My Grand Experiment

In my 25 years of leading people I’ve learned that change is hard…really hard.  Even more difficult is changing traditions and social norms that are deeply rooted in culture and conscious.  As a student of organizational development, I’ve spent countless hours, studying, pondering and speculating what makes certain organizations “successful” while others die.  Leaving the definition of success for another time, I believe the key element of organizational, and individual, success is the ability to adapt to changing realities.  I’ve also learned that people, while resistant to change, are fairly open to experiments.  It seems like a safer way to test new methods and perceptions without having to abandon what is comfortable and familiar suddenly.  It invites the team to participate rather than to simply comply and opens the conversation for truthful exchanges versus polite head nodding.  Of course, experiments fail and institutions regularly fall back to proven methods for yesterday’s problems.  Despite that possibility, I’ve embarked on the grandest experiment of my life.  It’s an experiment involving the oldest institution known to man, founded by divine declaration, rooted in the most ancient of writings but made up of very ordinary people…people like me. 
  

You’ve probably guessed by now that I’m experimenting with the local church.  Before you check out, this is not an essay on how bad things are and how other groups have really screwed things up.   It’s not an indictment on individuals or methods and certainly not a personal vendetta.  My experiment is rooted in my love for the Church and the timeless truths she is entrusted to deliver.  Having said that I am an analyst and my experiment is rooted in observation. It’s these observations that move me to risk resources and relationships to acknowledge her brokenness in our culture.  Of course this isn’t every church, and success looks different.  However, the trends are undeniable the American church is in decline as millions of Christians have left the local church and even more refuse to engage for a list of reasons too long for this discussion. 

Before I go any further it’s important to note that my view is not intended to be comprehensive and I don’t claim exclusive insight to the Church’s struggles.  This is about the experiment I’m leading for my community and others that may look like mine.  Our church’s experiment starts with the noticing that most churches gather and grow around similarities.  Similar races, similar neighborhoods, similar social groups, similar income brackets.   The hard part for me is that the community I live in does not have those similarities.  The neighborhoods are different, education levels are different, cultures are different, incomes are different…you get the idea.    Faced with these realities it’s not uncommon for a church to select a group they want to “target” and build a model that fits that group.  It’s popular and it works, unfortunately it greatly favors communities with attractive demographics.  The unwritten model of church planting sometimes is to find a white affluent suburban community with household incomes over $100k and create a culture that is attractive to that demographic.   This model fills the elementary school auditoriums of those communities with aspiring church planters looking for critical mass.

Interestingly, our experiment also involves an elementary school.  A school abandoned several years ago in favor of a more favorable location.  We started our church in this elementary school building.  A church is not a building but our building is an important part of our church.  We don’t own it, the community does, so we want it to represent and be used by the community.  We’ve converted our elementary school into a Community Center.

         

 We have a building, we have a purpose so who do we invite?  You guessed it…our community.  That’s where this experiment starts to get really messy.  While we are comfortable defining our community by geographic boundaries it’s clear that our community defines itself by social boundaries.  Kids in the trailer park play together and kids at the Country Club play together…we have both in our community.  It’s at this point when some community churches start to redefine mission.  Here is the thought:  The families in the expensive neighborhoods have too much stuff and the families in the less expensive neighborhoods don’t have enough stuff.  We then experiment with the idea redistributing stuff from the haves to the have-nots.  This works if the issue is stuff.  We live in a material world so material solutions seem logical.  Our experiment has taught us that redistributing stuff is helpful in some ways but is divisive in others.  We don’t invite poor people to our church because they have material needs and we don’t invite wealthy people because they material abundance.  We want people to come to our church to join the mission and meet the guy that started this mission (by the way that isn’t me). 

So what does a church committed to this kind of social diversity look like?  We believe you don’t battle the cultural complexities of division with more complexity and methods.  We believe the solution is simplicity.  We work to not be impressive but always inviting.  Our plans are anchored in simple ideas that are powerful enough to transcend income divisions.   Sociologists tell us that diverse groups can work and grow together where there is meaning.  They tell us that a group has to find an outward purpose centered on core ideals that are inclusive enough to accept broad experiences but clear enough to easily communicate.  Our simple idea is that we exist to Love God and Love Others.  We believe this allows for a diverse group of voices and invites everyone to play, regardless of where they are on the spiritual or social continuum.  Those voices have to be represented in leadership (or power) so our leadership team is made up of roofers and school counselors, felons and lawyers, entrepreneurs and factory workers.  They lead from different social experiences but are anchored in our simple idea to Love God and Love Others.  It’s this glue that holds the whole experiment together.  Are we successful?  I think so.  We see success in the areas you predict but our most measured area is that of change.  Change by all of us to be more like the guy that started this idea and we know how difficult that change can really be.