My experience with the change process at Romeo has revealed a lot about what I think about the change process in the local church and what I think about paradigm shifts in our culture.
This has a couple of folds to it that I’m still trying to work out in my brain.
- Early adapters to new trends and shifts benefit the most. By the time the rest of the world catches on to what they are doing or talking about (sometimes by the time THEY figure it out) the community they are working in is shifting once again. I’ve observed in 2 specific contexts ministries who were "the it thing" and teaching their methodology that have already significantly shifted again. How come ministries don’t look at what is working best now in their community before they look at models that are being marketed?
- Leaders never succeed by taking photographs. I think why "shifting" a ministry from one model to another works is not generally because they are copying something that is good, it’s because they try to adapt the photograph of what they’ve seen into the reality series they live in. (In our case, why it’s working is because everyone is suddenly on the same page, from the pastoral staff/deacons on down to the newest volunteer we are all asking the same questions and speaking the same language.) A photograph is a one-time event that captures success in a moment, but living a reality show is an entire different ballgame. I’ve seen ministries try to copy everything… and fail miserably because by the time the photograph gets to them, the stuff in the picture wouldn’t work anywhere because culture moves so fast. One of the cool things I’ve seen at Romeo is we study the photograph and then determine if there is anything we’d like to adapt. I cannot think of a single thing we’ve copied 100%. How can I lead an organization away from the photograph takers and into the photograph makers?
- Christian are cautious adapters. Perhaps it’s because paradigm shifts are somewhat cyclical, perhaps it’s because they cost resources and money, perhaps it’s because church people are so involved in their church that they don’t see the culture, but even the latest "lightning in a bottle" shift out there is still one-to-two cycles business in comparison to what’s really working in the business world. How many churches are striving for superlatives when people are after niches?
- Ultimately, all church models are business models. This has driven me insane for a long time. I think that models in ministry are extremely valuable because they allow an organization to focus on what they are good at. But I don’t think that we should ever eliminate non-business models simply because they aren’t what business people know. Most of the Bible talks about and to agrarian people and yet we use city/business terminology. There is a solid argument that most ministry leaders (paid and lay people) are trained in the business world so we’re simply adapting what they know to for a virtuous purpose. How can we get beyond what we’ve known and develop models that adapt at the speed of today?
- No one expects the church to succeed. This is something that I experienced while in Northern Ireland. It completely shocked me to see churches use 1950s or earlier approaches to ministry. When I met the people, most of the people in charge didn’t really think that God could change their world. So they had taken the stance of "we’re holding on to what we know." The church became and institution and not a living organism. Young people fled the church because they had absolutely no way to connect to the institution… the results were scary. There was an expectation that young adults would fall into sin so deep that by the time they were in their 30s they’d hit rock bottom and seek God.
I’m not done here… our ability or inability to shift paradigms shows us a lot about who we are in Christ. I’m still working all of this out in my mind. But my departing question of the day for myself is, "How did the church in Acts determine which paradigm shifts were worth adapting to?"
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