Illustration by Bratislava Milenkovic

What if we are asking the wrong questions? 

In our attempts to minister to the poor, reach the lost, or create effective ministries, have we stopped to ask, Who are we trying to reach? What do they really need? What do they have? 

Tabitha Kapic of The Chalmers Center believes the right questions and approach can empower people to meet the needs in their communities effectively. 

The Chalmers Center in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, has for decades helped people around the world think about the part they play in helping lift their communities out of poverty. Kapic is director of innovation for The Chalmers Center. She described The Chalmers Center’s approach to asset-based development as a three-stranded braid: God’s story of change, asset-based development, and design thinking and innovation. 

“Asset-based” means the materially poor are identifying and using the skills, resources, and assets they already have to meet community challenges. Design thinking and innovation helps Christians to practically apply biblically informed theology in any setting. Kapic has helped ministries around the world apply it in their contexts, and slowly it is catching on within the U.S. too. 

What Is Design Thinking?

The brand of design thinking that Chalmers has adapted could be traced to methodologies taught at Stanford University’s d.school and the IDEO consultancy. At its simplest level, design thinking involves listening to stakeholders, making a prototype, and testing it. Kapic said designers want to start small and fail fast so that they can make rapid improvements and succeed more quickly. 

But this simple model can be adapted to countless situations. 

The Chalmers Center uses design thinking as the basis for its Innovate program. Innovate leads participants to think creatively about solving problems in the community. Through an eight-week blend of live Zoom classes, exercises in each team’s community, and selected videos and readings, Innovate guides teams through aligning around a shared vision and creating or improving a ministry that empowers the materially poor. 

For instance, The Chalmers Center trained missionaries in Nicaragua using Innovate and challenged them to tackle problems in their communities. One team built a well to sell sustainable, low-cost drinking water in the community. Another team cleaned up an abandoned lot, and the community joined in the work. A church has now been started on the cleaned lot. 

Some of Tabitha Kapic’s stateside students are using the Innovate concepts to help Christians think about how their faith impacts their work.

Kapic said it is common for people to “make programs that no one wants.” With design thinking, problem solvers begin by asking the community to help it identify the resources and problems at the heart of community issues. So, the solutions are focused and asset-based rather than overly ambitious or missing the problem altogether. 

Thus far The Chalmers Center has certified 110 people around the world to lead others through the design thinking process, Kapic said, and more than 2,000 people around the world have had some sort of Innovate training. 

Design Thinking As Discipleship 

Some of Kapic’s stateside students are using the Innovate concepts to help Christians think about how their faith impacts their work. Using design thinking, they are connecting Sunday to weekdays and learning practical theology. 

Robby Holt is senior pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Before coming to Birmingham, he led business leaders from several Chattanooga churches through the Gotham Fellows curriculum on connecting faith and work. After arriving in Birmingham, he led a Wednesday night course called “God, His People, and the Poor.” The next year he invited Blake Schwarz of Park Cities Presbyterian Church to teach design thinking to 15 leaders who had participated in the course on poverty. Schwarz challenged participants to use design thinking to love their neighbors who are materially poor. 

One of the participants was a senior executive with a bank. From the outset he decided that he could love his neighbor by offering financial literacy classes for the poor. But when a nonprofit paired him with an individual to mentor, the financier had an up-close look at the obstacles people in poverty often face. While financial literacy is important, when compared with the other issues the man faced — struggles such as addiction, criminal charges, family crises — it is a tiny piece of the puzzle. 

Holt said the banker “didn’t fully realize how complex the factors are leading to generational poverty.” After taking time to ask questions and get to know someone struggling with poverty, he realized how much he didn’t know.

Holt also sees how design thinking could help pastors and sessions ask better questions when considering the church’s approach to various ministries. The “listen-make-test” model could help ministry leaders connect God’s ordinary means of grace with the present and pressing needs of God’s people. 

“Both times I’ve used it, it was helping people think about their vocational and social capital,” Holt said. “It influences me so it influences how I lead, but I’ve never used it to help people in the church revamp ministries.”  

Holt is also excited about how it can help denominations like the PCA think through evangelism. “Design thinking could help because instead of starting with, ‘Where do we go and say the right words?’ we can ask ‘Who do we want to hear these words? What are they struggling with? What are their questions?’” he said. 

For Blake Schwarz, design thinking is practical theology. Schwarz worked at Park Cities Presbyterian Church (PCPC) in Dallas, Texas for several years, and as part of his job he led its faith and work fellowship in partnership with the Gotham Network. In his experience working with The Chalmers Center and PCPC’s Pegasus Fellowship, he believes design thinking can help Christians in the business sector integrate their faith into their work in the most practical ways. 

After all, if Stanford and Apple used design thinking to create the iPhone, and Meta used it to create Facebook addicts, what might the same principles do when put to redemptive purposes? 

“You have to have the theological framework, but design thinking is a wonderful tool to help discern how to apply theology in a given situation to a given set of people to help them become what God has called them to be,” he said. 

At its most basic level, the steps of design thinking are listen, make, test. Schwarz challenges Christian business leaders to take this basic model into their jobs. He believes once Christians begin to grasp the process, they can have a bigger impact on the business world than a church or nonprofit could. 

And design thinking can flesh out some of the beauty of Reformed theology. If the sovereign, triune God is working to renew all things, that work is more than just the salvation of souls. Schwarz wants believers to take that gospel truth and apply it in their unique situations. 

“We think if we know the right thing to do for the homeless person, we’ve done something to alleviate their pain and suffering,” Schwarz said. “That couldn’t be further from the truth. Design thinking can help us live it, and not just know it.”