Whatever your opinion of the iPad roll-out today, Apple's ability to capture the consumer imagination and bring innovative products to life is unparalleled. Today's 8 minute overview of the revolutionary iPad contains these phrases. What if people talked about church saying things like...- When something exceeds our ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical
- It's hard to see how something so simple can be so capable
- It's going to change the way we do the things we do, every day
- I don't have to change myself to fit it; it fits me
- We decided, "Let's redesign it all...let's redesign and reimagine and rebuild from the ground up..."
- You get an order of magnitude more powerful
- There's automatic orientation
- Everything gets out of the way so that you can focus on the content you care about
- We want to put it in the hands as many people as possible right from the start
- This is a new category, but millions and millions of people are going to be instantly familiar with it
A I work daily to help the local church reflect amazing claims like this, I believe we have a massive opportunity to be schooled by Apple's achievement. How? Listen to the linchpin strategy of Apple's success:
"It's built by our hardware team in concert with our software team and what that gives you is a level of performance that you can't get any other way. Apple is the one place that you can really do this. We build battery technology, we build chip technology and we build software and we bring all those things together in way that no one else can do it."
The singular application is that design from the ground up is so fully integrated, that quality and innovation are unsurpassed. In church speak, we would dream that ministry content, ministry environments, ministry people and processes are so integrated that life change and accessibility to the gospel are unsurpassed.
But we prefer not to do the work of designing, thinking and building this way. We like the message of Simple Church, or Church Unique, but get stuck talking with lay leadership about original and simple design. In the end we punt essential principles in favor of ministry environments running with imported programs. We let every staff person makes decisions based on their own "operating system."