Growing up in middle Tennessee, I developed some ideas I no longer hold. Thankfully so. As a teenager and young adult in the 1980s, however, they seemed perfectly logical at the time.

Without specifically naming those thoughts, I can sincerely claim that I came by those beliefs organically. My environment and my circle of friends encouraged certain ways of thinking. None of the people who influenced me were stupid or evil. They simply had particular lines of thought that were reinforced by other friends and acquaintances with similar lines of thought.

I marvel at how my thinking actually changed over time. I didn’t think my way into new ways of thinking. No one argued me out of my thoughts. If someone had tried to convince me that I was misguided or had even criticized me, I would have doubled down on my (misguided) ideas. Even when I learned new things of various types, these tended to reinforce my thinking because I usually would delve more deeply into my own thoughts rather than explore new or differing ideas. I was so entrenched that no amount of “more thinking” was going to change how I thought. 

It’s my belief that more thinking rarely changes a person’s thinking. Instead, we need the experience of actually test-driving our thinking with real-life action. As we do that, we also need interaction with new circles of people with whom we want to identify and who can push us into exploring new ideas and new lines of thought.

Too often, we get stuck in the place of thinking about our thinking. Or we reinforce this by talking with other people who think in similar ways and who also think and talk about what they already believe. This is an endless feedback loop that prevents breakthroughs.

Academics can be guilty of this. They can think endlessly about their ideas, share those ideas with people who think similarly, and then learn more about why their ideas make sense. This produces a closed loop (surprise!) which rarely results in fresh ideas or breakthroughs.

People who work in a particular field—maybe skilled labor, or management, or education—can be guilty of this. They spend their days running up against the same problems, and they express their ideas and grievances to people who share the same ways of thinking. The result is (surprise!) a closed feedback circle in which no fresh lines of thought emerge.

The only way to see things differently is to test our ideas in the real world of doing. And to do those things in spaces that are beyond our normal comfort zones. And to do them long enough that we can see and hear the dissonance with our previous thinking.

Learning and thinking are crucial. Doing without reflection is foolish. We need the capacity to learn, think, and reflect. But learning and thinking are insufficient because thinking without doing is useless. Grand ideas that are not accompanied by action are of little value, even if they happen to be true.

While this principle applies broadly, I see this as a singular problem within North American churches today. Many churches and church leaders are stuck in imaginative gridlock. They commiserate with fellow churches and church leaders who are likewise stuck. Their shared learning and thinking creates closed loops that reinforce the inertia.

Richard Rohr describes the problem well: “We do not think ourselves into a new way of living, we live ourselves into a new way of thinking.”[1] In other words, lines of thought normally develop out of our experiences, not vice versa.

Only by experimenting with new things can churches begin to see how their thinking must change. The problem is even exacerbated by the limited ways in which Christians think about experimentation. Too many church leaders believe the only venue for innovation is in their Sunday morning assemblies.

What if churches stopped thinking about how to think differently? What if they actually tried new ways of gathering, new methods of discipling, new patterns for family ministries, and new ways of functioning as leadership groups? What if they utilized different worship spaces or leaned into new practices for spiritual formation that aren’t overly dependent on the Sunday sermon? There are so many areas for exploration and experimentation!

Churches must do more than learn, teach and think about their problems. (See the attached illustration from Adam Grant.) They must do something new in order to expand their thinking.

1.  Richard Rohr (@RichardRohrOFM), Twitter, January 1, 2024, 10:20 am.