Innovation is not creativity. There is a world of difference between the two.

“The difference between creativity and innovation is the difference between thinking about getting things done in the world and getting things done. Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.”       – Professor Theodore Levitt

With so many things to do, so many changes in the way the world works, with so many ideas on how to run a church – would you agree that we especially the Filipinos don’t lack creativity. The church in general does not lack creativity. What we need is innovation. The church might not be able to catch up with the creativity of the world but it sure can lead the way to innovation.

Innovation is way cheaper than creativity. Innovation answers what is the best way to communicate the gospel to the people? What would be the growth hindrance for people in our community to not worship in our church?

Let me give you an example:

December in Greenhills is crazy. It owuld take at least 30 minutes to park while at most 2 hours. Everybody shops in Greenhills on December. People would never dare try to go to our church because of the parking problem. Now we can get creative and wear shirts that would attract shoppers to our church, or get as creative as wash the cars of the shoppers while giving them an invite to attend our church, or create an attention grabbing ad that would target the clueless shopper to go to our church

or

Talk to the city government and cut a deal to have a reserved street parking for our church.

Both of the options went through our mind. if I were creative Ill choose option 1. But thank God the team is innovative and we chose option 2. Guess what the result was?

When we tried to be creative with our parking problem – we saw a 40% decline in our church attendance.

When we tried the next year to be innovative – we experienced just 10-15% drop in our attendance.

We are already cooking up something for this december that would try to address our 15% drop and hopefully combine our innovation and creative skills to see an increase this year. Pray for us and I’ll blog about the results this December!

What do you think, are you up to the challenge? INNOVATE!