How Much Change Do We Need?

I was listening to Seth Godin’s presentation (below) on the TED website as he was sharing about his idea that we’re all associated to Tribes and Tribes will influence and change the world rather than money or factories. He wrote a book called Tribes. I recommend it.

Early on in his presentation he describes a really obvious reality, That we’re all working to “change" something.

This struck me for some reason and gave some great insight into the world around us. It’s true, no matter what job you’re doing to make a living, you’re attempting to change something. You may be trying to get more people involved in doing something or you might be changing your process to become more profitable.

Makes me ask myself what am I trying to change?

Do I really need to change everything?

In my world, my main priority to influence(change) people to live differently to help offset basic needs for marginalized homeowners. I am trying to influence a tribe of Christ-followers to engage in community development for the sake of relationship and caring for folks who have no one else to look out for them.

I’m also leading this group of other social service workers to attempt to identify and develop a strategy that will change the way things are currently done in order to get more done. The question in that group is how can we fix(change) what’s not working in order to have more needs met. In all honesty, what needs to change is us, not someone/something else. That’s another blog post in itself.

I’m no expert on this issue, just an expert on the challenges I face on a daily basis trying to tie things together for positive impact. One of the biggest issue that I see is that we’re all trying to do our own thing. We all think our ideas are just a little bit better than someone else’s and the way we’ll do it will be better, which causes us to have so many different organizations and even churches. It’s easier to give into independence rather than fight for collaboration and interdependence. It’s a bigger issue than we realize. Submitting to someone else’s expertise or experiences in order to create something together seems dehumanizing to most. We feel we must give up our identity to take on someone else’s, and we’re afraid.

For Instance:

Guidstar.org says we have over 1000 registered non-profits in Fort Wayne, including churches. WHY? Do we need that many in Fort Wayne? How many do the same thing or similar things? How much money is wasted in administrative efforts? Do they know each other? Could they even begin to know each other? TONS of questions could be asked and broken down.

I’ll end this post with the idea that maybe we need to quit “changing" things by creating something new and start changing by deconstructing what is current.