Are conventional church growth strategies falling short in today's changing religious landscape? In this episode (first in a two-part discussion), we dive deep into the concept of "innovation" in church contexts, exploring whether it's a helpful framework for ministry or a potential distraction from our core mission.
Dr. Andrew Root offers a critical perspective on adopting business-world trends, while the Rev Dr. Michael Binder and the Rev. Dr. Dwight Zscheile present a case for "faithful innovation." Their spirited conversation reveals both cautions and possibilities for churches seeking to thrive beyond traditional growth metrics.
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Whether you're rethinking your church's approach to growth or seeking fresh perspectives on faithful ministry, this episode offers valuable insights for navigating the complexities of church leadership in the 21st century.
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Book: "Leading Faithful Innovation" by Michael Binder, Dwight Zscheile, and Tessa Pinkstaff
Download: Spiritual Life Listening Tool
Download: Free sample chapter of Leading Faithful Innovation
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/8rKGLGi9jC0
And "the listen" is a series of practices beginning with listening to scripture, then listening to each other's spiritual stories, and beginning to listen to neighbor stories and pay attention to neighbors in ways that allow and kind of foster the the naming by regular people in the Church of God's action, which in our experience with, you know, at least mainline churches specifically, is not something that most churches are really practiced at. And, you know, church doesn't really ask people to do that, doesn't create practices and spaces in many cases. So when we ask them to to do something like share a story of a time when you felt spiritually alive or engaged, um, people are kind of like, well, no one's ever asked me this at church.
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Pivot Podcast. This is the podcast where we explore how the church can faithfully navigate a changing world. The term innovation has become commonplace across the church today, and it's been embraced by the church at many levels as inherited structures and as the pattern of church life struggles to connect with people in today's life. But what actually do we mean by innovation, and is it actually a helpful category for the church to embrace? And if it is, on what terms? That is what we're going to talk about today. And I'm here to welcome three guests, my fellow colleagues from Luther Seminary faculty. Today we have Doctor Andrew Root. Doctor Michael Binder and the Reverend Doctor Dwight Zscheile. Andy Root is the Carrie Balsam Olson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry here at Luther. He is also the author of many, many volumes, a multi-volume series on the secular age, of which one of them is this in the Secular Age volume? Yes. The one that we're going to talk about today is in and it's called The Church after innovation. And Michael Binder is assistant professor of Congregational Mission and leadership. He's also a church planter and most importantly, a fourth generation family small business owner.
Fifth, fifth generation.
Sorry, I love that.
Might as well count them all.
Yeah. He is co-author of Leading Faithful Innovation with Dwight Zscheile and Tessa Pinkstaff. And then finally, we have Dwight, Zscheile. You may know him as our co-host here on the Pivot podcast. Today, he is here as the vice president of innovation and professor of congregational Mission and leadership here at Luther. He's also authored many books on church leadership and mission, including The Agile Church and the one that we're going to talk about today, Leading faithful innovation. Welcome to all of you today. We're looking forward today to have a robust conversation on one of our pivots, the pivot around what does it mean to go from fixing institutional problems to listening and discerning where God is actually leading, and as in these challenging times? So that's what we're going to learn today. And Andy, we're going to start with you. This is Andy's book, The Church After Innovation. And you talk about in this book how the church has innovation fever. Tell us more what you mean by that.
Well, at its most base, what I mean is that at least everywhere I go, everyone's talking about innovation, particularly at kind of denominational level. I think it I think it finds its way into congregational level, too. But, you know, you go to a, some gathering of any Protestant group and, and usually and I don't mean this disparagingly in any way, but usually the bureaucrats in one way or another. The people who are managing the institution. And again, I don't mean that disparagingly. I think we live in a day and age where you say the bureaucrats and it means something like Anti-artistic anti-creative. And I don't think that's true at all, but it usually is the people who have some kind of leadership position in, in the denomination or in the collective or the network or something, and they seem to be really wanting to leverage this language of innovation. And I think probably for some good reasons that we'll get into here. Um, but I'm just a weird person. And as soon as this language is popping up everywhere, I'm like, what? What do we mean by this? Why is this everywhere? Because it wasn't that long ago you would never hear this word, you know? Or you would have to be watching a, you know, a documentary on the invention of the iPad or something, or the iPod to to hear someone talk about innovation. But now it's, you know, kind of filtered into everything. And it it really was everything like, you know, hearing camps talk about it and undergraduate, you know, religion programs talking about the necessity of it to really across all Protestant kind of institutional structures.
So I'm curious, this book is a part of a series around the secular age. How how does this have how is it worthy of a book in that series, not just a chapter or a footnote?
Yeah, well, it's mainly worthy in the fact that I just can't stop. And so that's probably part of that's true. That's that's probably part of the agreement on that. Yeah. I mean, I think in the, in volume six, I'm gonna have to think about how I did this. But they're linked across because this was supposed to be three. It ended up six. And this one because.
You can't.
Can't stop. Yeah yeah. New questions come about. So this one's kind of linked to well it is linked to the to the third volume of the congregation in a secular age like this becomes the second three are kind of questions that spin off of those main three. And so it really was a question that really continued around. What do we think about kind of stabilization? What stabilizes an institution? What do we think about, uh, forms of good action? What does good action actually look like? And what is this larger kind of cultural ethos that demands certain forms of action as good? And so it really is a question of like, why does innovation become a good thing? And it wasn't that long ago, well, maybe before the modern project, but, you know, maybe even at the beginning of the modern project, where to say that seminary's innovative would have been an insult? I mean, you would have been saying those people are heretics is what you would be saying, you know, so that's an innovative theologian or this is an innovative church, this is an innovative congregation would have been definitely an insult. And yet now I think everyone who hears it would see it as some kind of good or some kind of leaning into a future, some kind of, um, artistic, creative act. And so I want to know why that is awesome.
We're going to come back to that. Michael and Dwight, your book Leading Faithful Innovation seems to have a very different approach and take on innovation. And you pair it with this interesting word, faithful innovation. Tell us a little bit about why you see innovation differently and what's the importance of faithful innovation.
So Michael and I are both trained as missiologists. And one of the lenses we bring to think about the church's life is just the process that the church has always done of adapting as cultural circumstances change and recontextualizing its life. And so we use a very simple definition of innovation in this book that is contrasted with invention. And I think that's an important distinction. That's in some of the innovation literature. And we draw even from a book called The Innovators Way, which is that innovation is simply the adoption of a new practice in a community. And in our case, the way we talk about it, it's often the adoption of old practices that have been lost along the way. So it's not only a kind of forward thinking escape from the past, or certainly not invention in the way that the term I think is commonly used in the society. Um, the Steve Jobs kind of approach to innovation, but it's really more about that discerning of the the shapes of Christian life and witness in the church's life and witness as the culture changes. So the word faithful is, you know, is pretty important in this, um, because it is about in our case, our agenda is really to deepen the faithfulness of congregations by helping them connect more deeply with God, each other, and their neighbors more than it is just to sort of come up with new kind of sexy forms of church or ministry or whatever, that will bring the bring the young people back or something like that. What would you add, Michael?
So, Michael, you come at this literally from church planting and a series of questions as, as I've listened to you from actually being on the ground trying to share the gospel with people. Why do you like. That's where a lot of our listeners are. Why do you think it's important?
Yeah, I think one of the real gifts that Andy's bringing to this conversation is that if you look back, even over a short history, we tend to grab whatever the latest business innovation or entrepreneurial idea is and just be and just throw it into the church and say, well, it's working here. So it'll probably work here too. And we're we're usually behind on that conversation because it's older in the business world by the time we get to it in the church. Um, but one of the great things we talk about at Luther is just always trying to look through a theological lens at any concept, which is partly what we're doing in this conversation today. So the word faithful innovation actually is an attempt to articulate what is a theological understanding of innovation, whatever. Whatever's helpful about innovation, innovation theory, innovation practices. We want to run it through a theological lens. So from my perspective, as somebody who's tried to do a lot of these things on the ground, one of the big questions is how do we actually do anything that we haven't already done? How do we get real people to try things? How do we introduce practices that help us engage with our neighbors or in our community, especially when people are uncomfortable with those practices? So rather than inventing new things, are there ways we can look faithfully at our traditions, at our history, at our theology, and incorporate either some old practices or combine some things that maybe are somewhat old and somewhat new, that ultimately are trying to help us figure out how to live out witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ in a way that actually makes sense to the people who don't go to church, don't want to go to church, don't have anything to do with church. Um, so that's my interest in it. I think it's intensely practical, but I agree with Andy's critique of this that if it's the nuts and bolts of innovation theory, which is always calling for this kind of never ending new thing that we all then have to buy and and as soon as it's out, it's, it's old and we have to invent a new thing. Well, that's certainly not what God's inviting us into.
Yeah. Thank you. So, Andy, you've written about the problems of innovation in the church context and some of the pitfalls that are there. I would love for you to address that and connect it to. This is a secular age. I think we talk about that in our circles. But I think, for example, one of the distinctly different things about the church in 2024 as a 1950 is the increase is the secular age is in front of us, you know, and there's elements and depth and breadth to that. Tie those things together for us and help us think about the problems of innovation in the church.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think there's I think there's a lot at stake here. And I think it well, and I think it goes back to where we're at in Protestantism. And maybe we didn't hear the word innovation or we had, we had different frameworks that we were, that we were using. Um, and I think one of the issues that we have right now that I think we all share in this room is it does feel like Protestant institutional life is is off kilter. It feels weak. It feels it feels like its structures are not, uh, are well, are not sustainable in many ways. So this becomes an issue of stabilization, like how do you stabilize institutional life. And I think one of the one of the things that I want to point out that maybe isn't as explicit in this book is that in another project that I'm writing right now, but definitely links up to this book, is that every society has to stabilize itself in every way. And so one of the things that makes us modern is that our stabilization process becomes something outside of cultic action. You know, so before the modern period and what maybe makes us secular, at least, at least in a kind of Max Weber sense of getting the magic out of us, you know, become we become disenchanted, which in the German really means like dis dis magicked, if that's a word. And so one of the realities of that is, is that before the modern period, what's stabilized were kind of ritualized functions of the cult, which is why the King and the Crown was so important, which why in the ancient world a king and the cult were interconnected, which is one of the reasons that God does not want the Israelites to have a king, because once you have a king, then you have to have a cult. And really, the, the I think the paradigm, at least for the prophet in the Old Testament, is David, who has a very soft cult of no cult at all, refuses to build a temple, doesn't have time to build a temple, and really just creates psalms. So it's really the interaction of this kind of familial language of a child, one whose hearts before God, of what it means to be children of God, elected out of Egypt, what it means to rest with God, what it means to pray. But as soon as Solomon comes along, then you have a whole cultic system, and he has to do in realpolitik. He has to marry all these foreign, um, these foreign princesses, and they bring their cultic structure, which really is they bring their economic structure. I mean, it's a it's a different reality. But if for us moderns, every election is it's the economy, stupid. In the ancient world, I mean, every stabilization question is it's the cult stupid. Like it's it rains or it doesn't rain, there's a drought or there's not a drought because the king can operate the cult in a way that allows the gods to respond or not respond. So one of the things that makes us secular is that our stabilization system becomes outside the cult, and really any of the forms of kind of cultic practice or all those religious operations don't have any structural realities on how we stabilize our society, necessarily. It doesn't rain or not rain because we do this, the economy and dollars and cents doesn't grow because we do this or that. That all becomes private. But the new stabilization system does become capital. Capital is what what does this and it really comes about in the in the first industrial revolution. And that changes everything. And Marx has this little equation that Hartmut Rosa uses that I think is and I think this is Hartmut Rosa's great contribution. That's a through line in these is to talk about the way that we stabilize ourselves in a modern framework is dynamically. So it actually is growth that stabilizes this. And he calls this the logic of escalation, that the only way to stabilize an institution is for it to continue to escalate in some form of capital, whether it's social capital, whether it's symbolic capital, whether it's just plain dollars and cents, that capital has to be increasing or an institution is not stable. So Marx does this thing where he flips that says, once the industrial revolution starts, you used to have commodities, money, commodities. So you have corn, you trade it for coin and you use the coin to get some clothes. And that's the point. The, the, the coin stands in, the money stands in for the commodity. But once the first industrial revolution starts, it flips it. And now you have money that you invest in commodities to make more money. And this infuses within the modern project this logic of escalation and one of the realities of inside the logic of escalation, in kind of my pushback to the conversation, is that it is really true that any society, any community, is always innovated. They've just never thought about it. They've never used innovation as a form of escalation to get more. It's been a response to, well, it's been it's been a home X home Home ec issue. It's been a response to the household. How do we do do new practices to care for our children? We have someone sick amongst us. How do we respond to this? There's always been that kind of adaptive change throughout all societies, but something changes when you flip that equation. And now your m c m prime to make more money. Now innovation becomes the objective to to gaining capital. And once that happens now there becomes a whole different sense of what is good. And it becomes very hard to get that equation out of our imagination. And most people I talk to across Protestantism are really looking to find more capital. And there's not a kind of critical engagement of, is this what's supposed to be driving us? So then everything becomes about growth, everything becomes about acceleration, and everything becomes about innovation as finding some way to leverage the new to receive more capital. And that's ultimately what I'm concerned about is it's, I think, a very ancient kind of concern that I think is embedded in, in a kind of Protestantism which really thinks the word presupposes the cult. I mean, I think that's the story of First and second Kings, is that Elijah is opposing that you could turn Yahweh into a fertility god, and that you could actually try to use a stabilization system to capture Yahweh. And Yahweh doesn't work that way. Yahweh comes from the desert and wants children, not cogs. For this continued acceleration, which will happen in a fertility system, where it will be about more sweat, more blood, more, more, more. And this is not the way the electing God of the desert works. This God elects and creates children, and in the midst of that, there'll be some kind of change, there'll be some kind of adaptation. But it is a question then of how do we think about stabilization?
So this is overly simplifying a very big way that you answer the question, but I remember some conversations, um, early on or coming out of the pandemic around kind of innovation to like, respond to church decline or to be like, hey, we can't do our close our doors, so we're just going to do produce and that kind of stuff. Is that kind of like a pitfall response? Like how would it play out what you're saying in the innovation for the everyday church leader? Well, I.
Think one of the places we see it rhetorically, and I see this everywhere too, and I think it takes a different theological frame, is I'll hear people say all the time, the church can do better, the church could do better, the church can do better, and they mean a lot of different things within that. But they tend to mean the church isn't relevant enough. It doesn't have enough resources. It's disappointed me in some way. And I really theologically and this is a big theological statement too, that we'll just, you know, let lay on the table. But I do not think the church is the kind of thing that can do better, that it's just not that kind of reality, that it's created by the Word of God. And the church as a people can only be obedient or disobedient. It can only follow the word or not follow the word. It can only be open to the transformation of the spirit or deny the spirit. It's not the kind of thing that can optimize itself to do better. Now, obviously, as a as an institution, there's things we can think about and there's ways that the church is bound in institutional structures that are just, you know, cultural and societal. And maybe that way it can think about how it does its budget better. But there's a whole kind of knee jerk reaction of a lot of disappointed people who feel like the church can do better at some level. And I think that that's an ecclesiology that gets us in a, in a, in a big problem of thinking of how the church can do better, because I think it pivots us away from a way of thinking about divine action and stabilization. That is a that comes from the theology of the cross, maybe, or comes from a different kind of logic.
And I think it also asks, where's the human agency? I think we we can put our human agency above God's divinity, right? Or God's action in the world. And innovation tends to preference many times the human agency.
Yeah. Like I'm all for forms of innovation that keep us in a certain dialectic of gift exchange, that this kind of God gives gifts and election and we have to take we have to take forms of action that are open to receiving the gifts. But when we we feel the decline and the lack of stabilization, then all of these, all these beckoning calls to do more, to accelerate, to grow, to innovate so we can save ourselves comes about. And then we are really serving the bails of capital more than the God who speaks and acts. Yeah.
Thank you. All right. Michael and Dwight, you see possibilities for innovation and the church. And so first to you, Dwight. How does this approach that you guys talk about address some of the concerns that Andy's talked about, especially I think, the human agency versus God's agency? I think that's a critical one to talk about. And what kind of practices would you are critical for us to do that kind of lean into that possibility?
Well, I share a lot of Andy's concerns about the particularly the core, I think, heresy of modernity, which is that we can save ourselves. And we're expected to do that in all kinds of ways. And so what we've developed in the leading faith innovation work here in this book, but also in work that we've done with congregations, is a series of practices that are designed to disrupt that. So there are three basic kind of movements of this listen, act and share. And the listen is a series of practices beginning with listening to Scripture. Then listening to each other's spiritual stories and beginning to listen to neighbors stories and pay attention to neighbors in ways that allow and kind of foster the the naming by regular people in the Church of God's action, which in our experience with, you know, least mainline churches specifically, is not something that most churches are really practiced at. And, you know, church doesn't really ask people to do that, doesn't create practices and spaces in many cases. So when we ask them to to do something like share a story of a time when you felt spiritually alive or engaged, um, people are kind of like, well, no one's ever asked me this at church. And then when you get them going, it's amazing. You can't stop them because there's powerful stories, and often those stories actually touch on suffering. Um, and tears and all kinds of things come out pretty quickly. Right. So, um, so, So the practices that we have are the first stage around. Listening is trying to help people name God's activity in their lives and in the life of their congregation. And but doing that through Scripture. And so we have a biblical text that we use throughout this book, which is acts 16 six through 15 as a, as a provocative text to kind of reframe people's imaginations. So I was just actually leading this practice of dwelling in the word in this text the last two days with a bunch of Episcopal clergy and one of the first comments after they did the practice, which is really about, you know, listening to the text and then pairing up and sharing what caught one's imagination or questions one has around. It was the first comment was, this text is the opposite of strategic planning, which is, you know, if there's anything that's about kind of what you're describing, Andy, it's this kind of classic strategic planning. And, um, you know, so that text is, of course, you know, Paul and his companions having this call to share the gospel and having some pretty clear ideas about where they're going to go to do that. So they get up and go and they're like, we're going to go to Asia and Bithynia and like these places. And and the Holy Spirit keeps thwarting them and frustrating them and redirecting them. And then, of course, Paul has this dream of this Macedonian guy, come over here to help us. And, you know, they get up and go all the way to Macedonia, having no idea probably where in Macedonia they're supposed to go. And of course they end up encountering Lydia outside the structures of that city. But, you know, by the river where people gather to pray among these gentile women. And then you have the Philippian church sort of starting in her home and all of this. So that's that kind of exchange that happens out there. And that's a really strange text for people to dwell in today. It's just because they can't.
Pronounce any of the they can't pronounce.
Sure. That's for sure. You give them.
Permission to butcher those? Yeah. But. Yeah. Do you want to see more about how you've seen that text? Kind of, you know, come alive for people and why we use.
It, I think. Yeah. I think the text opens us up to possibility because we do feel I think this is back to what Andy is saying. We feel like everything has to be planned out and work just the way that we thought it was going to work. I don't know how many groups of people in churches I've talked to to say, if you feel like you don't want to take the risk unless you already know how it's going to turn out, then you don't get to go on very many adventures that God invites you into. And part of our definition of failure is if we make some effort, even if we feel like God was leading us to one of these crazy towns, and then it doesn't work out, then we did it wrong, or we weren't faithful enough, or we we didn't have the right words to say to the person at the right moment and the right language for them to respond the way we thought they were supposed to respond. And at least in my experience, it isn't so much about every momentary result as it is about learning to be the kind of person who knows how to follow in that way, even if you don't know what the result is going to be. And I can't underscore enough how hard it is to develop the capacity to be okay with an unknown result. Let me say that one more time. Like it is so hard to develop the capacity as a person or as a group of people to be okay with an unknown result. And that is one of the gifts of the innovation field, is that it normalizes failure, and it normalizes this idea that we have to make a lot of attempts to try to discover something that might be good. And so we've borrowed from some of those practices and those learning to just try to help everyone feel comfortable, like, hey, take six minutes and design a greeting card for your partner to give to somebody that's important to them. What? I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to draw. I don't know where I'm supposed to crease the thing. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Just make a version. And to just help of all of us, lower our anxiety about always getting the right result and try to be more open to say, what is it that God may want us to do, even if we don't know how it's going to go? Let's give it a shot.
So I, my youngest daughter, is an interior designer, and as we were, this is just before the pandemic. We got to carpool when I take her to and we were just starting to use design thinking practices in some of our work here. And what was interesting to me from listening to her in those commutes was there's a whole set of there's a whole industry that the designer, it's not about them, it's about what you're trying to do and how you listen and how you collaborate and how you act your way into a new place. Okay, so what I'm curious about in in the work that you're doing, and I'd love you to talk about it with the listeners, is you're teaching practices by doing and then you're empowering them to just go do it. Like you're an amateur. Just do it. And how do those, like a bag of practices help leaders go from despair to possibility in some of these big challenges that they're facing? Can you say more about that?
Well, this, I think, connects with some of what Andy was talking about. So I think the pandemic was really important because for those Protestant churches and leaders that have been seeing the sort of erosion of engagement and participation and resources and still the expectation particularly, I think, in the culture, but also From members of the church, that the leaders will come up with the program or the fix. Like to turn this around sort of with their. And I think it's often it plays it out in the sense of leaders are expected to bring energy to somehow catalyze this, like engagement. And the young people are going to come back and all this stuff, and that's super exhausting. It was already exhausting. And then the pandemic came and it was like a lot of leaders were like, I just give, like, I just give up. Like, now I've got to somehow do that online. And the whole thing kind of came apart for a lot of churches, and they don't know what to do from there, because there's a sense in which some of these old approaches don't really have plausibility anymore, even as there's still a lot of expectation that culturally and in the systems, for sure, um, denominational and otherwise, that they do that. But a lot of leaders are just like, fried. They're like this. I can't try this. Like it's not going to work. So what we're trying to do is come alongside and say, okay, Great. That's actually a really important moment because it's when things, current things are breaking down that you have the opportunity to actually enter into a new story. And so what we want to do is provide a kind of pathway for congregations to use to take a very different kind of journey than they're used to taking. If the if what they're used to is a sort of programmatic managerial attractional. So we just try to we just try to like flip a lot of things. So so it's behave, we're going to help you behave your way into new ways of thinking and believing rather than like, let's get the ideas right. But it's like, here's a simple practice that anyone can lead. And the training that we do is always like, we just have people do it like, here's.
The card for somebody.
Or.
Why? Don't worry about it, just.
Make the greeting card.
Or just, you know, like listen to this text and share with the partner what caught your imagination for two minutes. And then and then share what your partner heard. Whoa, wait a minute. Like that already is disruptive. Um, and so when when people do that, what we've experienced is that there's a different kind of energy that that gets unleashed. And it's an energy where the Holy Spirit is through the word particularly. That's why we always begin with with Scripture is stirring, and people's stories are being opened in ways that are less about the institution. So so when we talk about experiments, for instance, the experiments are never directed at fixing the church. They're always about investing presence in relationship with neighbors, normally in neighborhood spaces. So it's not like how do we get people into the church, which is a really hard default to undo for people.
But when do the people come to the church?
Dwight we've had the yeah, Michael had been many trainings with huge rooms full of of church teams where we're explaining getting in the door stuff, and then someone will just stand up and say, well, like, tell me how many new members of the church this is going to lead to? And we say our answer is always, um, that's not what it's about. But if you're the kind of church that listens compassionately to your neighbors, you know, on their own turf and all of that and is able to hold their stories lovingly, you might be the kind of church that people will want to connect with, but that's down the path. That's when we get to Lydia. We still got we got a ways to go before we get there.
Let me ask this just as a follow up, and just see if this helps us get to the question of stabilization, because I think it's really interesting if we say, okay, everybody has to stabilize. How does the church, particularly in the US, stabilize in the 21st century? I almost laughed when I said that out loud, because it just seems like there's so much chaos, right? And people are trying to find some kind of solid ground. I remember hearing people during the pandemic say, Just please don't change anything else, because it's like the one place in my life where where it's stable, where it's constant, and I can't take it if one more thing changes. But I think partly the text from acts 16 helps us to, I think, imagine a stabilization that isn't circumstantial, where your stabilization comes from. Everything being the same, worships the same, the pastors the same, the songs are the same. My experience of it is the same. But there is a stability in saying these are the kinds of practices we use to engage God. And sometimes God takes us in different directions and we follow along and we figure out what, what the results might be. But those those Christian practices that are very old but modernized so they are able, we're able to engage them, provide us a sense of, of stability that might result in growth, but it might not. And it's certainly not guaranteed to result in growth. Does that counter some of the inherent danger of the form of stabilization that you see in the innovation concept?
Yeah. I mean, there's so much I agree with you guys on. I mean, you know, I guess to get to that is also to just ask the questions because this is, you know, what you said, Michael, about what what is what is good about, you know, design theory or the innovation literature. And so it is a it's a question of failure. Like failure becomes an essential piece of this. But I mean, again, this is this is to push back a bit at some level. No, though, because at some level there's someone who's putting capital in that wants return on it. So inside a company that's innovating or any other social institution, at some point you they're fine with failure because at one point you're going to you're going to you're going to hit it, you know, like a venture capital firm is really fine with losing a bunch of money because one at one point they're going to hit a unicorn and they're going to make $1 billion. So that becomes a very kind of different logic of what we even think about failure. Like failure is necessary to get to win. You got to take a lot of L's to get a W, but once you get a W, that's the point. The point is to win and you got to be okay with losing so you can win. I mean, this is just what gamblers do. You know you got to be okay with losing some hands so you can win some hands. And I, I think there's something fundamentally different in the Christian story, which is to say, the losses have an inner logic within them that produces a certain kind of life that you would never know unless you encounter it. And then that becomes fundamentally relational. So I do think there is a way that this kind of dynamic stabilization creates all sorts of instrumentality. So you eventually and this is this is my fear is if we're not really careful with how we talk about innovation, that what will start creeping is a kind of instrumental logic that says, what are we getting out of this? We just I just gave you a day and a half and what did we get? And and that could be like more members. But it could be I don't feel any closer to my church. I still feel like crap. And you didn't help me. You know, there could be all sorts of that. And so and there.
Is all sorts.
There is all of that that comes, that comes out. And so there's there's that kind of level of could, could stabilization happen within, actually the act of ministering to one another out of these experiences. And does that stabilize that kind of life where we move from death to life with each other's very personhood, where we attend to the relational. And that will mean I have to innovate for you because I have to get you to your cancer treatments. But I'm never thinking, my gosh, this is an innovation. I'm just thinking, what does it mean to see your concrete humanity and respond to your needs, share in your experience of death and loss and what might come out of that? How might we respond to that? So that's one. And the other thing is I just like the ideation process. It gets so much cultural or the creative. Um, I want to be careful on how I tell this story, but, like, I was with, like, legit creative guy, like, very creative guy. And his and his business partner was like, this guy can solve any problem. He's so creative that any problem you have, he can solve it. He's like, yeah, if I just do an ideation process, I can solve any problem. He said, so, for instance, in the country I'm in, he says there's an issue where we have, uh, older people who are really lonely, and we also have all these upwardly mobile, uh, rich guys in this in this area, these rich people in this area who aren't getting enough exercise because they're working too many hours. So what we did is we designed this process where you would run and you would have an app in the app would tell you who of these older people are lonely and they needed milk. So then you would run that these people would run, they would enter into the app, and then they would run and deliver the milk to the people, welcome them and then run back. And you got your exercise and we solve loneliness. We solved elderly loneliness and exercise in one stroke. See? It's over. And as a heat.
Demand and.
Milk demand.
Right? Yes. And then? And then they all invested in stock and milk and it all went up.
You really do that first. And they.
Really. There really was this sense like that solves the problem. And there's no sense of like how deep human loneliness is of like all these other motifs and realities going on. So I do think like design process can be helpful, but we also have to think of the way it is a philosophical assertion, like it does assert certain things about what it means to be a human being, what it means to to live well, what it means to solve a problem, what what is a problem. And so I guess I want us to use all of that stuff within the church, but not naively, I guess, is my basic point. Yeah.
And we're on the same page there. I think for us, a lot of those theories, design thinking, innovation theory, they came on the heels of a decade of trying to figure out what is a mission shaped church look like, where your first task is to discern what God, where God's presence is, what God cares about, what kinds of actions God thinks are good and wants you to be about, and then running into the very real leadership problem of okay, people aren't used to any of that. People are used to pastors doing that stuff for them, pastors performing faith on their behalf, and they come on Sunday and they serve and they give and that's it. So now you're turning the table and saying, you have to listen for what God's telling you to do. And people are freaking out because depending on your tradition, that could be anything from the light changed on my way here to I don't think God talks to people anymore. So to find some practices within that framework and what you've what you've said, I think, is when you extract it from that framework, you're in a whole lot of trouble. If it's helpful within a framework where the problem is, I don't know how to coach people, train people to live out this kind of discernment oriented life. And you got a set of questions or a set of practices that just opens you up to possibilities. But even the way I think about design thinking, design thinking, human centered design is user focused. I tell people, think about God as your user. Don't think about your neighbor as your user, even. Or the guy who needs milk or doesn't need milk. Think about God as your user. And if the practice of really listening to the user and then trying to discover what what is actually helpful in engaging in relationship with that user, then great. Then it's a helpful tool.
Yeah, but isn't this I mean, my pushback, my, my, you know, getting us to a deeper conversation here is there's a similar kind of conversation just around, like, say, how theology relates to the sciences. Like where does this, you know, if we're in an interdisciplinary conversation that we're using some kind of social science or even some kind of hard science and putting that in conversation with theology. There is a certain assertion that the sciences do not have the same purview as theology. Like, you know that the sciences do not speak of the in-breaking revelation of God necessarily. So when we enter into those interdisciplinary conversations, depending on whatever interdisciplinary method you use, which there's a lot of them out there. And if you're a nerd, you can you can get into them. But they're all is a sense where those are different epistemologies, like certain sciences, have a different way of knowing things, and theology is a different way of knowing things. And I guess my question is where does that? And I think what's really helpful about what you guys are doing is you're actually doing an interdisciplinary conversation on the ground with people, but there's still an interdisciplinary conversation. And if you're not careful, one logic comes in out of the other, and language is a huge piece of it. And this is a conversation I have with Cannadine all the time, which is why keep the word innovation. Why keep the concept? Because what you're really getting at is a kind of sense of standing before God, praying, discernment. And why is the the language within the tradition? And I'm completely open to you saying it does. But why is the language within the tradition not adequate, but some kind of business model? Silicon Valley language seems more captivating now. It could be because these are simply talking to people on the ground and, you know, they're all late stage capitalists that that seems to connect with them, and I'm okay with that. But then there's the onus even more on how do you translate these different epistemologies so that one doesn't envelop the other. And I do think it's both ways. Like, I don't think you're doing good interdisciplinary conversation if theology just trump cards the sciences all the time. But from my own bias, you're really doing bad interdisciplinary work. If theology is always kind of having to bend knee to the sciences or any other kind of epistemology, well.
I get to work with these gentlemen and we get to have these kind of conversations in places here. What I'm grateful for, for this podcast in general, but for today specifically, we are called to steward the future witness of this amazing gospel. And I think this is a hard time to lead. And it's a really exciting time because when you lay it down and you sit with that family, there's nothing more powerful, right? And that's how this momentum, this how the turn happens. So I thank you for engaging with one another. And to our listeners. We have a gift for you in addition to this podcast, is that we have one free chapter out of the book that we talked about, leading faithful innovation that you can find by looking at the show notes and how to download that. And for those of you listening here, you can help us spread the word. If you're watching us on YouTube, please subscribe and make sure you can get future episodes. If you're listening on any of our podcast platforms, please leave us a review that really helps us in our work here. And finally, you've heard this before. If you've listened, the best compliment you can give us is to share this this episode with someone that it might really be powerful for. So please do that. Get the word out. So till our next episode, this is Terri Elton signing out for another pivot podcast.
The Pivot Podcast is a production of Luther Seminary's Faith Lead. Faith Lead is an ecosystem of theological resources and training designed to equip Christian disciples and leaders to follow God into a faithful future. Learn more at Faith Lead.org.