"Not Yet"

Seth Godin has a new book out called Tribes. Couple of great thoughts from it:

• The secret of being wrong isn’t to avoid bring wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal.
• The largest enemy of change and leadership isn’t a “no”. It’s a ”not yet”. “Not yet” is the safest, easiest way to forestall change. “Not yet” gives the status quo a chance to regroup and put off the inevitable for just awhile longer. Change almost never fails because it’s too early. It almost always fails because it’s too late. By the time you realize that your corner of the world is ready for an innovation, it’s almost certainly too late. It’s definitely not too early. There’s a small price for being too early, but a huge penalty for being too late. The longer you wait to launch an innovation, the less your effort is worth.
  

I enjoy both statements, but I certainly resonate with the last one. Last year as we were kicking around the idea of the Wednesday Night Service, some of the initial feedback we got from focus groups was this “not yet” kind of thinking. Some of the fears and concerns included

• the absence of a midweek children’s programming and the related fear of whether or not kids could truly benefit from the experience of serving
• the risk of going too fast and trying to temper the movement with a hybrid model of once a month or every other week
• the concern that people might be too tired from the day’s work or home life to gear up and serve others; the beauty of the program, though, is that it puts participation in the hands of the participant, whereas with a small group or a kids program, you almost had to attend for the program truly depended on you. You can now miss a Wednesday night, jump back in the next week, and not miss a beat.
• Whether we we’re too early or there would be enough to do that would fit our very constrained time frame of Wednesday nights; (I honestly was a bit concerned with this as well, but in fact we have found that there is more to do than our group could ever pull off; we’ve had to become choosier about the opportunities we do participate in.)
  

This isn’t to minimize the importance of those thinkers and church people who are more realistic or pragmatic in their thinking and processing. Those folks sharpened and strengthened Wednesday Nights. But if Hillcrest would have waited, if we would have listened to the “not yets”, we probably wouldn’t be where we are at today. And we probably wouldn’t have received emails like this one:

I am very thankful for your forethought in coming up with this idea of taking the church outside the walls. I’m thankful for the Service opportunities you line up each week. I’m thankful for the opportunity you’ve given me to get involved in the church & to meet other Hillcresters in comfortable settings. (I’m pretty sure if we were just having a Service in the Church, I wouldn’t be there.) I’m thankful to be a part of a congregation that I believe does things to glorify God & not just to make ourselves look or feel good! I’m thankful for the opportunity to volunteer & to make a difference in my community. I’ve always gotten much more fulfillment from volunteering than I get from a day at work.