7 Ways to Disrupt Your Church

As some have suggested, it might take some disruptive innovation to get an existing church to think missionally, so here’s some helpful hints on how to do that (from Fast Company magazine):

1. Totally eliminate your industry’s persistent customer pain points — What practices exist in your church that drive people crazy? Identify these practices and “wipe them out.” Ask yourself: Can we turn our perspective around, to look through the lay person’s eyes as though they were the church leadership and we were the lay person?
2. Dramatically reduce complexity — “The more complex the processes and practices in your industry, the greater your opportunity to gain competitive advantage by simplifying them.”
3. Cut prices 90 percent (or more) — “Incremental change doesn’t disrupt an industry; radical change does. Radical price reductions require radical new processes and business models.”
4. Make stupid objects smart — “The race is on to make everything smart, and the dumber your products were to begin with, the greater the opportunity to make them smart.” Hmmmm …
5. Teach your company to talk — “No one owns the customer, and you either do what’s best for the customer or you will lose him. … What happens if your competitors’ companies talk, but yours doesn’t?” I think this point speaks directly to the growing trend of “multiple ecclesial belonging.”
6. Be utterly transparent — “Think: not just no secrets, but also no spin. … What if your company didn’t simply try to stop hiding, but instead radically embraced the truth? … The truth is coming, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Sounds almost biblical, doesn’t it?
7. Make loyalty dramatically easier than disloyalty — “By definition, when companies act smart they are personalizing the way they interact with and serve customers. Once you start delivering personalization, you create immense opportunities to make loyalty more convenient than disloyalty. … The challenge is to make loyalty so much more convenient, so radically easy, that customers won’t even consider switching to a competitor. Ever.”

What does all this have to do with church ministry and making the missional shift? You tell me!