Difference Between Adults & Children
Pastors all over the world are having trouble imagining a new and hopeful future for their churches. In the last blog we talked about how the church is no longer the church we signed up to lead, and I gave you some practical exercises designed to help you to let go and lament the changes we’ve all been through. This is all for the purposes of widening our imagination for church, something that us adults have literally been taught not to do.
As we get older, we get better at completing tasks. Our focus narrows, and we become motivated by finishing a job rather than brainstorming one. Of course, adults are more successful at completing tasks because there are rewards to arriving at one right answer. However, while this serves us well in a professional or academic setting, it can and does stymy the creative aspect of dreaming up new possibilities for the future of church—an area where there doesn’t seem to be one definitive answer at all.
Kids, on the other hand, are experts at coming up with an almost unlimited number of ideas. Not only that, but they have a lot more fun problem-solving than adults typically do. It came as no surprise to me that author Julia Cameron, in The Artists Way, says that our creativity is a child in us that needs to be nurtured and protected. If we are going to widen our imaginations for the new thing that God might be doing in our churches, we will need to reach for our creative, inner child in order to dream up a variety of possible ideas and solutions to the complex problems that we are facing in our churches.
Innovation & Widening the Imagination
Our leadership in our missional community started keeping two running lists. One was a list of all the issues that we were facing in our new post-Covid reality, while the other was a list of all the things that we had been learning. Both lists were extensive. We knew that we faced the challenges of a congregation that was roughly 60% of its former self. Not only that, but we were facing new budget realities as well. We struggled to come up with innovative solutions to these problems because we were having a hard time seeing past the ways that we had always done church in the past. We knew that doing the same old things were unlikely to produce a different result and we needed imagine a new and more hopeful future. But how?
Imagination is the foundation of creativity and innovation, but our imaginations needed a spark. The teams you work with likely need a spark too. Our brains are unlimited creativity engines, but our imaginations are limited by our past experiences and our current frames of reference. In the church, we often hear things like, “Well, that’s how we’ve always done it.” But mindsets like this are the enemy of innovation. Our frames of reference mostly include things that may have worked in the 1990’s, but will not work in our post-Christian context of 2023. If it’s true that ideas spark ideas, then our church (and yours) will need to find ways to trigger the imaginations of our leaders.
Divergent Ideation & Convergent Deciding
Innovation requires a combination of divergent ideation (many ideas) and convergent deciding (that narrows the many ideas into an experiment to focus on). Scott Cormode, in The Innovative Church, says that ideas are saplings…
- Never invest in just one
- Grow them in numbers
- You don’t always know which ideas will be good ones
- Ideas are measured in quantity, not quality
Churches tend to invest in the one big idea instead of considering the many potential possibilities. While it can be tempting to skip straight to one single solution (convergent deciding), creative people and teams understand the value of divergent ideation and the importance of allowing enough time for inspiration and exploration. We need to get comfortable with the ambiguity that surrounds the divergent ideation phase, trusting that it will open up new possibilities and perhaps new and unexpected futures for our churches. Below are some steps to guide you and your team through the innovation process:
- Choose a problem that your church is currently facing.
- Depending on the size of the team you are working with, come up with a minimum of three possible solutions to the problem, remembering that at this stage, there is no such thing as a bad idea. For more suggestions on how to map solutions, see Divergent Thinking Exercises and Convergent Thinking Exercises below.
- Debate the merits of each idea, making pro and con lists.
- Choose the idea that the team would like to try.
- Write down the desired outcome and come up with a simple multi-step plan for how to get there.
- Implement and evaluate.
Divergent Thinking Exercises:
• Brainstorming: This is a classic exercise where a group of people come together to generate as many ideas as possible within a set time frame, without worrying about the feasibility or practicality of the ideas.
• Random word association: In this exercise, one person says a word, and the next person has to come up with a word that is related to the previous one. The goal is to come up with as many words as possible, without worrying about the relevance or logic of the associations.
• Mind mapping: This exercise involves creating a visual representation of ideas, with the main idea at the center and branches representing different sub-ideas. This helps to stimulate creativity and come up with new ideas.
• Role-playing: This exercise involves acting out different scenarios, either as a group or individually. This helps to stimulate creative thinking and come up with new solutions to problems.
Convergent Thinking Exercises:
• Problem-solving: This exercise involves identifying a problem and coming up with a solution to it. This requires the ability to analyze different options and choose the most effective solution.
• Decision-making: This exercise involves making a choice between different options, based on their pros and cons. It requires the ability to evaluate different options and choose the one that is most suitable.
• Prioritization: This exercise involves ranking different tasks or ideas in order of importance. It requires the ability to analyze different options and choose the ones that are most important or urgent.
• Decision-making matrix: This exercise involves creating a matrix with different criteria and assigning a score to each option based on how well it meets those criteria. This helps to make more informed decisions by considering multiple factors.
Story of Transformation
Our team of staff and elders ran a process of divergent ideation and convergent deciding. We started with our lists of problems and lessons. Problems were things like attendance, purpose, participation, and budget. In the lessons list, we went over prior solutions that hadn’t seemed to work. Things like moving worship back to in person, shifting worship times, simplifying our worship process, etc. Looking back over our lists, we realized that we were focusing on the worship itself, and not on the people attending (or, in our case, not attending). We needed new ideas for how to build community, not new ideas for how to structure a service.
We knew we needed to get creative and explore ideas that were not limited by a traditional style of worship service, and so we let our team loose. Our team came through, brainstorming new and innovative ideas that we would have never been open to exploring before. Ideas like letting church members take responsibility for our mission, or alternating Sunday services with community opportunities. In our pre-COVID world, these ideas would have seemed radical. However, in our post-COVID community, they were exactly what we needed. Out of our team’s creative process emerged an alternative worship schedule and a complete shakeup of our ecclesiology that was designed to get us out of a failing worship setting and into our community. We rolled out a 6-month experiment to our congregation, expecting some pushback. To my surprise, instead of pushback, we were met with renewed energy and excitement for the future of our church. Our experiment to date has a small sample size, but the indicators are really positive and we are seeing a huge uptick in engagement. A friend just asked me if I felt that God was indeed blessing our meager attempts at being faithful in mission and I responded, “Time will tell, but it sure seems that way!”
Next Steps
- Do innovative work in teams as the myth of the lone innovator has been debunked
- Come up with a process for generating many ideas (divergent ideation) for a problem that you are facing
- Come up with your process for narrowing your list of potential ideas (convergent deciding)
- Design and run an experiment in your context using one or more of the ideas generated
- Evaluate the experiment and either redesign it or try another a new one
Encouragement
You may not find the right solution on the first try, but don’t give up hope. Working the divergent phase of the innovation cycle can help us recover that inner artist child that we left behind some years ago. It can guide us into a more hopeful future by generating new innovative ideas about the problems that we are facing as churches. Don’t be intimidated by new ideas because God is likely up to something new—perhaps our job is to try to tap into this new thing by widening our imaginations of who we can become together as God’s missional people.
