Reinvention involves anticipating, designing, and implementing change. According to Jim Merhaut, effective reinvention requires a leadership mindset ready to disrupt, experiment, and stabilize, ensuring meaningful, lasting change that shapes the future identity of the church.
Reinvention is an emerging field of study inspired by the work of organizational behavior scholar and reinvention guru Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva (Zhexembayeva, The Chief Reinvention Officer Handbook, 2020). Reinventors approach change with joy and hope. They believe things can get better, and they find meaning in doing the work of change.
Anticipating change, designing change, and implementing change are the three reinventional pillars that influence the culture of an organization. Creating the right mindset on a leadership team becomes an essential foundation for moving through the three pillars of change effectively.
- Anticipating change is the part of the process in which the leadership team listens and learns. It often includes research, surveys, focus groups, interviews, and more—all developed and employed as methods in order to assist in the team’s discernment regarding what kind of change would be most beneficial for the organization. Anticipating change is work most often done by those who are natural disrupters. Leaders create healthy chaos when they do the work of anticipating change.
- Designing change is the part of the process that includes experimentation. After the team has listened and learned, they are now ready to brainstorm ideas to address emerging needs. Brainstorming builds a menu of options that could work, but you cannot know if the ideas will work unless you test them. Pilots, experiments, and prototypes are all ways to try out an idea before you commit to it. Much can be learned in this essential part of the reinvention process.
- Implementing change often includes what reinventors call a launch. Once a team has tested one or more ideas, they commit to move forward with a polished offering. Here, stabilizers really shine. Stabilizers often take a half-baked pilot or experiment and transform it into a fine-tuned machine. Stabilizers develop things like registration procedures, process outlines, and forms. Success of implementation depends on how a plethora of complex and intertwined details are managed. Implementation is not the time to focus on dreaming about the future: rather, it is time to do nose-to-the-grindstone work.
These three pillars—anticipating, designing, and implementing change—are all crucial parts of the reinvention process.
Some important questions to consider, as churches move toward reinvention, might include:
- What is the value of entering into a reinvention process for our church?
- What kind of team do we need to build so we can accomplish all facets of reinvention: anticipating change, designing change, and implementing change?
- Who is our target audience for reinvention?
- What do we currently know about the target audience and the ministry we seek to reinvent?
- What do we need to learn about the target audience, and what research tolls will we use to learn it?
- What do we need to learn about the current state of innovation in the ministry are we seek to reinvent?
- Who are the thought leaders in the ministry area who can teach us?
- What is our timeline?
- What is our budget?
- What is our communication plan?
Wrestling with these questions will lead your team to reinvent in meaningful ways that could impact the identity of your church for decades to come. Planting seeds for meaningful relationships across generations and between church members and those who seek God outside of churches promises to produce a grace-filled harvest.
This article is excerpted from All Ages Becoming: Intergenerational Perspectives in the Formation of God’s People (Abilene Christian University Press, 2023) edited by Valerie M. Grissom. This book is available from the publisher, Cokesbury, and Amazon.
Related Resources
- Why Congregations Sometimes Change by Dan Hotchkiss
- A New Model for Leading Change by Doug Powe and Lovett Weems
- Sustaining While Disrupting by Doug Powe and Lovett Weems
- 3 Leadership Shifts for the Current Reality by Olu Brown
