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My book, Tell Me A Story: Creating Life-Changing Ministries from Stories, shows how an intricate ministry can be created by combining ideas from several stories. There’s a good reason why this works. It works because each story portrays one person’s version (vision) of a design for the ministry from the eyes of the protagonist he or she chooses (or, perhaps, is assigned) for the story.
Then, when the first story is considered by those working to develop the ministry, that team puts the story ideas into some convenient format (the book suggests some good ones). As soon as the second story is considered, the team begins to redesign the ministry. It takes the best features of both stories and makes a single, improved ministry from them. From then on, it’s redesign, redesign, redesign.
It’s true in general that virtually all ministry design is redesign. Even in the simplest of cases, for example, when one person sits down to design a very simple ministry. That individual comes to the chair with some ideas of what the ministry should look like. The next minute he or she is trying either to express those ideas in some form of document, outline, or diagram or to improve them. And the process proceeds by alternating randomly between documenting and improving, by capturing a design and redesigning it.
The approach of my book, what I call the Story Method, is almost exactly that. That is, it alternates between documenting and improving a design, capturing it and redesigning it. The only difference is that I describe a simple, orderly way to do this. I define a process that divides it into a sequence of steps, rather than a random walk.
We can say that the Story Method exploits the general principle, the aphorism, that all design is redesign. If you think about it, just about everything that is designed goes through a process of successive redesigns.
• An artist lays out a canvas, begins to sketch out his or her ideas, moves things around a bit, changes their size, begins to fill in the sketch, changes shapes, changes colors, scrapes a bit off to do it better, and so forth. The canvas captures the design, the changes are redesign.
• An architect does the same. The client comes with a mixture of specifications (three bedrooms and three and a half baths) and design ideas (master bedroom on one side and the other bedrooms on the other side). The architect turns this into a sketch (or two or three), the client suggests changes (not all of which will work), the architect resketches, the client changes some more, the architect draws a floor plan or picture of the outside, the client makes changes, and on and on until there’s no sense in changing more.
• An author gets an inspiration, writes a short description of his or her book, perhaps develops an outline, perhaps creates storyboards, and then writes, rewrites, rewrites, and rewrites, changing as he or she goes along. And then, of course, somebody else edits and makes lots of changes and suggests some more.
Design is all about capturing and changing. All design is redesign.
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Ministry Design 