Making the thing. That’s one of the threads running through the Phygital Fellows and the Phygital Gathering. Ministry in the digital space can be studied, discussed, and planned, but at some point, it comes back to implementation.
Sue Phillips suggests that, “Innovation is not in the ideas. Innovation is in the implementation.” She goes on to question, “How do we get more implementers, not more ideators and imagination people? How do we get more people who actually make $#!+?”
Moving from ideas to execution raises new questions for ministry in the phygital space. What ideas make it to implementation, and why? What factors produce the right environment for makers to implement? What pitfalls exist in the making and implementation process? How do we build resilience to keep making even when experiments fail?
The term maker is also emerging in our conversations. It feels more specific than creator, more grounded than execution, and pairs well with implementation. If the Phygital Fellows learned anything in the last two years, it was that we must “make” the things we want to see in the world. That is not just technical work; it is soulful work.
So maybe when we say maker, we are speaking of the person who is making (ie creating, executing, and implementing) a thing AND the soul that is being expressed and articulated in the making? What if maintaining the soul is the key to resilience in the making? That’s one of many questions we’re wrestling with right now.
Phygital Fellow Rohini Drake has spent the time making what she wants to see in the world and helping others do the same. She suggests, “in my experience, sometimes it’s not the idea that fails, but the first attempt at implementation. Sometimes the unsuccessful attempt at implementation is the exact thing we needed to discover in order to bring the idea to life!”
To get towards wholeness and integrated liberation, the world needs us to push beyond what doesn’t work and keep building toward what will. We can’t be so afraid of the consequences of making that we stop making.
One of the brilliant people who has invested in our Phygital Fellows recently shut down a three-year project. When they shared the news with followers via email, they named the parts that worked beautifully and the parts that didn’t. They were at peace with both because that tension was the entire point of the experiment in the first place.
Consider how we’d react if a church closed two or three years after it was planted, and the people behind it simply went and planted another one. By Western standards, that might read as failure. But it could be argued that this is actually New Testament church planting. What we call failure, the early church called the model: plant, learn, plant again. Western Christianity asks for something else entirely: get it right the first time, be successful, and have the fruit to show for it by a certain point, or stay away from planting altogether. That’s not resilience. That’s a one-shot model dressed up as faithfulness.
So how do we inspire more experiments? How do we push beyond a fascination with ideas to an obsession with implementation? What does it mean to be a maker?
These are some of the new questions we are wrestling with inside the phygital space.
What do you think? We’d love to hear from you!