think Invisible Children or Toms Shoes, and those that followed. The problem is that now new mission efforts get forced into secular paradigms to have any credibility. Many charities, for example, need secular money and secular stakeholders, and Christian leaders who don’t fit in the Church move into those spaces.
On the other hand, venture doesn’t need to be esoteric to Silicon Valley. Mission is fundamentally about (ad)venture. It’s always been about risk, courage, and moving into the unknown with the Spirit, and doing so in the context of a purposive band or community of missionaries. From Paul onward, this has been a mark of the Church, and whenever the Spirit moves, we have mission movements
The language of innovation in a missional context is not about reinventing theology — it is about innovating on systems of scale and movement. The content of the mission stays fixed; the infrastructure for how it spreads is where invention belongs. spiritThe only risk is if we assume technological or capitalistic, rather than fundamentally human, methodologies around growth and scale. Discipleship still happens at the speed of relationship.
But again—mission belongs to everyone, all mission is ultimately local, and every church has some resources. There are no super Christians. I think that every church everywhere in the world should have a way of discipling and calling out the kingdom dreams that are in people’s hearts and activating them. To me, that’s the essence of innovation! I think there should be more programs and resources that help congregations call out new dreams, nurture them, and fund them. Every church should have an incubator and a seed fund for new stuff that God is stirring.
This means, given the founder’s history and their experience and their story and their network and the way that they see the world, are they the right person to tackle this problem
And so, we don’t necessarily need high-charisma people. We need deep, real, mature, solid, stable people. It makes me think of that idea from C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce: some people were actually so substantive that they could walk on the hard grass in the new creation. The Church needs substantial, weighty people—and we have to unlock the God giving calling in soul of the person, and create pathways for it. That’s missional innovation.
