In his 1997 book Reinventing American Protestantism, theologian Donald E. Miller described a “revolution” taking place—an outbreak of paradigm-breaking church models that were changing the face of congregational life across denominations and traditions. This sudden influx of church innovation had caught many people by surprise. What was causing this change, and who were its guiding voices?
In the following decade, a new model emerged of a centralized church often led by a dynamic pastor open to entrepreneurial approaches to ministry and church leadership. Yet few looked beyond these high-profile pastors to the developing social systems that not only facilitated their innovations, but also drove the new ideas’ diffusion throughout the country.
As churches today look to take advantage of new digital opportunities, navigate our polarized society and collaborate across denominations in gospel outreach, the task of innovation lies at the core of the calling for pastors and church leaders, yet understanding how ideas spread is often underappreciated.
The story of Leadership Network demonstrates how new ideas can grow and gain traction. Arising at a point within a church subculture where innovation was not valued and leadership skills were nearly absent in pastoral training, Leadership Network developed a model that transformed congregational life and continues to foster innovative conversations today that we can all learn from.
A Crisis of Leadership
To understand the North American church’s current emphasis on dynamic innovation and concentrated collaboration between pastors and ministry leaders, it’s important to know that it came about largely as a reaction to seismic shifts in both societal and religious trends in the late 20th century.
The cultural turmoil of the ’60s and ’70s and the twin influences of a nascent neo-evangelical movement and the popular Church Growth Movement provoked a crisis among many pastors. While infusing a renewed evangelical vibrancy among churches and pastors, both movements had reinterpreted mission to prioritize growth and expansion. The resulting growth and centralization of churches—some reaching over 1,000 in attendance—left a discernible need for pastors to manage this growth. According to former Christianity Today executive vice president Keith Stonehocker, by 1980 it felt as if pastors were being thrown into an entirely new and complex world of leadership and left to either sink or swim.
When the Christianity Today board of directors tapped publishing veteran Harold Myra to lead their reinvention in 1980, he turned to editor Paul Robbins to conduct a national study on what needs were at the forefront for American pastors and church leaders. Robbins interviewed more than 90 pastors and discovered that for pastors of medium and large churches, there was a consistent feeling of being isolated and overwhelmed. These pastors wanted and needed resources to help them lead their congregations and manage their growing organizations. They also preferred to learn from fellow pastors who had innovative, effective strategies that they could use.
In response, Robbins founded Leadership Journal to address the sheer magnitude of this need. The magazine proved so popular among pastors that it began turning a profit after only its third issue. While individual articles were intriguing, Robbins attributed the magazine’s success largely to its pastoral forums. In these published discussions, pastors and church leaders tackled difficult or controversial problems reflective of many churches. These forums proved so dynamic that Texas entrepreneur Bob Buford expanded this model—with the initial aid of Robbins and Myra—into regular collaborative gatherings through the founding of Leadership Network in 1984.
A successful entrepreneur, Buford experienced a religious awakening in connection with the death of his son that led him to dedicate his wealth and leadership expertise to help pastors and churches. Mentored by organizational management theorist Peter Drucker, and guided by such influential men as consultant Lyle Schaller and chaplain of the United States Senate Richard Halverson, Buford envisioned Leadership Network as bypassing the task of innovation to instead focus on the challenge of innovation diffusion. Identifying megachurch pastors as significant drivers of church innovation, Leadership Network began convening gatherings of pastors for collaboration and encouragement. Pastors such as Rick Warren and Bill Hybels were among the many who cycled through these gatherings, sharing what would soon emerge as two of the dominant paradigms of church leadership in modern American religious history.
Innovation Diffusion
In his influential 1962 book The Diffusion of Innovation, communication theorist and sociologist Everett Rogers offered an outline of the nature of innovation and why certain innovations take root while others fail. Modern history is replete with innovations that failed to gain widespread adoption even as they offered significant advancement. Rogers admits that innovation is a daunting task—few are able to offer ideas or products that meet the standards of creating a relative advantage that remains compatible with the existent model, yet avoids exhausting complexity while offering immediate utility that delivers tangible results.
Yet Rogers argued that diffusion of these innovations was equally complex, focused on both how and why they spread. He learned ideas are diffused across a spectrum from innovators and early adopters, to the late majority to laggards (see chart): If, as Rogers suggests, only 2.5% of any community are true innovators, the effectiveness of diffusion is the dominant challenge of successful advancement of an idea or product.
Rogers identifies four key features of diffusion: 1) an initial innovation that meets an acknowledged need of a market or community, 2) clear channels of communication through which the application and benefit of the innovation can be transmitted, 3) a broad span of time during which the innovation can pass through phases of adoption, and 4) an interrelated network of leaders that can adapt and expand the initial innovation to meet the needs of the expanded market or community.
The impact of Buford and Leadership Network was discerning the need for a substructure within American Christianity that could facilitate the diffusion of innovations by pastors and churches. Recognizing that there were truly innovative leaders already in the church, the problem was helping these people’s ideas get to those who needed them. Thus, unlike denominational leadership which had to serve all its churches and leadership perspectives Leadership Network focused on the innovators and early adopters.
Directly influenced by Rogers and Drucker, Leadership Network turned their attention and resources to the challenge of church diffusion. In this respect, they developed a structure that advanced Rogers’ four features of diffusion.
- Leadership Network saw that the primary drivers of church innovation were entrepreneurial pastors of large churches who were often unable or unaware how to replicate their systems in other organizations. Recognizing early that much of the success of Leadership Journal had been due to the innovative contributions of large church pastors, Buford constructed Leadership Network as primarily a platform that refined and amplified innovations rather than creating them.
While Leadership Network’s initial decision to focus on large church pastors may seem controversial, our Entrepreneurial Evangelism Report research at the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center in partnership with Lifeway Research appears to support their belief that this group drives church innovation. Throughout the study, large church pastors (750+ attendance) consistently selected answers associated with innovation in ministry while smaller churches were more likely to be skeptical or cautious of new ministry ideas.
Nearly half of large church pastors (42%) reported that they “actively look for new ministry ideas” compared to less than a third (30%) of small church pastors. Where small church pastors tend to prefer their denominational leaders and seminary training as fundamental to their leadership model, large church pastors were the most likely to turn to nationally known pastors or large churches (88%) and the latest books on best practices for church ministry (85%). Moreover, 77% of large church pastors regularly turned to secular business and management practices in organization and management compared to only 57% of small church pastors. In essence, these pastors generally valued innovation to the extent that they were less reticent in turning to unfamiliar or traditionally accepted resources.
The lesson for church leaders today is not that large church leaders remain the drivers of innovation, but that true diffusion requires a certain type of leader. Leadership Network achieved clarity on the type of pastors they needed, and the result was a collaborative environment that liberated them to experiment, refine and share. Another result was a flood of innovations that flowed out of those initial meetings that continue to influence the shape of church leadership, worship and outreach today.
- Leadership Network developed multiple pathways of communication with critical innovators. According to Fred Smith Jr., the first president of Leadership Network, when the organization hosted their first gathering in 1984, few people could have anticipated the importance of the event. This meeting established a paradigm that changed how Buford and others understood the diffusion of church innovation, shifting their focus away from innovation to the relationships that refined and amplified them to achieve greater purchase in American society.
Capitalizing on the momentum, Smith argued that the organization’s vision needed to serve as a “catalyst for putting the best and the brightest together with their peers in ministry.” In search of church innovations, Buford and Smith invested in pastors who had the experience, expertise and passion for cultural impact through their ideas. As many who attended the initial years of meetings, the experience was nearly as much “confessional” as it was instructive. It was a unique opportunity for innovators to refine and develop their ideas with an aim for broader diffusion.
Within years the meetings had expanded to include parachurch leaders, denominational representatives and even seminary faculty. By the time Drucker was brought in to lead the discussion in August 1986, the purpose of the gathering had been honed to focus simply on helping those present be more effective.
That Leadership Network served only as the platform for innovators rather than as the instigator of innovation was by design. As Drucker confided to Buford, at the start of Leadership Network, the greatest need was not innovation but “developing mutual confidence, as well as creating a community.” While Buford’s self-deprecating mantra—that Leadership Network merely “poured the coffee” at early meetings—downplays the involvement of its key leaders in setting the agenda and participants, it hits at the overarching emphasis of the organization upon diffusion as its core mission.
In essence, Leadership Network recognized that diffusion happens through communication. While they would later help churches and leadings by publishing resources, the thrust of their model was fostering an atmosphere where every leader could take ownership of the innovation first, to adapt to their context and then diffuse to others in their network. Buford and other Leadership Network leaders recognized that for church innovation to take hold across traditions, localities and networks, a sustained coordinated effort needed to be dedicated to the task of development, collaboration and transmission.
- Leadership Network recognized the necessity of long-term investment in specific innovation, providing leaders space to move through the process of need recognition, training, execution and adaption without pressure. For example, few innovations are as connected to the emergence of megachurches as the creation of the executive pastor role. While a few churches experimented with dividing ministry and organizational responsibilities of the senior pastor as early as the late 1970s, the diffusion of the innovation did not truly begin until the early ’90s.
The new position resonated with pastors of large and medium-sized churches on several levels. In addition to addressing the need for organizational expertise as church staffing and structure increased in complexity by the end of the 20th century, the executive pastor relieved pastors of the organizational leadership responsibilities that had provoked much of the leadership gap of the previous decade. Through carving out a role that was simultaneously managerial and pastoral, the position proved adaptable to traditional models of pastoral leadership while infusing new strategies and expertise into church oversight.
Throughout their gatherings of pastors and church leaders, Leadership Network consistently encountered administrative and organizational challenges as the central problem frustrating church health. According to Brad Smith, Leadership Network president from 1993 to 2002, at each gathering for nearly five years, a senior pastor would outline a problem that could be resolved with an executive pastor role. Through regularly featuring pastors who had effectively installed the executive pastor position, Smith saw the position slowly establish broadscale acceptance even beyond megachurch contexts.
Leadership Network provided space for the community to express the need, established trusted voices of experience who communicated how this innovation worked in their organization, and endured in consistent reinforcement over years of discussions to the point that nearly three-quarters of all large churches now use the position.
- Leadership Network focused on building a culture of innovation that offered both innovators and adapters space for collaboration, support and encouragement. Coming on the heels of the developing movements of neo-evangelicalism and Church Growth, one of the most challenging hurdles for Leadership Network was forging a discernible social system that could sustain the steady stream of innovation, allow for the necessary time for diffusion, and communicate complex and controversial subjects across traditions and denominations.
Aside from fostering and communicating innovation, the success of the early Leadership Network gatherings became critical opportunities to build a vision of pastoral leadership where innovation was a value. Within a church culture that had prioritized theological fidelity as the core of pastoral leadership, there was a built-in skepticism of innovation that threatened to limit successful diffusion. Even as pastors were desperate for help, Leadership Network lacked the social systems that denominations had constructed over centuries of ministry.
To challenge this skepticism, Leadership Network invested heavily in offering ongoing support for pastors. Moving beyond the gatherings, in the 1990s Leadership Network began disseminating critical ideas on leadership in weekly faxes to pastors within their network to help build the individual learning communities so they felt connected to the larger movement. Over time, these faxes became lifelines for pastors who were looking for ongoing leadership support. These communications also provided pastors with a sense of connection and empowered them to build on church innovations within their own context.
Innovation in Community
As church leaders seek to understand church innovation, the story of Leadership Network is an important episode in our recent history. The organization had an impact on church leadership that continues today.
At the center of this success was the importance of paying close attention to the ways innovations are communicated, refined and reinforced over time. For churches or networks hoping to navigate the challenges facing congregations in the future, proper investment in collaborative communities can lay the foundation for generational change.
Andrew MacDonald is the interim associate director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center.