Note: In this series you will note that I mix the the language of "New Ministry Development" with "Ministry Redevelopment," because in the Episcopal Church, both are offered within Hospice Ward settings. (For more on that, you might read this post.)
Spirit-led innovation – what is it?
In my recent experiences I’ve determined that this is not just a concept borrowed from the business equivalent – “continuous process improvement” – in which you make a lot of little improvements in issues of liturgical style and taste, or maybe shared leadership. It is also not just “product or service innovation,” in which you create new offerings to attract new parishioners, but leave the existing ministry model in place. From what I’m learning from vital ministries around our church, “Spirit-led innovation” may include both of these, but at its best, involves tracking the work of the Spirit out in the world through uncharted territory.
2. To lead Spirit-led innovation within established (or inherited) Church, it is imperative to remember that organizational memory springs from powerful sources. What are they? Songs, Rituals, Architecture, Vestments, Smells, Signage. If you would redeem them, recognize the challenges involved.
When you lead an Episcopalian ministry that looks unlike anything previously Episcopalian, expect an internal “auto-immune” response.[1] For many of our leaders in traditional settings, it is actually much safer to repeat the behaviors with which we are already comfortable and just put a fresh face on them. That isn’t Spirit-led innovation. When you commit yourself to following the Spirit, you cannot follow some prescribed process. Instead, we read and reread John 3 and ask, “Where is the Spirit blowing today? That’s what will shape us in this moment!”
You might consider trying on the following four questions as a way of getting at some new practices and the accompanying fresh awareness.
2.) What are the principles by which you allow your encounters to shape the music and ritual offered to the gathered community?
3.) What are the theological “starting places” for these principles and practices?
4.) Are the “Fruits of the Spirit” enough evidence that it is God at work and not an overactive imagination?
Eventually, once it gains momentum, new ministries gather to themselves a fresh sense of identity, but from the beginning, the leaders are helped to recognize that they are called to the work of co-creating a new future. In fact, Otto Scharmer would assert that the new ministry’s primary responsibility is to allow the Spirit to birth the future that is longing to emerge.[2] To engage this process probably means shifting our focus slightly away from the way that the Episcopal Church has historically defined itself, its core competencies and even its ministry model. At the same time, this new ministry wants to “borrow” expertise from
3. In our present context, starting new ministry with Diocesan support can make matters much easier or much harder. Usually it’s both.
4. Strategic experiments face critical unknowns. It has to be that way. The way through the Wilderness of Zin was a two week journey. It just took forty years for
Primary focus? Learning!
To survive, emphasize learning. Your greatest learning task is to address these unknowns through better predicting and functioning, even though an innovative ministry can’t use formal prediction tools or intuitive rules of thumb. Instead, you must learn through “trial-and-error” as you engage in repeated experiments. Make your experiments clear, repetitious and speedy (as soon after one another as possible, so they stay fresh in your memory). Determine what you think will happen. Plan, execute, measure your results.
5a. New ministries in new contexts are best if started with as few assumptions as possible.
Forget, Borrow and Learn
The three core challenges in establishing new ministry within the Episcopal Church are:
forgetting, borrowing and learning.
Forget: Try to purge the spirit of your ministry from the Institution’s anxiety and tendency toward self-preservation – forget about it. Diffuse it.
Borrow: Which “areas of expertise” does this new ministry need to borrow, and in what proportions? Where can you use predictions and where do you have to deal with uncertainty? How should you evaluate leadership performance in a project that requires risk or could even collapse? Institutional memory might lend you the core beliefs that let your new ministry react quickly to challenges, but if you don’t forget the old responses, you are doomed to fail. Borrowing Tangible and Intangible Resources only when they support the innovation. Do not borrow culture. Invent culture as needed. You want to forget
To lead redevelopment of an existing ministry in severe decline, gather a mix of experienced and inexperienced individuals for your core team. Set up new behavior models of mutual learning, especially in accountability and emerging relationships to authority. One tough challenge is deciding when the new ministry needs to show itself as self-sustaining. Balance that pressure by pointing out how many of our ministries in big buildings and downtown properties are reliant on diocesan subsidies and they offer no new learnings, whatsoever. Too often new ministries are held to arbitrary demands that they demonstrate sustainability, when, in reality, we need to expect them to require support at first (they are experimental, after all) and give them grace periods.
6. Managing tensions between the new and the old is “Job One” for the leadership of a ministry redevelopment.
7. “Competing interests, outside influence, internal competition and Diocesan politics are the enemies of community learning.”
8. Contract with Diocesan Leaders for an accountability around learning as well as results measured in attendance and pledging numbers.
9. Ministries find their connection to that which the Spirit is birthing via strategic
Innovation (Lots of intentional Trial and Error).
To innovate strategically, we seek not so much to do things differently, as much as to accurately track the birthing of the Spirit’s new life. We start with very different questions and hoped-for outcomes.
[1] Social Autoimmunity is the failure of an organization to recognize its own constituent parts as “self” and necessary to the well-being of the whole, thereby blocking the potential healing and direction offered by its own “prophetic” leaders.
[2][2] You might explore Dr Scharmer’s approach by downloading Chapter 21 of his text,
