News and Views

 

Reggan Chapin, 10, loves macaroni and cheese. When her church, John Wesley UMC in Hagerstown, began to brainstorm about innovative ministry and how they could use the church’s commercial kitchen to benefit the community, they turned to Katie. Her response?

“Macaroni and cheeses for Jesus.”

It was a lightbulb moment in a room full of 48-hours of inspiration and experimentation at the Baltimore-Washington Conference’s Ministry Hatchery last month.

Led by the Rev. Kenda Creasy Dean and Ministry Incubators, the Ministry Hatchery gave 12 groups an opportunity to be missional entrepreneurs, creating and planning new ways of being church in their communities.

When Christie Latona, the BWC’s director of Connectional Ministries, posted one of the exercises they did on Facebook, people responded, celebrating "the creation of a space for dreaming with God.

“God has promised that God will make all things new, and the way that God does that is through us,” Latona said. “It is the church’s responsibility to be in a posture of creative co-creation with the Holy Spirit.”

Too often, churches dream and imagine and plan for months, or even years, and never launch new ministries. The Hatchery, Latona said, “reduced the amount of time between an idea of what God might be calling you to and actually trying something. It’s the whole idea of failing boldly and learning quickly, so it’s not just in our heads and hearts, it’s in our hands and feet, too.”

As she and her colleagues gave the 50 participants “the lumber to build ministry plans,” Creasy Dean explained that “the goal of what we’re doing is not innovating; the goal is finding better ways of loving each other.

“Love,” she stressed, “makes us inventors.”

She encouraged people to use design thinking – a process that calls on people to empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. And, she stressed that “human-centered” design is at the heart of everything. “Listen," said Creasy Dean. “Design from the perspective of the person you’re designing for. When you start making empathy the starting point, you end up in conversations you never bargained for.”

The values with which one creates are also essential.

“How you do things speaks more loudly than the things you say you want to do,” said Creasy Dean. To shape shared values, she encouraged those present to: put people first; care for the experiments, not the results; believe it’s safe to fail; celebrate what you want more of; and measure what matters or what you measure will be what matters.

As they explored creating avatars of their target audiences, writing mission statements, doing marketing plans, finding income streams, and more, the participants learned that “part of the magic is just taking yourself seriously,” said Trey Wince, one of the presenters.

For the Rev. Bill Brown, the BWC’s director of New Faith Expressions, the Ministry Hatchery was an opportunity for people to step apart from church as it has always been done and approach ministry from different angles with new ways of thinking.

“Too often, we're doing the same things we’ve always done and we’re getting the same results,” he said. “Experiences like this help us shift our stance and look at things differently.”

The Hatchery was an expansion of the BWC’s Change Maker’s initiative, an experience in missional entrepreneurship for young adults, sponsored in part, by the Baltimore-Washington Conference. This experience was open to people of all ages and is part of beginning to build a culture of expectation, Latona said.

The Hatchery’s “ecosystem of experimentation was not, ultimately, intended to be about end results and creating spectacular, sustainable ministry," Latona said.  “It’s about looking outward and developing empathy and faith — empathy for those who are not in our churches and faith that, with God, we can do something about it. It’s about loving well. How do we love our neighbor better?

“We’re hatching hope.”

Learn more about eight visions/projects/innovative ministries presented at the 2019 Hatchery, below.