New

“See I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland…...”

This is the God we worship and follow. This is the God who has put His nature and likeness into us.

The nature of creativity, newness, innovation, and disruption. The ability of creativity – for Him to create out of nothing “ex nihilo” but His creation, humanity – creative engagement from the created and revealed things. The character of “new ways of doing things”, freshness and newness every morning – for humanity - to thinks through ways of doing things differently and with newness. This newness being “innovative” – better solutions to meet new requirements, un-articulated needs or existing needs. And many times, these innovations – being a disruptive way of doing things from the existing paradigm of ways.

In God’s creation – we find Him creating “Ex Nihilo” – out of nothing. In the redemption process – he uses a disruptive and innovative way from what was expected – He sends His own Son – to die for the redemption and reconciliation of the creation. Something His creation – the wise of the world could not even imagine or fathom. In the taking forward of His Kingdom – he chose a small community of uneducated ordinary people to turn the world upside down – a disruptive way of engagement.

Have we stifled this “creativity, innovation, new ways of thinking and doing and ability to be disruptive” by institutional, organizational and project planning thinking processes? Have we stifled God given ability to be creative and innovative by our own self sufficient and structured ways of thinking and learning?

How can we redeem this creativity, innovation and newness in our ways of thinking and planning? How can we be disruptive in the way we engage?

Creativity emerges from impact thinking or in another sense “Kingdom thinking”. If we start putting the larger impact we want to see ahead of us – align our planning towards this greater impact, instead of processes and methodologies, we will start training our God given intellect to be “creative and innovative”.

Innovation emerges from thinking “out of the box” solutions to reach the impact. This out of box thinking involves training our God given intellect to think, reflect and learn well. Years of training and institutional and management thinking has primed our brains to think in certain patterns. We need to retrain ourselves to be good stewards of the intellectual talents God has given us. There are various well proven methodologies that can help us to retrain our mind.

At the same time, we need to look around to see how others have done things differently. There are many social innovators in the world today. There are locally relevant innovative ways of doing things tried out by communities. A discipline of looking, listening and learning is something that we should be willing to spend time on, if we are committed to “newness”. 

Disruption involves doing things differently as one gets innovative ideas. But this calls for courage and confidence and willingness to put our resources behind the idea and follow up with it. In another sense, this is about faith, bringing faith back into our planning and management thinking. Willingness to step out in faith and put our resources behind what we are stepping out into, with the assurance that God will be with us. If the vision (the Kingdom thinking) is from God, if the out of the box solution has come out of reflective engagement of our intellect in Gods presence, with the right motives, we should have the faith (or courage) to step out.  

And these processes have to be done, covered with prayer and reflection, as a community, so that God will “reveal” His purposes to us for His Kingdom, as we use God given abilities to think reflect and plan.

The time has come for faith based health care communities to redeem this lost art of creativity, innovation and disruption. It is about redeeming our character and becoming what God wants us to be like than charting a new path. Will I have the courage? Will we come together as creative communities to reflect learn and think...