Green Sky Innovation

Green Sky

The Learner's Perspective

ENSURE YOUR INNOVATION REMAINS RELEVANT TODAY AND TOMORROW.

The Perfect Man

A Parable

. . .

The Learner's Perspective

"The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little, compared with that of which we are ignorant "

—Plato, Greek philosopher

I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up. One of my favorite teachers in high school taught me physics, and he brought to life what could have been a really boring subject. We explored the way the world worked by conducting experiments. We tried to build the fastest mouse-trap powered car and float the most pennies on a raft made of aluminum foil, and we competed to see who could drop an egg from a tower and not have it break. We tested theories and learned through both our successes and our failures.

Scientists know that their knowledge is incomplete, and so they actively look for ways their beliefs might be incorrect. Scientists are always trying to disprove themselves. First, they form a hypothesis (a best-guess explanation based on evidence) and then test it in all the ways they can to see if it proves true. They are the first to question their own findings. Even after they are confident of their theory, they invite their peers in to check their results and look for flaws.

Assuming they are wrong is the attitude that is the key to their success. It is only discouraging to be wrong when you are not expecting it. Scientists can celebrate every failed experiment because that failure still brings them understanding. They are one step closer to knowing how the world really works.

The mindset of a scientist is so helpful for our ministry work. The learner’s perspective reminds us that there is so much we don’t know yet. We must strive for a clear and accurate understanding of the world and the people we are trying to reach. We should be the first to doubt our own assumptions. We should be the first to ask hard questions and carefully examine what we believe to ensure it matches reality. Will this “great idea” really help people encounter the Gospel in the best way? We should not press forward blindly hoping we are going in the right direction, but carefully take each step with our eyes open and minds ready to learn.

A learner’s perspective helps take some of the uncertainty out of innovation. It frees us from pursuing perfection and instead helps us try new things in small, calculated ways. I’ve heard ministries say they cannot afford to innovate because it is too risky. They worry about getting it wrong and wasting their time and money for nothing. The truth is, we cannot afford not to innovate. The world is changing so fast that what worked yesterday will not work tomorrow. Nothing is guaranteed except change.

Innovation can actually be very methodical and deliberate, just like science. We don’t have to wait for a once-in-a-lifetime idea or a flash of inspiration that may never come. Innovation is not a mysterious power of creativity that some are blessed with and others are not. Innovation is a discipline you can learn and consistently practice to move your ministry forward. You can test ideas, learn from the results, iterate, and try again—each time getting closer to a solution and learning more about the world. When you approach it this way, innovation is not unsafe or risky.

---

Certainly, it would be easier if someone just told us what to do. We live in a world that idolizes experts. We look to people hoping to discover their secret to success. Maybe that’s even why you picked up this book! We want to be experts too and spend time cultivating our own knowledge so we can be the person with answers to give. But expertise can be overvalued, and perfection is impossible. Becoming an expert learner is the most effective way to help you reach your goals.

The Work of Unlearning

My wife and I were lost. We were in Bali, Indonesia, looking for a restaurant located in the middle of a rice field. It looked easy to get to in the photos online, but we had missed a turn somehow. Hot and tired, we trudged to the top of a hill to ask directions at a nearby resort. The helpful lady informed us to go back down the hill, turn left, and look for a small dirt road leading off into the rice field. We retraced our steps down the hill and my wife immediately turned to the right.

“Where are you going?” I asked. “I’m following the directions,” she said looking equally confused. Somehow she had heard the lady say “turn right” and I had heard her say “turn left.” Only one of us could be correct, and I was certain it was me. But my wife was just as certain, and as a peacemaker, I followed her to the right. We ended up getting trapped in a huge street parade that was moving the other direction. By the time we made our way through we discovered my recollection was correct after all and the road we were looking for was back the way we had come.

It is rare that two people hear the exact opposite thing, but it is true that we are often wrong without knowing it. As humans, we like to be right. Our minds are constantly working to understand the world around us and fit new experiences into the patterns of our past observations. This is how our brain keeps our bodies safe—by ensuring we are constantly aligned with the truth of how the world works. That is why we don’t decide one day that cars aren’t real and step into oncoming traffic to test this idea.

When you were young, your parents probably taught you important things like not to touch a hot stove or jump from high places. If you did those things anyway, you experienced the painful consequences and hopefully didn’t repeat the mistake. Our brains are very good at processing information and experiences to help us learn.

We most often think about learning as adding new information to what we already know. But sometimes new information conflicts with a belief we already hold to be true. When this happens, we face a choice: unlearn something we believe to be true or reject the new information as false. You should know that your brain will most likely try to reject new information and hold on to what you already believe.

Author Kathryn Schulz explores the very interesting topic of how people view and respond to error in her book On Being Wrong. It turns out that even in the face of concrete facts, our minds may try to find ways to invalidate or ignore those facts to preserve our existing beliefs. "With error as with disaster, we screen out unwelcome information to protect ourselves from discomfort, anxiety, and trauma,” Schulz writes.

Denial can be a go-to response when someone tries to tell us we are wrong. It can be easier to deceive ourselves and hold our position than it is to change our mind. You can imagine how this tendency increases along with the importance of the belief. The more core a belief is to a person’s identity, the more likely they will be to defend why that belief is right and refuse to consider an alternate position. This is a critical thing to be aware of in ourselves and others. There is a cost to admitting we are wrong, and it is a cost we do not like to pay.

Right now, you and I are both wrong about all sorts of beliefs we hold, we just don’t know it yet. However, ministry is too important for us to live in ignorance or denial. We must not be satisfied with making errors or mistakes and not knowing it. As ministry innovators, we need to be actively seeking out areas where we might be wrong so we can correct our thinking and methods. Some mistakes may be pointed out to us, but others we will need to locate on our own. This takes courage, but it is worth doing to fulfill our calling to the Great Commission.

Sometimes our good ideas won’t work as well as we expect. In his book Black Box Thinking, author Matthew Syed describes a program called “Scared Straight.” Started in the 1970’s in the U.S., the program aimed to keep teens from falling into a life of crime. Students were taken on a field trip to a prison and got a chance to talk with criminals who were serving life sentences. The program was created with the belief that teens would be discouraged from committing crimes once they saw first-hand the life that would await them in prison. They would be scared into living a “straight” life within the law.

The program was highly praised for its effectiveness and became popular in schools across America. The only problem was that it was actually having the opposite of the intended effect. But nobody knew or cared to look into the results. Years later an independent researcher discovered that the research validating the program was incomplete and biased towards making the program look good. The truth was that the teens who went through the program were not deterred from committing violent crimes. In fact, some of them were more likely to end up in prisons like the one they had visited.

Despite the best of intentions, the educators, politicians, and policemen who promoted the program were making the problem of crime worse. The scary thing is that the program is still active in some places despite several decisive research studies proving it is counterproductive. This is a tragic example of innovation gone wrong with serious consequences for everyone involved. Lives were forever changed, not just for those students but for their future victims and their families.

This is not a ministry example, but it reminds us that the work we are doing in ministry is much more serious than this. Evangelism and discipleship is also life-or-death work. We are sharing the Good News of how people can be saved from an eternal life sentence. Through our ministry programs, we are connecting people to God and shaping their perspective on this life and the next. Ensuring our methods are right and that we are accomplishing what we intend should be a priority. We cannot afford to be ignorant of our mistakes and blind spots. The learner’s perspective helps us diligently seek out our errors so we can fix them. It is the mindset we need to become more effective.

The learner’s perspective is the active approach of relentlessly challenging information. Rather than being satisfied that your viewpoint is correct, you continually seek more up-to-date information. You strive to recognize the assumptions you have about people, their lives, values, and desires and how those intersect with the solutions you are offering.

Test your ideas to see if they work, and adjust them when they do not. It’s not a bad thing to be wrong. Getting something wrong doesn’t mean we have failed, it just means there was something we didn’t understand or anticipate. It is great to find that out! It means we can realign our understanding and our actions with reality.

Remember that the Gospel message we bring to the world may be hard for people to hear. We are fundamentally telling people what they believe about God is wrong, and this has many implications for their lives. People will resist this. It is difficult to change minds and hearts. Only the Holy Spirit can give someone the eyes to see God’s truth.

So remember to be gentle as you minister. Be willing to walk with people through their hard questions and their natural resistance to change. Pray that they will see the Gospel as the Good News it truly is. Pray that they will have an undeniable encounter with Jesus that will forever change the way they see. Work hard to see this happen, but at the end of the day entrust everything you are doing into God’s hands, which is where this work belongs.

Celebration Failure

I had a first-grade teacher who gave students a report at the end of each day with a happy face or a sad face to represent their behavior. I never understood why I often received sad faces, but it felt like a tremendous failure that I wanted to avoid. My mom later learned the reason. The teacher said it was because I finished assignments too quickly and then would go back to my reading, which wasn’t allowed. I was tremendously upset at the time, but when I reflect back on it today, being an avid reader has been a good thing for my life.

Our perceptions of failure affect many areas of our lives. We often associate being wrong with getting in trouble. But sometimes getting in trouble has little to do with right or wrong (like my story with reading), or being wrong is actually a step towards progress. The reaction we have towards failure reveals a lot about us and the way we think. It can be traced back to two fundamentally differing views of error.

“Errors expose the real nature of the universe or they obscure it,” writes Kathryn Schulz in her book On Being Wrong. “They lead us towards truth or away from it. They are either abnormalities that we should try to eliminate or inevitabilities that we should anticipate.” In other words, how we view making errors and mistakes dictates how we respond to making mistakes. Either it’s the worst possible thing that could happen or it’s something that will certainly happen and we need to be prepared to learn from it.

What is your natural way of thinking about mistakes? Do you go out of your way to avoid them at all costs, or do you accept them as a natural part of life and learning? On a practical level it makes sense to have a positive view of failure. After all, you will not go through your life and ministry being perfect. Only Christ was perfect. We should expect to make lots of mistakes and be prepared to have grace for ourselves and others in the work we do.

This is especially important in innovation where we are often trying something for the first time. Changing our view of failure is one of the most freeing things we can do to unlock innovation in ourselves and others. For some reason we tend to think that when we face a problem all we need is a solution. We will come up with an idea, make a plan, execute the plan, and it will solve the problem, and our work will be done. Unfortunately, things rarely go this smoothly. When was the last time your plans worked perfectly? It seems a little arrogant to expect that they would. We are not God, so we cannot see into the future. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” is a true saying.

When plans fail, a truth is being revealed that we did not understand. We should be open to learning this lesson so that we can act differently in the future. It is not shameful to try something innovative and have it go poorly. After all, it’s only the first time we’ve tried it! Avoid the temptation to cover up failure out of embarrassment or fear of punishment. Failure is not the end point; it is the beginning point. Failures give us lots of useful information. We can’t go back in time to make our mistakes never happen. But we can move forward armed with new understanding. Failures can be fresh starts for a new and wiser version of ourselves. Failing is a huge success if it propels the work into the future.

---

This makes sense on an intellectual level. But it is challenging to put this perspective into practice in our ministries. It is discouraging to fail in ministry because we want to be good stewards of our resources. People give us their time and money because they believe in us. We want to prove ourselves worthy of that trust by producing good results. There is tremendous pressure not to fail. There is a pull to do things that are guaranteed to succeed. But ironically, if success is guaranteed, then that idea has been proven effective enough times that it is no longer innovative. Innovation, by definition, means trying untested things to create new value.

Your ministry’s attitude towards risk and its tolerance for failure will determine much of what you are able to do as an innovator. Some innovations will not succeed the way we hope, but we must be willing to accept failures and learn from them. Intolerance for failure stifles innovation before it has even begun. If we give in to the pressure to only do what is guaranteed to work, our ministries will never be able to innovate.

Let’s not run away from our failures or hold ourselves to such a high standard that we never risk making a mistake. Hopefully your ministry culture is not one that pins the blame on a specific person when failure happens or slams the door shut on future innovations because something did not go as expected. Mistakes are natural and point us towards the places we need to learn and grow more. Let’s be courageous to try new things and be persistent in the face of failure.

Success is never guaranteed. But we have God on our side, and He promises to equip us for our calling. Your value does not come from how right you are or how well you perform, but from Christ, who establishes our worth before God. It is His work that we are joining, so we should feel complete freedom to reflect God’s infinite creativity in our work. Innovate, fail, learn, and try again. Trust God with the results since He is the one who spoke all of creation into being and is tireless to pursue the lost for His kingdom.

Faster and Smaller is Better

Every few years my wife and I try to improve some part of our home. We have gradually improved how our home serves us room by room. This has meant many trips to the store and lots of furniture assembly. One day I found myself struggling to bolt together our new dresser. The tool included in the box was small and not great for the job. I knew I could probably find a better solution in my personal collection of tools, but for some reason I was too lazy to change my process. With each screw I installed, I was closer to the finish line and had less incentive to change my methods. But the work was slow and painful. Finally, in frustration I got my power drill and quickly finished the job. The work went so much faster with the right tool. I was ashamed it had taken me so long to innovate my approach.

This story illustrates sunk cost—a business term that describes investments made that cannot be recovered. Sunk costs encourage us to keep going in the same direction because the more we sink our time, effort, or money into something, the harder it is to change course. We are invested in that particular solution and changing later represents giving up all the energy, resources, or time spent in the wrong direction. This thinking is totally natural, but it can put us into dangerous positions. It may force us to keep going with something that might not be headed in the right direction.

Failure is an effective way to learn, but it can be expensive. We don’t want to see things fail that we have put a lot into. Fortunately, there are ways to minimize the impact of failure—not by avoiding it, but by seeking it out. One of the best things we can do as ministry innovators is to test out our ideas as soon as possible to see what we need to adjust. This makes it much easier to try new things and take risks.

Some of the most successful businesses embrace the approach of failing fast and often. This is because failure is much easier when you are at the beginning of the journey than when you are further down the road. When you haven’t put too much behind an idea yet, you are much more willing to make changes or even abandon a solution that will not ultimately work.

Start small and test quickly. I wish I had known this principle at the beginning of my career. I was new to both technology development and innovation when I first started at OneHope. I was given a project called MyStory. The goal was to create an app that would enable Christian teens to record their testimony and share the video with their friends. It seemed like a great idea. We spent over a year working with a team of developers to build the app. We were sure it would meet a need and planned ways to promote it to our partners and to teens at youth events. But when we finished the project and launched the app, we found that nobody really wanted it or used it. It didn’t accomplish the results we expected and was a failure. As one of my first innovation projects, it was a big disappointment.

What did we miss? We all cared about the app and did our best, spending time to get every detail as perfect as we could before release. But ultimately our efforts didn’t matter because teens didn’t download and use the app. What if I could have found out this would happen in just a few days instead of after an entire year of development? I didn’t know it at the time, but that is the purpose of a prototype.

The word prototype comes from the Latin roots proto, meaning “first,” and typus, meaning figure or impression. A prototype is a first form or first impression that comes before the real thing. Before jumping straight into the work and expense of developing the MyStory app, we could have created a prototype to test our idea.

A prototype is anything that helps us get feedback from real users. For example, I could have created a flier talking about the app and asked teens what they thought. Would they download it? Do they ever share their testimony with their friends? What kind of content do they feel comfortable publishing online and where? These questions and a few others might have helped us figure out that convincing teens to use the app was going to be a challenge. We could have made different decisions before hiring a team of developers to build the project. Notice that zero coding skills would have been required to make the prototype flier.

Innovators should aim to be able to do almost anything with almost nothing. This is the power of prototyping. It helps us get to the early phase of discovery quickly before investing more time and effort. I have used prototypes that are extremely simple (like the flier example) and others that have appeared almost as functional as a real app. Prototypes aren’t just for technology solutions either. You can develop prototypes for products, experiences, and even physical spaces. The key is not that the details are perfect but that they are just enough to help you get feedback.

---

The reason that prototypes are effective is that you are putting your idea in front of people to see what they think. Watch to see if they understand the idea. Ask if they would use your solution. If not, what are the barriers that would keep them from it? Surprisingly, you don’t need to talk to that many people. Jake Knapp’s book Sprint suggests that conducting just five in-depth interviews with people in your target audience is enough to get you most of the feedback you need. Five people are usually able to spot 85% of the problems. You could conduct many more interviews, but you will hear similar comments and repeating themes. Sprint lays out a plan that enables a group of people to take something from idea to prototype in just five days. It is a great method because it helps you move quickly and learn even more quickly.

Smaller and faster is better. The quicker you can bring an idea to life and try it out, the easier it will be to make changes and try again. This is the process of iterating. When you are taking this approach, it won’t even feel like failure. It will feel like experimentation. Experiments are exciting! You create an idea, set up a test, and find out what happens. The learner’s perspective helps us be scientists for our ministries. It doesn’t entirely remove risk from our work. But exploring an idea with a prototype is often more than enough to show whether it will provide results. We can help ensure we are at least going in the right direction and take the first few steps forward.

Growing in the Right Direction

Prototypes help us test an idea inexpensively and quickly, but what comes after the prototype? How do we move our ideas forward while ensuring we are still heading in the right direction? Let’s revisit my app example. Imagine that my prototype had revealed that teens really were interested in a way to share their testimony with their friends. Equipped with that information, we could decide to move forward with development. But this time, we don’t work for a year in isolation building the app exactly the way we think it should be and unveiling it to teens in hopes they will love it. Instead, we work quickly to build the next step: the minimum viable product or MVP.

An MVP follows the same principles as a prototype in that it moves us forward inexpensively and quickly. But instead of being a representation of our idea like a prototype, this version needs to be “viable”—it needs to work. It should be functional while being the simplest it can possibly be. Just useful enough and no more. It will feel uncomfortable to put an MVP out into the world. We typically like to perfect our work before letting anyone else see it. But our goal is to get our product into the hands of users as quickly as we can so we can find out what they think.

To do this, you will have to focus on only the most essential aspects of your idea. It should be the bare minimum to accomplish your goals. This will be challenging because it means you have to say “no” or “maybe later” to lots of features you would like to have. But if those features are not core to your purpose, they do not belong in the MVP.

This might sound like a strange way to work, but this approach has been proven and is popular in the business world. There is an entire method around creating new companies to do this called lean startup. It focuses on developing MVP’s to get businesses up and running quickly so entrepreneurs can learn which direction they need to go. People who like this approach often refer to “lean thinking” to indicate that we should keep things as small and fast as possible until we determine the best next step forward. If you’ve ever been curious how top technology companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon became so successful, this is it. They create space for new ideas, test those ideas, and move forward only what works.

This points us towards another helpful principle for innovation: follow your strengths, not your weaknesses. When you see your audience responding well to something you are doing, examine that more. What is it that people are enjoying? How can you accelerate or improve it? Be willing to pivot towards the things your users find most valuable even if it is not something you planned for. Remember, incongruity—the unexpected—is an opportunity for innovation.

Observe how people are using your product or service and work to build on its strengths. Of course, if you see an obvious problem, you will need to fix that. But in general, it is more effective to focus on improving core strengths than adding new features. Your MVP is the core of your experience. So if it is not meeting a need, adding features won’t fix it. A bicycle with square tires doesn’t become more desirable with a bell, reflectors, and a helmet hook. It’s not fun to ride, so the extra features are irrelevant.

Make the most of the momentum you already have rather than focusing on what your ministry, outreach, or product doesn’t have. There may be time in the future to add what you think is missing, and your audience will welcome that if they feel you have already made something valuable for them.

Building minimum viable products helps us stay focused, which is critical because we have limited time and money to dedicate to our projects. One of the most common complaints I hear about technology development is, “If we only had more funding, we could make something really good!” The reality is that our ministry budgets will always be limited. We need to learn to work within our constraints to produce things that are excellent. The best way to do that is by simplifying. Simplify to the primary purpose and build that first. As you find problems, try thinking in new ways. Rather than immediately asking, “How can we fix what isn’t working?” consider first, “Can we remove what isn’t working?” Eliminate anything that is cluttering the experience or that no one is really using. This gives you and your team more time to focus on what is proving valuable to your audience.

To iterate effectively, you will need access to data about how people are using your product or service. Plan for ongoing research from the beginning. Data is key. It helps us construct an accurate picture of what is happening rather than needing to guess. Data unlocks insights we might not gain any other way. Analytics can be overwhelming, however, so ensure you know what you are looking for. If you are having trouble interpreting your data, the best thing to do is go straight to your users and ask them.

Our solutions are never separate from the people we are trying to serve. Most of the time, we are building things for people who are not like us. So we cannot rely on our own experiences and preferences to guide our work. We must put our products into the hands of the people they are intended for and bring them on the journey with us. They will see what needs to be changed—all we have to do is listen. The better we are at listening and learning, the faster we will be able to create something innovative and valuable.

You and I as part of the Global Church face challenging problems. We need methods for discipleship in digital spaces; ways to plant churches in areas that are hostile to the Gospel; better approaches to making Scripture accessible and understandable; and much more! These challenges can seem overwhelming. But I am confident that none of these problems can withstand the creative force we bring by starting small and learning quickly. By embracing the learner’s perspective, we maximize our time and resources and minimize the risk of innovation to find new ways to advance God’s kingdom.

Why We're Never Finished

Early in my career at OneHope, I helped build an app to go with a book we were producing for young children. The illustrations for the book were in a fantastic animated style with bright colors. The content had a storybook rhyme to it, communicating how God had rescued us to be part of His kingdom. We wanted to make the book digital somehow, so we came up with an idea for an app that would include all the content and some games to go with the stories. I helped create the games and project managed the development team to build and launch the app on time. Through this project, I learned that launching an app is only your first step.

After release, we found many things to fix. But I quickly discovered a bigger problem. The project budget only got us to launch, and we lacked money to make continuing improvements. We treated the entire project like a product. The release became our focus, but we didn’t consider how we would work through the app to serve children and families long-term. We released it into the app store like we might put a book on a shelf for people to find. Our product was a final destination rather than an entry point. You can probably still find it in the app store, but it hasn’t been updated in years. Unfortunately, this can happen often in ministry.

The pace of technology development and change is unrelenting. If we treat our digital initiatives like products, we are setting ourselves up to fail. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to keep an app or website functioning properly. One of the advantages of digital products is that they are dynamic. We can make changes whenever we need to. A book might go to print with spelling errors, and those cannot be corrected, but an e-book can be updated any time.

The ability to make changes to what we have released digitally is an advantage. But if our teams are not thinking about this and are not structured to respond, it is a lost opportunity. It may even become a liability. Just consider what might happen if someone downloads my outdated app today and finds it doesn’t work correctly. What kind of impression will they form of OneHope? They may think we create terrible products and don’t care enough to fix them.

Now let me tell you a different story. At about the same time I was working on my app, OneHope was assembling a team to figure out digital Scripture engagement for young children. We had the opportunity to partner with YouVersion, the creators of the world’s most popular Bible app, to create something innovative for children. Together, we came up with an idea to share the Gospel through interactive stories spanning from Genesis to Revelation. Our team came up with a launch plan and strategies to market the app to families.

When it was released, the Bible App for Kids was downloaded more than a million times in its first week alone! It quickly became the number one children’s app on the app store. The initial release created demand for more content. We launched with just six stories but had a plan for a total of forty. We worked with church partners and individuals to sponsor new development and added interactive elements and games. We recorded audio so children could listen to the Scripture stories. An accompanying curriculum was developed with engaging videos churches could use for their Sunday School classes.

Later, the app was translated and downloaded around the world—even in places where Bibles are illegal. The stories are on YouTube as well, where they are reaching millions more. The results of this project blew us away, and the app continues to be one of our main digital programs for children. Many times I have met someone for the first time, only for them to say, “My kid loves that app! We use it every night before bed. Your ministry made that?” The app has gone much further than we could have ever imagined. So what made the difference? Why did the Bible App for Kids succeed when my first app failed?

It’s an interesting case study because the circumstances were really similar. Both apps were even put out by the same organization. But in one case, I was working on an app we treated like a product. Once it was done, we were done. In the other case, we worked in partnership on a digital program we treated like a service.

The Bible App for Kids was able to do amazing things because we thought long-term. We assembled a team to be dedicated to the project for years. They were able to give the app their full attention and had a project budget to add features over time. We still started small. We released an MVP of just a few stories and then built on that. We gathered feedback and built on the app’s strengths. We fixed bugs and made improvements along the way. Other teams contributed their ideas and skills to the project as well. They helped develop innovative resources around the app that met a real need for our church partners. We didn’t try to do this all at once. We knew we were on a journey to serve families long-term. Because of that, we had the right attitude, team structure, and expectations that allowed us to build something great over years.

Approaching digital initiatives as services, rather than products, is key to success. This is the reason we are never really finished. Our work is not done when we launch something. We must be effective at listening, watching, and understanding who we are trying to serve. Then we must be willing to make changes based on what we learn throughout the project.

---

Data helps us learn. In digital ministry, there are many data points that show how people are using what we have created. In fact, we can quickly become overwhelmed by all the numbers available. The important thing is not to gather as much data as possible, but rather to focus on the right data.

“What we measure and how we measure determine what will be considered relevant, and determine not just what we see, but what we—and others—do,” writes Peter Drucker.

In other words, measure what matters because people will focus their action towards changing those numbers. If a church wants to grow their Sunday School, they would need to start by counting how many children attend each week. Attendance is their key metric. Then they would need to take into account what affects that metric such as adult attendance (families usually come together), the topics taught each week, how children like their teachers, and more. By putting this data together, we can gain insights to help us make decisions.

Making the right improvements starts with measuring the right things. But sometimes our data can distract us or lead us in unfruitful directions. Let’s look one more time at my example of the Bible App for Kids . How do we know the app is a success? One metric we use is the number of downloads. This indicates that people want the app. We celebrate every time we reach a major milestone. The last time I looked, the app had been downloaded more than 75 million times! But if downloads is the only number we care about, we would be in trouble.

Don’t get distracted or fooled by the wrong data—what some call “vanity metrics.” Many people install apps that they never open or use. It is easy to market an app and get people to download it. There are even systems in place that advertise to users in other apps and reward them for downloading yours. But most often they will uninstall without ever opening it. One data point, such as downloads, doesn’t tell the entire story.

Our goal is for children to engage with Scripture. So we care more about metrics that show how long people use the app and how many times they return to it. We do everything we can to improve those numbers. We celebrate downloads, of course, but we recognize that this one number doesn’t guarantee we are meeting our mission. Research puts us in touch with reality. When that reality is not the one we hoped for, we know we need to make changes.

Don’t be overwhelmed or discouraged by the fact that you will never be finished. The work of ministry is an incredible opportunity to model Christ’s example of serving others. Jesus lived with and journeyed with His disciples for three years. He did not just reach out to them one time; He developed a relationship that grew and deepened over time. As we minister to others, it is important to think in terms of years instead of minutes or seconds. We live in a fast-paced world, but believing in Jesus and growing our faith in Him is a lifelong pursuit. By thinking with a service mindset, we think long-term in the context of a relationship.

---

Jesus taught His disciples through sermons, parables, experiences, and miracles. Yet they still didn’t understand His death when it happened. The people closest to Christ thought His ministry had failed when they saw Him on the cross. It wasn’t until He rose from the dead, walked with them again, and explained everything to them that their eyes were opened to the truth of the Gospel.

It may be similar for many you are trying to reach for Christ. It will take more than a single encounter, a single explanation, or a single program. You should be prepared to walk with them and serve them as Christ taught us to do. There are many things to learn and even things we must unlearn as we do this.

As we grow in our understanding of how best to communicate the Good News to a broken world, let us do so like Jesus himself. Let us be servants humbly journeying with those who have yet to see the truth.

Afterward