Innovative Israel

Creating innovation corridors

(This innovation center is down the street from where we are staying)

I am in Israel for the next month and have been listening to the book, Startup Nation. I also recently heard Ben Shapiro’s podcast in which he interviews Benjamin Netanyahu, whose picture is on all the buses right now (there is an election here in less than a week) and who focused on innovation. I have pondered the question, “Can you make an organizational or ministry culture that is innovative?” Well, some people think that Israel is making the entire nation into an innovation hub.

Being here makes me think they are right.

It does appear that innovation aggregates geographically. That is why we talk in terms of Silicon Valley, the Boston Tech Corridor, and (more recently), the creative surge in Miami and parts of Texas. Typically, we have seen these areas as drawing innovators into them. This is one reason why Silicon Valley is now in decline. People cannot afford to move there, and people are the raw material for innovation.

In that vein, Jerusalem (where I am now) has a strange combination of ancient tradition and innovation. Just one example that touches me is an app called Moovit for public transportation. It lets one plan a route, pay on the bus, and track progress on the ride, alerting the rider when the final stop is at hand. Having traveled all over the world I can say that this is the single best app I have used for public transportation. We arrived in Tel Aviv, took the train to Jerusalem, and then grabbed a bus to our Airbnb, all using the app. Moovit was started in Israel ten years ago and was acquired by Intel in 2020 when it had 800 million users in over 100 countries. It is but one of many innovative, Israeli success stories.

So, can one catch “innovation in a bottle” and reproduce it as Israel seems to have done? Startup Nation was published in 2009. That is, in terms of innovation, a long time ago. The authors point to two factors that have contributed to the startup mentality. The first is mandatory military service and the second is immigration.

They argue that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is itself a creative and innovative learning experience for Israelis. The IDF, unlike traditional militaries, is not hierarchical and encourages improvisation. In the larger culture, one may never meet a millionaire. In the IDF, you may be their bunkmate. This leveling of societal roles opens doors both in reality and in one’s worldview.

The vast majority of Israeli Jews are either first- or second-generation immigrants. They are not averse to beginning new things. They have a built-in entrepreneurial bent, unafraid of working hard to achieve success. Like early American settlers, they are the ones who have risked all for a new life in a new place. Thus, they feed innovation by their very nature.

This double-barreled thesis may shed some light on what makes innovation in the US ministry context difficult. Evangelicalism has not done well in empowering an entrepreneurial spirit in our leaders. Instead, we tend to emphasize the gifts of a select group of preachers and teachers. I remember a conversation I had with a mega-church missions pastor in Thailand some years ago. He said to me, “When you have a guy that can preach like ours can, the goal is to get him in front of as many people as possible.” This does not encourage ministry entrepreneurs to rise up from the ranks and experiment with new ways of communicating the gospel in our culture. Instead, it emphasizes what I call “Good News for 16th Century Man.” It extends the Reformation-era, magisterial preaching model that was innovative five centuries ago.

Before you start throwing stones at me, know that I love the Reformation. It was innovative in its day. But magisterial preaching to believers from pulpits is not the model of ministry we see in the New Testament We should not limit ourselves to it nor make contemporary preachers our model of ministry innovation. I do not think we will find innovation among those whose primary goal is to gather followers instead of creating and empowering innovators.

Furthermore, our churches have not taken advantage of the immigrant opportunities around us. Even though the immigrant church holds great promise for the church in the West, we remain mostly segregated, unable to tap into the dynamism found in these communities. The church continues to be a place of segregation (minority churches, by the way, are among the most homogenous of all churches). How do we balance a need for deep relationships (which is easiest in a homogenous cultural setting) against the diversity available to us in the broader church? If we could do this, we just might be creating the conditions for “startup ministry.”

Do we have any “technology corridors” in the church today? If you know of any, I would love to hear about them.