Today, I read a great Wired interview with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of one of my favorite companies, Google. Here are three excerpts that should challenge our thinking about the future of ministry:

Google on Video

"We really do think that the YouTube phenomenon is a sustainable
phenomenon for many, many years. And the argument is very simple:
People are using video everywhere. People are building communities of
people who use video. They’re sharing them. YouTube’s traffic continues
to grow very quickly. Video is something that we think is going to be
embedded everywhere. And it makes sense, from Google’s perspective, to
be the operator of the largest site that contains all that video."

  • How are you incorporating video into your weekend services? (In my opinion, and they don’t pay me to say this any more, nobody does this better than Granger Community Church.)
  • How are you using video to share your service experience on the web?
  • Are you prepared to engage online conversations by bringing a biblical influence to existing social networks using video technology?

Google on Systems Standardization

"The information systems that are within the company are quite good. But
we’ve reined in certain things. For example, we don’t tolerate the kind
of "Hey I want to have my own database and have a good time" behavior
that was very effective for us five years ago because the cost of this
from a manageability, maintenance, and scaling perspective is a
problem. So virtually all of the product groups are now told, "Build on
top of this common set of services. Now, we internally use exactly the
same code running on the same servers - like Gmail and Calendar and
Google apps - as our customers do."

  • How many different databases (think ministry mailing lists) exist within your ministry? If it’s more than one, it’s one too many.
  • Are you paying attention to the strength of your infrastructure (computer network, database solutions, web solutions, communications solutions, etc.) and standardizing and enhancing these areas to create synergy for ministry impact?

Google on Idea Implementation

"Fast learners win. We’re in new, uncharted space. So the traditional
assumptions that you and I might have about the future might actually
just be wrong. There might be a new answer. And the only way to
discover that is to put out your idea and then test it. And we track
the results of that very, very, very rigorously, and this is not
something we talk a lot about, but it’s critical for us. How are these
new ideas doing? What’s their growth rate? What are the issues around
them? And we push. What can we do to accelerate the development of this
feature? What’s the new problem? What’s the new opportunity?"

  • What are you doing within your culture to encourage new ideas without allowing mission drift?
  • How quickly do new ideas get implemented? Does your decision-making model allow for rapid deployment and testing, or do ideas get bogged down in meeting discussions?
  • Does your ministry environment encourage ideas that periodically fail?
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