Innovative Church

Scott Cormode

Description

The church as we know it is calibrated for a world that no longer exists. It needs to recalibrate in order to address the questions that animate today's congregants. Leading congregational studies researcher Scott Cormode explores the role of Christian practices in recalibrating the church for the twenty-first century, offering church leaders innovative ways to express the never-changing gospel to their ever-changing congregations. The book has been road-tested with over one hundred churches through the Fuller Youth Institute and includes five questions that guide Christian leaders who wish to innovate.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781493426959
• Langue: English

Extrait

Cover
Endorsements
“We live in a moment when the need for churches to innovate has become undeniable. Yet that innovation must carry forward the best of Christian traditions so that they might faithfully offer life, hope, and healing to the world today. This book distills enormous wisdom in an accessible and practical, yet intellectually rigorous, guide for all those seeking to lead the church to adapt and flourish in trying times. Scott Cormode speaks to the heart of the challenges facing the church and offers hopeful ways forward.”
— Dwight Zscheile , Luther Seminary
“In recent memory, no book has been so timely as The Innovative Church . In the face of social upheaval, as demonstrated by such challenges as a pandemic and racism as unfinished business, the mainline Christian church needs to hear concepts and strategies not solely on innovation but also on our basic human experiences of ‘longings and losses’ that just may propel us to a way forward. Drawing on deep theological and biblical groundings, Cormode provides a field-tested method for innovation to emerge for our churches. This is a must-read book if we are to break the downward malaise that we are currently experiencing and emerge from our present crises with a future of hope.”
— Bishop Grant Hagiya , resident bishop of the Los Angeles Area of the United Methodist Church
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2020 by Scott Cormode
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakeracademic.com
Ebook edition created 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-2695-9
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations labeled NASB are from the New American Standard Bible® (NASB), copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org
Scripture quotations labeled NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Dedication
This book is about continuity across generations.
To my parents, Dan and Ann
To my children, Donley and Elizabeth
And, of course, to my wife, Genie
Contents
Cover i
Endorsements ii
Half Title Page iii
Title Page v
Copyright Page vi
Dedication vii
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
1. How the Church Is Calibrated for a World That No Longer Exists 1
2. The Meaning of Christian Innovation 17
3. Leadership Begins with Listening 39
4. Making Spiritual Sense 65
5. Reinvented Practices as Shared Stories of Hope 93
6. A Process for Innovation 113
7. Organizing for Innovation 151
8. Innovation and Change 173
9. The Next Faithful Step 203
10. Recalibrating Church for the Smartphone Generation 229
Appendix: Systematic Listening 243
Notes 245
Index 275
Back Cover 283
Preface
N ot long ago, I had a conversation with an innovation team from a large church in Texas. This was the first follow-up Zoom call after the four of them had traveled to Pasadena for an innovation summit. At the summit, the team learned about how to respond with agility to surprises and how to innovate in the face of social change—even unexpected social change.
“With all that has happened in the last two weeks,” one of them said over Zoom, “our innovation work now feels like genius.” You see, when they left Pasadena on Saturday, March 7, 2020, they expected to return to business as usual. By Tuesday, however, the vast implications of the spread of COVID-19 were beginning to be clear. By Thursday, the church had canceled its weekend services. By Friday, less than a week after the innovation conference, it was announced that we would all be sheltering in place. Of course, as I met with them, each one was hunkered down in their own homes, socially distant from everyone who was not immediate family.
The team reported a massive change of heart in their congregation. When they returned from the innovation summit, the ideas they proposed to the senior leadership seemed uncomfortable because they did not fit the way the congregation liked to do things. A week later, those same senior leaders were clamoring for new ideas. The team quickly decided that the experiments they hoped they could start in a few months would begin that weekend.

This project started as many innovations do, with the realization of a connection between two unrelated conversations. 1 On the one hand, in the Christian world I was hearing an increasingly urgent appeal that our churches need to change—even as our congregations have no idea how to change. On the other hand, in the tech world I was hearing about innovation—and about the growing sense that, in the words of one early computer pioneer, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” 2 So I began reading the innovation literature with an eye to how it might help us recalibrate the church for life in an ever-changing world. I wrote much of the book manuscript in the winter of 2015, thanks to a sabbatical from Fuller Theological Seminary and a grant from Fuller’s Max De Pree Center for Leadership (with heartfelt thanks to Mary and Dale Andringa).
The usual process is to publish a book once the manuscript is complete. But I wanted to ensure that these ideas would be useful to the church. So, taking heed of the innovation insight about iterative learning, I spent the next four years road testing and refining the ideas and insights in this book with congregational leaders.
We implemented the ideas through three parallel innovation projects—each one funded by the generosity of the Lilly Endowment and administered with wonderful care through the Fuller Youth Institute. The three projects were Youth Ministry Innovation, Ministry Innovations with Young Adults, and Innovation for Vocation.
Over a hundred congregational teams participated in these three projects. The process for each grant project was the same. We invited congregations from around the country to create teams of three or four. The teams went through online training to teach them the meaning of innovation (chap. 2), transformational listening (chap. 3), and the importance of making spiritual sense of daily life (chap. 4). The teams then joined a collection of teams from other churches in Pasadena for a three-day summit that followed the Christian innovation process (chap. 6), seeking new and creative ways to get young people to participate in reinvented Christian practices (chap. 5).
Each team returned home with a prototype for an innovation project. They then spent ten weeks running an experiment that would implement their prototype. Throughout the process, we provided monthly coaching calls that allowed the leaders to reflect on what they were doing and what they were learning. In 2019, I revised the manuscript to reflect what we learned by working with these hundreds of congregational leaders.
A key insight of the book is that leaders don’t have followers but do have people entrusted to their care—and leaders need to become who their people need them to be. This book has gone through the same process.
It started as a much more scholarly book, with long sections that carefully explained the development of its ideas. But after working with all those leaders, I have moved much of the scholarly conversation into the notes or jettisoned it altogether. 3 The people entrusted to my care are the readers of this book. And the fruit this book bears will be seen in the lives of the people who are entrusted to the care of those readers. As you read this book, do so not just for yourself. Instead, as you read, ask yourself how you might use the insights of the book to serve the people whom God has entrusted to your care.
I am putting the final touches on this manuscript as we are dealing with the unfolding effects of this global pandemic. I got a call from the congregation I refer to in chapter 10 as “Millennial Church.” The chapter describes the congregation’s fumbling efforts to come to grips with denial over social changes. The subject of the FaceTime call was about all the ways they were reviving the experiments that just last year seemed to be too much for them. The pandemic jarred them out of their complacency. Indeed, now they are clamoring for the very change they recently thought was unnecessary. If this pandemic teaches us anything, it is that we cannot stand still while the world changes around us. The future church will have to learn innovation and agility.
Acknowledgments
P erhaps the most enjoyable part of writing a book is getting to acknowledge publicly all the people you would like to thank. Let me begin by expressing my gratitude for Fuller Seminary—both the people and the institution. It has been my home for many years. Truth be told, it has been my intellectual and scholarly home since even before the school employed me. I like to say that I am theologically conservative and socially liberal, and that I am socially liberal for theologically conservative reasons. I learned that at Fuller. The seminary taught me to read the prophets who stood up for the widows, orphans, and aliens in our midst. It taught me to listen to lament and to see the sinners and outcasts with compassion. The emphasis in this book on listening