Some catfish can hunt by detecting the electrical current of their prey’s heartbeat, it’s a sense called electroreception.
Scientists are just beginning to understand how electroreception works, and why the seemingly scattershot collection of animals who have it (platypuses, sharks, catfish, axolotls) do, and what they use it for. As they have researched further, they have found evidence that electroreception has evolved, disappeared, and re-evolved, sometimes multiple times in the same species. Catfish, for example, evolved the sense, lost it, and then re-evolved it. This is counter to the way we can sometimes imagine evolution as a linear path towards more and more optimized species. If electroreception was useful enough to catfish to evolve it, why did they lose it? And if it wasn’t actually useful, why did it evolve all over again?
Scientists suggest that the catfish’s redundant evolution is likely due to the evolution of the environment around it. The catfish developed what it needed when it was in one environment, and when that environment changed to where that kind of close-up hunting was no longer the best option, the catfish who spent their energy on other senses thrived, and the sense died out. Then when the environment changed again, the catfish began to redevelop some of those senses, not by reactivating an old mechanism but building an entirely new one. 1
This may seem inefficient, but there’s simply not any other way the catfish could have evolved. The scope and sensitivity of the electroreception, as well as the frequencies it was most sensitive to, had to be rebuilt from scratch. Just because electroreception had stopped being effective at some point in the past, doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be effective now, and just because it had been done one way in the past doesn’t mean that’s the way it should be done again at its reincarnation. It’s not inefficient or pointless, it’s responsive to the environment.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
We, as church leaders, are often a leaders of the most recent chapter in a long and storied history. The list of things that have been tried is functionally endless. One of the most common conversational roadblocks our innovators tend to hit is “well, we tried that in the past, and it didn’t work,” or “we used to do that, and it fizzled out.”
There’s a lot of value in institutional wisdom, in partnering with people who know your community’s history, but we can’t let it get in the way of leading the church that exists now. The environment that led to the success or failure of a program in the past has substantially changed, and likely, so has the program, even if it looks the same on the outside.
As a Christian community, how many times have we invented and reinvented small groups? Some version of a group of 10-12 people gathering regularly to pray, study scripture, and be in community together in pursuit of God has been happening for quite literally thousands of years. And yet, when the original 12 disciples were split up by time, circumstances, death, and location, it’s not like the church never tried it again because it didn’t work out long-term.
When we talk about innovation in ministry, people sometimes imagine that we are talking about things that have never been done before. There are billions of Christians, and there has been a Church for millennia; everything has been done before. When we talk about innovation, we are talking about using your context (the water you swim in) to shape what skills, practices, and abilities your community needs to evolve in this era to be effective. They may look familiar, they may not, and a concern about whether we’re trying something that we know has failed before should be considered, but shouldn’t outweigh the call you and your team feel to embark on a project, program or idea.
If you’re feeling called to evolve (or re-evolve) your ministry in some way, reach out to us, and we can wade with your team into the waters of whatever comes next.
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