Entrepreneurship
Churches and Innovation
H’s comments last Sunday, on changes and trying something different, inspired me. I’ve jotted down a few of my thoughts, mostly culled from Peter Drucker’s book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which I recently re-read several times.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen very few innovative successes in churches. We usually think of innovation as something that businesses engage in, but there’s no particular reason why this has to be true. Surely innovation does work in business. And surely the church is no business. But that doesn’t mean that innovation can’t work in the church. But the church faces different obstacles, pursues different ends, and uses different tactics.
Why do churches fail? There are a number of reasons. The most important is that churches, like other public-service institutions, tend to maximize rather than optimize. After a certain point, spending even more on the same thing meets with rapidly diminishing returns.
When you go the grocery store, you buy one or two loaves of bread. If you have a large family—or if you really like bread—you might buy several. But you probably don’t buy 20 loaves. What would you do with all that bread? Even though you like bread, you know that the $15 or $20 spent on extra bread would be much better spent on soup, meat, or something else. It would achieve far greater results in terms of satisfying your family’s overall food needs. Click to continue »