Design Thinking and Christian Mission

What is it? Why does it matter? Is it helpful?

Hey there - this is from the archives. I did a bunch of writing on the intersection of missiology and innovation a few years ago, and I wanted to use those articles to populate my substack before I launched it. So, these are a little dated, but the core ideas are still sound. Check out tylerprieb.com for more.

Design Thinking + Christian Mission

I’ve been researching and exploring the theoretical and practical areas of overlap between a “Design Thinking” approach to innovation and problem solving, and the ways that this might contribute insight or value to the task of missional leadership.

This has a number of “downline” domains which I hope to eventually explore on the missional leadership side. Design Thinking has real conceptual application for church planting, teaching, preaching, discipleship, community development, community impact, benevolence, event/experience design, and more. For para-church or “missions” organizations, Design Thinking has application toward localized mission strategy and contextualization, for product design and development, for market and evaluative research, and more. There is much to explore.

But, for this post I simply wanted to summarize and give an overview to “why” and “how” I think Design Thinking maps directly onto Missiology, and should be in dialogue with it.

The heart of my argument is actually pretty simple. It goes something like this:

1. Christian missional responsibility is to faithfully translate the Gospel into resonant and plausible thought-forms and embodied experiences, for people to encounter the Gospel.

2. This task of contextualization requires empathy, agility, and adaptability to a wide variety of situations, communities, and subcultures around the world. Missionaries have always had to do this. Good ministry is a design challenge.

3. Ministry that is contextualized well always draws on interdisciplinary insights from across other disciplines, because ministry operates in the realm of the social/human, and so tools from the soft sciences can help us (if we are careful).

4. Design thinking, and the entrepreneurial process in general, helps organizations use participatory, social methodologies of discovery, testing, and feedback to design more effective products, services, and experiences for people.

5. Design thinking can also empower missional organizations and non-specialist individuals to contextualize and translate the Gospel faithfully, without compromise, in increasingly localized ways, for increased comprehension and impact.

6. This can be done with a robust theological rationale and genuine missional motivations, and can guard against the temptations toward relativism, syncretism, and other problems of over-contextualization.

I’ll go through each of these quickly, as an overview.

Our Missional Responsibility

“Mission” is one of, if not the, central hermeneutical tools for reading and understanding the Bible. God is on a mission to accomplish something, to fix something, to redeem something. We call this the Missio Dei. We are invited and charged with participating in the Missio Dei.

There are a few components or areas of emphasis about what the Missio Dei means, and I won’t go too deep into them here, but they are commensurate with “what we see God doing in Scripture,” like creating freely, building a family, making covenant promises, rescuing and liberating his people, establishing a just and loving Kingdom, making disciples in the way of Jesus, and extending blessing and invitation to all people in all places.

Beyond these thematic patterns, we also see that the heart of God’s missional action is the incarnation of God into human form in the person of Jesus. God’s mission is incarnated and translated, it is embodied and located in time and space. Christianity is a “translated” religion, as so many missiologists have said. So, to extend the mission of God is to join him in the work that he is doing, in the way that he is doing it.

The Task of Contextualization

This leaves us a big task — how to translate the Gospel effectively. The reality of human limitation and resource scarcity forces us into tradeoffs here. Whom shall we share the Gospel with? Contextualizing the story of the Gospel is hard enough with a single individual, and gets more challenging as you expand the scope of concern out to larger communities and groups of people. The desire to “zoom out” to reach more people often comes with a corresponding decrease in the power and precision of our ability to communicate and embody the Gospel well for particular people. It seems like we have to face the “economic” tradeoff between going deeper or going wider with our ministry work.

Contextualization is also a challenge, because Christianity is not a consumer product to be accommodated to market trends and customer preference. It is also and always a prophetic critique as well. As Tim Keller says:

Contextualization is not — as is often argued — ‘giving people what they want to hear.’ Rather, it is giving people the Bible’s answers, which they may not at all want to hear, to questions about life that people in their particular time and place are asking, in language and forms they can comprehend, and through appeals and arguments with force they can feel, even if they reject them.

The distinctive of Christian contextualization is that it has two “loci” of authority — it must remain faithful to the heart of the Gospel message and narrative, but it must be fruitful in the sense that it has to create clarity and resonance, so that people can accept or reject the right thing, not the wrong, obfuscated thing.

What is Good Ministry?

“Good ministry,” then, is when our local mission-in-practice reflects deeply on the balance between those two constraints (theology and culture), develops a sensible, inductive approach for how to move forward, and moves boldly in declaring and demonstrating the story and invitation of Jesus.

But, good ministry cannot stop there. The world is changing around us at an accelerated pace— technology, media, migration and displacement, politics, economics, cities — these are creating a very different world in our backyards, wherever we are. The other essential ingredient of “good” mission is the willingness to humbly evaluate our local mission-in-practice for fruitfulness in a changing environment.

We are pretty good, I think, at evaluating our mission and ministry for theological fidelity and faithfulness, but less effective at evaluating resonance — our translation, contextualization, and plausibility with the people we are seeking to reach and communicate with. This goes against the leadership grain — evaluation is messy, fraught with interpretive tradeoffs, and might force us to reckon with our own ineffectiveness.

It is tempting, and easy, to offload real evaluation as something outside the realm of “our” responsibility. But to truly reach clarity and fruitfulness in those we seek to reach requires the courageous action of holding a mirror up to ourselves, and adjusting accordingly. The changing world demands that we do.

What Design Thinking Does

So, the heart of my argument is that Design Thinking gives a toolbox for many of these tasks.

It gives us a problem solving methodology that allows for a wide range of interdisciplinary inputs to frame the problems solving space. Sociology, psychology, economics, technology, and more, function as endogenous variables to the design process, bringing new insights from surprising places. Higher order commitments, like theology (or “organizational purpose,” in business) can function as exogenous variables which constrain the design process in healthy ways as well. It’s possible to open up design space that focuses a large amount of insight into a specifically-framed problem.

It also gives us tools for empathy — because it starts with humans, and discovering the pains, gains, and goals of particular people in particular places, towards the goal of serving them well. This is the whole point of Design Thinking — finding new ways to create value for people, on their terms, not on the organizations terms.

It also creates cycles of hypothesis, testing, and evaluation. It’s not the scientific method, in the sense that it is “abductive” rather than “inductive.” You learn by moving, by doing, by making, and you cycle those insights back into the design process as quickly as possible. It always evaluates, always asks for feedback about fit and alignment.

It’s also highly collaborative and democratic. The best design conversations have the most diverse stakeholders in the room. It does, of course, often require a skilled facilitator to be able to create and manage space for everyone’s insights to be captured and synthesized well. And, it requires “experts” to put on a beginners mind, to reframe their contributions. But, the more diverse the room, the better the set of design options.

Ministry By Design

So, the next step seems relatively self evident to me. Design Thinking has moved from arts to technology to product development to business service design to organizational strategy to social impact design to community development. It’s not a huge leap to highlight implications for increased effectiveness in Christian mission and ministry. But here are a few ways that Design Thinking language maps on to mission and ministry:

Empathy and incarnation are the heart of it all. If we are good missionaries, we have to get as close to people as possible, understand them well, act as participant-observers, and understand language and thought-forms and desires and challenges intimately. The best “anthropologists” make the best missionaries and the best designers, because they have the most robust social insights.

Freedom to try and fail are important for widening the creative frame. If there is only one inherited “right way” to do something, whether by fiat or by historical precedent, and a culture of failure and fear, we will be paralyzed even when we see misalignment and ineffectiveness. But, if there is grace to try, fail, and try again, a whole new world of possibilities open up. We should not be afraid to improvise, even if our improvisation is in the spirit of what has gone before us.

Design thinking requires essentialism and simplicity. The best designs are the most simple. There is power in getting something down to its essence. As we seek to communicate and embody the Gospel, we must remember that translation doesn’t mean complication.

Collaboration means finding a place for everyone’s insight and contribution. The church is not run by specialists. All believers are gifted for ministry, and all people, Christian or not, have skill and insight and contribution for how to solve a problem. The body of Christ is a fertile design environment if the right people are in the room together — and how much more might we improve our ministry designs if we included community partners, or even those very people we seek to reach in the conversation as well.

Evaluation isn’t scary. It can be a hard thing, like I said, to ask, “How are we really, truly, doing?” I think the larger we are, and the more organizational momentum we have, the more difficult it becomes. This is a serious risk, and how we wake up after 10 years and realize we’re totally misaligned with the culture around us. Evaluate sooner, evaluate more frequently, test your assumptions, and make small adjustments more often.

Faithfulness Pursuing Fruitfulness

This is a very basic overview of how Design relates to Mission, and there are many, many, many ways to explore this conceptually and practically. I admittedly haven’t spent sufficient time on some of the tricky theological issues and trade-offs at play, which inevitably manifest themselves in our ministries and often show up in really nuanced or subtle ways. Let alone the political/relational dimensions of doing ministry well. Organizations and ministries an churches are made up of people, with commitments and desires and fears. Agile leadership in a missional environment is really, really, really difficult.

So, while I know that I’m not the first person to point to “adaptive innovation” as something important for effective local and global mission, my hope remains that Design Thinking and other organizational innovation tools might give us some language and frameworks for our ministry — and can relieve some of the burden, help us get un-stuck, and increase our resonance to a spiritually hungry world.