understand all the wonderfully varied and creative things that can be accomplished with a life lived fully, or is going to church and being nice the only thing they know how to do with their Christianity? Are people learning how to minister to and pray for one another, or just how to bring their friends to church so the "pros" can pray for them? Are people learning to think intelligently and Christianly about the world, or are they simply being fed pre-approved answers? "We've done the hard work for you, just put it in 'P' mode and take the picture."

Are we as leaders really equipping people to "do the work of ministry" (Eph 4:12) or are we only equipping them to staff programs? Are we teaching people how to live a full-featured faith, or are we stopping after they learn the basics? I suspect that in most churches, the expensive, feature-filled digital camera of Christianity is being used like a cheap point-and-shoot camera. We're not tapping into the depth of the Christian life because it's safer to just keep it in "P" mode. You won't screw up as many pictures that way (it's "safe"), but your pictures sure will be boring (safe is risky).

If we're going to faithfully lead people, we'll need to take them out of the safety of "P"-mode Christianity and show them some new things, like shutter-priority mode, aperture-priority mode, and possibly even (shudder to think) FULL MANUAL MODE! With a little knowledge, people might just start experimenting with the camera faith, creating some truly innovative pictures ministries that tap the depths of new life in Christ. It will take the intelligent application of new knowledge and new skills, and there'll be a few bad pictures mistakes along the way, but the result will be much more creative and useful pictures Christian living. Let's teach people to use all the features of their faith.

Web 2.0 / Church 2.0: humanization

From a somewhat recent post by Hugh MacLeod:

Web 2.0 [aka the Blogosphere] is about the humanification of the web.
So you wonder why blogs are important? Humanification.

Web 2.0 is finally convincing companies that their sanitized, lifeless websites with their stock photography have to go, being replaced by something far more human. Of course, many companies still don't get it. Like Coke, apparently: ("Coke boldly goes where every other clueless, control-hungry company has gone before.")

Church 2.0 is about the humanification of the church, I think. Of course the church has always been very human, at its core. The body of Christ is made up of people, despite all the confusion. But in recent years there has been an effort to de-humanify the church, at least in the sense that we believed progams and processes were more important than actual people. The problem with this kind of approach is that while it may streamline things and look more efficient, it's also crushing the soul of the church.

Professionalism and officialspeak are on their way out, and genuine humanness and humility are making a comeback, thankfully.

The Participation Problem, pt. 2

Yesterday I introduced something called the Participation Problem. The biblical ideal is for participational, missional communities, but the cultural reality is that people don't want to participate, because they've been trained to simply consume and stay quiet (oh, and give us your money). How do we bridge the gap?

In the same article I mentioned before, Bill Simmons thinks back to being a Celtics fan during the Larry Bird era in the 80's (for those who don't know, Larry Bird is regularly called Basketball Jesus, for his phenomenal play and the way he "saved" the NBA, so to speak), and how things are so different now:

We didn't need a Jumbotron or musical prompts to tell us what to do. When the Celts were introduced, we screamed for every starter and saved one extra decibel level for Bird. When we needed a defensive stop, we stood and shouted at the top of our lungs. When Bird found a wide-open cutter for one of his gorgeous no-looks, we were cheering even as the pass was being delivered -- that's how attuned we were to his passing skills and how they spilled over to everyone else on the team. The best moments happened when the C's would blow someone off the floor and force a timeout, and the roof would practically come off, and we'd keep cheering and cheering -- all the way through the timeout, no organ music, no other noise, nothing. That's how we judged the level of excellence, by how long everyone felt obligated to cheer. If we made it all the way through the timeout, the horn would sound, which only made us cheer louder because we had lasted so long. I'm telling you, there was nothing quite like it. And this happened all the time.

Things are different now, though:

During Angels games in baseball, the crowd waits to make noise until a monkey appears on the scoreboard. You can't attend an NHL game without hearing the opening to "Welcome to the Jungle" 90 times. Even our NFL games have slipped -- you cheer when the players run out, cheer on third downs, cheer on scores and sit the rest of the time. It's a crying shame.

I agree with Bill. And I think we've seen the same stuff happen in our churches. When was the last time we couldn't sing the next song because everyone was singing too loud? When was the last time we got a little too rowdy during worship? We've settled for spectatorism and consumerism because we've found that fighting it is a very steep hill to climb. Also because we recognize that we can't simply "hype" people into participation. We can't be the announcer at the ballgame, whipping people up into obligatory, forced applause ("I can't hear you! Lemme hear you make some noise!"). It has to come from somewhere deeper inside if it's going to be authentic.

But how realistic is it to think that everyone will be a participator? A recent Guardian article suggests that there is an emerging rule of thumb that says if you get 100 people online, one will create content, 10 will interact with the content in some way, and the other 89 will just view it. It's called the 1% Rule (1% of people will create online content, 10% will interact with it, and 89% will just look at it). At the very least, it should give us a reality check about the plausibility of an entire congregation interacting online. The article was specifically talking about online content, not church services or community life, but I wonder if there are similar percentages in churches, and if this is just the way it is, or if we should be thinking bigger.

The Participation Problem, pt. 1

Here's how the Participation Problem goes in my head. Biblically, participation is where it's at. Priesthood of all believers / everyone has a gift to share with others / equipping the saints for the work of ministry. It's all over the place, and it's a beautiful picture. However, in my experience, people resist this. We have been taught that things should be left up to "experts", and in most areas of life, we have relegated our normal participation to the experts. For example, people don't fix their own cars anymore, because they're too complicated. We hire experts to fix our cars. This is probably fine, but we do the same thing with our spirituality, and that's not fine. We relegate our spirituality to experts, and we somehow come to the topic as though we have nothing to offer, no way to genuinely participate, because there's probably someone else out there who does it better than me, so can't they just do it for me? An example:

Bill Simmons is my favorite sports columnist. In a recent article where he details his exercise of picking which English Premier League to follow this year, he mourned the death of participation in American sports, especially when comparing American sports fans to European soccer fans.

European soccer stands out because of the superhuman energy of its fans -- the chants and songs, the nonstop cheering, the utter jubilation whenever anything good happens, how the games seem to double as life-or-death experiences -- and I can't help but wonder if that same trait has been sucked out of our own sports for reasons beyond our control. ... By pricing out most of the common fans and overwhelming the ones who remained, professional sports leagues in this country made a conscious decision: We'd rather hear artificially created noise than genuine noise. That's the biggest problem with sports in America right now. And there's no real way to solve it.

We'd rather hear artificially created noise than genuine noise. Wow. In the church, would we rather hear 5-6 great singers and musicians perform a song, or would we rather sing the song ourselves? Would we rather have our sound systems make noise, or make a joyful noise ourselves? G.K. Chesterton began to see this kind of trend even in his day, saying that men used to sing choruses around tables, but instead now we have one person sing the chorus into the microphone for the "absurd reason" that they can do it better than everyone else (I love the way that guy thought!).

I have sometimes wondered if our own technology (or more accurately, the way we use our technology) often conspires against us as we try to build missional, participational communities. I wonder if the way we use our sound systems and video projetors and multi-media presentations have turned our congregations into compliant spectators, and it's no wonder there's hardly any genuine participation or spontaneous emotion in our meetings. Of course, those technologies aren't doing anything in and of themselves, but the way we use them is doing something to the character of our communities.

Part of the problem, of course, is that this is the direction our entire culture is heading. There isn't nearly as much spontaneous, genuine cheering at sporting events; people wait to be prompted by the jumbotron, or goaded by the announcer ("I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"), or awoken by the blaring music. We watch hours and hours of TV every day, hardly ever choosing something to watch. It's like our culture has been numbed into apathy. Normal rambunctiousness and precociousness has been called ADHD, we've been told to take our soma Ritalin, calm down and not be a nuisance.

With these kinds of cultural forces occurring, it's no wonder we see similar things happening in the church. The problem is that the space between the biblical ideal (participation, mission) and the current reality (spectatorism, consumerism) is a big one. I can understand why people create communes and monasteries. And I'm not talking about retreating from life in a pouty way, like someone who can't deal with reality, so they suck their thumb, pull the covers back over their head, and go back to sleep. The best monasteries aren't ones that completely close themselves off to the outside world, but instead they are simply trying to create enough space to cultivate a genuine community in the midst of a culture that is hostile to community. From that place of strength they can engage the world.

Part 2 tomorrow: Old-school Celtics games, the 1% rule, and a way forward.

Church 2.0: Emergence / chaos theory

I'm continuing my Church 2.0 posts (Web 2.0 thinking applied to church leadership) today by talking about the concepts of emergence, chaos, and nonlinearity.

The title of this post is likely confusing for some. I intend to talk about emergence and chaos as phenomena, and relate those phenomena to the Church 2.0 series. As such, it doesn't have any direct link to the Emerging Church Movement (if I capitalize it, am I making it into a denomination?). Incidentally I think Emerging Church is a great name, because of what emergence means. But this post is about emergence and chaos, not the Emerging Church Movement proper. Capiche?

Emergence refers to the process of a complex pattern forming from simpler rules. The termite "cathedral" on the left is an example of emergence in nature. None of the individual termites planned the structure, it just "emerged" from their collective termiting (or whatever it is termites do).

The Internet itself is an emergent phenomenon - there is no central database of links, no planning committees that decide what cool new web pages there should be. It's simply a massively decentralized network, yet a structure emerges as pages get linked to from other pages. This is why even though anyone with Internet access can get to my blog they're far more likely to end up on this one.

Emergence means that the end result cannot be reliably predicted from the initial conditions. It implies unpredictability and nonlinearity (1 plus 1 may or may not equal 2). Chaos theory is all about studying apparently random systems and finding their inherent, though hidden, order. All these concepts relate closely with one another:

Emergence = functionality/order without specific design
Chaos theory = "hidden" order in what looks random
Nonlinearity = 1 plus 1 doesn't equal 2

In Web 2.0 thinking, emergence means you can't predict the end result when you start the project, many times because you're creating systems that are "hackable", or scalable - systems that are fueled by user participation, and because you can't control how users participate (entirely), you can't predict what the thing will look like in the end.

Is innovation something churches should do?

After beginning my series of posts on the Ten Faces of Innovation (based on Tom Kelley's book of the same name), I wondered if perhaps people might wonder if "innovation" is something churches should be doing in the first place. So let me explain what I don't mean and what I do mean.

A quote from C.S. Lewis that has often restrained me in some of my "Let's blow the whole thing up and start from scratch" moods goes something like this:

"Jesus told us to feed his sheep, not do experiments on his lab rats."

Touche, Clive. Novelty for novelty's sake doesn't really have any place in the regular life of the church, I don't think. We don't want to simply be experimenting on people, introducing innovation every few weeks just to see what happens. People will eventually grow tired of it, because they will feel they aren't being cared for (and they would probaby be right).

The church needs to care for those already in her fold (I would see pastoral and teaching gifts functioning this way), but the church also needs to be engaged in mission to the world (I see apostolic, prophetic, and evangelistic gifts functioning here). We can't hunker down in our fox hole and wait for the explosions to stop, we can't stay within the walls of our self-imposed Christian ghetto. The church exists for the good of the world, she "exists by mission as a fire exists by burning" (Elton Trueblood).

It's in this area of mission that I think innovation and wildly creative thinking are necessary. Because of the radical changes we're seeing in our world, we can't just do a "tent meeting" and think it's going to have the same kind of effectiveness as it did fifty years ago. I don't even think we can start a hip evening service and expect it to have the same effectiveness it did five years ago. We have to be thinking creatively to be able to dream up, plan and execute innovative mission projects in the postmodern world.

So that's why looking at the Ten Faces of Innovation will be a helpful exercise, methinks.

The rule of 150

In my previous post, I mentioned that W.L. Gore & Associates limits their plants to 150 people. A Gore associate named Bob Hen said, "People used to ask me, how do you do your long-term planning. And I'd say, that's easy, we put a hundred and fifty parking spaces in the lot, and when people start parking on the grass, we know it's time to build a new plant." They don't add to the existing plant, or start double shifts or anything, they just build a new plant with another 150 parking spaces. Why 150? "We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty," said Wilbert "Bill" Gore, the late founder of the company.

The Hutterites, a religious group that came out of the same tradition as the Amish and Mennonites, have a strict policy that every time one of their colonies approaches 150 people, they split in two and start a new one. They've been doing this for hundreds of years. Why 150? "Keeping things under 150 just seems to be the best and most efficient way to manage a group of people," a Hutterite leader said, "When things get larger than that, people become strangers to one another."

Military planners over the years have arrived at a rule of thumb that says functional fighting units cannot be substantially larger than 200 men, despite advances in technology that we might think would increase efficiency and the ability for larger groups to coordinate their efforts. The reason probably has soemthing to do with the fact that for people to work together as a unit, they have to be familiar with each other, the raw fact is that human beings are limited in the number of people we can be familiar with (again, despite technology - just because you have 9000 "friends" on your Myspace account doesn't mean you have 9000 friends).

Of course it's possible to do all these things with larger groups, but when groups are larger than 150, you have to impose structural and hierarchical rules and regulations to command loyalty and cohesion. When the groups are under 150, "orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts. With larger groups this becomes impossible," says anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who has done some convincing research on the "social capacity" of humans.

It's fascinating that all of these varying groups have arrived at 150 as an optimal number for "informal" structure and cohesion to take place. I wonder if it says anything about how we build and structure our churches as they grow. Malcolm Gladwell says of W.L. Gore & Associates, "In order to be unified--in order to spread a specific, company ideology to all of its employees--Gore had to break itself up into semi-autonomous pieces. That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first."

The perils of bigness

Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point has an interesting story about W.L. Gore & Associates, the company who invented Gore-tex fabric. Two fascinating facts about them: they never have any more than 150 people working in any specific branch or plant, and they have eschewed traditional hierarchical models and titles of leadership, opting instead for a massively decentralized, organic, relationally centered structure. All of their business cards say the same thing: their name, and underneath it, "Associate", no matter how much money they make, how long they've been with the company, or how much responsibility they have. They don't have bosses, they have "sponsors", or mentors who look out for their interests. There are no organizational charts

Maybe you're thinking, "That's nice. They'll probably be featured on the cover of of some cutesy business magazine and go out of business in two years." But here's the kicker: It actually works! W.L. Gore & Associates is a multimillion dollar high-tech firm that has been profitable for 35 consecutive years, they are continually expanding and innovating in new areas, and they are consistently rated one of the top companies to work for. Their employee turnover rate is a third the industry average. "It is a big established company attempting to behave like a small entrepreneurial start-up. By all accounts, that attempt has been wildly successful," Gladwell writes.

Obviously this has some huge implications for the church in the 21st century. Like I've said before, growth is good, obviously. The gospel is good news - it is meant to be preached, and when it is preached, people will believe. They will become followers of Jesus, and the church will grow. But there are different kinds of growth: cancer is a kind of growth that kills because it's purposeless and homogeneous. There are dangers in growth, as well as opportunities. W.L. Gore & Associates has successfully navigated the perils of bigness by getting small.

Perhaps for the church to find healthy growth in the 21st century, she's going to have to get small to get big. Smaller, semi-autonomous "companies" that still retain the unifying vision of the larger  "body". Maybe this is the key to the church being a bit more sticky - it's easy to slip through an institution's system, it's harder to slip through a web of relationships.

More thoughts on decentralization

A comment on Scot McKnight's post about the influence of bloggers on denominational power structures says this:

I think blogs will have the same effect on the church today as printing the Bible in the common vernacular had at the end of the Middle Ages.

Just as the printed Bible allowed for differing interpretations (and thus allowed for challenging the power structure), so does blogging do the same today.

It's a decentralizing shift we're talking about. Just like normal people having a translation of the Bible in their own language challenged and decentralized the power structures of the church of that day, the Internet and the "flattening of the world" is having the same effect. And just like the Bible translation movement was met with some fierce resistance, there is some resistance in the church today to the decentralization of power, information, and influence. No longer is the pastor of the local church the sole proprieter of all things religious; he's now one of many sources, and for the most part, he's having a hard time dealing with it.

The outgoing head of the SBC is having a hard time with it. In his farewell sermon, he expressed disdain and annoyance with bloggers (who had a significant role in the electing of a new president, I guess, one that he doesn't entirely approve of), as well as technology in general (cell phones were targeted as distractions from witnessing). But the shift from a central locus of power, information, and influence to a decentralized model is well underway. We've gone from a vertical model to a horizontal model, and not just because of blogs. People can read all kinds of books from all kinds of theological perspectives at their local bookstore. Anyone can download messages from great (and not-so-great) preachers all over the world. And if the best response church leaders can come up with is complaining about the technology that made it all possible, they will be viewed with increasing suspicion ("What do they have to hide?" people will think).

I think the way forward is to realize that because technology has changed, the way we lead must change as well. We're going to have to realize that everyone has left the cozy living room modernity had set up, get up off the comfy modern couches we've been sitting in for years and start to engage people where they're really at (the postmodern world), instead of rant and rave that they should come back to the living room so we can minister to them from our comfy couches again. We've looked at the despair-ridden caves of postmodernity and looked for a way to turn back the clock. But we can't go back, we have to go forward through the valley of the postmodern shadow of death, and out the other side.

UPDATE: This graphic from a post on Creating Passionate Users called Mosh-Pit as Innovation Model illustrates my point: