What’s with the name “Future Church Pilots?”
What’s with the pilots part of this project’s name? Are we taking flying lessons? No! The term “pilot” here draws from its use as an adjective to describe something done as an experiment or test before introducing something more widely. As in, we’re doing a two-year pilot study on that issue. Another way to say this is “beta test” or “trial version” of something new, outside the boundaries of the standard thing. So that’s what we think all these partner organizations—congregations and various kinds of faith communities—represent: trial versions, or beta tests, or pilot studies of what the church will look (more) like in the future.
There is an approach to development work begun by Jerry and Monique Sternin working with Save the Children in regions suffering from high childhood malnutrition. The approach they developed, with the totally unsexy name (or is it sexy?) Positive Deviance (PD), is based on the observation that in every community there are certain individuals or groups whose uncommon behaviors and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers, while having access to the same resources and facing similar or worse challenges. The Positive Deviance approach is an asset-based, problem-solving, and community-driven approach that enables the community to discover these successful behaviors and strategies and develop a plan of action to promote their adoption by all concerned.
The new or radically redeveloping congregations and communities in the Future Church Pilots study are, we believe, both experimenting with what the Church will need to be vital in the future, and are finding success at a time when many congregations are declining and even closing all around them. The PD approach finds that the very best teachers of the fruitful experiments these communities are piloting is not someone like me, the seminary professor and program director. No, the best teachers of these fruitful experiments are the leaders from the communities themselves.
As this program progresses, these leaders will first be teachers to each other, building a peer-to-peer collective network and movement for change in the church. Later, in the last year of the project the program will host a big open conference with these same leaders teaching their fruitful experiments to all who wish to come and join in the conversation.
If you’d like to get updates on this conference as the organizing comes together, sign up at the bottom of this page.