Next session has been about leadership issues like hiring, board meetings, and firing. It has been interesting and some helpful ideas have been put forward.
Gary Hamel is speaking and is saying that only 17 percent of Americans attended a worship service on a given weekend according to the last survey. It is good to see this number because I believe it is far more accurate than the 40 percent number we have seen.
Hamel goes on: In too many cases, the church has become a convocation for the converted. It is full of apathy. The culture has turned against the church and consumerism and a plethora of choices, distrust of institutions, and a lack of confidence in claims to truth, are all warring against Christianity. But, maybe some of these things can be good things if they give us a chance to demonstrate authentic faith and relationship with Christ.
ME: It isn't the world that I am worried about. It is Christians and their growing captivity to culture. I expect the world to be lost. But, when believers run after the world, with what power will we encounter the world with the gospel.
Hamel: Our problem is not the world, it is inertia. This is happening when the world is changing at an alarming pace. The world is becoming more turbulent at a faster rate than organizations are becoming resilient. Shifts are taking place in every field (example: shopping malls to big box stores to shopping online). Unfortunately, most organizations end up shackled to one business model and when that model fails, the organizations generally fails with it.
The best thing that we can develop is the ability to change and morph with changing circumstances. Usually a crisis is necessary to cause this to happen. Also, a change in leadership is usually necessary. That is not good.
How do you become an enemy of entropy?
1. Overcome temptation to take refuge in denial. Every organization is successful until it is not. Most people live in denial when it comes to a lack of success regarding their organization. We dismiss the problem, rationalize it by coming up with reasons, mitigate the issue (which doesn't work), and we finally realize that we need to confront the issue head on. Self-delusion is not our friend. We have to face the facts. People live in denial not because the future is unknowable, but because it is unpalatable. We always need to question the way that we are doing things. Bill Gates has said that he believes that Microsoft is always 2 years away from irrelevancy, so they need to keep innovating. We should listen to the renegades and dissidents as well. Do we welcome dissent or do we try and stifle it?
2. Generate More Strategic Options: We get paralyzed because we clutch at what we know instead of continuing to innovate. Change needs to be more exciting that staying the same. We need to look at lots of ideas and develop search strategies to try and find what will work. We need to generate lots of ideas. You need to diverge a lot before you find the ideas that will work. You need to invite a lot of people to the table to participate. Are we being effective?
3. Deconstruct what you are already doing. Look at everything. Take radical approaches. Challenge your own orthodoxies before growth stagnates. Look at everything and ask what hasn't changed in 3-5 years. Compare your church to others in your community. What are we doing that everyone else is doing? Why not "open source" the sermon? Put it out there and let people make suggestions. Why is the sermon more of a lecture than a discussion? When you are in a rut, the edge of a rock looks like the horizon. Are we more committed to redemption and reconciliation or to the way we do things?
4. None of this is feasible with a top-down, autocratic leadership structure. When the mental models of leadership are depreciating faster than their power to make change. The renegades leave and start something new because they cannot exist in a static system. Bottom-up leadership allows innovation to make its way to the top. Is the challenge building great leaders or developing organic, bottom up leadership structures? We must create an organization where people innovate all the time and fight bureaucracy none of the time - Bill Gore, Founder of Gore (Goretex).
Our organizations were never meant to be adaptable. They were formed in an industrial age and they are no longer valid. We need new organizations that fit the new reality. People need to feel like they are part of a community, not minions in a bureaucracy. The Web is the example of this. Natural hierarchies exist based on value added systems. If something has value, it will continue. The Facebook generation does not want to go to a church that feels like a corporation. They want a flexible community that has a cause - a cause that they can organically help create. The early church was spiritually powerful and institutionally weak. We need to learn from network-based structures that lead and empower from the edges.
Jesus is the hope for humanity and He uses the church to extend that hope. Our churches need to be the most vibrant, resilient, and adaptable organizations in the world.
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Gary Hamel was incredible. He is an author and Harvard recognized leadership expert. I'm looking him up later.
Tim Keller is next at 2pm! Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
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