In 1997, the top-grossing movies were Men in Black, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Liar Liar, and Airforce One.
As Harrison Ford yelled at Gary Oldman, “Get off my plane,” and punched him in the face, the corporate titans at Blockbuster video were laughing their way to the bank. They held the home video industry in a tight grip of control and enormous profit.
That same year, two buddies started a fledgling company that took a chance on new video technology called DVDs. They had faith that VHS tapes would be a thing of the past and that the American consumer would be willing to purchase a brand-new DVD player to watch movies at home.
They started Netflix as one of the first home delivery DVD services, allowing patrons to rent a movie and simply drop it in the mail when they finished watching it.
And when their fledgling company skyrocketed to the top and toppled the Blockbusters of the world, they saw beyond the mail-to-home video option and innovatively considered an online on-demand possibility instead.
Nowadays, Netflix is synonymous with streaming, on-demand, and original content. Netflix is the primary driver behind why many have cut the cable cord and why all major networks have developed their streaming services.
As of July 2021, Netflix had 209 million subscribers, including 72 million in the United States and Canada.
We look at company’s like Netflix and believe that it takes enormous, organizational shifting steps to be successful. But what if it is not the huge changes that make a difference but the little-big things?
More often than not, when we look at the success and failure of a church, we believe it takes tremendously huge, overhauling changes. And so, churches will either subjugate themselves to change their entire identity to model themselves after the latest fastest-growing church, or they will settle into immobility, not wanting to compromise their identity.
We have convinced ourselves that the difference between one thriving church and one failing is a different as night and day.
But what if what separates successful churches and failing churches is relatively small? What if the difference between thriving and floundering focuses on subtle and small things that make an incredible difference?
On Sunday, October 31st, we are starting a new conversation, “The Little-Big Things: How Shared Spirit-Led Commitment Drives Oversized Results.”
Over the next six weeks, we will journey through the Book of Acts who hosts a repetitive statement not found in any of the rest of the New Testament letters: And the church grew in numbers.
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