In our new book The Changing Church: Finding Your Way to God’s New Thing my friend and co-author, Bill Griffith, and I distinguish between two kinds of change congregations and their leaders often face. These are “continuous” and “discontinuous” change. Here’s an excerpt from chapter two where we define these types of change:
Continuous change, sometimes also referred to as incremental change, is change that is tied to past experience. In working through this type of change, we simply are making an adjustment in something we’ve had prior experience with and want to improve.
Discontinuous change is change for which we have no prior experience or reference point. It is change of a completely new direction or orientation, outside our experience and prior knowledge. Many of the challenges that congregations face today are of a discontinuous nature.
Which type of change have you found more common in your congregation’s ministry of late? How do you begin to approach discontinuous change? We invite you to pick up a copy of our book to learn more about this and how to have conversations with one another in a congregational setting.
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