Several years ago, I responded to a blog post about “innovative churches". Recently I was asked about this same subject, so I’ve revisited my thoughts in the hopes of opening up the discussion again with you - the churches leading and getting it done for the Kingdom. I’d love to hear what you have to say on the subject and learn from the practical ways you think we can become truly innovative.

I’ve yet to be in any church that meets the real definition of the word innovative, though I hear many churches use the term to describe their approach. Instead, a better set of descriptors might be: artistic, clever, hip, inspired, resourceful or even atypical. But these descriptors are really only accurate in comparison to other churches, not to the culture at large.

Yes, the church should be innovative (leaders instead of imitators), but to do so will first require church leaders to understand that the current church definition of “innovation” is often inaccurate.

Dictionary.com defines the word Innovative:

adj 1: ahead of the times; 2: being or producing something like nothing done or experienced or created before.

Far too often we promote our churches as “innovative” only to set up the attendees for a bait-and-switch.

For example, if you’re going to use the Spiderman theme for a sermon series, then make the full connection between this comic-book superhero and the super-power of God; not a tangential spin that looks at the web that Spidey casts as a metaphor for a web of lies. That tie-in is marginal and could easily have avoided the Spiderman theme, but that wouldn’t look as cool on a post card or movie-theatre advertisement.

And so a bait-and-switch (we offer one thing that will get you in the door, but will largely ignore the thing that got your attention so that we can force-feed you our propaganda) leaves the attendee feeling ripped off - nay, LIED TO.

Our communities don’t expect us to photo-copy our culture - they expect us to be different. We should leverage technologies, themes, concepts and practices that help us achieve our goal of communicating truth without the bait-and-switch actions that turn off the unchurched.

Similarly, being creative is a goal many churches try to attain. I’m in total agreement that church should be creative in reaching their communities, but just because your stage was set up to look like a Lenny Kravitz concert doesn’t mean you’re creative - it simply means you’re good at copying culture.

Real creativity and innovation is hard to do for an organization (the Church, if you will) that’s not been an influencer of culture for a long, long time.

I believe that a two-fold approach is necessary to see real change:

1) Resourcefully equip your church to meet the relational needs of people. This will involve the improved use of technology (audio, video, lighting, computers, database management, etc.) and the adoption of new pastoral models that include production managers, project managers and IT managers as not only people devoted to specialized tasks, but as true pastors who lead a team of lay people to utilize their gifts in these areas.

Let’s face it: when it comes to technology, the church as a whole lags far, far behind the culture and thus continues to feed the impression that we’re out-of-touch.

2) The re-igniting of the arts within the church. If I hear of another “Creative Arts” ministry within a church that limits the “arts” to music and drama, I think I might puke. The “arts” include both traditional art (painting, sculpting, acting, singing, playing an instrument, etc.) and digital art (electronic painting, 3D modeling, voice acting, digital editing, etc) and should be a major focus of both churches and seminaries to re-evaluate how we include artists in our ministry training.

As true art is inspired, real innovation and creative thinking will develop beyond the mere duplication of culture back to the influencing of culture. As this happens, the secular world - ever in search of new and innovative ideas - will start to see the church as a true innovative force.

We’ll measure our results by the impact we make on our local communities and in how we interact & influence people outside of our church walls. The greatest measurement will be how seamlessly our people take the paradigm of innovation out to the marketplace.

Will our Artists and teachers develop community service opportunities that look nothing like what’s available in our local communities today?

Will the church be viewed as a community center that’s open 7 days a week and as heavily populated on Thursday afternoon as it is on Sunday morning?

Will we create opportunities to redeem the culture through our community involvement instead of forcing our community neighbors to come to our (not their) facility and participate in a way that’s culturally out of context with their lives?

Our obstacles are age old:

• Change - not a mere modification - is really hard.
• Cost - technology, in particular, doesn’t always scale down to allow a small church to leverage it as well as a large church.
• Control - it’s hard to manage more than we’re used to managing. Most churches stay small because we can manage (control) a smaller size.
• Commitment - real innovation and creative development is expensive in three ways: people, equipment (resources) and time. Because it’s hard to manage that which we don’t understand well, many leaders will fail to give the freedom and flexibility to the technicians and artists that are so desperately needed in today’s church.

In the end - or the new beginning, if you will - churches must learn to creatively communicate to their local culture if they ever hope to be a leading innovator to the masses.

UPDATE: Check out Ben Arment’s thoughts on the subject of innovation at the Collide Magazine website.