The Art of the Idea is the best creative book I have read in the last couple years. At velocityculture we try and broker resources when we come across really good ones. Well this is one…Tom Peters meets Seth Godin and voila you have John Hunt’s new piece. 
I picked this up in Cape Town South Africa and am really glad I did because what I didn’t know was Hunt is from South Africa. Apart from the sentimental value the purchase holds, I am taken by his freshness about how fresh ideas are critical to our in-flux world.
I am incredibly concerned about the dearth of good, fresh and original ideas when it comes to church ministry, church 2.0, and our ministry intersection with culture. Until we are able to generate enough curiosity to think in original and contextual ways I am afraid “church” in the West will continue to be marginalized with an impotent voice at best. Sometimes we just need others’ genius to jump start our ideation process. Sometimes we need to enter a more quiet state to free up some creative brain space. And sometimes just reading a piece like Hunt’s is enough to ignite some new flames.
One of the things I am doing with a number of church both here in the States and abroad is helping churches begin to thing through their creative process. How do you generate ideas? How do ideas then get moved through a process that navigates sorting, discerning, enfleshing, and executing them? We need lots of work in this area as well. Whatever we decide to do we need to stop laying conventional tired ideas on yet older worn out ideas that have outlasted their welcome and shelf life. I think Hunt’s book may be a huge help to all of us.
And he has about the coolest book website I have ever ever seen. Make sure you hit all the tabs at the bottom to allow the site full lateral scrolling.
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This continues the March 8th post on 3 things I remain convinced of…
1. here
2. The best ways of doing ministry have yet to be found and we are in an “idea” crisis
Idea crisis, creativity dearth, innovation desert. We have to own that part of what we are called to do is design, create and come up with better ways of doing it.
We have to own this one deeply, passionately and relentlessly. This is not because we have to be innovative or don’t like the way we have always done it. We have to own this because God is always doing a new thing and inviting us into new territory and terrain.
I am convinced the best ways are yet to be found and furthermore am totally convinced by my experience that some of those “best ways” are actually in the ideas that will come from people who we don’t know yet and who don’t follow Jesus yet.
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I feel like three things are more clear to me after being gone 37 days in South Africa and Namibia. I will unpack these over the next three posts. But here they are briefly.
1. Spirituality will be more relational, creational and communitarian into the 21st century
I have mentioned this before but haven’t much unpacked it. I need to. I am more convinced than ever and I see these yearnings and core longings from the Nassau to Namibia and Stellenbosch to St. Louis. If we can break the textual addiction we have the relegates formation to bible study we are going to be dead in the water in the postmodern world. (and obviously I love the bible my latest book released 8 days ago is about the good Book)
2. The best ways of doing ministry have yet to be found and we are in an “idea” crisis
This was one of the core values we as a staff owned at the DNA level of our being when I was a local church pastor. We need church leaders that continue to think into new frontiers and arenas.
3. People aren’t craving church, or sermons or bible study…the are dying to be in small community where real dialogue and doing life together happens.
Many of us as leaders in the church still don’t seem to get this. We have been so conditioned by the old modern world where obligation and belonging were premium values we don’t seem to heard the wake up call of the information age…. it is ubiquitous therefore our brokering of it is of little value to this world. We will have to broker much more.
More ruminations to follow.
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