The key to Innovative Ministry

Innovation and the First Flight

 

Most of you, I’m sure, read about the Wright Brothers in some high school history class. If you paid attention, you know they conducted the first ever flight in 1903 near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. As a native of North Carolina, I was indoctrinated at a young age to be extra aware of that fact. We have the slogan, “First in Flight” on all sorts of things, like our license plates and driver’s licenses. 

 

Aviation has a strong history here. The first American helicopter took off from North Carolina, a North Carolinian was the first American to shoot down an enemy craft in WWI, and North Carolina native Tiny Broadwick was the first woman to parachute from a plane. So naturally, when I visited the Wright Brothers National Memorial a couple of years ago, I was expecting to be impressed. I wasn’t prepared to arrive and be...well, bored. Save your $10 folks. 

 

One of the things they don’t highlight in the history books is that the first flight only lasted twelve seconds. That’s it. The plane took off and was back on the ground 120 feet later. I’ve flown on planes that have a wingspan longer than that. Oh, and the second and third flights? Twelve and fifteen seconds. The fourth one was really wild, it almost lasted a whole minute.

 

Yet news of the first flight shook the world. Never before had mankind designed a machine that could take off and land under its own power. Wilbur and Orville Wright became international celebrities, conducting flight demonstrations around the world, in front of audiences of more than 10,000 people. What fascinates me though is that flight technology advanced exponentially after the first flight. It wasn’t long before others independently designed their own airplanes and flights lasted well over an hour. Militaries had air forces organized within a decade.

 

The thing that’s special about the first flight is that it provided proof of concept. That’s all that was needed for inventors to get beyond their mental blocks and not just mimic, but exceed and build upon older designs. There’s a lesson for us as church leaders when it comes to proof of concept. 

 

Proof of Concept: The Key to Innovative Ministry

 

Oftentimes, we refuse to try something new, sticking to what “works,” whatever that means. We grow accustomed to our results and content with our barriers. We’ll develop minor, incremental improvements and repairs on our services, leadership structures, and discipleship strategies. In the end, we maintain the status quo and resign ourselves to systems that have led to a decline in the proportion of Christians to non-Christians in the Western world. 

 

Instead, we need to come to a place where experimentation and risk are encouraged. Where we can learn from our failures. This is particularly true where microchurches are concerned. Church leaders are all over the map in what is probably one of the most innovative areas of ministry today. On one end, leaders are enthusiastically implementing micro everywhere as the next big thing, and on the other, it’s not considered a valid approach. I believe both ends of the spectrum should approach microchurch with cautious optimism. We have to be ok learning from trials that provide proof of concept and little else. Rather than experimenting and becoming dejected or smugly satisfied that the experiment wasn’t wildly successful, we should pause and recognize that a minor success is enough to build off of. Just twelve seconds in the air can free you from the confines of your current paradigms. 

 

One of my favorite quotes is from G.K. Chesterton’s What’s Wrong with the World, “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” Chesterton knew that it’s better to do the right thing imperfectly than not at all. Otherwise, we’ll probably never learn how to do it well. If you have kids, I’m sure you didn’t watch them take their first step and then berate them for falling down. You encouraged them. Likewise we must encourage those in our churches that are taking steps of faith and pushing the limits of reaching the lost. It may be done badly at first, it may only last twelve seconds, but it can take the world by storm.