The Church Is Not Apple, But…
The Church is not Apple. I know that. I wasn’t trying to suggest it was with last week’s riff on Guy Kawasaki’s post about learning from the Apple store. There are plenty of things about Apple that I don’t want to emulate (and, truth be told, plenty of stuff in the church – historically and presently – that I’m not proud of, either, but that’s for another post.) And there are lots of places where even a metaphorical comparison between Apple and the Church breaks down. So, let me say again: The Church is not Apple….
But….
And of course here’s where it gets interesting. Because while the Church is not Apple, and our congregations are not Apple Stores, I still think there’s a lot to learn from Apple. And of all the things we might learn, of all the things Guy Kawasaki and Carmine Gallo point out, here’s the number one thing I want us to learn from Apple: design matters.
Sound simple, even superficial? Let me explain.
Steve Jobs was, above all else, a designer. He cared, and cared deeply, about aesthetics – the way things look, the way they feel, the way they work. He didn’t just make things, he made things work beautifully, and in this way made work more beautiful.
Indeed, one could argue that Jobs didn’t make anything in the sense of inventing something new. He didn’t invent the home computer, he made it truly personal. He didn’t invent the mp3 player, he made it cool, simple and useful. He didn’t invent mobile phones, he made them indispensible and beautiful.
I’d suggest that Jobs’ emphasis – and genius – was two fold. (Warning: what I’m going to say may sound initially contradictory, but I’d invite you to entertain it as a paradox. 🙂 ) 1) Beauty and simplicity are valuable as ends in and of themselves because beauty and simplicity create delight, pleasure, and enjoyment. 2) At the same time, beauty and simplicity are not the ultimate point. Or, perhaps better, beauty and simplicity reach beyond themselves and so they are not simply ends in themselves.
While I want to affirm the former – beauty and simplicity have integral value on their own – I want to elaborate on the latter: they also serve another end, which is why design matters.
What Jobs understood about design, I think, is that design – and aesthetics more generally – is about experience. The way you design something – in terms of functionality, appearance, feel, and all the rest – shapes the kind of experience you’ll have using it. And what Jobs brought to computing was the desire and intention to shape the experience of those who might use Apple products. Or, even more, Jobs wanted to create a particular experience for users and he started with that experience as the goal and then brought everything he and others knew about design to work backward from that experiential goal to the critical components necessary to create that experience.
This kind of “backward-design,” or “outcomes-based design,” is something I think congregations could benefit from tremendously. What kind of experience do we hope people will have in our congregations, at worship, when (if) they come to education? What should our bulletins and newsletter look like? How should we construct our sermons and worship services? What shape should our youth outings and outreach programs take? What should everything we do look like and feel like and work like in order to create the experience we hope people in our faith communities will have.
The great barrier to this kind of approach, I’ve found, is that we believe we already know what we’re doing. That doesn’t mean we’re know-it-alls, but that we accept as a given that certain things are just the way the are. For example, if there’s one thing the church knows how to do it’s preaching and worship, right? Except it doesn’t seem to be working anymore, at least not in the sense that people are leaving our services confident of their own ability to read and understand the Bible or share their faith. But because we know what we’re doing – the unassailable assumption – we keep doing it over and over again – or maybe with more flash (video clips) or power (power point) – instead of wondering whether we should rethink the basics of preaching and worship in light of our desired outcomes or the particular experience we want to create.
In a documentary on Jobs life, I heard him say that the single most important moment in his life was when he realized that a) reality is not a given, it’s something that is created; and b) that the people who created it were no smarter than he was. That insight gave him the permission and passion to rethink how things are put together, to focus on design that creates experience, and to transform both the experience of users and the entire industry.
Design matters, and I’d love if more congregations were willing to ask design-oriented questions – what do we want the outcome to be? how do we put things together to get there? – in order to give faithful witness to the Gospel in this day and age.
A very nice follow up to the previous article — which I found extremely interesting and directly on-point for our situations. Thanks for both!
In a class I took a week ago, I was struck by how much I had become a visual learner for certain things. That got me to thinking about my old teacher-prep courses (in another life) and how we focused on meeting the needs of visual learners, auditory learners and tactile learners. Then, I progressed to thinking about worship(current life) and how we meet the needs of worshipers — visual, auditory and tactile. I put a great deal of thought into the bulletin cover each week (visual) and the hymn selection (auditory). We have a lovely sanctuary (old, but beautiful) which meets a visual need and a fabulous choir, meeting the auditory path. But how do we incorporate tactile worship? Holding a Bible and actually reading it might do that, but so few bring their Bibles anymore. We have just put new Bibles in the hymnal racks and we’ll see how that goes. This Sunday, everyone gets a feather — as we concentrate on the challenges of following the Holy Spirit. I hope this is a start. I’d love feedback ideas anyone might have.
Thanks for your blog. Concentrating on the entire worship experience is something we need to consider. If we want people to take worship beyond these doors and beyond this hour — and I do — I need to think about how we do that.
I love the idea of handing out feathers, Dawn. And I agree that the tactile dimension of worship can be a challenge. Given our sacramental heritage – real wine, honest-to-goodness bread, ordinary tap water – you’d think we could find ways to accent this, but the larger culture has moved in visual and auditory directions which means, I think, that it’s both more challenging and more important than ever to find a tactile expression of our faith.
Great idea! Where can I find feathers?
I found mine at Hobby Lobby… and this week they are 30% off!
Caring for design and aesthetics of worship shows reverence. We should always bring our best in worship and in service to God. Many years ago my thrifty congregation began using a less expensive disposable cup for communion. When I pointed out to my mother (who was on the Music and Worship Committee) that these were the same type of cups that are used in clinics as specimen cups, they went back to the nicer, but more expensive variety.
In the last three years our church has added 350 new members, in part, I believe, because of the ongoing efforts of many volunteers, and financial investments made to create an aesthetically appealing, multi-sensory worship experience for all who gather in God’s name.
Great story and example, Tom. Thanks for sharing.
You mean just faithfully doing the same old thing in the same old way doesn’t cut it anymore? You bet it doesn’t. Keep shaking things up. Charlie
Some of the most powerful and experiential worship experiences I have participated in were not necessarily in traditional churches. Hotel ballrooms transformed into worship by the people who gathered there and the structure of the worship service. Simple, but moving worship under the stars at a mountain top camp. Poweful preaching and singing in the superdome with thousands of young people. These experiences do not translate easily to Sunday mornings in your average congregation, but they do have some common threads.
Thoughtful planning and intention, just like Apple. Creative use of lighting can change the atmosphere of a space. Contemporary language that speaks to our daily lives through the mystery of the Holy Spirit. Intentional hospitality that links us together as community is also an important part of the Apple and hopefully, the church experience that can lead us to be believers.
I think we really need to try to look at our worship through the eyes of newcomers (perhaps even using some real newcomers to help). Hotel ballroom worship setting work, when they do, because literally everything has to be brought in and thus thought about. How many of us just look at our worship spaces as just a given, a utilitarian container for what we do there. One speaker recently sensitized me to this question: What in our churches proclaims scarcity rather than abundance? Whether it is that loose prew that needs fixing, the carpet that needs cleaning, the light bulb that needs changing, or even running out of bulletins–all can say “this is good enough.”
Like a faded photograph or a house one has lived in for decades, the space is imbued with memories for people who are already part of the congregation. Newcomers have none of these memories–the space and even the worship itself can seem as old and tired as a polka band, Just having someone evaluate how and where we worship who does not already have memories associated with the place and format would be a useful thing, I would think.