Watch This Video: Innovative Churches Are Different

"Innovation requires a culture of risk and a willingness to push beyond one's comfort zone."

Many church leaders work hard to help their congregations value creativity, variety, and trying new ways of spreading the gospel. For example, how many of the following creative solutions has your church tried or looked into?

1. All-church, communitywide day of service
2. Internet campus
3. Recovery groups as a Sunday school class
4. Capital campaign that includes an external focus
5. Spiritual formation through individualized life coaching plans
6. Church-specific social networking site
7. Pastoral blog as a means of church-wide communication
8. Church lobby kiosk for financial giving
9. "Glocal" (both local and overseas) approach to missions
10. Church partnerships with municipal government to do good to a local community.

When you build a culture that values such innovations, does it make any difference? When you encourage an atmosphere of risk and a willingness to push beyond one's comfort zone, is there a payoff?

"Churches that welcome innovation tend to embrace creativity, ingenuity, and divergent ways of thinking inside the box."

Leadership Network, in partnership with Hartford Institute for Religion Research, did a study to find out how churches that describe themselves as innovative differ from other churches. Our survey group happened to be larger churches, which may or may not be representative of all churches since the larger a church is, typically, the more innovative it is. Even so, we compared the ones that describe themselves as highly innovative against the group as a whole. We found some big differences overall.

Highly innovative churches:

• Grow faster
• Have a higher rate of new believers
• Put more emphasis on personal Bible study and tithing
• Experience less conflict

Drilling down, they also seem to experience great worship. Of seven choices offered, these are the three highest scored descriptions of a highly innovative church's worship (in order): "filled with a sense of God's presence," "welcoming to newcomers" and "joyful."

They also know what their church is about, expressing a strong sense of congregational identity. An overwhelming 91% strongly agree their church “has a clear mission and purpose”

Highly innovative churches are also filled with people who invite family and friends. A delightful 43% report that their attenders are involved "a lot" in recruiting new people to attend church (vs. 28% for the survey group as a whole).

Highly innovative churches also staff themselves differently:

• They have more volunteers
• They have fewer full-time staff
• They have lots of part-time staff instead

Highly innovative churches are more likely to be multi-site than others, and are more often than not externally focused. They view themselves as "a positive force for good in our community." They describe "community service activities" as a "specialty" of their congregation.

Highly innovative churches rate themselves with a high spiritual vitality. An almost unanimous 98% agree their congregation "is spiritually vital and alive." They describe themselves as "an exciting place where people can experience God and have a good time" and also as a place where God "changes people's lives"

If the Creator of the universe values your creativity in taking risks and trying something new, how can your church make innovative changes that lead to the kind of ministry improvements that enlarge the work of God?

The ideas in this blog are expressed in a creative way through animated information visualization, which you can watch here:

Warren Bird, Ph.D., is Research Director at Leadership Network, and co-author of 21 books on various aspects of church health and innovation.

RELATED LINKS:

• Innovation3 www.innovation3gathering.com
• Changes in American Megachurches, www.leadnet.org/megachurch
• Multiple Everything, www.leadnet.org/multisite
• Beyond Megachurch Myths by Scott Thumma and Dave Travis

Comments

[Erin]

"Our survey group happened to be larger churches, which may or may not be representative of all churches since the larger a church is, typically, the more innovative it is."

How can this be asserted with no explanation or data? In what way are larger churches more innovative? Isn't the marketplace trend smaller, more networked businesses?(Why is innovation the goal - could it perhaps be the way the church is held captive by marketplace ethics in a naturalist's world)?

1. Let's define innovative.
-Innovative within what framework? Theological or managerial?
2. If things such multi-site video feeds are more innovative, doesn't that suggest innovation is directly tied to capital?
3. There seems to be an blurring of ideas between growth and revival in the article. I find no Biblical reason to believe they are the same thing, but I do find lots to indicate they are different.
4. If the goal is innovation, won't that make churches like that kid in Highschool who got a tattoo, and so did all of his friends, because they wanted to be different?

To be clear, I like innovation- the freedom to pursue where God is calling- but I worry in studies like these we assume growth=call of God. These values and "noted features" are not inherently Biblical:

Highly innovative churches:
* Grow faster
(Perhaps they are a wide road)
* Have a higher rate of new believers (Provided they stick ,this is admirable. Of course one wonders if the world is then getting better for all the millions of new believers large churches are "producing".)
* Put more emphasis on personal Bible study and tithing
(How very individualist and financially geared. It sounds like a great way to create people who fit in well to our consumerist society.)
* Experience less conflict
(And are robbed of ever practicing what Jesus spent so much time talking about? Is it avoidance, reconciliation or humility happening? Group think is not the same thing as a unity of mind. So I question the source of the "frictionless" church bodies. If they are so great at reconciling I would expect them to be more multi-ethnic and engaged in healing the breaches in their cities.)

For a post about innovation, there is nothing truly innovative mentioned; we just get enamored when Church can run and market itself like Apple. Lobby Kiosks? How is "make it easier to receive people's offerings" innovative? (regardless if you support it or not.)
New Monastics- that's different.
No Head Pastors- that's different.
Quakers- that's really different.

But peace to you- an effort to love the Body of Christ is always a good one.

[djchuang]

Erin, thanks for your comments. Perhaps it'd be helpful to surface this starting point, that Peter Drucker's definition of innovation is "a change that makes a difference in performance." Or, "Innovation in ministry is any new change of practice that improves performance." via http://learnings.leadnet.org/2009/04/why-churches-must-innovate.html

[erin]

DJ! How are you? Thanks for the response! I hope my post is not too strident- blog comments are like text messages - little content with less context :) I compensate by extroverting online. hmmm. maybe I should rethink that...

Drucker's definition is a helpful starting point, but it doesn't answer the underlying problem. If innovation is "change of practice that improves performance," then we must ask what the performance expected of the church is. The problem with the original post is that it makes some pretty large blanket statements that assume what that performance is without making it explicit. Of course, it's a blog so I understand it's not a Doctoral dissertation, but it does present itself as such.

The problem for me then, is on two related levels.

First, I question the results. The assertion that, "since the larger a church is, typically, the more innovative it is," seems largely unfounded. What were the terms of the study? I believe innovation is easier for smaller churches, but a) no one notices, and b) the innovation is not driven by capital so again, it isn't the flashy, “risky” kind of year-end report pulp churches like to dramatize. Just surviving is risky! :) The innovation examined is by definition not an innovation a smaller church could offer many times. So much of the recent literature in the field has produced slogans like "Big is the new small" that the results posted are jarring.

Similarly, it is a bit concerning that these innovative churches report of their services as "filled with a sense of God's presence," "welcoming to newcomers" and "joyful." There is a strong connection here between God's presence, joy, and numerical growth. Certainly it is appealing to be a part of something growing and exciting. It adds a sense of vitality. But is it faith? What if people are enjoying a phenomenon that is largely a result of social engineering and has little to do with the Spirit of God? Is an "All-church, community wide day of service" really innovative? I am saddened that we cut out the other 364 days away and then celebrate it as remarkable.

Which brings me to the second problem: The nature of the assumptions and definitions in the study are not explicit, and I don’t think I agree with them. How do we judge the performance of a church? I am all for studies that show us truths about ourselves, but it must be remembered that a study only displays something human- only give us numbers and patterns that represent human behavior. They cannot point in a direct way to something outside of any scientific measuring; faith, the Spirit of God at work. The tools of science can only tell us about natural things, not supernatural things.

Perhaps the Sermon on the Mount is a more useful performance criterion? Are people reconciling more? Are they growing in their giving to the poor? At some point powerful worship services that reinforce the identity of the church or a generic evangelical identity will run at cross purposes with the gospel. (A subtle Constantinianism at best). But those same services will look very faithful. Perhaps we should turn to the homeless in a city or the atheists or Planned Parenthood to let us know how we are doing as churches?

My concern about the way the sigmoid function is applied as an endorsement for innovation in the church is that it risks reducing church and the demands upon it to an entirely socially engineered phenomenon. It baptizes business methods in a way that is unaware of the cultural assumptions from which it works. This, ironically, makes the church not innovative at all, leading us to chasing after business trends and the latest research from sociology and psychology instead of pursuing a freedom to create in the name of God, in response to God. And in fact, the things mentioned in the study hardly seem innovative at all, though I am encouraged by the observation that churches are increasingly getting involved with external issues.

So what is success in this study? What is "performance" in a church? Numbers, the bottom line, do tell a story about a church, but not The Story about a church. I worry that there is a church industry more able to help churches reform small groups and provide materials and tweet during services than able to teach people what it means to reconcile and seek justice across the racial divides in our church; how to address the abuse of women and children or overcome addiction to pornography. My deepest fear is that the church becomes a kind of cultural pornography in and of itself, exploiting all the best research in business technique to make the church a fine establishment that confuses good business with faith, -a particularly American phenomenon. Is it the legacy of the Seeker Service movement that now Christians are perpetual seekers?

But hey, I am in a small church, and I take myself with a grain of salt, as well! It's an accomplishment for me to remember to spell check my emails, LOL! I highly recommend checking out http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/ for a view of something different. No mater what though, onward and upward! Thanks for pouring yourself out on behalf of the church and Christ’s call. I promise not to hog all the pixels!