As a missionary and a Christian technologist for forty years, I lead Cybermissions, which uses computers and the internet to facilitate the Great Commission. Over the years I have been among the pioneers of internet evangelism and mobile ministry, and Cybermissions has established various online training and internet radio initiatives. However, on reflection, I think there is a bigger picture to innovation that I may have missed and that is Structural Innovation.
 
I now believe that the innovation of structures and systems is where the most powerful discipleship takes place. These higher-level innovations create methodologies, frameworks, institutions, and practices that transform culture, nations, and traditions. The development of such redemptive structures has led to great spiritual victories such as: 
1.         William Carey’s training of India’s public servants and his opposing, and eventually banning, widow burning.
2.         The original Sunday School movement which taught trade schools as well as Scripture.
3.         The great universities such as Oxford, Harvard, and Princeton, which were established to train clergy.
4.         The preaching friars of St. Francis of Assisi which discipled Europe.
5.         The Benedictine monasteries that created well-regulated religious communities that preserved faith, scholarship, and Christian tradition in a more sustainable form than the occasionally chaotic Desert Fathers.

Systems Create Quality

These redemptive structural innovations all involved the creation of robust systems. Only a system can deliver a consistent, high quality result. Whether you are washing the dishes, or landing a rocket on a comet, or making disciples of nations, you need to create a system for that activity. And the system should involve taking frequent measurements of quality.

“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort.”[1] Missions is about the quality of souls and the quality of God’s Church. Since the only way to get a consistent high- quality result is with a system, missions must be about the creation of godly systems that produce the qualities that God wants in his people. Qualities such as spirituality, holiness, wisdom, justice, truth, and righteousness, as well as evangelistic effectiveness.

The neglect of quality in the pursuit of quantity has led to widespread theological devastation such as the Prosperity Gospel. Crusades without seminaries, the scorning of theology, the neglect of spiritual formation, the discarding of the Sermon on the Mount, the contempt for the trained clergy, and the antinomianism of much modern missiology has left its dreadful mark!

The main paradigm for missions needs to be the Christian discipling of whole nations, and the process of discipling whole nations involves laws, education, systems of governance, and the establishment of institutions that incarnate, teach, and demonstrate the principles of the kingdom of God. There needs to be Christian businesses and Christian business principles. There needs to be Christian politicians, and Christian political science, and institutions that teach Christian ways of governing nations. And all of this needs to be predicated on developing the qualities of the kingdom, at depth, in every disciple of Jesus Christ.

For instance, I used to set up Christian internet cafes among unreached people groups in Southeast Asia. Part of the process was training indigenous missionaries to run the icafes well and to inculcate basic business principles. The thoroughness and attention to detail required to run the Internet café was part of their process of discipleship and became spiritually formative.

Structural Solutions Require Systems

Gadgets don’t disciple nations (and I say that as a Christian technologist). Shallow innovation leads to shallow discipleship. Also, ideas are not necessarily successful innovations. There is a massive difference between a Ph.D. thesis full of wonderful ideas sitting on a library shelf, and a factory producing an essential product and employing thousands of people for forty years. Most scientific discoveries take many decades to go from the laboratory, to “bucket chemistry,” to prototype, to production, to government approval and marketing. Devices and ideas will not advance the Great Commission unless they land in the real world. And they will land in the real world if they are incorporated into robust systems and processes! Here are seven reasons why ministry solutions require systems:

1.         The only way to have a permanent solution to an ongoing problem is with a system. Hospitals have an ongoing problem with the possibility of infection. The only way to solve that ongoing problem is by implementing an infection control system. There is no “one-shot” solution. Infection needs to be controlled every single day, and that requires a system. 
2.         A system enables you to train new people in that job. Without a system, your new staff will have to make things up as they go along. Your system is the way that you train new people into your values and your practices.
3.         A good system will enable you to monitor things as you go along and to correct mistakes before they become disastrous. For instance, ministry embezzlement can be caught early on by a good financial system.
4.         Chaos comes from variance. If one dish is sparkling clean, the next is broken, and the one after that is still dirty, you have variance. Variance will destroy your desired solution. Good ministry systems control variance in discipleship outcomes.
5.         Variance leads to alienation. Random ministry will lead to hurt parishioners. One person gets lots of attention, the next person gets none. The church member who gets none, goes away disappointed and feels alienated. 
6.         Competence is the way we love people. An incompetent doctor who harms people is not a loving physician. An incompetent farmer whose family starves is not a loving farmer. Competence is delivered through systems. If you want to love people well, you will implement positive systems that bless human lives!
7.         Systems create culture. The culture of a missions agency is built upon the systems that govern its activities. If you want a better organizational culture you will need better organizational systems that are implemented by caring servant leaders who take care of all the details. Discipling nations requires transforming culture which means changing systems and to do that we need to understand how systems work, and how they must be redeemed.

Does God have systems? If you use a microscope, a telescope, or an oscilloscope, you will discover the systems of God! The Lord gives us dazzling displays of his sense of order in everything from his wonderful equations to the structures of crystals. Every cell in your body is full of systems, ranging from cell walls to the nucleus, the DNA, and the mitochondria. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 14:33, “God is not a God of chaos but of peace” (and order). Yet, systems are not sacred. They exist for only one reason, which is to give a consistent high-quality result. If there is another system, that produces a better outcome, then the first system can be thrown out entirely.

A New Vision for Mission

The information and communication model of missions is incorrect. Our beliefs are not just shaped by information. Our beliefs are overwhelmingly shaped by the institutions and systems that we belong to: our family, our schooling, our cultural traditions, work, church, and voluntary associations.[2] If we don’t redesign and redeem the institutions, then we cannot change the beliefs for very long. 
 
Management guru, W.E. Deming, said “A bad system will beat a good person every time,”[3] so if we leave bad systems in place, they will crush the life out of Christian converts. Social action is simply reforming the systems that are destroying the souls of men and women who are made in the image of God. Leaving injustice in place is to subject Christians to soul-deforming forces of oppression and unbelief. It is to renounce the spiritual task of the discipling of whole nations and the instruction of them in all that Jesus taught, including the Sermon on the Mount.
 
Yes, it is still a great idea to covertly distribute the Bible on SD cards in a creative access nation. However, we should also have a long-term plan for the social transformation of that nation through Christian systems, institutions, laws, practices, and Christian business ethics. We should implement a robust theology that challenges the principalities and powers and establishes the values of the kingdom of God in the hearts of the clergy and the laity alike. We must be like the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages, with plans that stretch out for hundreds of years! 
 
The innovation we need at this time is for the discipleship of nations that are soaked in pornography, crushed by unjust financial institutions, distracted by entertainment, crushed by lingering imperialism, and deceived in every way possible. Missional systems must  create environments where truth is heard, justice is served, Christians learn integrity, and where righteousness emerges from a new generation of believers.