Three Critical Shifts for Ministry in a Phygital World: Critical Shift 3: From Experts to Emergence

Eugene Kim

The 500 Year Rummage Sale

The late theologian Phyllis Tickle suggested that roughly every 500 years, the institutional Church undergoes a massive upheaval — a “rummage sale” in which it keeps what is healthy and useful and lets go of what is harmful or no longer working. The Protestant Reformation, the Church’s most recent great rummage sale, happened almost exactly 500 years ago. We seem to be right on time.

The Reformation was ignited, in part, by a technological revolution. Gutenberg’s printing press, invented just decades before Luther nailed his theses to the door, meant that for the first time in history, ideas could be reproduced and distributed at unprecedented speed. Scripture could be placed in ordinary hands. The printing press didn’t cause the Reformation, but it made it more possible.

The internet came online in the early 1990s and, in just a few decades, has transformed the way we do nearly everything, from commerce to community, from education to entertainment, and yes, the way we practice our faith. We are living through a major technological disruption far greater than the printing press in both scale and scope, followed by major spiritual and ecclesial upheaval. If history is any guide, we shouldn’t be surprised that the ground is shifting beneath us.

The Big Question

Tickle argued that one pivotal question sits at the center of every major ecclesial upheaval: Where is the authority?

At the time of the Reformation, authority was concentrated in the institutional Church, embodied in papal power. The Reformers’ motto, sola scriptura, was a massive decentralization. Authority shifted from Rome to the canon of Scripture. But following the currents of the Western Enlightenment, knowledge became power. Biblical scholars and theologians became the new gatekeepers and interpreters of that canon, sparking fierce conflicts and debates.

Five hundred years later, that decentralization has run its course to its logical conclusion. We now have over 45,000 Christian denominations worldwide, each claiming, in some sense, to have the correct interpretation of Scripture.

And now, the question arises again: Where is the authority? Or, “Who can we trust?”

Trust in institutions of all kinds is at historic lows. In part, because we’ve seen corruption, abuse, and cover-ups become familiar stories. The Church has been on the wrong side of history more times than we care to count — on science, slavery, race, gender, sexuality, mental health, etc. And, globalization and pluralism have shown us that truth and wisdom don’t belong exclusively to any one tradition. A simplistic, single-point-of-authority model no longer holds up in a world full of diversity and complexity.

So again: Where is the authority? Who can we trust?

Wikipedia and the Wisdom of the Whole

Recent research has found that Wikipedia is now roughly as reliable as Encyclopedia Britannica, with comparable error rates. However, Wikipedia covers a much broader range of topics and can be updated in real time. Britannica relies on credentialed subject-matter experts, while Wikipedia crowdsources knowledge from its contributor community. Both have strengths and weaknesses, and of course, expertise still matters, but one thing is clear: we no longer regard expert opinion as the only valid source of knowledge.

The New York Times food editor may have genuinely excellent taste and expertise. But when I’m hungry in an unfamiliar city, I open Yelp or Google Reviews. I want to know what hundreds of ordinary people with different palates, budgets, and expectations actually experienced. A critic’s opinion is just one data point. The crowd’s collective experience is usually more relatable and far more diverse. We engage with information this way instinctively now, in almost every area of life. Yet the Church is still largely asking people to simply trust the expert at the front.

In a complex world, no single vantage point can see the full picture. Experts are only human — subject to bias, shaped by limited traditions and contexts, and often missing the view from the ground. Our best hope for navigating complexity isn’t to find better experts. It’s to cultivate better collective intelligence.

The Body, the Internet, and Emergence

The Apostle Paul imagined the Church as a body of many parts, an interconnected organism where “the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you’” (1 Cor. 12:21). Every part sees and contributes something the others cannot. The body doesn’t work when only one part does all the talking.

For decades, computers were capable of complex operations, but they were isolated and limited to whatever data they held locally. Information was shared through slow, clunky means: printed documents, floppy disks, and person-to-person transfer. Then came the internet. Suddenly, millions of computers connected into a network, and learning accelerated exponentially.

The prevailing model of the Church still looks a lot like a collection of isolated CPUs. Individual congregations, denominations, and ministries that are largely disconnected, running their own programs, generating their own content, rarely aggregating the collective wisdom of the whole Body. The internet has been available to us for decades. We’ve used it to stream our content. We haven’t yet used it effectively to connect our wisdom.

Scientists and systems thinkers use the term emergence to describe how complex, connected systems produce outcomes that no single part could have planned or predicted. A flock of birds or a school of fish has no choreographer. The pattern emerges from each animal simply responding to its nearest neighbors. A forest ecosystem has no boss or manager. Resilience and abundance emerge from countless organisms interacting, adapting, and responding to one another over time.

Emergence happens when the conditions are right for the whole to become greater than the sum of its parts. It cannot be engineered from the top down. It can only be cultivated from the ground up, by creating the right environment, fostering the right relationships, and asking the right questions. There’s more to it, of course, but the point is this is a fundamentally different posture than what most ministry leaders have been trained to assume. But it may be exactly what the Church and the world need right now. And technology can offer the tools that make emergence more possible.

(Sidenote: It would be impossible to write about emergence and collective intelligence without acknowledging the elephant in the room: artificial intelligence. AI presents both extraordinary opportunities to aggregate and synthesize collective wisdom at unprecedented scale, and profound risks we are only beginning to understand. This topic deserves much fuller treatment, and I defer to my Phygital Fellows colleagues who have thought about it far more deeply than I have.)

What Does This Mean for Ministry in a Phygital World?

When I was a pastor, I didn’t always have the answers. But it was tempting to fake it, to perform certainty and position myself as the source of wisdom in people’s lives. It might have provided job security, but it would have also been dishonest. Even my training in the Bible and theology was narrow, shaped by a handful of traditions and experiences. The people in my congregation knew things I would never know. I needed their wisdom. Unfortunately, I seldom thought to ask for it.

Shifting from expertise to emergence means decentering authority — and ourselves when necessary — and learning from everyone. It’s about finding solutions together in the space between us. Where is the authority? The authority is in us, in the wisdom and consensus of the community. When an idea emerges from many people’s input and genuinely resonates with a community, the authority belongs to no one and to everyone at the same time. There’s no need for command-and-control or competition. We can collaborate to solve problems none of us could address alone.

To start moving from expertise toward emergence, here are a few ideas to consider:

Create feedback loops. Companies invest heavily in customer feedback because good leaders know what they don’t know. In my experience, most churches never ask. Every Sunday, a goldmine of insight sits silently in the seats. What if, using a simple online form, congregants were given two minutes after a service to respond to two or three questions, such as: What are you taking away from today? What questions or feelings came up for you? Was anything unclear or confusing? The patterns that emerge might surprise us — and they could fundamentally reshape the way we lead.

Involve stakeholders in complex decisions. When a community faces a difficult question about direction, values, or resource allocation, the instinct is often for leaders to deliberate privately and announce. But in my experience, solutions that emerge when diverse stakeholders are brought to the table are almost always better than what any one person could produce alone. Complex times call for a more adaptive leadership style that isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about knowing which questions to ask and who needs to be in the room. We need to move from solving problems for people (which seldom works) to solving problems with them instead.

Harvest the wisdom in the room. Use crowd-sourcing tools like Reddit to ask questions or Mentimeter to create polls and word clouds. Virtual whiteboards like Miro or Mural can help facilitate brainstorming. Collaborate on documents using Google Docs to allow people to comment, contribute, and build on each other’s ideas over time.

For smaller groups, structured circle dialogue is a simple practice that can surface extraordinary insights in a safe, trusting environment. Two tools that New Wine Collective has built into its online platform for groups are speaking queues and timers. Speaking queues ensure every voice is heard, and timers ensure each voice is heard equitably. When a group learns to listen attentively to one another, powerful things can emerge from the many voices in the room, not just the single expert in front.

Use technology to aggregate wisdom across communities. One of the gifts of digital technology is its capacity to connect people and knowledge across geography and now, even across languages. What if churches and ministries were not just disseminating content, but sharing learnings — patterns, practices, failures, breakthroughs — across a networked Body? Rather than each congregation reinventing the wheel in isolation, we could be building a living, collective intelligence together. This is part of the vision behind New Wine Collective: not one more ministry doing its own thing, but a platform that can support a whole network of ministries, weaving together wisdom, knowledge, and resources from diverse traditions and backgrounds.

We Are a Part, Not the Whole

The shift from experts to emergence requires the humble recognition that we are each a part, not the whole. That the Body of Christ, in its full diversity and breadth, sees more than any one person, tradition, or culture, and that the Spirit moves through the many, not just the few.

The phygital world gives us unprecedented tools to actually live this out: to connect across distance, to surface voices that have been systematically excluded, and to aggregate wisdom at a scale the early church could never imagine. The question is whether we have the imagination and the humility to use them that way. What would change in your community if leaders began to see themselves less as the source of wisdom and more as its stewards and facilitators? What might emerge if the whole Body were actually given voice?

Three Shifts, One Vision

Taken together, the three shifts in this series point toward a fundamentally different vision of what the Church can be in our time.

When we move from limits to liberation, we stop trying to be everything for everyone. We begin to see ourselves as part of a larger, richer ecosystem, one where diverse voices and traditions each contribute something the others cannot. We empower people to trust their own intuition to discern the pathways they need in community with others.

When we move from content to connection, we stop optimizing for the lecture or performance on stage and start designing for the relationships through which genuine belonging, healing, and transformation can happen. Love, not information, is the original technology of human transformation. Love is why the Church exists.

When we move from experts to emergence, we stop concentrating wisdom at the top and start trusting that the Spirit moves through the whole Body — that the insight we need may already be present in the people around us, waiting to be surfaced, gathered, and woven together into something new.

A Church that is liberated, connected, and relies on collective wisdom is a more fully realized one — one that is closer to the vision Paul described when he wrote that the whole Body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love as each part does its work. (Eph. 4:16)

The rummage sale is already underway. What emerges next will be up to all of us.