Yesterday, I listened to a talk from Steve Jobs from 1983. I’d encourage you to at least play it in the background or give it a skim listen at some point:
Did I mention that he gave this talk in 1983?!?! In this hour he predicted the world that we live in today. And he did it with passion and confidence. It felt as if Steve Jobs had time travelled to the year 2000 and then went back to 1983 to tell people what he witnessed. Amazing!
As I listened to Jobs I couldn’t help but wonder whether or not churches ought to dream like Steve Jobs? 
Jobs stood before these people and said, “This is what the world is going to look like in 10-15 years because of what we are doing at Apple”. This got me wondering, should pastors stand before their churches and say, “this is what the world will look like in 10 years because of the impact of our church”?
Maybe Not
My first instinct is to balk at the idea of a pastor or church speaking in this way about the work of God in their community. There are several things that are different about what Jobs did and what a church is tasked with doing.
For one, there is very little that is offensive about an Apple Computer (apart from maybe the price). The gospel on the other hand is offensive. Convincing someone of buying an Apple isn’t the same as convincing someone of the beauty of Jesus. One requires the work of the Spirit the other is something that man can do.
Secondly, the folks at Apple hand-picked the people that worked for them. They only took the greatest of people. The church is much different. Christ does not look for the best and the brightest. The church is not structured like Apple nor should it be.
Third, after I listen to this presentation from Steve Jobs I cannot help but marvel at the amazing Steve Jobs. That seems opposite of what a Christian preacher ought to do. James Denney was correct when he said, “No man can bear witness to Christ and to himself at the same time. No man can give the impression that he himself is clever and that Christ is mighty to save”.
For these reasons and more I do not think it is wise to uncritically latch onto Steve Jobs’ passion and say, “church we ought to dream like this”. People can build computers, only Christ can build His Church.
At the same time, I do not think we ought to dismiss the passion of Steve Jobs. There is something here that ought to be emulated.
Maybe
There is something about Steve Jobs that ought to humble churches. He had a vision, albeit one created in his mind, to change the world. He believed that dream so much that he “gambled everything on it”. He gave his life to the vision of Apple. He could talk about 10-15 years down the road because he knew that he was going to still be at Apple. The average pastor in the SBC barely stays for two years in one place—so how can he dream about 10 years down the road?
There is also something to be said about the fact that Jobs would not settle for something that did not fit his vision. If it was not ready he was not going to roll it out and sell people garbage. He had a dream and rather than settling for what could be done today he kept plodding until his vision became reality. There is certainly a sub-biblical way to follow Jobs in this way. Yet, there is also something to be said for not comfortably camping out in a world that doesn’t yet reflect the heart and mission of Jesus.
This leads me to ask, why can’t we take God’s story and His mission and dream like Steve Jobs? If God is working to fill the world with his glory by rooting out of his kingdom all sin and unbelief and replacing it with passionate worshippers then why can’t we be like Steve Jobs in seeing this “dream” come to fruition? We might not be able to say, “in 10-15 years” but we can certainly say with confidence “this is the world that God is creating”. And let’s be like Steve Jobs and not rest until God’s vision for the earth is accomplished.
If a man can be this passionate and confident about a dream of computers why can’t believers be that confident and passionate about the sure promise of God’s redemption?
Jesus promised us that whatsoever we asked in his name of the father, he would give it to us. Few of us actually believe that. How many pastors are so plugged into the Cause of the Kingdom that they know confidently and correctly that their decisions are exactly what God wants them to be doing in that place and at that time. If we begin with the question of “What wilt thou have me to do?” and not move until we know, then we can ask, “How am I to do that?” and get an answer. And if the “how” involves things we don’t have, then we can approach the Throne boldly, resting on His promise to provide for His service.
Not sure how else we would want to do ministry.
If we know what God wants, isn’t the vision something that comes with that knowledge? And if it isn’t then what are we doing?
Do you have to get fired by your first church, start two new churches–one if which arguably is a failure–watch your first church almost go out of business and then buy your “modest success” (I.e. near failure) in order to heap apologies at your feet for firing you, and then finally use your success with your third church to essentially take over just the worship ministry of an entire mainline denomination to hand it over to your lead minister of worship and choir director in order to START seeing your vision actually fulfilled?
Or should the real lesson be not to turn your church start over to a presumably superstar entity head because they might not be able to grow a church? Or is it instead that you should spend hundreds of millions on a couple of times creating satellite campuses (Apple III and Lisa) that you have to close before you essentially canabalize your business to establish a new, 10 seat prototype worship that people love to go to but you can only fit the worship team and one family in at a time (the original Mac)?
There are so many potential lessons you could extract from Jobs life including his extremely abrasive treatment of co-workers, his adoption of Eastern spiritualism, and his death due in part to rejection of modern science early after the diagnosis of cancer and taking up “residence” in the state with the most favorable rules to him (and MUCH lower population than California) in order to qualify for a liver transplant.
Yes, Jobs was an effective visionary and a prophet and fulfiller of his own vision. But the first handheld computer that was the first step in fulfilling that vision was also a failure (the Newton) and even the company itself has broken the commitment to stay out of the music business that was made to the Beatles’ Apple Studio that allowed the company to be Apple Computer. That was not very forthsightful, I suppose?
The moral to the story I think you can safely extract from Steve Jobs life? The Book of Ecclesiastes tells it all and tells it true. And better.
So I take it you don’t have an iPad…..
I’m not sure how my ownership of devices is relevant to my view on Steve Jobs. That detail was all from memory. But since you asked, I posted it from my iPhone.
Get a Droid.
Heh. You realize that Droid is licensed from LucasArts by Verizon specifically for their line of Android phones, right? So you’re suggesting abandoning one evil empire by buying another one that is licensed to use as a trademark an allusion to a third one?
Just making a joke.
I’m sorry if my retort came across harshly. I thought you would appreciate the irony.
I’ve never liked Alanis Morissette’s music.
I think that every child of God should, with prayerful surrender and faithful anticipation, dream dreams of God doing a mighty and miraculously large thing with their lives.
I think it is good, not just good, but right and proper, for the children of God to ask Him to give them visions bigger than their abilities, environments, or “peers” would naturally allow.
We, the children of God, have been super-naturally birthed from above by the atoning work of the Son of God. Therefore, we should be inclined to dream beyond the realm of the natural and set our sights on that which is of the super-natural. For after all, we are literally the children of the One and Only God. In other words, Our Daddy is The Super-natural of the First Order. Therefore, our dreams should be to suit our birthright.
You promised you wouldn’t say anything. I am never sharing any of my secrets with you again.
What makes me uncomfortable about this post is that I think churches have been destroyed by someone conjuring up “God’s vision” and adopting a Steve Jobs type of attitude. I’ve personally seen churches ran into the ground because a pastor was convinced that they needed to build a new building because it was God’s will.
What also makes me uncomfortable about this post is that in reaction to the above paragraph some pastors don’t dream at all. What I was convicted about as I listened to that Jobs talk is that God has given us a biblical vision that we absolutely KNOW is His will. Why not be as passionate and single-minded as Steve Jobs was for the true Kingdom?
That is a fine line. Key is making sure that the vision in born in God’s heart and that I am serving his glory.
Jobs said one thing I recall that seems to have some real and direct application for churches. He was asked once if Apple used “Focus Groups” in product planning, and his response was along the lines of “No .. people usually don’t know what they want until you show it to them”.
Hmm…
Yeah, that was one of the things in the interview that I noticed about Jobs. He wasn’t reactionary. He had a vision and was so confident in that vision that he believed people would respond to it. He didn’t poll a bunch of people and then create products around that. He created his product and then convinced everyone that if they didn’t have it they were losers. (Not that churches should totally adopt that approach…LOL).
There weren’t any absolutes in the products he was offering.
I am a fan of usability testing for seeing if a person can “grok” how something that is supposed to benefit them–like a product and especially software–works. Focus groups do decently well at giving you trends of subjective appreciation. User groups are often equally horrid at providing a sense of direction, but usually they act like a democracy in giving people a “say” that makes them feel like they’re listened to.
As to a personal example of someone expressing a vision given to him (in this case) by God, very early in my dad’s time as Rob Zinn’s associate pastor Rob was expressing a very specific vision for Immanuel growing to a specific size which, if I recall correctly, was around 3,000. Now one of the tough parts about that kind of specific vision is “how do you count that?” Another is a natural trepidation by those of us who have dealt with God being rather ambiguous most of our lives actually whispering an actual number in some leader’s ear.
And, finally, the one other thing you can encounter is a sense of enormity: that where you are versus where the vision takes you makes it seem impossible at times to get there. Kind of like the promise to Abraham that his descendants would outnumber the stars and most likely especially when he was still waiting for the first descendant to appear (and gaming the system to help God out by impregnating Hagar.) In the case of Immanuel, as far as I know they accomplished the vision in terms of membership. The history at the site today says they’re currently averaging around 3,000 in weekly attendance.
So I’ve experienced at least one, very specific vision expressed as given by God that was appropriated by the church and over roughly a 25-year time period completely fulfilled as originally stated.
Mike Leake,
I don’t think there is nothing wrong with having a dream, Matter of fact I have dreamed through a lot of sermons when I wasn’t Pastoring. Some of my brothers are pretty dry. Some of the sermons I’ve heard in church were so long and dry that I wished I had brought some cornbread and an onion to church with me so I could have a snack before lunch.
I think it’s a lot easier to make a dream come true out in the world than in church, much easier. CEO’s of companies are more on the same page than a church has ever thought about being, sad but true. If the typical Baptist was thrown into a furnace of fire like the three Hebrews, there would be enough ashes to acatter from New York to California.
We Minister’s can have dreams, but don’t be suprised if they are shattered
I’m just returning Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography to the library, so your post is timely for me.
It does seem sad to live in an America that doesn’t have a vision of the future. At least, the future doesn’t look much different than today. It’s hard to read about Jobs and not catch his idea that we’re on the verge of something better. The economy and culture has sapped a lot of that kind of vision.
If you ask a church about a “better future,” my guess is that most will measure it by “bigger.” There’s not a lot of dreaming about the future being a place where spiritual lives are better.
But, on the other hand, Jobs’ “genius” was that he was callous in relationships. He demanded the seemingly impossible. When it worked, it was great. But if you lost, you were a loser, and put out. After thirty years of repetition, he accomplished a lot of his vision. I’m not a wishy-washy “feelings” person, but it’s hard to imagine an ethical justification for his treatment of friends and family.
Visionary? Yes. But “servant leader” he was not.