Church Planting Advice from Google’s Founder
Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Gary Page, the founder of Google. He was asked how to get more people thinking about doing things that might actually change the world:
There are a number of barriers in place. Let me give an example. In our first founders’ letter in 2004, we talked about the risk profile with respect to doing new innovations. We said we would do some things that would have only a 10% chance of making $1 billion over the long term. But we don’t put many people on those things; 90% work on everything else. So that’s not a big risk. And if you look at where many of our new features come from, it’s from these riskier investments.
Even when we started Google, we thought, “Oh, we might fail,” and we almost didn’t do it. The reason we started is that Stanford said, “You guys can come back and finish your Ph.D.s if you don’t succeed.” Probably that one decision caused Google to be created. It’s not clear we would have done it otherwise. We had all this internal risk we had just invented. It’s not that we were going to starve or not get jobs or not have a good life or whatever, but you have this fear of failing and of doing something new, which is very natural. In order to do stuff that matters, you need to overcome that.
This is solid gold–even if Gary didn’t precisely have church planting in mind. I can’t think of anything that would “change the world” more than new culturally-situated, Jesus-loving churches. By the same token, when it comes to church planting, there’s tons of risk just waiting to be invented–and heck, some of it’s even real. But to actually plant a church, you have to push past that fear of failure and just go for it. Fortunately, Jesus is intimately involved in that process.
HT: Daniel Scocco
