Intimacy, imagination, innovation
From a talk at Kairos Connextion
Kairos Connextion (KX) help equip churches to put mission and discipleship front and centre of church life, where everyone gets to play a part. At a recent event for their network, Rich Robinson of Catalyse Change gave a short talk about Intimacy, Imagination and Innovation:
A great way to think about positioning ourselves is intimacy, imagination and innovation.
Intimacy is that familial, friendship dynamic with Jesus. As we journey into that we grow into deeper relationship. It's not just one or two efforts and grand gestures. Are you seeing that familial element growing? I'd encourage you to think about building practices that help develop those intimate rhythms and that intimate relationship. What are your rhythms of prayer, solitude, silence, worship - building intimacy? It's not just a few months of effort and engagement with God, but it becomes part of who we are.
And it's not just building those rhythms personally. What could they look like communally and corporately?
Imagination, seeing, framing the future, in our mind. God says, "See, I'm doing a new thing. Do you not perceive it?" How have you got on seeing the future? And not just seeing it a long way off? Are you seeing it in your mind and actually stepping into it?
Imagination is coupled with innovation, the use of, the application, the embodiment of a new idea. Have you taken time as a team to pray, to seek God's revelation to ask him to share with you his plans, his purposes? Have you begun to look, can perceive God doing a new thing?
Maybe you've just had your head down working, working, working. Just take some time individually and as a team to imagine, what's the six month, six year vision for your context? Then marry imagination with innovation.
What have you tried, trialled, prototyped over the last months? For those initiatives that you've prototyped, have you broken them, learnt from them and gone again and again? You never get it right first time, so fail forward. We encourage you to set yourself how many risks will you take, how many prototypes will you release? How will you learn and fail forward over the next six months, one year, eighteen months.
So Intimacy - create rhythms and patterns of intimacy - personal and communal to grow with familial friendship with God.
Imagination - take time to both dream but also receive revelation individually, and communally. Lift your head up from the coalface, on the battlefield to look for, listen and receive revelation of that greener pasture.
Innovation - set yourself a target of prototypes or tests or pilots. Who will you release? What will you try? How will you learn over the next six months? How can you gather data from scouts, tests and experiments to strengthen your work and take everyone with you?
Intimacy, imagination and innovation - three key components to position ourselves for movement.
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From a talk at Kairos Connextion, 22/08/2023