Blue Ocean Faith

There's a new phrase being bantered around the business world: Blue Ocean Strategy. It's about reinventing what you're doing, rather than competing within the confines of an industry and trying to steal other people's customers.

Mike Metzger, writing recently for the Clapham Institute, says "Businesses that keep using the same language are fishing in red oceans - where the market space gets more crowded, the lines get tangled and the competition turns the water bloody."

He goes on to use the red ocean as a synonym for church today. "It's a continuous film loop of sermon series covering worship, family, fellowship and evangelism... perfectly designed to yield the results we are getting."

Albert Einstein once said that we can never solve a problem in the framework in which it was created. Metzger suggests the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get a different result.

It's no secret that church attendance is dropping in the U.S. as well as New Zealand. New churches that grow rapidly are more often than not growing through 'transfer growth' (people moving from one church to another). There's no real growth - we're just fishing in the same ocean.

In Blue Ocean Strategy, customer demand is created. Metzger says that Blue Ocean Faith is “…not an emerging church. It’s not a rehashing the same information. It’s helping people imagine an old faith in a new way.”

So, is Oxygen a reinvention of church? Is it a new way to imagine old faith? Are we casting our line into a blue or red ocean?

For more, check out the Clapham Institute