In the medical world, a clinical definition of death is a body that does not change. Change is life. Stagnation is death. If you don’t change, you die. It’s that simple. It’s that scary.

"You live by shedding."

Why are churches in such disarray? The more they shrink, it seems, the more they sink into rigidity and slink behind an ancient regime that is being swept away.

Stability is less to be desired than resilience. Stability is the capacity of a system to return to equilibrium after it has been disturbed. Resilience is the "measure of the persistence of a system and its ability to absorb change and disturbance."

We are living in a world of quantal changes, of macro change.

Can church culture become a change culture?

Since when did Jesus call his disciples to lead a risk-free, safety-first life?

"I’ve missed more than 9000 shots…failed over and over…that is why I succeed."
Michael Jordan

"A memorable leader calls up in each of us a visit to the ragged edge of brilliance and the out-of-the-way corner of genius."
Chip Bell

The church is by its very definition a chaordic organism – an organic, free-form community driven by mission and responsive to its indigenous environments. The early church was fluid, flat, fast off its feet and strong on its feet with control at the edges only.

In this new world, speed is essential. In 1996, companies launched a record 24,406 new products. Jim Zurn, head of Intel, says that "most big organizations rely on one leader to make a decision and then wait for that decision to trickle down. Those organizations are like an aircraft carrier. You turn the wheel and it sort of turns…real….slow. We’re more like a school of fish. A school might have tens of thousands of fish in it, but they can change together instantaneously, and go in a new direction."

The key to postmodern ministry is adaptability and flexibility, which might be defined as the ability to change midstream.

Both continuity and change are essential to an institution. How can the church express continuity through change? Easy. The central mystery of the gospel is this: a thing can change and still be the same.

We’re always changing.

We’re always the same.

We’re the church.

Change itself is changing: it’s no longer seen as abnormal, but normal; and it’s no longer incremental, but exponential.

Much of the church has a brain like Einstein’s – it’s been dead since 1955.

The watch you now wear on your wrist contains more computing power than existed in the entire world before 1961.

Before too long, your computer will speak, your TV will listen, and your telephone will show you pictures. "Answer the television, honey, I’m watching the phone."

All Americans in the future will have a computer. What all Americans won’t have is an understanding of the new world that the computer has generated.

The church is still on dirt roads, or worse yet, cow paths. We are trying to pave cowpaths with asphalt when we should be building the superhighway with electronics. And when we do use computers, we are simply computerizing old ways of doing business much as earlier auto makers designed their machines as "horseless carriages."

The Internet, the most important US export in history, "is like a freight train roaring along while people are laying tracks in front of it. It’s not just gaining on those laying tracks; it’s gaining on the steel mills."
Wired

The church must prepare for and lead ongoing adaptive change by grafting new ministries onto old roots. The church lives out of tradition, not on tradition. The church builds on tradition. Churches that live on tradition die on tradition.

W³ ministry. W-cubed ministry. In the media world, "w-cubed" means whatever, wherever, whenever it takes. In the religious world, W-cubed means the gospel is communicated in whatever, wherever, whenever form. The container doesn’t matter. Content stays the same, containers change.

"The bend of the road is not the end of the road unless you fail to make the curve."
Anonymous

"For those of you traveling with small children, in the event of an oxygen failure, first place the oxygen mask on your own face and then place the mask on your child’s face." In ministry we spend almost all our time placing oxygen masks on parishioners’ faces while we ourselves suffocate. The Postmodern Reformation Church knows it must keep fresh, keep current, keep that supply of oxygen strong if it is to help our people.

"Today the church goes into spiritual battle in an electronic culture, seeking to communicate the gospel in a new cultural environment. Into a culture dominated by television, films, CDs, and computers, the church continues to pursue its strategies that were developed for a culture in which books, journals, and rhetorical addresses were the most powerful means of mass communication."
Thomas E. Boomershine, Sr.

IYAD
WYAD
YAG
WYAG

"If we weren’t doing this today, would we start doing it now?"
Peter Drucker

Now What? Net Notes

1. The devotional booklet Daily Bread is offered in both English and Spanish versions online. There is also a campus journal, Bible study, "answers to tough questions," sports and religious TV guide, and so on. Check it out at http://www.rbc.net/.

2. Visit the Mirage Web site from Las Vegas and discuss what it means that every year 20% of the rooms, lobbies, and hallways are remodeled so that every six years the Mirage is a totally new hotel. See

http://www.casenet.com/concert/lvmirage.htm.

3. Listen to the songs from the British ambient-techno group "Delirious." You can hear them at http://www.delirious.net.

4. There is a famous maxim from Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." As you use the Net, what is "magic" about it? Is it "magic" to your kids?

5. Visit the Web site of Saddleback Community Church, the first church that has provided a Net linkage to each of its members. Download the article on the intranet and extranet ministry of Saddleback from http://www.saddleback.com/index.htm.

6. Get out an old church directory. What would it take for your church to have a church directory as part of its Web site, with each family being responsible for its own Web page? Is the Olan Mills of the future a Web company?

7. The six-sector system developed by Professor Philip Kotler of Northwestern University is being widely used by leaders tracking postmodern culture. Take a tour of cyberspace using these six categories as guides: Technology/Economics/Environment/Demography/Culture/Government

8. Visit a site with avatars. There are already over a million avatars in cyberspace. Come up with a rough design for your avatar—keeping in mind that avatars will soon be three-dimensional. Will your avatar have a dog or cat as part of it? Since your avatar will have a unique identity in cyberspace, even a reputation (based on the sites it visits), how would you like your avatar to greet other avatars? In postmodern evangelism, do you want your avatar to witness for Christ?

9. George Barna predicts that 10% to 20% of USAmericans will use the Internet as their sole means of spiritual expression and experience by the year 2010. Visit some of the cyberchurch Web sites. Try these:

http://www.firstcyberchurch.org/evangelism/

http://websyte.com/PositiveChurch/

http://www.hawaiian.net/~mpilot/

http://pages.prodigy.com/CA/church/firstchurch.htm

How would you distinguish a cyberchurch from a realchurch?

10. Visit http://www.housesofworship.net. The mission of Houses of Worship is to provide free Web pages for every church in North America, thus giving our spiritual centers a "more powerful, far-reaching voice."

11. Who is (are) your Web minister(s)? If your church already has a Web site, have some kids review it in light of how interactive it is. Would your church support someone doing a Web site for it if they were not "official," or a part of the establishment? How much control is necessary in electronic culture? How do we "give permission" without the congregation or community losing appropriate control? If the modern issue was "accountability," might the postmodern issue be "transparency"? How might you encourage people to undertake small outreach ministries?

12. Visit the Web Fanatic Web site. It covers the hottest Internet Web sites, software, and hardware twice each week. Find it at http://www.cobb.com/webfan. Does your church have a Buzz Webster?

13. Would you subscribe to a service that would bring the Upper Room or Disciple to the Net? What about pastoral counseling online? Online prayer groups? Religious e-mail?

14. The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama, has put up a $10 million "tent" that symbolizes the tabernacling of the Hebrews as detailed in the book of Exodus. Rick Ousley, the senior minister, calls it "an ancient concept with 21^st century technology." Visit the church Web site at http://www.brookhills.org/. What other examples of "ancientfuture" ministry can you think of?

15. For the use of the arts through the Net, visit American Visions, the companion Web site to the PBS series on American art hosted by Robert Hughes. Here is a treasury of American masterpieces, with links to more than 100 related Web sites: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanvisions/.

Also see the 65,000 images housed by the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, which has as its new mission statement to "behave more like a resource and less like a repository": http://www.thinker.org/index.shtml.

For a global but still Western perspective, stop at the Louvre at http://www.mistral.culture.fr/louvre/louvrea.htm.

16. Try something crazy on the Internet: Type in your first or last name (or both) and then type in something unusual like "underwear" and see what comes up.

17. To "taste and see" what the Internet can do, log-on to the NASA space shuttle site—jpl.nasa.gov. You can receive live readings from the shuttle—they get to your computer 45 seconds after transmission. You can post questions to the astronauts, who can answer you from their terminal. You can see images of earth and other planets from on-board cameras. You can listen in to the astronauts talking about their jobs. And you get all this while the shuttle is traveling at 18,000 miles an hour, orbiting the earth in 90 minutes.