by Dr. Scott Cormode
The church as we know it is calibrated for a world that no longer exists. The world has changed and we in the church have not. So, we will need to recalibrate – and that will take innovation. But there is a problem. The secular literature on innovation tells us that the best way to innovate is to abandon the past. “Burn the boats,” they say, “Cut the ties to the past.” But we Christians cannot abandon the past. We will never stop reading Second Corinthians, we will never stop loving our neighbors as ourselves, and we will never stop saying, “Jesus is Lord.” We cannot abandon the past.
So the question of innovation is this, “How do we maintain a rock-solid commitment to the unchanging Christian gospel, while at the same time create innovative ways to express that gospel to an ever-changing world?” And that takes us back to the image of recalibrating. You recalibrate against a standard. If I want to reset my watch, I look up the time from a standard I trust (my cellphone). Christian recalibrating is particularly tricky because we have to account for both the ever-changing culture and the never-changing gospel. We will thus recalibrate using the dual standard of people and practices. That is, we will recalibrate according to the longings and losses of the ever-changing people entrusted to our care and according to the practices that constitute the never-changing gospel. But how exactly do we innovate?
Innovation often comes not through new answers to old questions but rather from asking new questions about everyday experiences. Here are five questions to help churches innovate without abandoning the past.
Q1. Who are the people entrusted to your care?
Christian leaders do not have “followers”—only Jesus has followers. Instead, Christian leaders have people entrusted to their care. There are three theological reasons for recasting the mental model of leadership to be about “a people entrusted to your care.” First, it emphasizes God’s role as the one doing the entrusting. Second, it emphasizes that we are stewards of people who already belong to God. And third, it says that the measure of good work is not my intentions but is instead the effect my work has on the people entrusted to my care.
Q2. How do those people experience the longings and losses that make up the human condition?
Leadership begins with listening. The greatest act of leadership began with the greatest act of listening, when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. He did not just walk in our shoes; he walked with our feet. Every time God entrusts a person to my care, I have to begin by listening, because before I can invite a person into a new story, I have to understand that person’s particular backstory. I have to understand what matters most to them––what stories define them. Only then will I be able to invite them into a gospel story that gives them hope. Otherwise, I am just treating them as a stereotype.
What do we listen for? Sociologist Robert Wuthnow argues that the reason our current crop of congregations is in crisis is that we have been listening for the wrong things. Most congregations listen to the things that are important to the congregations rather than to the things that are important to their people. We need to listen to the issues that matter most to the people entrusted to our care––issues such as work and money, or health and family. These are the universal issues that comprise the human condition, and every person asks fundamental questions about life, death, relationships, and how it all has meaning. These are the things that keep people awake at night.
Q3. What Big Lies do your people believe that prevent them from hearing the gospel?
Longings and losses are such a powerful and indeed overwhelming part of most people’s lives that we tend to create ways to simply cope with the questions rather than find ways to actually address the human condition. Our people can feel overwhelmed by their longings and losses, and they often take refuge in Big Lies. A Big Lie is a distorted belief—a way of seeing the world that upholds a falsehood.
We are all familiar with Big Lies that compete with the gospel. Big Lies might include ideas such as these: “Money can buy happiness.” “Look out for yourself first.” “Greed is good.” But the subtler Big Lies are often distortions that we have adopted in the church. We may not say these things out loud, but our behaviors show that we act as if they are true. For example, in my innovation work with congregations, we have seen Christians who believed (perhaps silently) that: “Some sins are worse than others and they will define you, while some sins are excusable and they will not affect you” or “Not doing bad things makes up for not doing good things” or “Good Christians will be successful.” Your people may not believe those exact Big Lies, but we all believe Big Lies that distort the gospel.
Q4. How do you make spiritual sense of those longings and losses?
Every Christian leader is called to make spiritual sense, and in doing so, we join a great cloud of biblical witnesses. Throughout the Bible we see God’s appointed leader explaining the spiritual meaning of the people’s common experience.
Look, for example, at the way that Jesus taught. Jesus repeatedly reframed the very meaning of the law. For example, he said, “Let him who has no sin cast the first stone” and punctured the self-righteous arrogance of a crowd that could no longer see its own sin. He also extended the law in new and uncomfortable ways, using the story of the Good Samaritan to show that “love thy neighbor” extends beyond the comfortable confines of polite society. Jesus offered an interpretation (“The last shall be first”) that refocused people’s lives. They thought that power and prestige signaled God’s blessing, but it was a Big Lie. Instead, he offered an image of a servant who dies on behalf of his people, saying to his followers, “whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). Jesus made spiritual sense of the longings and losses of the people entrusted to his care.
Q5. How do you express that spiritual meaning as a shared story of future hope?
The ultimate goal of Christian innovation is to invite our people into a new story––a communal story, a hopeful story. How are people transformed? People do not latch on to a plan, or an abstract statement of doctrine. That does not change them. Instead, people are transformed when they participate in a story––a story that sets them on a specific trajectory.
Let us follow the model of Jesus. Jesus invited people into the stories we now call parables. He told the story, for instance, of a man beaten and robbed on the road to Jericho and of the Samaritan man who unexpectedly cared for him. In another parable, Jesus invited people to see themselves in a story about a young son who squandered his inheritance but who was embraced by his father on his return, and he asked them to examine whether they might be like the older brother who was insulted by his father’s kindness. And Jesus repeatedly said, “The kingdom of God is like . . .” He did not so much define the kingdom of God with detailed teaching as invite people into a vision of what God intended, a vision where “the last shall be first,” a vision presented through stories.
We Christians offer something more specific than “future hope.” We offer a hope rooted in the gospel—rooted in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christian hope is different from other kinds of hope. When you hear a person say, “I hope it does not rain,” they are expressing a wish for the future. They may or not have much reason to believe that their wish will come true. But that is what they want. Christian hope is different. Our hope is not in something (like the weather), our hope is in someone (our Savior). So Christian hope is more like a quiet confidence. It is the sense that all our eggs are in Jesus’s basket, and that is just fine. And we communicate that hope by inviting people into stories, just as Jesus did.
The church as we know it is calibrated for a world that no longer exists. If we want to innovate without abandoning the past, we need to start by making spiritual sense of the longings and losses of the people entrusted to our care.1
