June 2024 Update

Moving Into Year 2!!

Wow, it's been a long time since I've written an update! I've been quite busy in the trenches working on our church experiment, along with a bit of travel mixed in too. It's been a busy stretch. Now that the school year is wrapping up (last day of school tomorrow as I write this), things are winding down just a bit and it seems like the perfect moment to step back and try and take in where we've been so far.

Easter timed out to be the one-year anniversary for our gatherings here in Phoenix, so we're coming up on 14 months of this adventure out here. It's been a wild ride so far and it has definitely been a great opportunity to experiment with new ideas and approaches. On the whole the Lord has really blessed what we're doing. We've got a great group that averages around 50 or so on Sunday mornings and we have lots of great ministries, outreaches, and events that we're keeping busy with. The presence of the Lord has been really special in our gatherings and it's been exciting to see people responding to our experimental approach and the things we're pursuing. On the whole I'm super encouraged! Of course it's still church planting: there are always 80 things on fire or in drastic states of incompleteness, but that comes with the territory.

Experimentation is a funny thing, and it's odd to be working to church plant when the goal is to develop a new model that you believe God is giving to you more than you're inventing yourself. In another church planting scenario I'd be trumpeting vision as one of the primary tools at this point: "Here is what Jesus is calling us to do together, let's get after it!" Right now, we are a few steps out from being able to do that. "Vision" to us looks more like, "I think God is inviting us to wander in that direction now. Let's go over there and see what we find. It might help us figure out how to do this particular layer of church." The kind of clarity that vision can usually bring - facilitating cohesion and creating momentum is something we have to learn to live without a whole of at present. We can't create something before God gives it to us (otherwise we'll repeat the same things we've done in the past and not realize it as we're doing it). It's an exercise in patience and discernment at an intense level!

As we continue our experimentation, it feels to me like a picture is slowly emerging out of the fog; specifically what we're doing is gradually becoming clearer. When we developed School of Kingdom Ministry that was largely how it went, so that's encouraging to me. We ran the class the first year and then God began to drop into our lap the idea of collaborating with other churches to run it in their context. That was a total surprise at the time and it was really stumbling through year two that created the kind of clarity that allowed us to build forward. Year 2 was the year of seeing what God was doing, year 3 was building out what we needed to be able to support what God was aiming us at. I'm not sure how closely those specific phases or times will track with our experiment (and of course what we're doing is different as well), but so far the general frame feels coherent with my previous experience, and that's really helpful. I find myself increasingly excited about the clarity I believe the Lord is going to bring us here in year 2. I’d love to be able to write a little more about what that clarity is, but the Lord hasn’t shown us yet! I guess in lieu of that I’ll share about some pieces we’ve been investing in lately.

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Using Technology Differently

I’ve written elsewhere about how I believe a fair bit of the activity in how the church is wrestling to leverage technology is misplaced. It’s tempting to see the value of technology in the church as a more effective connection medium. I think a deeper value is more disruptive though; technological tools have the capacity to create a new collaborative framework which facilitates kingdom activity along totally different shapes than churches have in the past.

To see the difference between these two, consider the different ways the Encyclopedia Brittanica and Wikipedia have used technology. Brittanica has kept the same process (hiring authors, editors, etc), but has changed their distribution using technology. You used have to have to buy the books, now you can find them on a webpage instead. That’s what it looks to me like what a lot of the church is doing. When we stream our weekend services or create zoom small groups, that’s what we’re doing: making the same “product” available through digital means.

Compare that with Wikipedia though. Wikipedia doesn’t just have a webpage that displays the articles: Wikipedia leverages technology in an entirely new way to create the articles collaboratively and openly. It changes the article-creation process to happen through an open cycle involving authors & editors that fulfill their roles voluntarily and autonomously, and it relies on lots of rapid iterating rather than thorough (slow) processes with “experts”. And that approach seems to have worked! Not only does Wikipedia seem to have the same or less errors as Britannica does, it also has managed to produce 10x the articles in the same timeframe (Brittanica ~130k, Wikipedia ~6.84m)!! And let’s be real…when was the last time you looked up something on Brittanica? But a fair number of us have used Wikipedia in the last week. I know it’s where I go when I want to get some quick info on something.

I believe we have a parallel opportunity in the church. Not to just use technology to connect more widely than we could before, but to use technology to fundamentally change the way we create the same things the church has always been about. It’s not that the things we do will change. The church has always gathered, discipled, evangelized, received and allocated money, and so on. None of that changes - but the how that results in those outcomes can change. And I believe when it does it will be interesting to see if that form of church shares the same aspect of feeling disjoint from culture that is common to hear people express today. I’m not saying it’s a silver bullet - but I’ll be curious to see how it plays out, if we can crack the nut.

A year into our experimentation, I’m no less convinced of this opportunity than I was before. We’ve been working hard to learn what it means to organize in this different shape. How does it work and what’s required technically to do that? Along the way I’ve had to catch up enormously on my software capabilities. Along with building this community I’ve written thousands of lines of code in order to be able to build frameworks to test these ideas. It’s been a stretch! But I’ve seen the first layers of it in action and I think there is something real here. The exact features aren’t clear yet, but there is something in that direction.

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The Approach Seems like It Works

We’ve now been doing over a year’s worth of gatherings with our app-empowered fluid/structured design that we created. Is it a perfect system? Of course not! There are some tensions we’re feeling that we’re going to take a pass on improving in the next few months. But the point is, this kind of framework has produced a year’s worth of gatherings. Dynamic, fruitful gatherings in which the people of God have been ministered to and have encountered God. There have been profound encounters often a palpable sense that God is with us.

All this has been facilitated by a very different framework for creating a church gathering. A much more co-created framework that has filled 925 roles in the last 12 months. It has resulted in people being mobilized to contribute to church in new ways and it has opened up opportunities for discipleship as people work to step into new roles. All of this facilitated by using technology as a collaboration framework to produce a church function. If it can work for a year, it’s hard for me to see this approach as untenable.

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This Approach Opens New Facets

One thing we’ve been working hard at these last six months is a new aspect of the Fuse ecosystem called Discipleship Journeys. Discipleship Journeys are a tool we’re developing that sits somewhere in the space between sermon series, training classes, e-courses, and small groups. It’s a new thing that kind of blends elements of all of that together into a scalable and replaceable vehicle an author can use to share from the grace God has put on their life and minister to others.

Getting into all the nitty-gritty of what discipleship journeys are and how they work would probably take too much text to explore here (besides, they’re changing almost every day at this point). But suffice it to say for now to say we’ve been able to use the technology behind them to allow for both more personalized choice, while also creating new facets of action and accountability than I’ve ever seen in a discipleship experience.

First, there is the layer of “what experience do you want here?” that each person is empowered to choose. Do you want to audit this and keep it very simple for you right now? Or do you want a deeper dive with extra layers of exercises & activities? Or an even deeper layer that qualifies you to lead this discipleship journey for someone else? With one tool we can facilitate all those layers simultaneously so each person can take the version of the journey God is directing them to at this point in their life right now.

There is also a layer of “how do you want to act on this?” That we can facilitate. As we conclude a teaching session, I outline a series of potential action steps someone might feel led to take with what we’ve explored for the day. Then I direct everyone to pull out their phone and assign themselves what they feel led to. And only when they’ve assigned themselves an action step is the teaching session marked as complete.

During the time between our sessions, the journey administrates everything. There are people participating in the exercises as they’re able to during the week - but often sharing with one another through our platform as they do. And it keeps the action steps they haven’t completed yet in front of them until they check them off. When we gather together, the first thing we do is take a look at what everyone did and reflect on what we’re learning. How have we grown by putting it into action as God led us? What stood out that God did in us in the time since we met last.

This aspect of our experiment is still rather new, but so far I’m encouraged by how it’s going. There has been a real engagement and a clear sense of value delivered in these experiences to our people. Since we began experimenting with this framework late last year, our little community has checked off 582 waypoints (our word for modules), and our people have done 237 action steps that they assigned themselves and completed. (And it grows more every day!) This kind of personalized, action-oriented, discipleship experience is something I dreamed of being able to do before. Technology makes it doable. 

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Doing This Approach Well Matters

Okay so I’m encouraged by the general trajectory. I think this approach is feasible in terms of being able to coordinate kingdom activities, and I think those activities may have new facets that add real value. Now here is the counterpoint to a lot of that. It’s hard to do this. This is an approach that needs to be executed well to really work.

When we first got started, I didn’t know where the technological pieces of what we’re doing would come from. I knew the importance of the technological tools to be able to administrate the patterns of collaboration, but I didn’t know what the plan was to get those tools built. It became clear as we went that I was the plan. Oh! Okay…um, I guess so. That’s fine Lord. So I began to roll up my sleeves and get to work. I begin to learn and learn and learn about web development at new levels. I began to build and rebuild and rebuild. All along the way working to integrate the tools we’ve been building into the coordination of our community immediately and only build what we have the tools to facilitate as we have them.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had about a year of getting-up-to-speed curve before I really could build the kind of tools we need to experiment. Along the way I built a series of not-really-there tools, which were okay, but ran into a lot of hurdles. For something to be an effective collaborative tool, it needs to be intuitive and well-designed. It needs to be able to handle as much complexity on it’s side to keep the experience as simple as possible on the users’ side. And all of that means if you kind of halfway execute on the technology side, it isn’t worth much. It’s got to be well made for people to be able to use it. And if people can’t use it easily, the whole approach begins to crumble at the foundation.

On the other side, I’m not sure the approach of “Hey I’ve got this great app idea for the church” is really a path that can work well either. I’ve seen this path as well: often it’s people who are passionate about the kingdom from a technology background that have a great idea. Their idea is often great. I’ve seen some really great ones. But the problem with that approach is that you’re trying to attach something technological to a church that was already built without technology woven into the collaboration model from the beginning. It may work to a degree, but I struggle to see that really giving the kind of foundational pivot that I think is possible here. I suppose it’s akin to the difference between attaching a window AC unit to a house and having central air. It just works differently when it’s built in from the beginning.

So I say all of that to say while I think this is a good road, this kind of experimentation is hard to get the necessary factors to align properly for. The ability to create the kind of tools in play is not commonplace in church contexts. But it’s extremely difficult to get the ability to create those tools at the level that is helpful when you’re at the beginning phases of a church - which is I think what you really need if you want to give "can we find a new approach?" an honest go. These two don’t come together much. It’s likely the case that once some of the foundational tools have been built they can be used by other planting churches (and perhaps other non-planting churches too), but it is a hard road to get the conditions right to do the pioneering work.

Am I saying this all depends on us? LOL, I sure hope not! And I really doubt that could be true. The Lord doubtless has other groups working on similar things and exploring similar avenues. I just don’t know who they are yet! I look forward to that day I do, and for now I enjoy being a small part of the process of whatever the Lord is doing in his broader church in this area.