Anyone can look all around at the way that culture is innovating and leapfrogging forward. Some things are very positive, others are not. No matter the outcome, the whole world is moving fast.
As church leaders, we know that things in the church world don’t usually move that fast (except gossip:). And of course, we’re not interested in innovating on truth - but the way we deliver it and meet our culture has to change.
There are people all around every church - business owners and entrepreneurs - who are living in a change culture. They have to, if they want to survive. But when they approach the church, often their gifts and insights don’t check the boxes for the kind of volunteers that we need. As a result, they either take their catalytic vision somewhere else or they simply go along as tamed and passive church participants.
If we want to engage them, then we have to create an innovation space inside the church. Because the Western church is primarily built on a pastor-teach model that focuses on content and care, we have a hard time making room for experiments. You could call starting a different kind of service, or supporting a church plant experimental, but that still lives most of the truly catalytic people (business owners and entrepreneurs) without something to do most of the time. The exception is short-term mission trips which invigorate and reshape the faith of many - at least for a season.
How do we create spaces inside of the church life that are built for experimentation and ready to engage people who want to do as Jesus said, and see “greater things” develop, which can shape culture and reach groups of people that are way outside the current church box?
One source of inspiration comes by taking a page from the innovation processes that are being used so successfully in the tech world, but without sacrificing our Biblical integrity or our heart to learn God’s ways.
The tech version is called lean start-up, which seeks something different. Lean start up seeks a profitable fit between product and market. Experimental ministry has a different goal - take timeless truths and patterns and engage a shifting culture in fresh ways to see Kingdom outcomes. When you take what’s useful from lean startup thinking, experimental ministry is simpler than it sounds: borrow the discipline of testing and learning, but replace the growth metric with something that actually matters — Kingdom fruit. In this approach, you’ve learned to continue iterating. You're still willing to kill what doesn't work, with the mantra of “fail fast.” You're still staying humble about your assumptions. But the questions you ask at the measurement stage look very different.
The Framework: Four Moves That Change Everything
Move 1: Listen Before You Launch.
Before you build anything, go be present. Walk the neighborhood. Eat with people. Ask questions without an agenda. Lean startup calls this customer discovery. The New Testament calls it incarnation. They're not that far apart. The goal is the same: stop projecting your ministry idea onto a community and start surfacing what God is already doing there.
It’s the idea modeled by Jesus and echoed by Henry Blackaby: Let God make the plans and simply do what you see Him doing.
Move 2: Start Thin.
Launch the thinnest viable expression of community you can. A shared meal. A gathering around a common need. A service project. You're not planting a church yet — you're creating conditions where community and spiritual curiosity can emerge. Keep the overhead near zero and keep your hands open. Try small experiments, and keep it simple.
Move 3: Measure What Actually Matters.
Forget pure growth metrics. Instead, ask the harder questions. Are relationships deepening? Are people who are not yet Jesus followers genuinely engaged? Is this activity serving its neighborhood, or just serving itself? Are you seeing real transformation — not just people showing up? Gather stories. Look for fruit. Ask: is this expression of church bearing fruit in ways consistent with what Jesus said fruit should look like?
Move 4: Build in Honest Reckoning.
Every six months, sit down together and ask the hard questions out loud. Is this working? For whom? Are we pressing on out of faithfulness — or out of fear of failure? This is what lean startup calls a structured pivot, and it's what real discernment looks like in community. Make sure all five voices in Ephesians 4 are asking questions. It also gives your church permission to end things well, which is something most church cultures desperately need to learn how to do.
The Initiator Doesn't Have to Be the Pastor
…and maybe shouldn’t be.
Here's something the lean startup world got right that the church has been slow to figure out: the person who starts something doesn't have to be the person with the title.
In an experimental setting, anyone with a problem worth solving and the courage to act can be a founder. The same is true in the Kingdom.
The New Testament is full of people who initiated without any official permission — Lydia opened her home, Priscilla and Aquila invited Apollos in and sharpened his theology, the unnamed woman at the well became the first evangelist to her entire city. Even Paul went back to Jerusalem to make sure he had it right. None of them waited for permission from an institution.
Your church is full of initiators right now. They're sitting in the seats. They're the ones who notice what's broken in their neighborhood and can't stop thinking about it. They're the ones who already have relationships with people your programs will never reach. They're the entrepreneurs who have spent years building networks, reading markets, and taking calculated risks — exactly the kind of people Jesus recruited for his own team.
The question is whether your church creates the conditions for those people to move — or whether it unintentionally trains them to wait.
This means that your church needs to become a permission-giving and commissioning body. The permission is based on the idea that we’re all called to do the Kingdom wherever we go. Everyone has permission to do that, and we should give voice to it.
Faithful experimentation means sharing the initiative. It means a pastor saying to a business owner in the congregation: you see something, you feel the pull — go listen, start thin, and let's discern together what God is doing. It means treating the pew not as a place to fill but as a launch pad. The role of church leadership in this model isn't to initiate everything — it's to create a culture where initiation is expected, supported, and celebrated at every level.
In an experimental culture, the pew becomes a launchpad, not a resting place.
When that happens, your leadership pipeline doesn't just deepen. It multiplies. And the church stops being a place people attend and starts being a catalytic movement people carry into every corner of their community.
A New Loop for Ministry Leaders
Forget build-measure-learn. The loop that actually serves the Kingdom sounds like this:
Listen. Risk. Discern. Adapt.
That's not a product cycle. That's a servant leadership posture. It carries the discipline of lean methodology while honoring the relational, Spirit-led reality of what you're actually doing. You're not engineering a product. You're participating in something with its own life and its own Author.
The Tensions Worth Holding
This only works if you're willing to accept some tensions instead of resolving them too quickly.
Scale is a possible outcome — not the goal. A dinner church of twelve people in a particular neighborhood might be exactly what God intended. That's a win. Failure is not just tolerated — it's redemptive. Lean startup treats failure as a tool to create something better. A Kingdom framework can make meaning out of failure. We’re always asking and watching to see what God is doing, and sometimes we miss it. Other times, he was taking us on a learning journey and we got his leading just right.
We need to foster communities of faith that have the capacity to become aware of a God moment and the faith and support to take a risk when they think we’re in one.
Who This Is For
This framework is for church planters who are tired of launching programs that don't connect. It's for denominational leaders who want to fund experiments without demanding certainty up front. It's for established churches trying to reach new networks in their community without defaulting to the same playbook that stopped working a decade ago.
It gives permission-givers — pastors, elders, sending churches — a way to resource experiments with open hands. And it gives practitioners a language for honest reporting that isn't just evangelistic spin.
The bottom line is this: lean startup provides the how for disciplined experimentation. Kingdom theology provides the why and the what counts. Put them together, and you have something more powerful than either one alone — a church that moves with courage, learns with humility, and stays anchored to the One who is building it and bringing all things together in Christ.
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