“Innovation” can seem like a bad word in the context of the church. It sounds too new, too customer-focused, as if the church is a startup trying to gain market share. But what if innovation is a lot closer to Genesis than to Silicon Valley? In a time of crisis, what if innovation is exactly what the church needs?
Because my career has meandered through corporate America, international relief work, government service, and a number of faith-based nonprofits, I feel a little like I’ve seen it all. But this is the first time that I’ve seen anything like the complex, chronic crisis of a full-blown pandemic — or the incredible ways churches around the world are responding to this crisis simultaneously.
What if innovation is a lot closer to Genesis than to Silicon Valley?
It doesn’t matter if you have a congregation of 40 or 4,000, if your church is meeting at all right now, it is innovating. Seemingly overnight, we all scrambled to record sermons, livestream prayer meetings, and turn youth group into a Zoom session. If your church is well-resourced and your country has some digital infrastructure, it’s easier to cope with the pandemic, but none of us is immune, and even the best technology falls short of truly being together.
My husband and I have the privilege of knowing many pastors and their families. This week, we spoke with a pastor friend in Texas, who shared with us that he didn’t hold out much hope for his large church meeting together in 2020. “Maybe Christmas,” he said, and my response was stunned silence. While we both hope that he is wrong about that timeline, it is worth considering.
Right now, the problem we are innovating around is coping with physical distancing and shelter in place. But COVID-19 is causing more than one kind of problem. The first wave of church response is happening now, but what will the next wave look like?
Pastors Having Technological Conversions
In Rwanda, my friend Daniel’s church is using free apps to connect. He told me that his senior pastor, who wasn’t all that tech savvy before the pandemic, woke up a different man! With the help of younger people in the congregation, he is uploading sermons to YouTube and contributing to church WhatsApp groups. Many pastors all over the world are having similar technology conversions. Daniel explained that the church is handling tithing with mobile money through a Venmo-like app that lets anyone with a flip phone have a “bank account.” Such apps are common throughout Africa, but tithing by using them exclusively is an innovation within an innovation.
The biggest challenge facing Daniel’s church is the same one facing churches throughout the United States and around the world: How do they reach members who do not have smartphones or access to the internet? And how do they meet the increasing physical needs of their most vulnerable congregants?
In Togo — a West African nation that is home to some of the most vibrantly colored fabrics in the world and is also one of our planet’s poorest nations — my friend Mawoussé’s church is using Facebook, WhatsApp, and phone calls to keep in touch. It has made fabric face masks for every church member, plus others to share. Soon, it will start a ministry of purchasing and delivering food for the most vulnerable in its community. These efforts remind me of the churches of Macedonia mentioned in 2 Corinthians 8, which gave beyond their own means and with abundant joy.
An Innovative Use of Time for Furloughed Workers
In Scotland, my friend Heather’s church got moving quickly. Before lockdown began, the church distributed messages by letter and social media, letting the community know it had people available to help. Some church members have been furloughed and are using their time to pick up food and medicine for others, a lovely innovation that helps everyone involved. Heather explained that the church has moved to more frequent, virtual connections as a strategy for getting through the massive change. It is especially focusing on those who live alone.
Personally, Heather mentioned how happy her family was to be building relationships with neighbors “over the garden wall.” My mother in California mentioned something similar. These are the bright spots to keep our courage up.
What is Innovation?
To return to the idea of the “next wave” of innovation, I want to focus on a definition. The way I identify an innovation is that, when it is encountered, someone feels relief, delight, or renewed hope. In Genesis 2, Adam would perhaps agree that women are the greatest innovation. When he first saw Eve, he broke out into song. Talk about relief, delight, and renewed hope!
The way I identify an innovation is that, when it is encountered, someone feels relief, delight, or renewed hope.
Design Thinking is a well-known process used to create innovations codified by Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and famously applied to a wide range of challenges by the California-based company IDEO. You can download free resources from both institutions to get you started. Many denominations, Christian organizations, and individual ministries and churches are using versions of Design Thinking, and I promise it’s not as scary as it sounds.
An Innovation Process for the Church
For the past year, I’ve been working with my colleagues at The Chalmers Center and churches around the world to develop a faith-based innovation process. We are testing it in West Africa and multiple locations in the United States. The process has three quite simple steps: Listen, Make, and Test. That’s it. And those are the three things I’d encourage every church to do right now — regardless of how big or small your congregation is, regardless of your budget.
Listen to your people and your community. Ask questions about how they are feeling, both the good and the bad. Wonder why they feel that way and let that wondering start to connect the dots between your community’s needs and assets (not just finances and property, but all your social, relational, and spiritual blessings). Once you have an idea of the asset you want to amplify or the challenge you want to meet, it’s time to brainstorm and take the best ideas forward to make simple models, or prototypes, and improve those through testing with the people you want to serve.
So what’s next for the church facing a new set of chronic and complex problems? The range of technologies available can help many people on the planet, but not all of them. Once we move beyond solving the problem of physical distancing and quarantine, how do we keep going and shifting to meet longer-term needs? If we start with good questions, we can listen to those we want to serve, create new ideas with them, and get their input through simple tests to make our solutions truly beautiful, the type of solutions that might make someone break into song.
When we innovate and use creativity to solve emerging or chronic problems, we more closely resemble our Creator God. I have often wondered why God made the world so beautiful and intricate when He could have made it gray and flat and we would have never known better. Instead, we are surrounded by His gorgeous innovations of love and ingenuity.
Maybe God is saying something to us besides, “Look, this is pretty.” Maybe He is inviting us into this rich work of innovation and creativity. We serve a truly innovative God whose primary tool is love. Let’s go be like Him.
Tabitha Kapic is the director of innovation processes at The Chalmers Center at Covenant College.