Henry Ford didn't invent the car, neither did he invest mass production. 'All' he did was to produce a car cheaply enough that middle class Americans could afford to buy, the Model T. He is reported to have said, 'if you always do what you've always done you will always get what you've always got"
To be blunt about it, Henry Ford not only was wrong, he was catastrophically wrong. Although we should not be too hard on him because we perhaps do not understand the context in which he spoke or what he was trying to say through the comment. Ford, like all great industrialists knew that to maintain and grow their market share, they had to constantly develop a better understanding of their consumer and also improve the manufacturing process to better meet the consumers' needs.
Perhaps the motivation behind Ford's famous quote was to make it clear that to have a different output there must be a different input. Continuing to do the same thing will not result in better outcomes. Henry Ford's comments were perhaps a rallying call to continually seek to make changes to improve performance
How is all this relevant for Christians in a rural Welsh, twenty-first century context? There seems to be evidence that many Christians here are committed to continuing with their current practise of church life and expecting the results to somehow significantly improve. It is as if we are saying, 'One hundred years ago we set a meeting time, choose some hymns, organised a preacher and half the village would attend. Now we do exactly the same and hardly anybody turns up!' Perhaps we think, like Henry Ford's words imply, that if we carry on doing what we've done in the past, eventually we will get the same results - people will start to come again.
However the reality is that this has not been the case for many years and probably never will be again.
The gospel is still 'the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes (Romans 1:16) but our methods are not working and perhaps we must at last face the reality that they never will. There is an important truth to face; we are to seek God not just for the message but also the method, not just what to say, but how to say it.
For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it (John 12:49)
But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. (Matthew 10:19)
In his book, The Medium is the Massage, Jerome Agel argues that how a message is presented significantly influences, not only how the message is received, but the very nature of the message itself. Could it be that by continuing with methods that are not working, we are inadvertently changing the actual message itself? Could we be changing the gospel from a powerful, relevant, life giving reality to an out of date, irrelevant, un-connected message that interests very few?
To return to Henry Ford, he was obviously not talking about the impact of a post-modern and post-Christendom culture. However in our current context, perhaps we should change his saying to this: 'if you always do what you've always done, you will never again get what you've always got.'
There surely must be a better way!
Martin Holland
