“Every system is perfectly designed to achieve exactly the results that it achieves.”

In other words, if you build a factory that makes pencils, it will make pencils! There will be some defects here and there, but by and large, it will make pencils and a lot of them. So to make any sort of change in output, you can’t necessarily blame the personnel (although they certainly play a part), but you have to look very closely at the entire ecosystem in which those people carry out their jobs. Is there an inefficiency in the eraser attaching station? (I’m making this up, I have no idea how to make a pencil). Then you can’t blame the worker for attaching erasers too slowly, you have to re-evaluate the process within the system where the erasers are attached. Or, to provide a more day-to-day example, think about your commute to work. I take the 38L (Limited stops) or the 38BX (Express bus, almost no stops) bus every day, whichever one comes first. But if I took the 38 (many stops), it would be less efficient. I can’t blame the 38 bus, I have to make a change to shorten my commute time. Same thing can be applied to driving–if 101 South from SF to the Penninsula clogs up every day during the 7am hour (I experienced this first hand), then you have to make a change: either wake up earlier and commute partially during the 6am hour, or take a different route (280 South). But don’t blame 101 South. It’s handling exactly the traffic it was designed to, driver inefficiencies included.

Alex Smith - A changed man, or part of a changed system?

Or, to take a current sports example, look at the relative success of the 49ers this season compared to last, with essentially the same personnel. What changed? The coach, yes, but essentially what changed was the system! (Full Disclaimer: I don’t really know anything about football, so I am completely open to correction on this analogy).

This all got me thinking–does this sort of improvement science thinking apply to the church context? A common attempt to solve church problems happens on the personnel or people level–change the pastor, swap out small group leaders, use teaching or training to fill gaps in theology or thinking processes, have more prayer and worship times to facilitate people’s connection to God, and many other good things. And this is a natural way to go about things, because that’s what is right in front of us. This is undoubtedly a tricky question, because a church at its core is the people (see my post “Mischaracterizations of Church“), not an institution. However, there is value in a “living systems” approach, which sees the church as a live and active organism that moves, breathes, reproduces, and depends on its constituent parts to form a healthy whole. Moreover, when one part of the system is operating inefficiently or is experiencing some sort of trauma or unhealthiness, then the whole system suffers as a result.

But what if the problem is the system?

From the start, the church is not a factory. It’s not simply an input-output machine where you put a person in one end and get a result out the other. But our post-industrial mindset teds to conceive of church as that way. A better approach would be to recognize the organic nature of the church as a living system working synergistically. As Alan Hirsch aptly puts it in his book The Forgotten Ways, “the church in its most phenomenal form organizes itself as a living organism that reflects more how God has structured life itself, as opposed to a machine, which is the artificial, inorganic alternative to a living system” (Hirsch, 180). What exactly does this sort of approach look like?

“A living systems approach seeks to structure the common life of an organization around the rhythms and structures that mirror life itself. In this approach we seek to probe the nature of life, we seek to observe how living things tend to organize themselves, and then we try to emulate as closely as possible this innate capacity of living systems to develop higher levels of organization, to adapt to different conditions, and to activate latent intelligence when needed (emergence).” (Hirsch, 182)

If we take an improvement science approach to a church organism, then, it would involve identifying unhealthy or inefficient parts of the system (not the people, per se), and correcting them. So if people aren’t growing in their prayer life, a first move might be to evaluate what things are in place that are supposed to foster a healthy environment for growth. Moreover, it’s not simply a “More is Better” approach–it may not be that more preaching or more prayer gatherings is what’s needed to help the overall health of the church organism. What may be needed is a complete re-conception of the system itself. That’s where I think re-constructionists like Hirsch and an improvement science approach can be quite helpful. Instead of applying band-aids or swapping personnel, a living systems improvement approach would require deep thinking and reconfiguration. It would mean asking a lot of hard questions and examining every cog in the church, comparing it to known kingdom values, and removing or changing those parts that don’t conform. That process can be quite jarring, but I think it’s worth it f it means healthier, more Christ-centered disciples.

Not to leave God out of the equation, I think where the application of improvement science principles breaks down is that it can’t account for a transcendent God that constantly surprises us and works as He wants to work. We simply cannot systematize God, and even if we create the “perfect” environment for spiritual growth, ultimately nothing will happen without a work of the Holy Spirit. Simultaneously, as responsible disciples, our task is to listen to God, do what He says, and create the best environment possible in our churches with what we’re given. And that takes work on our part. I think this also breaks down a bit because the church IS the people, and any structures or systems associated with it–when operating organically–are quite intertwined. That makes it hard to just make a systems change that is distinct from the people themselves.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

Related posts:

1. Living Mulch: An Organic Illustration of Churches and Church Networks
2. More Isn’t Always Better…in the Church
3. Mystery Brought to Light Through the Church

1. I have a problem with consumerism marketing which pushes new products on people even if the new product won’t actually provide a noticeable improvement.
2. I think there are lessons in this for the church.

The church is supposed to be God’s people living out kingdom realities here on earth, proclaiming an alternate story that says the God is alive and active in this world, redeeming and restoring that which was broken and bringing things back to the way they were supposed to be. This includes people and creation. However, all too often the church has succumbed to the culture around it instead of actively transforming the culture while living counter-culturally. With regards to consumerism, I think this takes shape in the commonplace sentiment that more is better. I’ll give two examples.

First, I think we’ve been deceived into thinking that more Bible reading is always better. What are the common questions typically asked when attempting to ascertain spiritual vitality? “Have you been reading your Bible? How much? How often?” I think those are the wrong questions. The relevant question is rather, “How is God speaking to you through his Word?” I was a part of some great groups called “Life Transformation Groups” (LTGs) that were significant forces in my spiritual development. Part of being a part of an LTG was a commitment to read 25-30 chapters of Scripture a week. Mind you, that can be a lot, making it sound antithetical to my statement that more Bible reading isn’t always better. However, there were a number of factors that made this work. First, it was done in community. In these groups of 2 or 3, we read the same sections of Scripture (say, Ephesians five times in a week) and reflected on it together. If one of us didn’t finish, we would just say, “Well, I guess the Spirit wants us to read it again,” and we’d do it again the next week. It took one of my groups almost 3 months to get through Colossians six times in a week this way. But the bonus of this was that we read through Colossians around 200 times in that period! In this case, it was sustained dwelling in a small section of Scripture–in community–that really made the difference. So while more Scripture can be better, what really made this work was repetition and doing it with others. Then, in conjunction with that, our intent was to let the Lord speak to us through those Scriptures. Out of one of these groups emerged a semi-regular trip to the Tenderloin to distribute socks, pray for people, and have a conversation over a cup of coffee, right there on the sidewalk. Pair this with careful, deep meditation on selected pieces of Scripture, and you’ve got a great combination. You can then have depth and breadth. We don’t necessarily need more Bible reading, but better Bible reading.

Second, I think we’ve been deceived into thinking that more programs are better. Think about this: on an average week, the average churchgoer could be involved in anywhere from two to six or nine church-related meetings or more. Start with (1) a Sunday morning worship service, add(2) a Sunday School class, then pile on (3) a midweek small group, (4) a leaders meeting, (5) a youth group meeting, (6) a planning meeting for the youth group meeting, (7) an accountability group,(8) a homeless food outreach, and/or (9) a prayer gathering. At the end of the week, what’s left? Nothing. No energy, no free time, no margins to actually live the life that Jesus wants us to live. Moreover, this really creates compartments for stuff that was never meant to be compartmentalized. Instead, I’d argue that more programs can actually be a detriment to church vitality. Instead, we should seek convergence in as many of these areas as possible. For example, converge that homeless outreach and the midweek small group: people should be on mission together. In my local church’s case, that means our Sunday gathering is our small group. Moreover, we should seek better programs and meetings, not more of them. We shouldn’t be afraid to strip away and let extraneous programs die, in order that healthier ones may be reborn. We don’t need more programs, we need better ones.

Agree? Disagree? Sort of agree? Let me know.

Related posts:

1. Living Mulch: An Organic Illustration of Churches and Church Networks
2. Mischaracterizations of Church
3. Mystery Brought to Light Through the Church

Fast forward to today, and usually when people look at cameras they look at megapixels. The 6 megapixels of 2003 pale in comparison to the 20+ megapixels of today. What’s often lost in the conversation is the fact that more megapixels doesn’t necessarily mean a better image. First, consider this: the 10 megapixels shot on a little point and shoot are nothing compared to the 10 megapixels on any digital SLR. The reason? Simple math: bigger pixels. The sensor size of a digital SLR is way, way bigger than that of a point and shoot camera. Check out the diagram to the right:

My five year old digital SLR, the Nikon D200 has a piece of “digital film” otherwise known as the image sensor that is represented by the blue rectangle labeled “1.5X Crop Factor.” Most point-and-shoot cameras today have one represented by the tiny yellow circle in the middle. Pixel for pixel, you just have a lot more to work with using a bigger sensor. That doesn’t necessarily mean that a 1 megapixel big sensor is better than a 10 megapixel tiny sensor. There are still trade-offs, but the general principle holds.

Which leads me to the main issue: what matters most is not the quantity of pixels, but rather the quality of pixels. Back in 2003, Nikon introduced a professional digital SLR called the D2H that had people up in arms. The reason? In a season where 6 megapixels was the norm, and 8 and 10 megapixel cameras were becoming common as well, they released their top of the line sports camera with a measly 4 megapixels. What were they thinking? The previous generation pro camera, the D1x had 5.47 megapixels!! How could they possibly go backwards with a new product release? Lost in the shuffle, though, was the fact that the D2H had quite possibly the best quality pixels of any camera out there. Noted Nikon photographer and reviewer Thom Hogan defended Nikon’s decision by pointing out that although they reduced the overall resolution, they actually increased the acuity of the pixels, meaning the clarity on the edges of shape transitions (what we typically perceive as “sharpness”) was greatly improved from the D1x to the D2H. In other words, Nikon upped the quality, not the quantity of the pixels. One of Nikon’s current top of the line cameras, the D3s, still has only 12 megapixels when many of the other industry leading cameras have over 20 megapixels. Yet many pros still use it! Why? It’s the quality of each individual pixel, not the quantity.

I’m not saying that other cameras like the Sony A900 or the Canon 1Ds MkIII or the Canon 5D Mark II are inferior cameras because they have more megapixels. Not at all. In fact, images I’ve seen from some of these cameras are amazing (which usually has a lot more to do with the photographer than the equipment anyways). And to be sure, there are certain advantages, like more detail (the presence of more pixels per area to capture more subtle transitions), ability to crop, as well as other technological advances, but the D3s and the D700 (which uses the same sensor) have extraordinary image quality and industry leading high-ISO ability.

Consider this–the latest Canon pro DSLR, the 1DX (coming in 2012) which replaces the 1Ds MkIII (introduced in 2007) went down in megapixels too: from 21.1 to 18.1. Why? I think it’s because they’re going for quality, not quantity. Simply increasing the number of pixels on the image sensor doesn’t necessarily improve the image unless each pixel also gets better. If anything, it simply introduces more noise (“grain” in the film days). In another example, the Kodak DCS 14n was a full-frame 14 megapixel Nikon-mount camera released in 2002. Does that beat a Canon 5D or a D700? No chance. The pixels from the last few years blow the socks off that one from almost a decade ago, which yielded smeary and almost painting like pixels at 100% magnification.

As for me, there are some other practical reasons that I don’t necessarily want more megapixels: hard drive space. Photos from my 12.3 megapixel Olympus E-P1 (and 10 megapixel Nikon D200 before it) are already eating up plenty of space as is.

But here’s my main point: I’d much rather have a high-quality 8 megapixels than sub-par quality 16 (or 20, or 26, or 12, or whatever number). Don’t buy in to the consumeristic marketing that oversimplifies everything to “more is better.” It’s not. Better is better.

Next up: How does this digital camera analogy apply to the church? Coming soon.

No related posts.

In Malcom Gladwell’s Blink, he tells a story about a car salesman who sold way more cars than any other salesman on the lot. In trying to ascertain the source of his success, the salesman shared that he treated every single customer as someone who could realistically buy a car. If a teenager walked on the lot, he didn’t automatically assume that it was just some kid who was dreaming about cars and just taking a look–he assumed that this kid could actually buy a car, either via his parents, or in some other way. Under his watch, cars were flying off the lot. He treated people like people.

My experience at the lumberyard got me thinking about the gospel. The gospel tells the story of a God who welcomes people–warts and all–into his family by a sheer act of grace. This unmerited favor extends to people across socio-economic, cultural, ethnic, national, generational, and every other line you can think of. To God, it doesn’t matter what you look like or what you’ve done, but rather your internal beauty as one of God’s creatures. The gospel tells the story of a God who sent His son to bear the weight of the shortcomings and failures of all of humanity so that we might be welcomed into God’s family in this way through faith and by grace. He doesn’t look at someone’s track record and turn away, but instead he extends the offer of grace through Jesus.

The church, as the people of God, should be exemplars of treating people like people. As people who have experienced this type of grace, the church shouldn’t be ready to write someone off because of his or her past, but rather demonstrate what it is to be a part of God’s family, ready to surround people with love and support and at the same time challenging them to be who God wants them to be. The church should be exemplars of avoiding preconceptions based on track record or appearance, but–much like my experience at the lumber yard–see the full potential of every human being as created by God and capable of being transformed by His grace.

Now, on to that patio bench…

Related posts:

1. Mystery Brought to Light Through the Church

1. People don’t go to church, people ARE the church.
2. People don’t “do” church, the church DOES stuff.

Below are 111 verses where the word “church” (ekklesia) shows up (for a total of 114 times) in the New Testament. Let me know if you see anywhere where people “go to” or “do” church. Thoughts?

Related posts:

1. Mystery Brought to Light Through the Church
2. Living Mulch: An Organic Illustration of Churches and Church Networks
3. A church in Mykonos

One of the main principles in biointensive farming is that you maximize use of the land. Planting in rows wastes space because you have to leave space for your feet to stand while you walk through your crops–planting in large rectangles and reaching over into the center makes more sense. So instead of having a single row of plants, you’d have a box about four to five feet wide of a bunch of plants close together and you reach over to the center of the box to weed, harvest, and tend to your plants. Here’s a simple drawing of that idea:

Biointensive takes it even a step further. Instead of planting in square rows and filling in the slots, it’s even more efficient to plant in triangles, so that every single plant has the optimal distance from the next plant (see photo to the right of some of our radish seedlings). I leave it to someone else to do the math as to why this maximizes space. It just does.

Here’s where living mulch comes in. Theoretically, when you plan plants with optimal spacing, they create a living mulch: (1) Their leaves provide coverage over the ground to prevent sunlight from hitting the soil in between plants, preventing weed growth, and (2) they release a beneficial bacteria that inhibits weed growth. Pretty amazing. I don’t think we’ve done it quite right, because we’re still battling clovers and other weeds, but in theory, this means you spend less time weeding or providing some other ground cover, and more time taking care of the plants!

I’ve thought about this organic analogy for a while and wondered–does this apply to the church? Here’s my thought: in my own simple church experience, we’ve struggled with finding the right balance between gathering together and living out our faith in the world. Gather together too often, you become ingrown; gather together too little, you become isolated. In our church, we started out by meeting formally twice a month, but we found that too infrequent to build any momentum. So we shifted to once a week. But even then, sometimes it was hard to keep up with each other’s lives, so we sometimes have dinner with one another during the week. But, multiply that by however many relationships you have in your respective house church, and you could be occupied every night of the week pretty quickly.

The same thing applies for church networks. Our relational network in SF gathers once a month. If someone misses a month, then potentially we don’t see that person for two months. But gather more than once a month, we run the risk of getting suffocated with meetings. Similarly, in farming if your plants are too close together, then they crowd each other out and fight for the same water and soil nutrients! Too far apart, and weeds get in and threaten your crops, not to mention the time suck it is to pull them out. Living sustainably involves finding that balance.

Here’s my question: How do we find that balance to create a Spirit-led living mulch in our churches and church networks? I realize there won’t be a magic formula, but I do think there are some things we need to think about in order to find the optimal mix for maximum kingdom effectiveness. Thoughts?

Related posts:

1. Mystery Brought to Light Through the Church
2. Acts 2 and Communal Living
3. Friday’s Flip Book – Teaching in House Churches and Photography Trends

8 To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, 9 and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, 10 so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.  (Eph. 3:8-10, ESV)

As a part of our church gathering a couple weeks ago, we went through the first part of Ephesians 3, and a lot of our conversation ended up settling on these verses.  My own application step from that day was to think about it some more, and blog about it.  So here I am, blogging.

Verse 10 in particular stood out that day, specifically the three-fold progression: (1) through the church (2) the manifold wisdom of God (3) might now be made known…in the heavenly places.  The collective response to this idea was – huh?  First off, a certain amazement was felt with the idea that the “unsearchable riches of Christ” would actually be somehow proclaimed “through the church.”  That in itself was huge.  But the larger question was how in the world that interacted with the idea of the manifold (multi-faceted, variegated, richly diversified) wisdom of God is made known to those in the heavenly realms.  How does that work?

So I did some reading.  The word for church, ekklesia, appears earlier in the letter, in Eph. 1:22.  And as I got reading about 3:10 in the context of the letter, commentaries pointed back to that verse.  And here’s the intriguing idea that emerges: “it is better to understand the term [ekklesia] metaphorically of a heavenly gathering around Christ in which believers already participate…It is a figurative manner of speaking about Christians being personally related to Christ as they are related to one another…”  And what about the present, local church?  “Local gatherings, whether in a congregation or a house-church, are earthly manifestations of that heavenly gathering around the risen Christ.”  (O’Brien, Ephesians, 146-7, bold mine)  And the word translated “Gentiles” in verse 8 is ethnos, i.e. peoples, as in ethnic people groups.

Here’s the beautiful implication:

God is sovereign.  Yet, in His sovereignty, he has chosen to enact certain things through His people, the church.  A significant part of what is being communicated in the book of Ephesians is that the gospel is not only for one particular people, but for all people, and that gospel bridges over every social, racial, economic, ________ (fill-in-the-blank) barrier you can think of.  Jesus is the uniting presence (and the only such one) that can cross all those barriers.  This impact is to the extent that God’s plan for all peoples to be reconciled to Himself through the cross is expressed through the church and the living out of the gospel.  As O’Brien puts it, “Its [the church] presence is the means by which God himself discloses to the powers his own richly diverse wisdom.” (O’Brien, 246).  And the present-day local church gets to participate in an earthly expression of what’s already been enacted in heaven, just as Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  So even spiritual beings that are pitted against God see this expression of the church on earth, and realize that, indeed, the God of the Universe is in control and has triumphed over every manner of darkness and evil, to reconcile people to Himself and to one another.

Now that’s good news.

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1. Light

It got me thinking about major shifts like Gutenberg to Google in areas that I’m passionate about – photography and biblical studies.  When I got more seriously into photography about eight years ago, pro digital was in its infancy.  I started with 35mm film, shooting negatives, moving on to slide film, even stepping into the arena of medium format with a sweet 6×6 rangefinder.  I distinctly remember while taking photos for some gigs the anxiety associated with the very fact that I really had no guarantee that what I thought I was capturing on film was actually going to be there.  Instead, I had to wait a whole day or so to see the results come back.  Digital photography changed all of that.  Now, seemingly everyone has a digital camera.  Instant feedback is the norm.  Blogs with tutorials abounded.  Photo blogs, photo sharing sites, home print shops, all of that has become the norm.  Expert information now accessible to the masses.

Let’s shift the discussion to the arena of biblical studies.  Among my favorite classes in seminary have been Hebrew and Greek.  Something about it just connects with how my brain is wired – I love seeing patterns, dissecting paragraphs and sentences, diving deep into the study of a Bible passage, and asking lots of questions.  It’s actually quite invigorating for me.  Along the way, a huge help for me in this area has been a piece of technology, software to be precise, called Logos Bible Software.  Whereas in the days before, one had to painstakingly parse verbs or count by hand the number of occurrences of a text, or look up manually in a real book a reference, Logos does all of this for you.  You can hover your mouse over a word in Greek, double-click, pull up a commentary, link all the books together so they scroll simultaneously, do intensive searches on all sorts of topics with all sorts of parameters – all without even leaving your chair.  Some would look at this as the end of an era, much like the end of analog film.  Much of this resulted from an instant gratification, a “microwave” generation expectation, so to speak.  Expert information now accessible to the masses.

In so many ways, this shift is good.  It opens up things that were once only available to a select few to a much larger audience.  Technologies like Wikipedia have made a significant contribution to the dissemination of information.   Yet Sweet brought up a very interesting point toward the end of his talk – “These are the first generations of kids that do not need authority figures to access information.”  It’s all there.  But then he went on to say, “But where the generation needs us more than ever (you used to have kids to work the fields, not to work the remotes), they need help in process – what do I do with all this information? How do I turn it from information to knowledge to wisdom?”  And there you have it.  Information does not equal wisdom.  And that’s where I think training of various sorts comes in.  (Which, by the way, won’t be the same type for everyone, since God wired us all differently.)  The information alone will only get us to a point.  It has to be processed and put into practice.  Applied wisdom, ahh, obedience, information activated – now you’re on to something.  I think that’s one of the primary areas where the church is meant to come alongside each other in community and cultivate that kind of a relationship with Jesus.  And ultimately, it’s not what you know, but who you know.  Christianity is about a relationship with the living God.

Digital photography is great.  So is Logos.  But here’s where I think the dots between mentors and training and tools can connect.  We can’t focus on just the tools alone, but how to use the tools.  I’ve been in seminary for more than four years now, and I’ve been hugely blessed by the experience.  Having something like Logos to my toolbox has been a huge boon for me – I’m able to take ideas that I’ve got in my head – either from class or preparing a Bible study or a sermon – and process those ideas through some real data available at my fingertips.  And I’m constantly reminded not to seek just the information, but real wisdom – applied knowledge.  Moreover, I’m reminded that gifts like teaching and knowledge are meant to bless others, not to be kept inside one individual.  When that starts happening, when one member of the body blesses another, who in turn blesses another (2 Tim. 2:2), then you start to see movements happen.  Even though I look at this era that we live in with some trepidation and uncertainty, I rest assured in the God who stands above all of history and has the whole trajectory in view.

Those of you who know me know that I can get really excited about certain things.  Logos is one of them.  And for those of you who are in seminary at the moment, they’re making a $1,000 scholarship available, and whoever gets it also gets a really nice copy of Logos.  Tuition can be expensive, and anything can help.  Check it out here: seminary scholarship.  All you’ve got to do is watch a video and fill out some forms.  For those of you who aren’t looking for a scholarship at the moment, you can still check it out at http://www.logos.com.  And for all of these things – be it seminary, a computer, a piece of software – they’re tools – among many different types – that are out there that can help us in our journey of following Jesus.

Oh, and Sweet’s answer to the question above is this – Jesus was all about pointing people toward what it means to be truly human, that is, the way we were meant to be.

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