Four approaches to innovation in the church – Introduction (1 of 5)

I recently heard a talk on the IT side of my life by Jeff Bonforte in which he asserts that Anger Drives Innovation (also the title of the talk)

Maybe one of the reasons for the church’s steady decline in the West over the past century or so has been that we aren’t angry enough. Wait a minute, some of you are saying. Angry? Christians aren’t supposed to be angry. We’re supposed to be nice, aren’t we? Perhaps if Jesus visited some of our gilded ecclesial palaces he’d get ticked enough to turn over a few tables, but I’m jumping ahead.

If you’ve been visiting any church planting conferences, you will undoubtedly meet a lot of angry twenty-something and thirty-something guys with goatees who are royally ticked off at the traditional-institutional church. Anger is certainly one of the drivers of ecclesial innovation, and we see both its positive effects in the rise of new church planting movements, a good and healthy development, and in the emergence of those who call themselves “emergent”, who want to chuck out the theological baby with the ecclesial bathwater, which is not always so good. I’ll come back to the angry young ecclesial innovators a bit later, but first I’d like to look at a bit of what Jeff Bonforte said about telecommunications technology (of all things!) and see if any of what he said translates into the church realm. I think it does.

In the sphere of technology, Bonforte avers, there is an emotional spectrum of responses to technological change, which he termed lovers, irrational, efficient, and comfortable. Technology lovers are driven by gee-whiz factor. They like cool toys and new technology for its own sake. This category will include the nerds and geeks that have become so closely associated with techie types (although not all who are technologically inclined are geeks, which I discussed earlier here. Technology is a playground, and the light-hearted technology lovers get a lot of joy out of new toys.

The irrational are royally ticked off at the technological status quo, and they’re not going to take it any more. If technology won’t do what they want, they’ll build or buy what they want. Bonforte suggests that those who are angry are the real drivers of technological change. Technology lovers innovate, but are more likely to be adopters than drivers and creators. It’s the angry folks who actually create and fund new technology – they’ve got an itch that’s bad enough they’re willing to go to extraordinary lengths to scratch it, even to the length of learning or creating completely new technologies. Not all technical innovation comes from the angry, but much of it does. The focus for the irrational is not technology itself, but the frustration produced by the status quo. What some others see as “just the way things are,” the irrationals see as unfairness or injustice. Irrationality may not be illogical – righteous indignation is a powerful engine of change, fueling a passion that people are willing to live and die for. Buddhist monks who seek passionlessness are out on the streets of Burma, dying to protest the brutal regime of the military junta there. Richard Stallman and others started a movement for free software thirty years ago that has become a worldwide movement. The Angry are among the main engines of change in the technological and cultural spheres.

The efficient are coolly pragmatic – they don’t really care about technology for its own sake; they’ll adopt and use new gadgets if they work to help them achieve their goals. They are focused on accomplishment, and they want tools, not toys. The passionate, the angry, are the visionary leaders. The efficient are the organizers and managers who provide structure and focus for all the energy produced by the visionary leaders.

The comfortable like things to stay the way they have been. Bonforte describes the grandmother who will pay $800 to a travel agent to purchase a plane ticket she could get for $200 online. She pays extra because she doesn’t know any better, and is comfortable with the way she’s always done things. She’s willing to pay extra to avoid the stress of having to deal with doing things in a new way, and doesn’t really care if it’s more efficient or not. The comfortable don’t want to be disturbed or challenged. Things are just fine the way they are, thanks very much. The comfortable have limited horizons, and are unaware and unconcerned about things outside their own little sphere of experience. Life in the fish tank is fine; there’s no need to get ourselves all riled up with talk about rivers and oceans. Only troublemakers talk about such things, and they just upset us.

In this post I’ve just introduced four types of people Jeff Bonforte talked about in his talk on anger as a driver of technological innovation. But I think there are fruitful parallels for them in the ecclesial realm that will be useful to think about for the church. Whether you are a church planter, a leader of an existing church or a congregant, I think that these categories will probe us. How do they correspond to the types of people we lead in the church, and the ways that Jesus providentially moves us, sometimes forcing us to change in ways we never previously thought about? I’ll explore each of the categories in more depth in the next four posts.