Ten Years of Holy Experimenting
by Rev. Mark E. Tidsworth, Founder and Team Leader
Has it been that long? Ten years?
While engaging the Advent season this year, anticipating the end of 2025, I realized we have been training church leaders and consulting with churches around the concept of Holy Experimenting for ten years now. We published Shift: Three Big Moves For The 21st Century Church in 2015, though we actually created the phrase and were using it before the book was published. But if we use 2015 as a marker, looking back, it’s clear that the Holy Experimenting concept and practice has been in the top five most impactful contributions of our ministry over the last ten years. Churches and their leaders have resonated, using the concept and practice to introduce adaptive transformation into their church systems.
Why then has this concept and practice become so impactful? Timing, it seems. Adaptive transformation and leadership is another primary focus of Pinnacle’s work over the same ten year span, reflecting the significant need in most established churches for deep change. Holy experimenting is a clear path for adaptively transforming one’s church, becoming a 21st century kind of church. If churches needed anything in the last ten years, it’s been innovation and adaptation, moving toward relevance in this Post-modern context.
One of the most encouraging experiences with a church pursuing adaptive transformation was with the one who introduced holy experimenting into the priority list for the coming year. This church, determined to shift into an adaptive-culture church, decided to do ten Holy Experiments in the coming year. The back story included their awareness that their church culture and system was not designed to reward nor reinforce adaptation. Instead, reinforcing sameness and stability was their default culture. This unique new aspiration for the new year was designed to train themselves to value innovative and transformational moves in their church. They were less concerned about the specific outcomes of these ten experiments than they were about learning to value, reinforce, and celebrate when they tolerated the discomfort inherent in adaptive moves. What a courageous and insightful bunch they were.
So many other church leaders have used the concept of holy experimenting to introduce and pursue changes. A few that come to mind are:
Making a change with the pulpit furniture, with the promise that this experiment will be evaluated at six months for fit
Shifting the order of worship for a period of time, followed by evaluation
Changing worship times, followed by evaluation after a specific time period
Changing the roles of pastors and church staff persons, experimentally followed by evaluation
Introducing a new service of a different style that stretches the congregation
As you can see, nearly any change that pushes the boundaries or nudges us out of our comfort zones can be approached as a holy experiment. It seems the power in this approach is the experimental nature of it, following the Spirit’s lead without committing to a particular change for the rest of life. This allows for directed change, combined with flexibility.
So how about your church? What’s the culture of your church when it comes to adaptive transformation? Perhaps the phrase holy experimenting might find its place in your context as well.
Please find below additional descriptors of how churches tend to function when holy experimenting becomes part of their culture.
When we are holy experimenting,
We engage in activities without knowing the outcome beforehand.
We are making our best guesses about what might contribute to God’s kingdom.
We recognize and accept that experiments may lead to any number of outcomes, each a step forward.
We continue our “learner’s attitude,” staying open to God’s intervention as we go along.
We discover unforeseen new missional pathways, given our experimentation orientation.
We are able to pivot quickly, updating our action-plan as we move along.
We give ourselves freedom to try many new missional engagement actions without over-burdening them with expectations of “success.”