Americans enjoy relatively good health care, a bountiful food supply, and secure borders. What’s rarely recognized is that these three accomplishments, along with the rest of the greatest success stories in human civilization, used an identical approach. So it’s odd when faith organizations ignore this when seeking to change the world.
Tiger is missed.
The Professional Golfers Association is facing uncertain times. Golf is individualistic; so when one individual, in this case Tiger Woods, is absent, PGA attendance dips 50 percent. Individualism however is not exclusive to golf. It is endemic to American culture. It is why the American church approaches culture-making as a game of golf. It’s not. Culture-changing is more like football, played on a gridiron.
by Mike Metzger & John Seel
The NFL’s fall season finally finished last night—in February. Now eyes turn to NBA basketball, a winter sport that wraps up in June. But a sports-saturated society is not necessarily a negative. An extended basketball season, for example, provides an elongated glimpse of shalom. That’s because shalom means leading the league in assists.
In 1983, General Motors unveiled “a new kind of car company.” Saturn was GM’s five billion dollar gamble in innovation. They lost their wager.
This year, Saturn is being shut down. An accurate assessment of human nature would have predicted this. Almost 100 percent of the time, when a company tries to innovate inside their old culture, they’re whittling rotten wood.
