“And what you have heard from me through many witnesses entrust to faithful people who will be able to teach others as well.”
2 Timothy 2:2
I’ve been reading lately about something called a diffusion network.
I know. That sounds like something you’d find on the back of an air freshener. But stay with me.
A diffusion network is the web of relationships that new ideas travel through as they spread across a group. The research on this goes back to a sociologist named Everett Rogers, who spent a lot of time figuring out why some ideas catch on, and others don’t.
Here’s what he found. Change rarely moves through the official org chart. It moves through trust. Person to person. Coffee cup to coffee cup.
Rogers sorted people into groups. About 2.5% are innovators, the brave souls who try something new just to see what happens. About 13.5% are early adopters, the respected folks everyone else quietly watches. Then come the early majority, the late majority, and finally the laggards, who will adopt your new idea sometime after the heat death of the universe.
(If you’ve ever tried to change the time of a worship service, you’ve met the laggards. You may have been one. No judgment.)
The more I read, the more one thought kept coming back.
That’s us. That’s the Network.
We are not just an organization that puts on events. We are a web of people who try things, learn things, and carry good ideas home to our congregations and synods. And we share. We share these ideas with each other. We are a diffusion network. We just never had a fancy name for it.
Let me give you two examples.
The first is peer ministry. Barbara Varenhorst trained a guy named Lyle Griner. Lyle took what he learned and started Peer Ministry as an organization. Then youth workers caught it, tried it, and brought it home. For years, Peer Ministry has been a primary model for leadership and ministry development for young people across ELCA (and other denominations) congregations.
One teacher. One student. Then a whole lot of congregations. Because an idea spread. And now, Peer Ministry has taken on new life as the Relational Leadership Collaborative.
Paul would have recognized that pattern. He tells Timothy to take what he heard and entrust it to faithful people who will teach others, too. Count the generations in that one verse. Paul. Timothy. Faithful people. Others. That’s four links in the chain. Paul was running a diffusion network before it was cool.
The second example is accompaniment. This one is different, because nobody really led it. There was no single champion.
Over time, more and more of us grew uneasy with service as something where we are the doers and the people we serve are the receivers. It felt incomplete. It felt transactional. Congregational leaders started getting more excited about connection. About building relationships and walking with people instead of doing things for them.
That idea didn’t spread because someone launched a campaign. It spread because it rang true. One conversation at a time, it changed how a lot of us think about mission.
So sometimes an idea spreads because of a champion. And sometimes the network itself is the champion.
Either way, the network has to actually gather for any of this to work.
Which brings me to Extravaganza.
Extravaganza is where the diffusion happens face to face. It’s where an innovator tells a room about something they tried that might be a little crazy. It’s where an early adopter leans over and says, “Wait, tell me more.” It’s where somebody in a hallway hears an idea, writes it on a napkin, and carries it home to a congregation that’s never heard of it.
The napkin is optional. The conversation is not.
So here’s my invitation.
If you’ve been trying something new in your ministry, come and share it. Some of it worked. Some of it didn’t. Both are worth hearing. If you’ve been watching others try new things and wondering what might work for you, come and learn. You don’t have to be first. You just have to be in the room.
Most of us are a little of both.
Extravaganza 2027 is January 22-25 at the Hilton Minneapolis. Early bird pricing has passed, but registration is open, and there’s room for you. You can find everything at ext27.org.
Paul handed it to Timothy. Barbara handed it to Lyle. Somebody handed something to you once, too.
Come pass it on.
In Christ,
Todd
