Does your Church have a Learning Disability?
Wikipedia definition:
Learning disability (U.S.) -- In the U.S., the term is used to refer to a learning difficulty that is unexpected given the general intelligence of the affected individual. That is, the academic performance of the affected person is much lower than the individual's general intelligence would predict.
For a variety of reasons church leaders tend to to think of themselves as static organizations with hard and fast rules not only for developing dogma in the minutia of life, but also in their organization.
The world is changing. How a Church engages it must change.
If this is so true, then why is it so hard to move your service time from 9:30am to 9:45 without their being an uproar?
Because change means we might lose something and church is the place people go to keep from grieving.
What I'm talking about here is the ability for the church organization (organism) to learn. Not only learning from successes and failures, but also identifying assumption your church holds to that were often solidified from past experiences.
Most churches simply do not learn about why they are they way they are. They do not look to see how their practices, behaviors, programs, communication, staff, expectations and theology all teach and move us toward action that generally doesn't work. But they still do it. over and over.
This is the essence of a learning disability in churches.
Learning disability (U.S.) -- In the U.S., the term is used to refer to a learning difficulty that is unexpected given the general intelligence of the affected individual. That is, the academic performance of the affected person is much lower than the individual's general intelligence would predict.
For a variety of reasons church leaders tend to to think of themselves as static organizations with hard and fast rules not only for developing dogma in the minutia of life, but also in their organization.
The world is changing. How a Church engages it must change.
If this is so true, then why is it so hard to move your service time from 9:30am to 9:45 without their being an uproar?
Because change means we might lose something and church is the place people go to keep from grieving.
What I'm talking about here is the ability for the church organization (organism) to learn. Not only learning from successes and failures, but also identifying assumption your church holds to that were often solidified from past experiences.
Most churches simply do not learn about why they are they way they are. They do not look to see how their practices, behaviors, programs, communication, staff, expectations and theology all teach and move us toward action that generally doesn't work. But they still do it. over and over.
This is the essence of a learning disability in churches.
Labels: Riddle Group, Systems Thinking
posted by mark at
8:40 AM
1 Comments:
Except for noting the obvious, that we'll never agree about theological changes, I actually rather liked that one.
I told my pastor once that we needed to change things once in a while without even having a good reason, because otherwise people confuse "what we've always done" with "what is scriptural" and the two ain't necessarily the same.
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