March 2007 Archives

In 200,1 The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America did a large study looking at who attends worship in ELCA congregations. In this graphic you see church attendance by age group in the blue bars. The black line marks the percentage of the US population for the same age groups. What we see is that older people make up the majority of the ELCA and young people are noticeably absent, particularly when compared against the general US population.

The common wisdom has been is that what we see in this graph is young people sowing their wild oats and eventually they will gather their senses, get married, have kids, move out to the suburbs and start going to church again. However, this seems to be a case of wishful thinking, and what we are seeing is a massive change in church attendance practices among generations. George Barna sorts worship attendance by generation.

My friend Pam, the founding pastor of Spirit Garage, has an article in Christian Century, Off-Road Ministry: What I Learned from mountain biking. It's a lovely article, I hope you enjoy.

National Geographic has an interesting story this month by T.D. Allman on Orlando as the model of the new American city.

Walt Disney's utopian dream forever changed Orlando, Florida, and laid the blueprint for the new American metropolis. Everything happening to America today is happening here, and it's far removed from the cookie-cutter suburbanization of life a generation ago. The Orlando region has become Exhibit A for the ascendant power of our cities' exurbs: blobby coalescences of look-alike, overnight, amoeba-like concentrations of population far from city centers. These huge, sprawling communities are where more and more Americans choose to be, the place where job growth is fastest, home building is briskest, and malls and megachurches are multiplying as newcomers keep on coming...

In this place of exurban, postmodern pioneers, the range of choices is vast even when the choices themselves are illusory. Here life is truly a style: You don't want to live in a mass-produced, instant "community"? No problem. Orlando's developers, like the producers of instant coffee, offer you a variety of flavors, including one called Tradition. Structurally it may seem identical to all the others. Only instead of vaguely Mediterranean ornamental details, the condos at Tradition have old colonial finishes. In Orlando's lively downtown, it's possible to live in a loft just as you would in Chicago or New York. But these lofts are brand-new buildings constructed for those who want the postindustrial lifestyle in a place that never was industrial...

All over Orlando you see forces at work that are changing America from Fairbanks to Little Rock. This, truly, is a 21st-century paradigm: It is growth built on consumption, not production; a society founded not on natural resources, but upon the dissipation of capital accumulated elsewhere; a place of infinite possibilities, somehow held together, to the extent it is held together at all, by a shared recognition of highway signs, brand names, TV shows, and personalities, rather than any shared history. Nowhere else is the juxtaposition of what America actually is and the conventional idea of what America should be more vivid and revealing.

Welcome to the theme-park nation.

Personally, I find this a terrifying vision of an American future, yet if you travel in many of the ex-urbs of the US, this is the future you find. But as Allman points out, Orlando is based on the distribution of capital generated elsewhere. So where is the capital coming from? Economist Richard Florida suggests that the largest economic engine in the US is no longer agriculture or manufacturing but in creative industries such as technology, media, bio-med, etc.

Orlando rates high in service industries but low in creative industries and is likely to not attract a significant creative core because of the cities urban design. Florida argues that Creative industries are collecting in particular regions of the US such as Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Minneapolis, and Austin. These cities boast dynamic urban arts cultures and good neighborhood life attractive to creative workers and industry rather than the sprawling developments of Orlando. As Florida contends, we are on course for a situation of two Americas; one that is doing well in the new creative economy and the other that is losing out. While Orlando-esque cities seem to be very much in the future for the US, we should also not count out Creative industry centers as another possible future for the new American city.

The folks over at Brand Autopsy have been looking at the dilution of the Starbucks brand experience in the use of automatic espresso machines, the lack of coffee smell in the stores etc. Today, they pointed to a leaked email by the Starbucks Chairman Howard Shultz writing to the board about very similar concerns.

The email is a great look into how brand experience is cultivated and can be lost in the process of corporate growth.

Last week I had a great conversation with a designer here in Minneapolis where we were talking about the Design Economy as the next wave in business. The basic idea is that as products and information become commodities, economic advantage shifts to the realm of design. The Star Tribune had a story about the Design Economy in today's paper.

Q Have we entered a design economy?

A The information economy is still with us. But the paradoxical effect of the Internet is that it has made information so widely available that it holds no real economic value. Everybody can get incredible amounts of information, so there's no competitive advantage of having it. The idea of the design economy is that, for developed countries like ours, which cannot compete in a global marketplace on price or even quite often on the quality of a product, we have to compete on the basis of innovation, creativity and imagination, which takes you to design. By design, I don't mean just aesthetics but function and cultural adaptability.

Q What's an example in our daily lives?

A Apple and the iPod. Competitors came out with products that were cheaper, but didn't look as good or feel as good or form an emotional bond with the customer. Or look at the car industry. The American segment struggles because it still operates under the old assumption that price matters most. But people will pay a higher price for a Toyota Prius because it has a multiple meaning: It gets you places, but it uses less gas and carries this symbolism of doing something for the environment.

It used to be that an American product would sell whether it was well designed or not. Now a product must not only be priced right and have quality and aesthetic value, but form an emotional attachment. It empowers you to have every song you've ever liked stuffed into this tiny thing in your pocket that you can take with you anywhere. Look what you can do on your cell phone now. These products go deeper than aesthetics. They become almost a part of your body.

In a globalized economy, most manufacturing work (software code included) can be done elsewhere in the world at a significantly lower cost than can be done in the US. This means that competitive advantage in the US will have to be driven by design and creativity. Richard Florida's Rise of the Creative Class is a fantastic and detailed text on this account.

This shift to the commodification of information also affects churches and religious communities. Recently I typed "Jesus" into the search field of the Barnes & Noble web site and received more than 22,000 hits. Jesus is a commodity. No one needs churches or clergy to tell them about Jesus or any other religion for that matter, it can all be found somewhere else. The design economy holds true for faith communities as well, churches will be judged by how well, or not, they help live their faith, not on their ability to provide information.

The folks over at Signals vs. Noise, a software design blog, speak of good software design as 'helping the user kick ass.' I love the notion of good design helping the user to do great things, and this seems to be the basic idea behind most good design. In an entirely different field, Susan Susanka's "Not So Big House" design concepts focus on homes being smarter, not just bigger, are a great example of design as a central piece of better living.

So what does this look like for faith communities? What does a church that helps its users kick ass look like? It will likely be different depending on people and location, but I don't think any community will get to a place of good design without a lot of intentionality. Good design cannot be something you tack onto the end of the creation process to make it look pretty. Often this just ends up being an exercise in polishing a turd. Good design is integral to the whole creation process, with the end user in mind through the entire development. Where does this all go, I'm not sure, but I know I do love good design.

For a brief historical article on Design Economy matters, see BusinessWeek's article here.

Here's another from my trip to Stockholm last summer.