Guest Blog: Scott Rodgers
Scott Rodgers is our Mesa Campus Pastor. He writes…
Innovate.
- Why do we do that?
- How can we do it different?
When was the last time you threw those questions out on the table for discussion? Church is too predictable for me. I’m looking for something remarkable, something memorable; and so are your first time guests. I had a club sandwich at Houston’s the other night and told three people the next day how great it was. Most people love to have a story to tell; a story about their experience. As a church, we need to give people a story to tell.
In addition to what God does by impacting or perhaps changing someone’s life, what are we doing to make a person’s experience memorable, remarkable, worthy of telling someone else about? I used to think of innovating in the church to be all about lights, videos, and gadgetry. Houston’s didn’t have intelligent lighting, just a great club sandwich. In-N-Out burger doesn’t have big video screens, just someone standing in the drive thru personally taking my order during lunch and asking me if I want my burger in a bag or if I am going to eat it on the road. If I am eating on the road, they wrap it half open, ready to be consumed. That’s cool. I tell everyone about In-N-Out because of that.
Innovation isn’t about communicating like Ed Young or Andy Stanley, or Craig Groeschel; innovation starts with the small things. I call these touch points. Identify every place a guest interacts with something or someone else and make it memorable.
- Why do greeters just shake hands?
- Why are church bulletins all about information and getting people to sign up for something?
- Why do we do four songs, a 25 minute talk, and announcements; in that order?
How about one hundred greeters mingling through your parking lot and opening doors, carrying babies, handing out drinks, and passing out stickers to the kids? How about doing our boring announcements on video in a fun way, after the second song when everyone is fully engaged? Oh gosh, we can’t do that; can we? It would hinder the flow of worship. Really? Change it up and get creative.
Identify touch points. Create memorable experiences. Step outside the norm. Do it regularly. That’s innovation. Give your people a story to tell around the water cooler on Monday morning. That’s it from me; I’m heading to In-N-Out to get a half wrapped burger.
Visit 
Scott - Great words! Even us “creative” and “innovative” churches can easily find ourselves doing the same creative and innovative things over and over. Kind of defeats the point. I appreciate you taking this discussion outside of the worship environment and into areas like the host team/greeters. We’re in a rut with our host team and desperately need to inject some innovation into them and what they do. I’ve emailed your post to our host team leaders and asked them to begin thinking in ways they never have about host team. Thanks!
Great post, Scott!
I agree (and have tended to fall into this) that we limit creativity to a particular area (that’s not very creative, is it?).
Instead, if we want to cultivate creativity in the church, we need to look at every aspect.
This begins by observing. If you want to be innovative in your church, look at what your church does. Write down everything you encounter when you come to church. Like you said, everything from parking to announcements at the end. Then you can tackle any or all of those things you wrote down.
Dr. Howard Hendricks makes a point that only one out of every twenty ideas is creative. When we want to be creative, however, we often take one idea and try to change that idea over and over again, working from a single origin. What Hendricks suggests, on the other hand, is to, as fast as possible write down twenty ideas about a subject. Don’t think about it very much either. Some of them might be really stupid. But chances are, one of them will be creative.
Then, you can back through and say, “oh, I don’t like this one…” and cross it out, or you can see two and say “oh, well I like part of this one, let’s combine it with this idea.” Now, instead of working from one origin, you are working from twenty origins, and can eventually come up with a creative solution.
So if you can come up with twenty things about your church experience, and then take each one and try tackle them individually, that’s 400 new ideas you can work with to make your church more innovative in reaching people for Jesus Christ.
I have always thought greeting was a sort of necessary evil. It is boring and predictable. However, it is important for people to be physically welcomed on arriving. How do all of you make it more fun, original or creative? Any suggestion is a good one.
Brandon
Great comments you guys. This is Scott Rodgers. Casey, that’s so cool that you’re empowering others on your team to innovate by passing this post along. Whenever it comes to what we call ‘innovation’, I get most of my ideas or inspiration from outside of the church. Anything from cool environments in restaurants to how they greet their guests to watching the hottest game shows like ‘deal or no deal’, or american idol. They have some great communicators and I like to see how the general public likes to be engaged.
Patrick - what a great way to inspire creativity and out of the box thinking. I think you’re right, most of our ideas never get past paper. That’s not the point though is it. The point is to create a culture of innovation and if we can do that, one out of one hundred ideas will be keepers and potentially make a huge impact on your guests experience. You definitely can’t be afraid of failing when it comes to innovation. The fear of failing paralyzes you from innovating.
Brandon - I think that being greeted upon arrival is important for some but not all. Though not everyone wants to be ‘greeted’ I think everyone wants to be engaged. I wonder if we can create a momentary experience that engages our guests that is more meaningful to them than a handshake. How about handing them a pack of Juicy Fruit gum and a bulletin rolled up and sealed so that when they open it a small greeting falls out that says, ‘We hope you enjoy your experience as much you’ll enjoy the Juicy Fruit’…signed personally by the person who handed it to them. The sky is the limit, the key is meaningful engagement. And probably for some, a handshake is what they’re looking for.
Scott,
No more In-N-Out talk on here please. You’re making me crazy to think that I’m about 1,000 miles away from the nearest one!!!
Mike
I like the thrust of what you are talking about when it comes to innovation.
A few thoughts popped into my head as I read it.
I love reading about innovation. This article will appeal to folks who do.
Is it really all that innovative to simply be rearranging the furniture for a large group gathering we mislabel church?
I think the truly innovative churches will actually be helpful and stellar at new and creative ideas when then engage the theological systemic issues that arise at the same time, or shortly thereafter. Producing remarkable experiences without engaging in the theology of what we are teaching people thru innovation is often as destructive as it is helpful.
Innovation can be, and often is a distraction from the gospel.
And.. please don’t take this as criticism… just a very limited observation.
Why is it that the most pastoral post on this blog in a long time has come from the central office’s creative team member (abbi) and that the pastors all talk about leadership and innovation? Maybe I’m wrong, and I need to reread this blog a bit… which I will do right now.
[...] Scott Rodgers is the Mesa Campus Pastor for LifeChurch. He writes the following on the Swerve Blog… [...]
Great post, Scott!
Scott,
what a fresh perspective on making sure we keep the main thing the main thing. I think it is possible to have a “blow out”, technologically savy service and miss all kinds of opportunities to touch someone’s heart. The gospel does’nt require millions of dollars in lights and buildings to be effective. I personally think that we, as Americans, can learn some incredible lessons from believers in other third world cultures. they have so little of what we view as “necessary” to doing church, yet they are thriving with passsion,creativity and community. How? exactly what you wrote: using what they have to hit the target of someone’s heart with looking freshly at what they do have and not what they could have.
by the way, I miss you up here in the frozen Tundra of Michigan. Keep on rockin’ in the free world!
Riddle,
Thanks a bunch for your thoughts, they are thought provoking. The thing that I love about the LifeChurch.tv multi campus model is that as a campus pastor I can direct my energies in areas that I may be stronger in and have the blessing to lean on the strengths of others such as Craig and our teaching team to do what they do well. One of my primary goals is to create an environment that removes the barriers of discomfort so that when Craig speaks the people are ready to receive what he has to say and even more important than that, what the Spirit of God may be saying. I think Craig has been quite innovative in how he communicates spiritual truth. That’s his job. I see mine as coming alongside Craig and hosting people so that they feel cared for and valued. I’m not sure what your question is regarding the recents posts and Abbi’s post, etc. But we believe that creativity and innovation comes from all directions. We try more to create that culture than giving someone the title that says, ‘you be the creative one and the rest of us won’t', etc. We’ve taken action on what we thought was creative from our custodians, pastors, administrative assistants and so on. A primary role for our creative team is to help us execute the ideas that come through the organization. Thanks for adding to the dialogue.
Shout out to Lee Cummings. I hope you’re doing well up there in Michigan. I’m coming up there in August, maybe we’ll cross paths. You are so right. Craig calls what you’re talking about as ‘it’. He often asks, ‘Does your campus or church have ‘it’? Sometimes ‘it’ is a mystery but the recipe seems to be a blend of passion, excitement, relevance, expectation, and a whole ton of the Spirit of the One who does the life changing work anyway, that’s Jesus. Lee, you have modeled great leadership to me. Thanks for sticking with it and now passing along your experience to the next generation of leaders.
thanks for a thoughtful response Scott.
I’m really glad to see Scott blogging oh Swerve. I met Scott at one of my fraternity brother’s wedding. He’s a great guy and very intelligent.
I begin to realize the importance of striking a balance between variability and stability in my job of a foreign language teacher. For example, a teacher may regularly use a book in one hour (stability) and something different every second hour (variability). Maybe the same should work for the church: striking a balance between variability (innovation or creativity) and stability (regularity).
Thanks Scott.
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Harvard Professor Theodore Levitt said “Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.”
That is a huge difference. There are a lot of creative churches. Churches that think up new things. I often think up new things or new ways of doing things.
The innovative churches don’t stop at the creativity part but go into the innovative part. This all lies in execution.
Innovative churches execute on the creative urges and inspirations. Innovative churches don’t fear failure but thrive on experimentation.
All of us must keep the creative muscles flexing but at the same time we must execute to become innovative.
Hi Jason,
Absolutely. I think it was Peter Drucker who said something to the tune of, ‘All great vision eventually dissolves into work’. Ideas are a dime a dozen, getting results isn’t. Idea generation is the fun part. We start sweating a bit and working our butt off when we actually want to execute the idea. In my experience, someone who can bring one great idea all the way through the process of execution is much more valuable than a caffeinated ‘idea man’ who talks all day long and brings no lasting value to our church or organization.
This is very helpful reading. I serve a traditional church and I am looking for innovation. Most of the time when innovation is spoken of it is only in the area of communications an the things that Tony, Ed and Andy our doing. But to look at the work of “Greeters” for example an how that activity can be made more effective and fun, etc.
This is what the church ought to be fun. The whole notion of being more observent seems to be key to innovation.
I think we will look at Sunday activites from beginning to end and see what we as church family can done.
PL
Hi Paul,
That sounds exciting. As you look at your ‘Sunday activities’, give a shot at doing your best to think like your first time guests would think. Sometimes we think we know what would be more effective and fun but we’ve been so far removed from someone who doesn’t know Christ and what it’s like to go to a church for the first time that when we try to doing something fresh, it doesn’t mean much to our guests. Going from a handshake to a hug may mean a lot to Joe the usher but it could freak out Jim the unbeliever. I know I’m being over dramatic but I think you know what I mean. Our guests are the ones who determine the value of their experience, not us. Go for it and have fun.
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