Hirsch, Einstein, and Movements

Well, I’ve been on the road for the last month and am just beginning to capture some thots. At the end of 5500 miles of driving, Laurie and I ended up in Muscatine, Iowa with some of our kids and grandkids. While Laurie drove home from there, I caught a plane to Orlando for the Exponential Conference. Two "thought" mentors were speaking there— Alan Hirsch and Tim Keller–movement leaders whose books I’ve read but never met. Got to shake Alan’s hand and say hello and sat in on most of his sessions. As always, I was challenged by his prophetic thinking.

One illustration he shared has application to the challenges we face in building movements everywhere. He posed the question.

Can we can reach the increasing secular audiences around us by doing the same thing with the same kind of thinking?

As Einstein has noted, the "definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Or as he similar wrote: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Alan illustrated the idea in following diagram.

Most church planting (e.g. movement building) tends to find a typical model, method or approach (the red box) that has been successful in the past or is successful in certain situations and/or among particular target audiences. Because of that apparent success, other efforts to build movements attempt to mimic (or refine or improve) that typical model or approach. Unfortunately, the typical model only appeals to a certain percentage of the overall population we’re trying to reach–a percentage that is increasingly shrinking. As Alan said, we keep digging in the same hole and pretty soon we’re so deeply in the hole that we can’t see over the sides. As he added later, if all you have is one solution, you’ve got missional poverty.

So, the challenge is to "think differently" — to give permission to our teams to go after the rest of the population in new and creative ways. We need to develop new solutions, new approaches, new methods, new models.