If you’re here and reading this…good for you. You’re a learner and as Louis Pasteur said “Chance favors only the prepared mind.”
If you’ve been along for much of this ride, you know that I spend a lot of time thinking about how to connect unconnected people. And you also know that I’m certain that “if you want to connect people no one else is connecting, you’re going to need to do things no one else is doing (to borrow a line from Craig Groeschel).” Most likely you are now convinced of that as well.
Which is why I loved this line from a recent Fast Company article by Cliff Kuang about What We Can Still Learn from Steve Jobs. Referring to Jobs’ well known attitude that it isn’t the customer’s job to know what he wants, Kuang wrote:
It’s not that Jobs doesn’t think like a consumer–he just thinks like one standing in the near future, not in the recent past.
Just stop for a moment and think about that statement. Think about what it might mean for your ministry to think like an unconnected person from the near future.
Now, admittedly, for many churches even thinking like the recent past might be an upgrade. After all, when you start asking questions about why it is the way it is, you often find out that the way it is was planned to meet the needs of a generation of people who are now dead.
But seriously…stop and think about what it might mean for your ministry to think like an unconnected person from the near future. What would you tackle immediately? What would you drop everything you are doing and address? What are you doing that actually brings a gasp or an LOL moment…when you think about the needs of an unconnected person from the near future.
My prayer for me and my prayer for you is that we would become preoccupied with the needs of the people who aren’t connected now but need to be. That we would all see the world through the lens of the near future.
Want do you think? Want to argue? Have a question? You can click here to jump into the conversation.
