Networks

Associations, networks, and other informal watering holes continue to change the missions landscape

A few weeks ago I was on a phone call with a program director for a foundation. He verbalized something I’ve felt but have never been able to articulate. As we discussed the challenges that I have faced in raising funds for Missio Nexus, he said,

“It is rather ironic that today, a lot of the action out there is with networks and collaboration, but we funders have a hard time with that because the metrics for these networks aren’t outcome-based.”

He is absolutely right.

If you travel the world today and explore global missions, what you find is that loose and formal networks are where great ideas are being shared, work is being coordinated, and learning is happening. This does not diminish the role that churches or missionary organizations are playing. In fact, the opposite is true. Networks can supercharge them. Those that participate are more likely to see their own organizational goals fulfilled. The sharing of progress, ideas, and joint spiritual action is fueling the best of missionary work.

Networks lay along a continuum of formality. The network I lead is an association. Money changes hands, and with money comes formality. Denominations are another form of network that have more formality. Many of these are struggling today but it appears to me that this struggle is not because people have no need to relate to like-minded churches. Rather, the more formalized denominations of the past are being replaced by less formal networks. Church planting, for example, used to be the domain of denominational offices. Today you can pick between a large range of different networks if you want to collaborate on church planting.

At the other end of the spectrum are loose networks. Some are nothing more than annual conferences. Some are small, groups of niche friends focused on similar ministry goals. Others are large, like Exponential, the church planting network in the US. The barriers to entry are minimal. This often means the engagement level is also minimal. You don’t want to count on a loose network to accomplish well defined goals and objectives. They tend to aggregate the results of those who participate and claim success, but it’s not the network itself achieving those outcomes. Be glad you are not dependent on a loose network for your paycheck, for example, because you would not get paid regularly. “When two men feed a dog, the dog goes hungry,” is why clear communication about expectations to groups is helpful. Institutions thrive at this sort of execution. They coordinate, manage, and deliver. Loose networks are simply not designed around execution. They serve a different need.

In addition to struggling with outcomes, networks are not great at creativity and innovation. Art is rarely, if ever, the work of consultations, events, or collaborations. I listen to a lot of classic rock. My favorite single album from the classic rock era is the original Boston album. The songs and the electronic equipment used on that album were a game changer for the music industry. The music was not written by a band. Tom Scholz, an MIT trained engineer and employee of Polaroid corporation, did all of the creative work in his father’s basement. He then pitched the album to a studio, and only then assembled a band. More often than not, creatives work alone or on small teams of two or three. Tom Scholz was a rockstar of music innovation!

Most of us will never be Tom Scholz. So where will we get our ideas? In today’s missions environment, most of these good ideas are being shared at the network level. Networks provide a means of sharing what is working and what is not working in ways that institutions cannot. When a single church or ministry organization is in charge of something, the inherent institutional gravity diminishes trust. Institutions have self-awareness and self-interest that we inherently resist. Anybody who has suffered under a bad institutional decision knows what I mean by this.

If I ended this post with a pitch to attend the Missio Nexus annual conference in September, for example, you would be suspicious of my motives for writing this. “Is Ted making unbiased observations about networks, or is Ted just selling us on something?” That feels institutional. In our marketing driven world we have all become experts at ferreting out institutional self-interest. I believe this is one reason why networks have risen to the surface in the past few decades.

A contributing factor is that big donors are almost always business owners. There is nothing in their experience quite like the global networks around ministry. A trade association is a specific type of network focused on its members cooperating for the good of a particular industry. In almost all cases, these are associations made up of competitors, like a real estate association (the agents compete with each other), the tire industry association (Goodyear and Firestone compete), and so on. In Missio Nexus, our members are cooperators. There should be no competition among them. This opens up doors for collaboration that are not present in other types of associations. My experience with large donors is that they struggle to grasp this important aspect of networks.

Tn the offices of major foundations, metrics, outcomes, and “measures of success” rule the day. They risk missing out on investing in the less countable but more influential reality of networks in today’s global mission movement. Ironically, with networks and associations a little bit of investment goes a long way. Getting key leaders in the room at the same time to openly share about success and failure is critical to Kingdom success.

Oh, and don’t forget to join us for the Missio Nexus Mission Leaders Conference in September! :>)