News

OPINION (12 March): We lap up the latest mobile phones, but when it comes to something new at church...
By BY WAYNE BRIGHTON*
March 12, 2008
* Wayne Brighton is a lay assistant at St John's Glebe, Sydney, and is a co-convener for CONVERSE, an interdenominational network for the Emerging Church. * Wayne Brighton is a lay assistant at St John's Glebe, Sydney, and is a co-convener for CONVERSE, an interdenominational network for the Emerging Church.

As fishermen, Jesus' disciples were quick to read the tides and react. So why, asks WAYNE BRIGHTON*, is the church so resistant to responding to the flow?

 

"You either innovate or you imitate," said William Barton, an Aboriginal composer who blends Western classical music with the didgeridoo. 

William's observation captures the paradox for our time, the zeitgeist of contemporary Australia. 

If the market economy is the engine of liberal democracy today then innovation is the little black box that makes it all work, while imitation is the drive chain that makes it go. Innovation and imitation make the unthinkable indispensable. 

If you doubt the ubiquity of innovation and imitation, just look at your mobile phone. 

In 1966, Maxwell Smart made phone calls from his shoe.  By 1996, mobile phones had become truly mobile and affordable.  Mobile telecommunication was worth $8.7 billion in 2006 with over 19.4 million users in a nation of 20.5 million. 

The mobile phone looked laughable in 1966, ridiculous in 1976, had become fashionable by 1996, and indispensable by 2006. 

No one could have imagined or foreseen the impact of the mobile phone but this pocket-sized innovation not only created an industry, it revolutionized the way we work and live. 

It revolutionized civil action (think Seattle, 1999 and Cronulla, 2005) and became a weapon of mass destruction (think Bali, 2002).   It will probably save your life from anywhere in the world, especially if you live in Baghdad. 

The adoption of the phone illustrates what Grant McCracken calls the flock and flow of a dynamic marketplace. 

McCracken is the director of the American based Institute of Contemporary Culture and a professor at MIT. 

Other writers have discussed the process under the unwieldy term 'diffusion theory', but McCracken makes it digestible.

McCracken argues that the marketplace consists of a flow, beginning with the chaos of innovation and ending with the rigidity of imitation.  Added to this dynamic is the fact that consumers act like a series of flocks, like birds, that grow in size as each one responds to the others around her/him. 

The first flock is small and loves risk and novelty.  As each subsequent flock grows larger, the risk and the profitability declines until the innovation has become so safe that everyone has adopted it.

For business, flows are all about the timing.  Success means neither getting in too early nor staying out too late. 

Get in too early and the development costs exceed profits, as no market yet exists. 

Get in too late and it becomes a matter of survival, trying to keep up while the market shifts again. 

The task is to identify the right flock vis-a-vis the flow.  Hit this and you strike gold! 

The ubiquity of innovation and imitation is a paradox for the church too because even when we try to avoid it, it catches us.  The Church might be Christ's body on earth but flock and flow populate our churches too. 

Think about the concept of every member ministry or the idea that all the baptized share a call to serve the Lord in the world and the church. 

This innovation in the Protestant world took root during the 17th and 18th Centuries.  While Anglicanism fought hard to keep this idea at bay, by the mid 19th Century it had crept in with the recognition of some lay ministries. By the mid 20th Century, it had become so obvious and necessary that the General Synod's Doctrine Commission recognized its importance and promoted it accordingly. 

The wisdom of the call to every member ministry was evident by the 21st Century.  Churches that thrived were those who adopted this idea and for whom it became natural, to do otherwise was unthinkable.  Those wondering what all the fuss was about simply shut their doors. 

Either we innovate or we imitate... or we die.  God's mission goes on but our participation is always optional.

The church is by nature a conservative organization. Its conservatism means that it actively resists or misses entirely the drivers of innovation in our society, at least to begin with.  Our longevity is the byproduct of Christ's faithfulness and a rigidity that works by adapting whilst never 'changing'. 

We do well to remember that today's absurd, challenging and crazy innovation may well become tomorrow's blindingly obvious answer.  Before then it will need to be normalized and made safe. 

Fresh expressions of church looked odd in 2004 but they will be ubiquitous by 2014. 

The church has every right to be suspicious of self-appointed marketing experts. 

Most have the knack of changing the things that should be kept and keeping the things that should be changed. 

But marketing is not simply playing with the bells and selling a few whistles.  It is about understanding how flesh and blood people think and respond to changing needs and realities. 

Jesus understood the dynamics of diffusion theory very well.  The apostles were influential at starting flocks and reading the flow of events and God's activity. 

Most were fishermen but not the romantic, humble subsistence guys we've imagined them to be. 

They were entrepreneurs used to operating a profitable outfit and well equipped for the task of fishing for people.  Maybe we should learn a thing or two.

 

* Wayne Brighton  is  a lay assistant at St John's Glebe, Sydney,  and is a co-convener for CONVERSE, an interdenominational network for the Emerging Church.