Learning Principles from Other People's Ideas

The participants were divided into three groups and asked to read and draw principles from three different articles.

The first group a chapter from the book Making Room for Life by Randy Frazee about how to deal with the fragmentation of doing so much in the church. In this article, the pastor recruited what he thought was the ideal small group, but it turned out to be the worst experience, because they were so fragmented. Then the pastor told about something that had happened to him that had changed his idea. One day, a neighbor borrowed a ladder from him. The next day, the pastor noticed that the neighbor already had a ladder. Borrowing the ladder had made the pastor feel needed and a relationship developed. The pastor then thought that the church needed to focus on how to serve the neighbor rather than focusing on programs. Principles learned from the article include place, proximity, and natural relationship for ministering to the local community. Instead of focusing on programs, come alongside people in community group to reach people in his circle of influence.


The next group read the article Good to Great and the Social Sectors by Jim Collins. Mr. Collins was in a meeting of successful CEOs when he challenged them with a proposition that probably offended them, "When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocricity, not greatness. So then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocricity into the social sectors?" He said that they do not need more business concepts. They need to correctly define success, having a consistent method of assessing output results. The group used Fellowships after-school program as an example. They were worried about how many students and volunteers were involved when the big idea was supposed to be how involved the parents were.


The third group read an article by David Dorsey that was about positive deviants. Mr. Dorsey wrote about an organization called Feed the Children. They were finding in impoverished areas that there not all the children were malnourished. Some were doing quite well. Those children were postive deviants. They learned that in homes where there were healthy children, the mothers were feeding foods that were unacceptable to the culture. The organization began reproducing what was working with those children. The group reading the article found four principles to mobilizing volunteers: use people from different disciplines and backgrounds to work together, if something is working feed the existing rather than starting something new, learn from what is happening in the organization, make teachers of those working in the areas that are working. It is experience-based mobilization.Where are people making break-throughs? Use this as a teaching experience.