By PAUL DZUBINSKI and ANDY BETTENCOURT

Paul Dzubinski is the Innovation Catalyst of Frontier Ventures and the Director of the Winter Launch Lab. He started ministries and churches in Europe and is fascinated with all kinds of innovation.

Andy Bettencourt is a Research Associate at Frontier Ventures, has chaired the Ralph D. Winter Memorial Lectureship, co-hosted The Missions Drop podcast, assisted the IJFM in their publications, and facilitated innovation with mission groups as a part of the Winter Launch Lab.

 Innovation Through Community Collaboration

You probably recognize iconic artists like Picasso, E.M. Forster, Georgia O’Keefe, Jackson Pollock, or Andy Warhol. Maybe you know scientists like Robert Oppenheimer, Marie Curie, John Bardeen, or Francis Crick. All these people are both accomplished and famous, but they also owe a good deal of their success to the communities that surrounded them.1 They are kind of like actors who give Oscar acceptance speeches. They have a community of people to thank.

The same is true of innovators. That is why, in the Winter Launch Lab, we strive to be a community of innovators. There are nine of us, each working in a different area. And even though we live in multiple countries, we encourage one another and help each other to innovate in our unique ministry contexts.

 Fostering a Collaborative Innovation Ecosystem

In innovation, this is one part of what is called an innovation ecosystem. In a Forbes magazine article, Kalina Terzieva defines an innovation ecosystem as “a collaborative approach where a network of individuals, organizations and institutions work together to generate new ideas, technologies, and business models.”

She says that “This approach fosters creativity and allows companies to explore new opportunities while minimizing risks.”2 In this same edition of Mission Frontiers, you can see an illustration of this in Nate Scholz’s article.

The current efforts of the Winter Launch Lab involve a wide range of initiatives. They include things like partnering with non-Westerners to share Jesus with unreached people groups, supporting health professionals in underserved communities, and ministering to people serving nomads in Africa. Because of the innovators in the Launch Lab and those with whom we collaborate, we are constructing an innovation ecosystem.

Currently, our nine Launch Lab members collaborate with over 14 organizations/businesses and more than 35 individuals outside of Frontier Ventures.

Infusing Spiritual Discernment into Innovation

In these efforts, we use or explore two key concepts. The first is the spiritual application of innovative problem- solving. We want spiritual discernment to be at the heart of what we do. Spiritual discernment, in a general sense, can be described as “the capacity to recognize and respond to the presence and the activity of God—both in the ordinary moments and in the larger decisions of our lives.”3 Connecting with God in those ways help us address the second concept. We want our work to bring a holistic gospel for everyone, especially those beyond the traditional borders of world Christianity.

Putting together sensitivity to the Holy Spirit with innovation practices starts with a deep connection with the Scriptures. We root our approach to innovation in Scripture by listening to God’s Spirit. We see Scripture being vital in relationship to the way innovation is approached. We use the gospel of Mark to describe how a team should approach innovation: Mark 8:14–21 Open Mind, Mark 9:2–8 Prayerful Reflection, Mark 14:32–42 Open Will, and then Acts 10 and 15 to Discern New Ways Forward. That spiritual approach to innovation involves “tools and practices of design thinking and systems thinking, but we insist on adding to them group thinking, spiritual discernment, theological grounding, and a missiological focus.”4 I like the way Steven Spicer said it, we seek “sustainable transformation in the ways we speak, think, imagine, and act with God to better express Jesus’ gospel in the world. Our goal through this effort is to encourage sustainable innovation in mission praxis among Jesus movements as they follow the Holy Spirit and cross barriers to Jesus.”5

Pioneering Spiritual Innovation in Buddhist Contexts

An example of this is our long-term innovation project with a team in Buddhist countries. Despite over 200 years of gospel presence there, Christian communities remain small. Why is that? The people taking the gospel to these countries are godly, Spirit-filled, and backed by church and prayer communities. Is it that people in those countries are unreceptive to the gospel? Could it be that the translation of Christian ideas and presentations of them are poorly done? Could it be that workers don’t stay long enough to have an impact? Or could it be that workers do not integrate well into society? It is a complex problem.

A small group of experienced expats and locals began our in-depth innovation experience. We call it a Transformation Collaborative (tcolab). There are three fundamental elements to a tcolab:

1.   Seek understanding around your complex gospel problem through prayer, research, and experiential learning.

2.   Prayerfully reflect on emerging insights and sense where God might be leading.

3.   Discern new ways forward by designing creative prototype experiments that lead to further innovative insights and breakthroughs.

Barriers in gospel Acceptance

The group began meeting every other week. As they started to seek understanding about the issue, it was important to reflect on their own experiences. They shared about all the barriers to gospel acceptance they have seen. Those experiences began to sink deeply into their hearts and minds, yet there was no immediate agreement on how to address those barriers. In fact, the group was divided on ways to move forward. Some wanted to focus on translation issues. This is because the way in which Western Christians have explained the gospel does not connect with Buddhist culture. Others in the group thought that workers and local believers were perceived by their Buddhist friends as less honorable than good Buddhists. They thought that helping Christians in that area was a path forward.

At that point, we moved from their experiences to examine the Jesus movements that have happened among Buddhists. These movements have seen hundreds come to faith. We hoped to discover a way forward by comparing those movements to local established churches that were not growing. They discovered that the established churches had dispositions reflected in their practices, opinions, and/or teachings that actually hinder relationships with Buddhist neighbors and relatives. For example, “The dispositions of the ideal Buddhist monk are noticeably different from those of the ideal Christian leader. Christian leaders learn to confidently and zealously persuade others to put their faith in Christ. They preach and lead with passion. They often use loud voices, work with entrepreneurial energy, dress in Western clothing that reflects the business world of Southeast Asia, and use technology in a way that projects the power of consumerism.”6 When we got to that point, I remember how painful that realization was. We encourage the opposite of the ways Buddhists communicate virtue.