Social Justice and the Church

Last month I had the chance to go visit Newsong LA and talk to Adam Edgerly about how the local church can bring social justice to the city.

Here is the 4 minute cut of the interview.*

* If you want to learn Portuguese, just read the subtitles.

What is your church’s “idea”?

Saw and stole this from Ben Arment’s blog.

“You can’t take a mediocre idea and make it viral. There’s not enough marketing savvy in the world to help a bad idea work.

Stretch with me on this… think of your new church as an idea for the community. Don’t think about the mission and theology for a minute, yadda, yadda, yadda. Just focus on ~ the idea ~ of your church.

Is it a good idea for the community… or a bad idea?

How do you know? Ask yourself… is the idea spreading?

And if it’s not, you may not have a marketing problem. You may have an idea problem. Maybe your church’s purpose is not distinguishable enough. Maybe you’re not meeting a need in the community. Maybe you’re answering questions nobody’s asking.”

Design Thinking and Ministry #1

For the past couple of months I’ve been trying to apply more of the stuff I know about Design Thinking to my ministry approach.

It has been an interesting journey.

Roughly, Design Thinking is the process through which designers create solutions for problems.

These process involves (according to IDEO):

• Understand
• Observe
• Visualize
• Evaluate/Refine
• Implement

(If you read Wikipedia’s definition of Design Thinking you will see the same process with different names to each step.)

When creating a chair, the designer does not try to design a chair, instead he tries to answer the question: How can I support somebody above the ground?

This opens up a wide range of possibilities. Instead of limiting himself to: How can I create a cool chair?

Innovation only happens when you ask good questions.

This is the first step. To understand/define what you are trying to resolve.

What problem is your/mine ministry trying to resolve?
What questions are you asking that you are trying to answer through a Sunday meeting?

We’ll only find the answers when we ask the right questions.

The Movement Day – Debriefing

So last Sunday I had a chance to talk to some of the guys from the college group about how their “Movement Day” went.

Interestingly, we all said we felt a little frustrated. I guess all of us had a higher expectation about it.
We were all kinda expecting HUGE opportunities, not small ones.

Still, the cool thing about it was that this day raised everybody’s opportunitytolovesomebody awareness, and even cooler, most of us said that they continued to do it Saturday and Sunday. Naturally.

I loved “The Movement Day”. It was an opportunity to focus on one (very very important) aspect of the Christian faith and see how would our lives look like if we lived that out on a daily basis.

We will continue to try experiments like this one.
Be ready for it.

What is Third Culture?