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For congregations who are experimenting with trying something new, or letting something go, or daring to pilot a partnership with another congregation or organization - all of these experiences could go badly. Something could turn out to make someone mad or cause financial complications or require the church to close. In a word, the innovation could fail.
But if we are serious about innovation and growth, if we aren't kidding around about adapting to the spiritual needs of our times, we have to get used to failure. We have to come to expect it, to anticipate it, and to build the resilience that allows us to try again...and again...and again.
The past several weeks I've been participating in an intensive fitness program. On the list provided to us of "How the Program Works" is a reminder that "if your way was working, you wouldn't be here." It's an encouragement for people to trust the trainer and to follow the meal plan, basically encouraging us to be suspect of our inner expert.
It's hard for me to imagine a better parallel to innovation and growth work. There are congregations who will never entertain the challenges of adaptation towards relevance. They are content to keep doing things just as they always have and have decided to basically bury their collective heads in the sand. Yet, there are other congregations and communities who have shown up, as I have with my bad eating habits and sedentary lifestyle, and said, "we need to be here because our way isn't working anymore."
And those congregations who have made some headway towards relevance as spiritual centers in their communities? Who have engaged full on the work of innovation and growth? Here's what they have done: They have built cultures of experimentation and risk. They just keep trying stuff, over and over, until they become less afraid. Their leaders say, "that thing we did was hard and I'm scared to live through it again, but what have we got to lose?" They confess their feelings, face them, try something else, and repeat.
A lot of these themes come up in business writing I read, articles from Fast Company or the Harvard Business Review with titles like "The Promise of Lean Experimentation." Most of what I encounter is examples of how closely we have tied our innovation narratives to our beloved myths of individualism. I read countless articles detailing how single, solitary people come up with great, isolated ideas. Luckily those of us in congregations know that this story is not true.
We know innovation and growth takes a village because we are the village, and acknowledging this reality can make all the difference for us in this work. Our lived experience in congregations proves that we do not have to do this work alone. The truth of community is that when we try something, and fail - which we will - we will not have to feel that failure alone, and there will be others there next to us willing to try the next experiment, together.
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