Listen, Walk and Innovate

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

 "... listen with humility, walk with compassion, 

and minister with biblical clarity and pastoral tenderness." 

Taken from the WEA Seoul Declaration

Travel changes the tempo of a conversation. With every step there is new energy. That must be why fellow travelers have a bond unlike those who simply sit together. Some of my best discussions happen on the move. I remember a walk through a prayer garden with a ministry partner in Phoenix. A late night stroll after dinner with a new acquaintance in Rome. Talking, and getting lost, with a friend amidst the skyscrapers of Singapore.

There is plenty of science that talks about the benefits of taking a walk. It clears your mind, helps you process, and gives you much needed exercise (along with Vitamin C if it is a sunny day!). Now combine it with a deep conversation and the benefits are hard to quantify. 

I recently attended a conference in Seoul, Korea that put this on display. The World Evangelical Alliance had its General Assembly, where 850 delegates from over 124 countries gathered to represent the evangelical movement, build deeper connections, and talk about the issues of our times. 

The conference was held at a large church in the city center. Unlike a convention center, the church was not connected to a set of hotels to feed the convention center traffic. So how do you house hundreds of people who need to get to an urban church daily? The organizes decided to spread the attendees out to a series of hotels all along the Number 2 line of the Seoul Metro. (Photo: Aaron Choi on UnSplash)

This mean that every morning people would begin walking to the subway and riding in to the conference site. The first day there was big group that went together from each hotel led by a volunteer from the host church. Their job was to teach us all how to use the subway so we could get to and from our hotel throughout the week. After that first day smaller groups formed around friendships, logistics, or mere desperation to not go alone.

As everyone got more comfortable with the process of walking and riding to the conference, it became an enjoyable part of the day. As I walked with various groups and individuals, I found myself having wonderful and deep conversations. I spent time getting to know the daily life, challenges and opportunities of a pastor from Pakistan. I bumped into a Chilean Data Scientist presenting on AI at the conference and we had a wonderful conversation about how AI is impacting so many areas of life. I met an intern working for the WEA's advocacy arm and got to hear her dreams and hopes from the work she is doing. I enjoyed a lively conversation with a group from the Philippines and we found we had a friend in common. I could keep right on going. Almost every walk was another unique and inspiring conversation. 

Those morning and evening walks set the stage for the event. The event is a mix of a pastor's conference, a membership meeting, and special interest meetings. In some ways it feels disconnected because there is so much going on. But those walks to the church tell a different story. Here you have a diverse set of people representing what it means to be evangelical in a world that is both deeply skeptical of its motives and profoundly grateful for its mission. For full coverage of the topics and outcomes, take some time to read the various articles written by The Christian Daily International. 

Unlike the Lausanne Congress a year earlier in the same country (see my posts here), this event was less about strategy and action and more on relationship and common cause. It's hard to explain. Both events cared about action and relationship, but each event was wired very differently. One of the biggest differences is that most of the people at the WEA General Assembly were or are pastors. So the pastoral tone and approach was very palpable. 

My purpose in being there was to collaborate with Frontier Ventures' innovation guru, Paul Dzubinski, on a project. We are building a Spirituality of Innovation Field Guide to help innovators integrate their faith into their work. The WEA leadership invited us to come and lead two workshops to introduce the concept and collect more insights from world evangelical leaders. More to come on what we learned as we put together this new resource for innovators in mission. 

On the edges of that agenda, I also was able to organize a meet-up of innovators during one of the open sessions during the evening. We gathered to share about new ideas we are exploring, challenges we are facing and opportunities to collaborate. It was deeply encouraging to me and it seems to be a helpful time for those who came. I've been doing meet-ups for years on different topics and had really enjoyed the innovation ones I organized during Lausanne. With that template in mind, we invited broadly and a very diverse set of innovators showed up. That made the discussion very rich. We talked about everything from Scripture Engagement to creative youth outreaches to technology applications in the church. What united us was not so much the specific ideas but the innovation process we are using to explore those ideas. 

Another area I am involved in significantly is the exploration of how artificial intelligence (AI) can and should be used in a mission context. I was so pleased that the WEA invited the team from AI and Faith to come and lead an entire track of the event. The sessions focused on the ethical, practical, and technical issues that AI presents. The team was optimistic but also cautious and made significant room for people attending to wrestle with the hugely disruptive dynamics of this new technology. The WEA also put AI to work during the event with a very creative process where people could share inputs from table discussions and have that input be curated with the content that was presented into AI-generated summaries of each session. I'm looking forward to going back and exploring those summaries. 

As I consider the role of innovation in the Global Church, the statement that most stuck with me from the conference was shared on the first day by the Executive Chair of the WEA, Rev. Dr. Goodwill Shana. He spoke of light as "God's first missionary," and said, "Of all the words God could have spoken to begin creation, He chose light. When God said, 'Let there be light,' He was revealing His nature. The Bible tells us God is light, and to begin this project called Earth, He began with Himself." 

Innovation is a ray of light into a new space. It happens when the innovator, just like our innovator God, decides to imagine something new and bring it to life for the benefit of others who have a real need. My hope is that the world's evangelicals will grab courageously onto our light-giving God and boldly innovate new solutions that are aligned with His values and purposes.