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disruptive innovation

Small Churches: Don’t try to swim with the big fish

disruptivePutting Disruptive Innovation to Work
Principle 3

Doing what the natural competitors consider unattractive or uninteresting

Many business books show in great detail how companies that act in the right way can crush existing competitors. Successful disruptors almost never seek a head-on collision with established competitors.

Interesting advice. Churches almost never take it. Most churches set out to be like every other church within their denomination. Many of them fail.

This is the root of the thinking of the pastor who claimed the East Falls neighborhood had enough churches and therefore Redeemer didn’t matter. There is an assumption that all churches do the same things in the same way.

This is the thinking of church professionals. Church members know that every church is not the same. They know their attendance means more to them than just sitting in the pew and walking through the weekly rituals led by a different ritual leader. That’s why members who move from one neighborhood often hop in the car on Sunday morning to travel 30 miles to the church that feels like home to them. That’s why people shop around when they move to a new neighborhood. That’s why people care. We need more churches that are different.

Small churches cannot survive if they try to minister in the same way large churches do. This doesn’t mean they are unable to do strong and worthwhile ministry.

In our Ambassador visits, we saw several churches doing things differently and well.

  • Prince of Peace, Lawncrest,  has made reaching out to varioius immigrant groups the cornerstone of its ministry.
  • Prince of Peace, Plymouth Meeting, is centering on issues that relate to family problems—serving families with members with autism and focusing on the effects of bullying within the family structure.

These are ministry niches that larger churches bypass. Remember, from a regional body’s viewpoint, a primary purpose for ministry is support of the regional body.

Unfortunately, there are other examples, some of whom are probably on Synod’s endangered list. (They deny they have one, but they referred to it in court. They claimed Redeemer was the first of six churches they intended to force into closure. Five congregations can thank us for slowing the slaughter.)

Larger churches would see service to these segments as charitable outreach. The efforts would not support their budgets. The bigger the church, the bigger the burden of the budget. Attention given to these ministries is therefore limited to the typical church budget for charitable outreach. If you are guessing that this is a minimal figure, you are probably right.

People served by these niche ministry churches would be lost in larger churches. It would take years to prove their leadership worth. If they are going to be active, they are going to be part of smaller ministries.

Redeemer, East Falls, learned this lesson. Naturally, older members discussed finding newer members who were “like them.” But they were with able to see beyond themselves, as painful as it may have been at times.

There was no need to maintain a mainstream-style church in face of neighborhood apathy for the way churches usually do business. It would have taken tons of money to support a minister for years to rebuild this kind of ministry after a decade of synodical neglect. But Redeemer was able to rely on other strengths. We had a decades-old reputation for having good daycare programs that the neighborhood traditionally supported. As a congregation we were open to the diversity that visited us. We had a part-time pastor for three years who facilitated this openness. We had lay talents that could serve and bring others into service quickly.

We built a valuable ministry around our strengths and did not try to fit our strengths into the mainline vision for church growth. We were succeeding.

Unfortunately, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America did not understand Redeemer. They were blinded by what they thought was easy access to our wealth. A lot of good ministry effort in East Falls has been wasted.

Disruptive Advice to small churches: Find a niche ministry that the bigger churches can’t serve and pursue it doggedly.

10 Dec 2012

The Church and Its Elusive Goals

disruptiveGood Enough Can Be Great

Let’s look at the second principle of Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work.

 Noting that “good enough” can be great.

Many innovators seek to leapfrog over existing solutions, essentially hoping to win by playing the innovation game better. Disruptors win by playing the innovation game differently. [emphasis in original] Disruptions are all about trade-offs. Disruptions typically do offer lower performance along dimensions that historically mattered to mainstream customers. They aren’t bad along these dimensions; they are good enough. But they more than make up for that — in the eyes of their customers — by offering better performance along different dimensions.

This is very applicable to church life. Congregations are bombarded with demands to transform. We are competing to reach a standard that no one has measured. The drama sets congregation against congregation as they vie for attention from their regional body in access to professional services and standing. Transform becomes conform.

Concentrating on growing can be frustrating. It can discourage people who never joined church to work to reach other people’s goals. New members need time to settle and mature.

Sometimes churches are exactly the right size. They can afford their pastor. They can maintain their building. People know each other and are sensitive to one another and their community. They work well together and are confident enough in their sense of mission to welcome new people.

So why can’t we accept congregations the way they are? Is the push to grow important to the mission of the church or is it important to maintaining the three budgets each congregation is expected to support (their own, and those of the regional body and national entity)?

Churches will grow if they are growing for the right reasons. Their way of achieving their mission may not suit church professionals, but it may be good enough—at the moment. It may be great.

Redeemer was good enough. Redeemer was great at what it was doing in mission work — which no one else was doing quite the same way. We were not replicating a model foisted on us from above but we were innovating in ways from which others could learn and which we could afford and had the talent to support.

We don’t know what would have made the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America happy.

  • We had grown five-fold since Bishop Almquist’s interference in our ministry in the late 1990s. SEPA didn’t know that because SEPA ignored us for a decade. When faced with the facts, they simply refused to count the new members. “White Redeemer must be allowed to die. Black Redeemer — we can put them anywhere.” (Bishop Burkat)
  • We had achieved diversity, a stated goal of SEPA.
  • Our members spanned the age ranges and was no longer top heavy with older Christians.
  • We had several pastors interested in working with us.
  • We had some money in reserve.
  • We had lay leaders with diverse talents that complemented those of professional leaders.
  • We had a ministry plan that had the potential to create ongoing revenue.

We were and are good enough. We might even be great.

But recognizing Redeemer’s unique ministry didn’t meet SEPA’s agenda. They needed us to fail so they could justify taking our property (which their Articles of Incorporation forbid, but who cares).

So they quickly, in a blink of an eye, acknowledged our success but followed it with criticism for not achieving it under their direction. (They were AWOL.)

Since they kicked us out of the ELCA, we’ve visited 52 congregations. We know our ministry is just as active and effective as those who sat in judgement over us. And it is unique. We don’t have a food pantry. We don’t sign up for every charity run. Our kids don’t go to Synod youth events. But we do support ministries in other countries. All our kids and families had an opportunity to attend church camp. We have developed a social media ministry which reaches 1500 people a month. We’ve made a project of connecting with other Lutheran congregations. We have fought to maintain congregational polity, which will someday benefit every other SEPA congregation. We continue to meet for worship and ministry weekly.

If we had tried to be like bigger churches we would not have been able to accomplish the things we did. We did our own thing with our own resources and remained true to our mission. If we had concentrated on emulating bigger congregations we would have failed. All of our resources would have been spent keeping up with the St. Joneses. We found areas of ministry in which we could excel and make a difference.

We were good enough, we like to think, to be welcome in God’s house.

We were not good enough, we know, to be welcome in the ELCA.

09 Dec 2012

Making Disruptive Ideas Successful in the Church

disruptiveTransformation Requires Disruption

This is the second in a series about the concept of Successful Innovation by adopting Disruptive Techniques.

We reference the book Innovators Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work published in 2008.

The work of Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson, Joseph V. Sinfield and Elizabeth J. Altman proposes three principles that characterize disruptive growth. They cite businesses that found a way to thrive when the trends and statistics were discouraging.

We think these theories point to the missing ingredient in the Church’s long and ineffective quest to transform. Here are the three principles which, if followed, lead to growth.

  1. Serving “overshot customers” or totally new consumers
  2. Noting that “good enough” can be great
  3. Doing what the natural competitors consider unattractive or uninteresting

Let’s look at each of these as they might apply to the Church. We’ll use our own ministry as an example. Today we will look at Principle 1.

Serving “overshot customers” or totally new consumers

What does this mean in the world of Church? The study elaborates:

A truly disruptive strategy is unlikely to find success in a current market. Making that disruptive solution good enough for current customers often requires heavy investment to fix performance limitations. Those investments can snuff out the disruptive essence of the new solution. Furthermore, bringing the solution to established markets means following established approaches, which can blind companies to the new potential inherent in the disruptive model.

This is a description of the current situation facing thousands of mainline congregations today. The Church cannot transform without the support of the current membership. The Church frequently opts to discourage current members hoping for better luck and more influence with pews full of newby Christians. They are hoping that they will buy in, ask few questions and give money to support the way things are already being done. In so doing, they are wasting the investment they made when they nurtured and educated the existing members.

This is not insignificant. The current membership with knowledge of the church and its traditions is the most likely source of both sweat and financial equity. The Church is shooting itself in the foot (not to mention missing the point of Christianity) when it undervalues its current members.

The Church has its established approaches.

  • Thick manuals on how to minister to churches in transition. (We’ve read them.)
  • Book after book sitting on the shelves behind the pastor’s desk. (We read many of them.)
  • Changes in constitutions to give the hierarchies powers to force their ministry ideas on congregations.

In all this effort to follow accepted or conventional ministry techniques, the Church is eroding their foundation and missing opportunities that are begging for unconventional attention.

The second part of the above quote is equally important: while we are following the conventions of church building we are blinding our eyes to new possibilities — new potential.

How the Redeemer/SEPA conflict validates this principle

The Redeemer situation illustrates this principle. Redeemer members were following the Disruptive Innovation techniques, serving a neighborhood which church analysts had determined was “overshot” and totally new populations. We had never heard the term at the time.

One of the few pastors who have openly addressed the Redeemer issue (retired, of course) justified the Synod Assembly vote with a point that was never raised in either the Synod’s presentation or Redeemer’s allotted few minutes.

“There are too many churches in East Falls anyway. What do we need with a church there?”

(Let’s forget for now that under Lutheran polity this isn’t his or the Assembly’s choice.)

This is not true, the people of East Falls are largely unchurched—not over-churched.

East Falls has

  • a Roman Catholic Church
  • a Presbyterian Church
  • an Episcopal Church
  • Redeemer with its locked doors but open hearts

The Roman Catholic Church is reeling from its own conflict with its hierarchy. The hierarchy, ever attentive to their own fiscal challenges, closed St. Bridget’s relatively successful school in an attempt to bolster the numbers at a school a couple of miles away that was failing despite the diocese’s investment in renovation. (Now both schools are closed. Great job, hierarchy!)

Five years ago, when SEPA’s attention turned to closing Redeemer, Falls Presbyterian Church had half the membership of Redeemer. Their denomination decided to support the congregation with a minister who has helped them make significant progress.

Five years ago, the Memorial Church of the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church was struggling, following the unexpected death of its pastor. They turned to then synod staff member, Claire Burkat. As a consultant, she determined that this congregation, located at the more affluent end of East Falls, with a location on a side street with no parking lot (a criticism she hurled at Redeemer) had ministry potential. While supporting the Episcopal congregation in East Falls, Bishop Burkat was soon plotting the downfall of the congregation in the same neighborhood that had supported her work for decades.

It should be noted that East Falls once had

  • a Methodist Church, which failed when its location became locked in the crowded streets of an old neighborhood
  • a Baptist Church, with similar challenges
  • a Congregational Church that closed more than 30 years ago
  • and a second Episcopal Church that did not survive a conflict with its bishop

There is a track record here of techniques that don’t work. Redeemer noticed and addressed its ministry challenges with them in mind.

So the neighborhood, in the analysis of church experts, was over-served but in reality it was “overshot,” a fertile field of “nonconsumers.” Prime ministry territory for Disruptive Innovation.

When the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Church in America decided that this was the next church they could turn to as a solution to their fiscal problems, Redeemer had already taken significant and promising ministry steps. We were able to forge a new direction in part because  SEPA Synod was following its guidelines of NOT HELPING churches they determined might die in TEN YEARS. An unbelievable philosophy that is documented.

Pastors were discouraged from serving here. In that void, the laity charted an unconventional but promising 2008 Redeemer Ministry Plan, which we are still following this plan today, with necessary adaptations, despite the fact that SEPA excludes us from church membership.

During the ten years that SEPA thought we were dying, Redeemer was reaching newcomers to the East Falls area—some with Lutheran roots, some without. They were different from Redeemer’s historic membership in that their roots were in East Africa as opposed to England, Scotland and Germany.

SEPA Synod and Bishop Burkat in particular looked at our membership list and criticized it. “A lot of these names look African.” She tried to remove our African members asking our pastor to take them with him to another congregation—choosing for them which church they should attend, something she would never dare try with white Lutherans. She never counted them — reporting to the Synod Assembly in 2009 that we had only 13 members. We had only 13 white members. We had 60 or more black members that SEPA refused to recognize. They were unconventional.

SEPA wanted to see a conventional ministry here, opting to follow the trend of three other denominations that failed following the same “tried and true” ministry strategies. Pastor Patricia Davenport made a presentation to East Falls Community Council last March, repeating “We want a Word and Sacrament church at that location.” Why they evicted the Word and Sacrament church that was there was not explained. Redeemer, if given half a chance, would be flourishing and paying the debts the Synod continues to fight over in court.

And we would be forging new ministry techniques that might help others.

08 Dec 2012

Transforming the Church with Disruptive Ideas

disruptiveEighteen months ago some of the remnant of Redeemer, East Falls, began visiting their sister churches that voted in 2009 to confiscate Redeemer property for their own enrichment.

Bishop Claire Burkat decided the way to transform Redeemer is to deny the congregation the services she is pledged to provide member congregations, make sure they have no professional leadership, lock out the loyal members, and sue their lay leaders. It is exactly as it sounds — ridiculous and cruel. Nevertheless it has been tacitly endorsed by the clergy and laity of a synod that is struggling and fearful that any misstep will find themselves undergoing similar “transformation.”

After our third visit, a pastor reported our activities to Bishop Burkat, which didn’t bother us. We saw nothing clandestine about attending church. We have made our reports quite public. As of this writing we have visited 52 SEPA congregations.

Bishop Burkat responded by issuing a warning letter to all pastors including instructions on what to do if we became disruptive—a new slant on the standard All welcome! sign.

Perhaps she thought we would behave the way her representatives behaved when they visited Redeemer.

But we didn’t set out to disrupt. We came to worship, learn and share. Period.

One of things we learned is how many of the congregations exist under the watchful eye of the synod. They are in transition with a synod appointed professional leader or they are in some form of mission development with clergy reporting regularly to synod.

One term cropped up regularly — transformational ministry. It actually is a common term used by church leaders, who have published many books on the subject. It sounds inspiring. It is really quite vague.

  1. It is unclear what the term means.
  2. It is unclear when it is successfully achieved.
  3. It is unclear as to how it happens—if it happens.
  4. Is is unclear if the term addresses a ministry model that is replicable or a fluke.

Generally, transformation seems to happen when a struggling church is by some means able to once again support the hierarchy.

Recently, we came across a book:

Innovator’s Gude to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work
published by Harvard Business Press in 2008.

This is a fascinating concept and one which Redeemer had unwittingly stumbled upon entirely ignorant that Harvard thinkers were concurrently developing a new business model that mirrored our experience.

Disruption Can Spur Success

Redeemer didn’t set out to be disruptive. Nevertheless, we had a track record for success in doing ministry in unconventional ways. The Synod and its voting membership never took the time to know or understand our ministry. They were better off without our people. “Hand over your money. Good riddance. We’ll pray for you. See you in court.”

It’s going on four years since East Falls Lutherans were locked out of the ELCA. Our visits reveal that SEPA has not experienced much innovation or transformation in the three years they have worked so tirelessly to exclude us.

We are going to look at the concept of Disruptive Success and see if it might be the catalyst that is missing as the church gropes blindly for “transformation.”

Look for at least four more posts on Disruptive Innovation in the Church.

07 Dec 2012