NeoSparks
Blog
Experiments: Failing Forward
When it comes to the contest for Poster Child of Experimentation, there isn’t any real debate. Even nearly 100 years after his death, Thomas Edison still epitomizes innovation through experimentation. Over the course of his 84 years of experimental living, he captured...
Experiments: The Seeds of Innovation
For the next several posts, I’d like to dig deeper and plant a few more thoughts deep in the soil of your mind as you think about innovation. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve liked to plant things and watch them grow. I’d dig a shallow hole in the rocky soil of the...
Getting into the Weeds of Innovation – and Loving It
Innovation is gritty work. It demands getting our hands dirty. It means embracing messy. It invites us to jump into “the weeds,” as we look for bold solutions to some of our world’s most ingrown problems. Ironically, the most effective innovations tend to spring from...
What is the “Square Watermelon” of the Ministry World?
Several years ago, Japanese farmers got a neospark—a new idea to spark an innovation. They realized that the oblong, oval-round shape of natural watermelons makes them very difficult to pack in shipping trucks from the farm to the store, extremely difficult to stack...
The Tension of Innovation—You need BOTH Hard AND Soft Skills
Innovation requires that you become cohabitationally comfortable with certain core tensions—tensions between popular, “soft” concepts like collaboration, experimentation, freedom to fail, freedom from fear, and decentralized leadership and then less popular, “hard”...
Spiritual Innovation: God’s Gift of our Regeneration
But to all who have received Him—those who believe in His name—He has given the right to become God’s children.John 1:12 The very moment a person trusts Jesus Christ, he or she is regenerated. The simplest way to explain the concept of regeneration is this way: When...
A Delicate Question: Is It a Sin Not to Innovate?
In our last post (“The Supreme Motivation for Innovation”), we learned that God’s unmistakable innovational impulse throughout redemptive history is motivated by His love for us. But there’s a delicate question we need to ask—specifically of those who claim to be in...
The Supreme Motivation for Innovation
There is an undeniable and traceable thread of innovation throughout the entire record of redemptive history, from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22. And this innovational “newness-for-value” (or different-for-impact) pattern is so clearly evident from even a superficial...
When is God at His Innovational Best?
Ok, this is gonna be stretching. And if you’re new to the world of theology, this is going to be super stretching. Just like physical stretching helps you to be more flexible, recover, and perform better, so it is with intellectual stretching. And when we add theology...
The God of Innovation: Toward a Theology of Innovation
I’m not trying to break your Weirdness Meter with this post. I promise. But when you see the title of this post, your gut reaction may be, “What the heck does God have to do with innovation?!” I get it. And before a couple years ago, I think I would likely have...