Good Innovation Doesn't Require Demolition

For those whose hearts do not beat with the rhythm of Silicon Valley, the word innovation can cause alarms to sound. Some hear the word and start looking around for TNT expecting someone to be looking to fire off charges that will implode everything they hold dear. That is not how innovation works.

Good innovation learns from what has gone before, takes stock of the problems, and imagines a new path forward. The iPhone is a great example. When Apple began working on the iPhone they had a host of existing devices (including some of their own) that they drew from. They looked at the difficult to use keyboards of the Blackberry, the styli of the Palm and Handspring PDAs, and the clunky texting interface with phones that just had a number keypad. They also looked at their own products like the iPod with its revolutionary click-wheel interface for navigating a music menu system.

Apple took note of the assets and the problems. The click wheel was intuitive but ultimately not usable for texting, the tiny keyboard of a blackberry was precise but easy to mis-click, and the stylus was great for interacting with a screen but handwriting with it was labor-intensive and required learning new letter shapes.

All of that was fuel for their innovation. It revealed a set of problems that needed to be solved as well as a set of solutions that had been tried and found wanting in some fashion. They developed several innovative solutions including an actual click-wheel dial interface for dialing phone numbers (not all innovation is ultimately positive).

They finally settled on the best of all worlds. They would have a touch-based keyboard that would be controlled by software that could predict which key you intended to hit whether or not you hit the correct one. The iPhone wouldn’t require a stylus but would allow you to have a touch interface like the stylus enabled. And, though the click-wheel was not coming with it, the iPhone would be able to store and play music just like the iPod did.

Then when apple released the iPhone, nothing changed to their product line except that this new item was added. They didn’t tie a bundle of dynamite to the iPod that was generating 70% of their revenue. They just released the iPhone.

One thing they also didn’t do. They didn’t hinder or limit the iPhone so that it wouldn’t compete with other products. That is key. Often, organizations will limit innovation that threatens to change or undermine existing business. That can seem wise in the short term, but stunts growth in the long term. The goal is to be your own best competitor so that you keep your customers instead of losing them to someone else’s innovation.

That is how good innovation happens, good innovation releases alongside existing products and as it succeeds, it supplants the older products.

That is what has to happen in the church: good innovation. It is not helpful to try to blow up the existing models for serving our existing members. Those models can and should continue as long as they are serving the needs of those people. However, the fear that something might supplant that model cannot cause us to hamper or stop innovation.

Instead, we need to take what we know worked in the past, what we know is not working, and where we see everything headed and begin trying new things. Yes, some of those things will look like a rotary-dial iPhone, but some of the things will be the predictive-text keyboard and the full-color touchscreen.

As we release these new forms of church and worship and preaching and social action, some will rise above the rest and, hopefully, supplant our existing models out of their success not because someone pushed down a TNT lever like Wyle E. Coyote.

Let’s get innovating on how we recruit, equip and train leaders. Lets reimagine how we tell the story of Christianity. Let’s find new paths for fighting for justice and serving those in need. I’d love to help you navigate those conversations. If you’re interested, send me an email:

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Christianity is Crumbling (We May Have Time to Stop it)

Christianity is cracked, crumbling, and approaching the brink of collapse.  Though many chose to ignore the fissures and use misdirection to shift attention away from them, this only serves to accelerate the timeline that leads to to a pile of rubble sitting where a great religion once stood. This article (and more to come) looks to point clearly at the structural damage that has been done.  The goal is not some sort of faith disaster tourism, but a blueprint to the damage that must be addressed.

Let me be clear before I go any further, the call here is for innovation.  The damage cannot repaired by a return to what got us to this moment in time.  There must be experimentation, testing, ruthless dedication to change and a commitment to imagination that would make Sesame Street look like an Ikea instruction manual. If the church as a whole or some group/denomination/collective does not step up soon with a lot of commitment, people, and financial resources deployed to establish some sort of spiritual Bell Labs or Xerox Park, I believe Christianity will soon be a sliver of its former self.  It may be too late already.

We lost the mojo

Christianity began as a movement within a great world religion that brought individuals into transformative community while simultaneously pushing the bounds of what was conceivable within its progenitor religious stream. It kept pushing past boundaries and breaking open access to the world of God and the spiritual realm in dangerous and offensive ways.  Not only did it break out of the walls of Judaism, it broke free from limitations of gender, slavery, and social status. Now women could be priests, slaves had full access to all the religious systems and privileges, and the poor were not deemed religiously deficient because they had little.

That revolutionary expansive mojo is gone.  At various points along the two thousand year journey the movement in Acts that sounds to me like Metallica turns into a lounge singer covering the greatest hits for the rich in a clubhouse and eventually loses the “lost in never never land” lyrics to a forgettable instrumental version in the world’s elevator.

I’ll let historians parse the details, but Phyllis Tickle made a good case for several moments of upheaval in the Great Emergence that I think were major moments of seismic activity that began the damage we live in today.

Christianity fought for power and lost

Religion has power of its own in its own realm, but along the way Christianity began to lust after other forms of power.  It laid down with kings and politicians adding the world of politics and war to its herem.  When the political power began to find its own way, Christianity fought to hold on to a power that corrupts religion, that damages it.   Even now some streams chase after the memories of being warmed by political power in a cold night only to find the bed empty and the cracks in the walls worsening as a result.

As new forms of power emerged, Christianity didn’t greet them as friends and partners.  It challenged them.  It fought them. It tried to silence and stunt their growth.  As science created a new form of power Christianity openly disputed its claims.  It fought with these new scientists who often were Christians themselves.  But it was doomed to defeat because it was fighting a war that it never should have entered.  As science was able to cure disease and infection, able to create the radio transmitter and microchip, this war left lasting fissures in the foundation of a great religion.

Christianity stopped looking forward

As it lost ground it kept spending more and more of its time looking at the photo albums of the past. Even in times of expansion Christianity began to romanticize its past and try to re-enact things that had lost all relevance and connection.  Instead of creating the iPod and then the iPhone, it kept trying to find a fresh new way to present  the telegram as the world kept plowing ahead and left it behind.

Want to talk about innovation in church?

Walk into a church now and you will find odd artifacts from the past that seem completely out of place in the modern world.  Pipe organs and pews are the low hanging fruit of course, but go into “contemporary” churches and you simply see a more updated form of past obsession like 40 minute lectures and some version of PowerPoint.

Christianity lost the core of its soul

This movement was about a radical acceptance of people into a transformative community. Now it doesn’t matter where you turn, both of those things are being challenged.  Christianity has stopped risking theological orthodoxy to include more people like the early church leaders did when they stopped requiring male converts to get circumcised. Instead, its leaders have defined clear boundaries for who is in and who is out often based on some non-religious dichotomy espoused somewhere in the surrounding culture.

Instead of finding more ways to accept more types of people and then bring them into a messy, diverse, often disagreeing community, it shuts its doors to people, subdividing itself out of existence and losing the transformational power of a diverse community who is united by their being accepted by God.

We traded helping people for institutional preservation.

The earliest church was known for taking care of everyone in its community. Everyone had their basic needs met. Christians in some areas were so dedicated to this that they gave up individual ownership so that everyone had what they needed.

Then at some point within some groups, values began to change. There were implements of status that were desired, buildings that could be built. So they began to place less values on feeding hungry people, helping the sick get well, etc.. But eventually the numbers started to drop (this actually happened several times in different locations). And they continued to drop. And people were faced with difficult choices like, ”Do we merge with another Christian community and sell one groups property so we can keep feeding people and doing ministry? Or do we double down on the institution focusing on how to increase attendance at our out of date variety shows.” All over the world especially in the west Christianity chose the institution over the hungry and poor. And we keep doing it.

Let’s get specific

That’s a lot of high and lofty claims, but they have many specific expressions that we can point to as beginning points for imagination and innovation.  This is not an exhaustive list, it’s just a list.  Each of these deserves its own article (and some have one).

• Our content is boring. When people were asked by researchers to describe their most recent experience with church, the most common answer was,”boring.”millennials-want-when-they-visit-church/ I have to say that I almost always agree with them.

• Our content is generally too long or not long enough. People want short content like TikTok or long seasons of shows. A 40-70 minute variety show with a large helping of lecture is not it.

• Our funding model is broken. We absolutely have to find a way to make an impact in people’s life without requiring them to donate some percentage of their income.

• We own too much physical property. Churches absolutely have to stop buying land and building on it. The church as far too many assets tied up in physical things. As brick and mortarchurches dwindle in attendance, they hold space and tie up finances at a level that far outstrips the needs of the handful of members in almost any given location.

• We own far too little digital property. The church has far too few assets like high quality content, innovative apps, web presences, etc. The modern age needs much more digital investment.

• Power is too centralized. The world is moving away from hierarchy and towards decentralized, federated authority. Imagine if the internet required a single computer to disseminate all the information. Not possible. There isn’t even a single source of authority to know where a url goes. Instead, there are agreed upon, federated sources that cross-reference each other and rely on decentralization to make them dependable and resilient.

• We have gotten greedy with our resources. It’s time to slash budgets, sell more property, let staff go, and use all that money to feed people. And, if we can’t fully let go of our ego and greed, we need to devote our staff and program resources to building programs that feed people and provide medicine that are so good they get massive grants.

So that’s a start.  The list goes on and on.  Now lets talk about what the hell we need to do about it.

A call for innovation

We do not need a two-year commission to discuss and study and debate and imagine ways we might move forward.  We need the Silicon Valley of religion.  We need to move fast and break things.  We need to get venture-capitalist-level funding and hire top level software engineers, coders, brilliant musicians, filmmakers, visual artists, marketing professionals, and reassign a handful of pastors.

We need to release video games, databases, stock media libraries, Ted talks, meditation soundtracks, and fund some protests. But, that should only be the first 2-3 years.  After spending many millions of dollars on that, we need to take what works and build on it.  We need to turn Odeo into Twitter, branch out from Google into Gmail and YouTube and Nest.

And we need to do all of this innovation knowing that part of what we create will hasten some of the demise of what has come before.  We may reach millions through a new app and find that some of those millions aren’t coming to listen to organ music anymore.

When we see those people moving to a new platform, we don’t shut down the app or find a way to make it encourage people to go back to the room with the organ in it. We celebrate that we are finding what is next.  We celebrate the fact that instead of getting bored and leaving,we inspired them to live for something that works better.

Or we can keep finding a better way to get fewer people to give more.  Or we can keep the doors open to the brick and mortar buildings until they are in such disrepair that they just have to be leveled and the adjacent cemetery maintained.  Or we can work on another hymnal knowing it will likely be the last.

I hope we don’t go that way, but recent history does not make me optimistic.  So this article (and the others to come) will be my prayers that something miraculous happens and the religion I have refused to give up on finds it’s way again.

Want to talk about innovation in church?

Why church marketing fails (a guide for finding a fix)

Church marketing is really bad. It’s so bad, a site was created in the early 2000s called “Church Marketing Sucks” and they were right. The initial goal of the site was to help with the overall design of marketing pieces churches create. But the problem is deeper than bad design.

Church marketing is really just an evite

Most church marketing is focused on getting people to leave their house and come to a physical location where there is a promise of inspiration or community or something else. This approach to church has been called “attraction” where churches keep trying to attract people to their campus/programs. This kind of marketing could be called attraction marketing and it is proving as successful in the modern age as the attraction model of ministry. When you could replace most of the content released by an organization with an elite you can be sure they are missing the point.

In the modern age, marketing is a mix of giving away valuable content that people can use with invitations to attend, buy, participate, etc. That looks like releasing content that helps parents know how to respond when their teen says “I’m Bored.” It looks like having books or pre-packaged craft bags you hand out at the local farmers market rather than a flyer with service times on it. Giving away helpful tools that are on-brand for your congregation shows people who you are. That’s effective marketing.

Ok, it really is ugly too

Let’s be clear. It has to be packaged well. Churches would do well with letting go of their organist and using that money to pay a graphic designer or video producer. It doesn’t matter how great your content is, if it looks dates, has poor quality audio, or is just plain ugly, people won’t take it, keep it, or use it. Churches absolutely have to prioritize well-designed everything, starting with those things that are meant for public consumption.

So where do we start?

• Do a media review. Look at everything released on social and in email. How does it looks? What was its purpose? Did it add value to someone’s life without them having to come to something?

• Pick the first new thing. Find something you can create and release into the world to make it a better place. Maybe it’s a devotional, maybe its a book of artwork, maybe its a recording of the famous flautist that comes to your church. Picksomething. Do it well. Give it away.

• Pick the first revision. We all know you need a better website, but that is too big. Pick something public you can redesign quickly and do it. Don’t wait for a committee to decide on a new logo. Start making things look better. If you don’t have money for a designer, grab a young adult who knows how to use Canva.

The content problem: too long and not nearly long enough (and a guide to find a fix)

The primary content/experience churches offer comes in the form of a 45-70 minute worship service. It’s got a little singing, a little praying, a smattering of awkward silence, and a sizable helping of lecture. Churches all over the world judge their effectiveness, in part, by how many people they can get to come once a week and sit through that 45-70 minute piece of content. And, for most congregations, there are far fewer people sitting through that content today than there were ten years ago. That kind of trend in the business world is a clear message from customers: we don’t like the content you are creating.

Church content is WAY too long

Look at the most popular content delivery platforms and you’ll find a clear trend: short. Like, really short. I mean under five minutes short. People in the modern world prefer to consume content that is far shorter than what we expect people to sit through at church. They want a TikTok video, an Instagram story or a Reel. And people who have learned how to deliver compelling content at those lengths are finding audiences in the millions sometimes reaching BILLIONS of views.

Meanwhile, back at church, leaders are frustrated when congregants reach for their phones in the middle of a hymn or sermon. And, when churches decide to release digital content that people can consume in between worship services, the most common choice is a sermon podcast. Some fraction of the people who come on Sunday morning end up listening to the podcast along with the Pastor’s mom and a couple members from the pastor’s previous church. The content doesn’t take off, doesn’t find its own audience because, in part, it’s too long.

Church content is not long enough

Except that most churches don’t create content that is long enough. At the same time TikTok is dominating the world allowing people to consume fifty pieces of content during the time of your average church service, Netflix changed everything by releasing entire series at the same time fueling a new binge trend. Many people will refuse to watch shows that are released one episode a week until an entire season is over because they want to watch all twenty hours in a single weekend.

Again, the worship service falls short. Not only does the one-hour timeframe not allow for bingeing, it is also not bingeworthy. The content is built to try and maintain attention for a single 40-70 minute segment rather than keeping people engaged for two or twenty hours. There is a real need for long, thoughtful content that leads people though books, ancient meditation practices, etc. But the church can’t see beyond trying their best to keep people from diving into their phones before the end of the sermon.

This is a fixable problem

Churches spend an inordinate amount of money, time, and people resources on creating a piece of content that doesn’t match the content preferences of the modern world. Insead of designing for an outdated format, maybe it’s time to flip the priority. Most churches would die in a couple of weeks if they went cold turkey and stopped doing worship, but there could be a middle ground. Here are some questions to get you started:

• How could we change our music offerings to be interesting to people who don’t attend church?

• How could we record our Sunday music pieces in such a way that people who don’t know the people in the video or the song itself would want to watch it?

• Could our pastor write a ten hour long sermon that is delivered in 20 parts and then becomes a single course/season of podcast episodes that work together?

• Could our pastor write a sermon with intentional 2-minute chunks that could be pulled out and made into short content that is interesting/provocative?

• Could we spend the majority of our energy pre-taping even more compelling content that is repurposed on Sunday morning for Worship?

Church funding is broken (a guide for finding a fix)

The individual donor model for funding spiritual communities (a.k.a churches) is broken. Churches are receiving less money overall and less money per member while membership is waning. This is a cycle that is moving in a single direction: closing church communities.

Problem 1: Tithing Impossibility

Many churches have a history of teaching that the Bible encourages all people to give ten percent of their income to the religious community they attend. There are two problems with that. First, the Bible does not mandate 10%. It varies from year to year, but is closer to 22.5%. In addition, the New Testament doesn’t offer anything close to a percentage. Second, for most people giving 10% of their income is an impossibility for much of their lives, and faced with the impossible standard, they generally opt out altogether.

The way the church is talking about tithing has the net result of making people give nothing.

Problem 2: Ignoring Direct Giving

For the majority of people, they no longer want to give to a giant fund. They may give a little here and there, but they want to give to something they are passionate about. They want to give directly to solve a problem or fund a specific effort that made a difference in their lives. Churches fail on two counts in this area. Many constantly pressure members to give to an anonymous general fund instead of to the parts of the organization that is making a difference in their life. In addition, the church only invites members to give to the church ignoring the desire of their members to give to organizations who are addressing issues the church is not. Yes, they will sometimes invite members to give to the general fund by talking about how the church gives money to other organizations through a mission committee, but that committee generally gives away a tiny fraction of the overall church budget. When members discover these percentages, they are often frustrated and disillusioned with the church’s broader appeals.

The anonymous, broad appeals from churches are causing people to give less and stop giving altogether.

Problem 3: Not charging for products and services

People know that it costs money to teach a class on meditation or to send weekly devotions to their email. Though churches are great at coming up with new, helpful products and services, they rarely consider charging a fee that would sustain the effort. The lack of financial buy-in can cause people to flake out and stop attending and the lack of meaningful financial feedback that comes from people discontinuing paying for a service, churches often continue programs long beyond their natural effectiveness lifespan.

Churches need a new financial model

It’s time for innovation in the area of financial models for churches. We need experimentation and testing. Here are a series of questions that can get that innovation started:

• What are meaningful programs that we can invite people to donate toward?

• What kinds of policies do we need to develop to sustain the overall institution off targeted giving?

• What other Biblical teaching on money could encourage generosity that does not present an impossible bar like the Tithe?

• What other sources of income have we not explored (interest from direct loans, grants, digital products, etc)

• What do we do that is worth paying for? How much would we have to charge to fund it completely from sales?