Malaysia is a great place to meet muslims. It’s a muslim state, and thousands of muslims from the middle east honeymoon and holiday in Malaysia every year. Abdul was one of them.

I struck up a conversation about life in Saudi Arabia, and life as a muslim. Abdul was devout, so I started asking questions about salvation, the Prophet, and Isa (Jesus).

Fortunately I had just finished reading an excellent summary of the Camel—a helpful way to sharing Jesus with muslims starting with what the Quran and bridging to the Injil (New Testament).

We talked for an hour and parted as friends. It was the best sleepless night I’ve had for a long time.

The Camel condensed

The Camel website

The book. . .

“The Camel: How Muslims Are Coming to Faith in Christ!” (Kevin Greeson)

UPDATE: An interview with Kevin Greeson

I think we spend too much time analysing the problem of the decline of Christianity in the west. Too much time deconstructing and conceptualizing. It’s not a mind game.

We should be asking: Where do we see the gospel advancing, disciples made and churches multiplied? How can we get more of that? How can we serve what God is already doing?

Here’s a story by Fast Company on Jerry Sternin (above) that illustrates the point.

When Jerry Sternin arrived in Vietnam, the welcome was rather chilly. The government had invited his employer, Save the Children, the international organization that helps kids in need, to open an office in the country in 1990 to fight malnutrition. But the foreign minister let Sternin know that not everyone in the government appreciated his presence. The minister told him, “You have six months to make a difference.”

Sternin had traveled to the country with his wife and 10-year-old son. None of them spoke the language. “We were like orphans at the airport when we arrived in Vietnam,” he said. “We had no idea what we were going to do.” Sternin had minimal staff and meager resources.

The conventional wisdom was that malnutrition was the result of an intertwined set of problems: Sanitation was poor. Poverty was nearly universal. Clean water was not readily available. The rural people tended to be ignorant about nutrition.

That analysis was, in Sternin’s judgment, TBU — true but useless. “Millions of kids can’t wait for those issues to be addressed,” he said. If addressing malnutrition required ending poverty and purifying water and building sanitation systems, then it would never happen.

Especially in six months, with virtually no money to spend.

When it’s time to change, we must look for bright spots — the first signs that things are working. We need to ask ourselves a question that sounds simple but is, in fact, deeply unnatural: What’s working and how can we do more of it?

read on . . .

“Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard” (Chip Heath, Dan Heath)

Here’s a simple paradigm for turning your bible study group into a disciple making group that reproduces. In a traditional home group, it’s the red that gets left out when time runs out. In a multiplying discipleship group it’s black that gets left out when time runs out.

Jay: We have white-hot faith, commitment to a cause, contagious relationships and rapid mobilization. Your fifth one was adaptive methods; speak to that one a little bit.

Steve: The heart of the Christian faith never changes and movements are very rigorous in that conservative side of the faith of saying there are some things that will always be true about the Christian faith.

Dynamic movements, while they are very conservative when it comes to the cause, they’re radical in their methods. In other words, they won’t change the message or the heart of the message, but different contexts in different situations, they adapt how that message is communicated or what the structure and the form of the church or the mission agency looks like or how we do evangelism.

They are willing to change everything about themselves to get the job done, except the heart and core of the message. They say, If the internet is going to make an impact we’ll do that; if it’s the printing press puts the scriptures in everyone’s hands, we’ll use it.

Movements pick up on what’s working and are continually changing their methods, but never changing their message.

Jay: Are there some of these characteristics that tend to resonate or do all five tend to just have the same sort of impact?

Steve: My personal bias is white-hot faith. But if I took a step back from how I’m wired, I’d say it’s important to hold the five in creative tension. If your bias is white-hot faith you may need to be a bit more intentional about some of the others. Like baking a cake, you’ve got to have the ingredients in the right balance in order to pull it off.

Two observations on the story of Ignaz Semmelweiss:

1. Semmelweis was passionately engaged and humble enough to learn.

He wanted to save lives. He did not accept current reality. He was a driven man. He knew what his mission was—save lives. And he did something about it. He did not come with preconceived notions of how it was to be done. He learned by doing and reflecting not by theorizing.

Clear, and passionately committed to the cause, but teachable and flexible in how to get the job done. In contrast his colleagues were indifferent to the suffering of the women and rigid in their methods.

2. Semmelweiss faced relentless opposition.

The medical establishment did not want to know about his breathtaking achievements in saving lives. They opposed and ridiculed his methods despite his clear, consistent and repeated successes. It was not until the weight of evidence was overwhelming that the medical profession accepted Semmelweis’ methods.

Thomas Kuhn, studied the history of science to see how a new scientific paradigm triumphed over an existing one. The new paradigm does not prevail by convincing its opponents, it triumphs because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that embraces the change. The first to pursue and accept the new paradigm were typically young or new to the field; they did not have much invested in the existing way of seeing things. As we have already noted, breakthroughs in any sphere of human endeavor occur on the fringe, not at the center.

What should we do with this?

Get passionate and keep learning. Make sure you are clear about the cause and desperate to adapt to make it a reality. Expect opposition. Keep asking yourself, What does success look like? How will I recognize it when I see it? How can I multiply what’s working?

What’s my cause? Godly leaders, multiplying churches that make disciples. Everywhere. That’s what I look for, and when I find it I ask, “Why?” and then I ask, “How can we get more of this?”

This year I’m praying and working for 10-15 multiplication hubs around Australia—church plants that reach lost people and multiply, no matter what their size. The lessons we learn from these will be invaluable for the wave of church plants.

Next time you go into a hospital and come out alive this is the gentleman you should thank: Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865), a nineteenth century Hungarian doctor.  

He discovered there was one cause to the unusually high rates of women dying from “childbed fever” or blood poisoning following childbirth—dirty hands.

At the Vienna hospital in which he worked, one maternity clinic had a 10% fatality rate following childbrith, another was less than 4%. Semmelweis wondered why.

Then a close friend was accidently cut by a student’s scalpel while performing a postmortem examination and died. A postmortem revealed the death was caused by a similar condition to the one that was killing mothers in the maternity ward.

Semmelweis saw the connection and concluded that it was contact with corpses that somehow was fatal to these women and to his friend. This was confirmed when he discovered that the ward with a 10% fatality was attended by medical students who had performed postmortems, while the ward with a 4% mortality was not.

Semmelweis began requiring hospital staff to wash their hands in chlorinated lime between autopsy work and examination of patients. The immediate result was a ten-fold drop in fatalities.

The response of the medical establishment was opposition to Semmelweis’ conclusions and recommendations. Their was no scientific theory to back up Semmelweis’ findings. The germ theory of disease was decades away from discovery.

When his term expired Semmelweis was not reappointed by the hospital. He left Vienna for Budapest humiliated and took up a relatively insignificant, unpaid position at a small hospital. Childbed fever was rampant there, under his supervision the hospital introduced hand washing and the disease was virtually eliminated.

His dramatic successes continued to be ridiculed and rejected by the medical establishment in Vienna and Budapest.

From 1861, he suffered from severe depression and became obsessed with the topic of childbed fever in every conversation. In 1865 his family lured him to a mental institution. When he tried to leave he was severely beaten by guards, put in a straightjacket, and locked in a dark cell. He died two weeks later from extensive internal injuries. The autopsy revealed blood poisoning—the same condition he had attempted to eliminate in maternity wards.

Semmelweis’ methods finally gained acceptance years after his death, when Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease which provided the explanation for Semmelweis’ findings.

I wonder how many people are alive today because of his pioneering work?

The next post will have some reflections on what we can learn from Ignaz Semmelweis.

Apple didn’t invent the idea of the iPod. A British furniture salesman named Kane Kramer did—thirty years ago. He was 22 at the time.

The point?

Breakthroughs in fashion, technology, science, art, warfare, sport—in every sphere of life—and most especially in the renewal and expansion of the Christian faith. . . . breakthroughs ALWAYS occur on the fringe. NEVER at the centre.

So where do you like to hang out?

So what should the churches do? Why not go to Adriatic coast where the people are and bring a 30 metre inflatable church?

You may think this is a joke, but there is a serious side as the BBC report reveals.

The best methods are adaptive, flexible, reproducible, functional and simple enough to be contagious.

Here’s an example from my email traffic.

Hi Brian

How’s it going?

I have an Aussie mate living and working in Europe. He’s reaching out to the other single young adults “internationals” at work and around the city.

It might be the beginning of a church plant. He’s a really good connector.

Been talking to him re taking the next step of running some discovery groups/bible studies.

Back in the dark recesses of my mind was our discussion years ago about your simple model of bible studies. It was so simple I forgot the details! But that’s usual for me.

Would you mind giving me a few bullet points describing what you do and I’ll shoot it to him and if he’s keen maybe he could call/skype you.

What do you think?

Steve

Hi Steve,

Yes it is very simple and yet seems to be effective for both Seminary graduates and non-Christians…

Each week we read at least a book before we get together… Genesis week one, Exodus week two… (Joshua, Judges, Ruth week 6)

When we come together for coffee we share the three things we loved about it.

[note: we want people to love the bible and when people share what they loved, they are really sharing the things that jumped out at them… the things God is most likely speaking to them about.}

Primary goal is to focus on what they Loved.
Secondary goal is to teach them to Listen to what God is saying to them through his word.
Lastly, over time the bible is Learned.

Life-long Christians have the hardest time with this… they either try to make it a “Bible answer man” time… which we do not allow (if there is a question or two we may talk about it at the end.) or they try and make it a “look how deep and smart I am.”

We had a seminary student who was sharing from commentaries and I had to call him on it… I want to hear what God is doing in your hearts quit trying to impress people with your head.

My group meets in Starbucks (it is a value to us to not do this in homes but in public places) we pray, then we go in a circle three times around sharing our three things, after someone shares it is not uncommon for others to say how and or why they might have loved that same verse or passage… after three times around we pray and end.

Simple. The job of the leader is to have passion for the bible and cultivate it in the people of the group.

Very brief… hope this helps.

Brian.

Brian is a church planter in Glasgow, Scotland. You can read his excellent blog here.

Here’s what Chip and Dan Heath have to say about making ideas stick.

1. Simplicity. To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission–sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound.

2. Unexpectedness. We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. We can use surprise–an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus–to grab people’s attention. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity.

3. Concreteness. We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: ‘A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.’

4. Credibility. Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves. Ronald Reagan asked, “Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.”

5. Emotions. How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness.

6. Stories. How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.

Have a read of the Gospels with these six points in mind. I’d give Jesus six out six for making ideas stick.

Thanks to David May for another great summary. Why not get on his mailing list?

“Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” (Chip Heath, Dan Heath)