Wave goodbye to the past

There’ll be a couple of links in my links post later today about Google’s latest innovation – Wave – which is being billed as “the way we would have invented email if it was invented now”… or something like that.

It raises an interesting question – what other things do we do that would be done completely differently were they thought of now? There are heaps of examples I can think of where ideas are refined and developed rather than being groundbreaking.

But I’m wondering more about church – particularly in the context of my ongoing discussion with Izaac.

My question is this… if Sydney’s Anglican church (or in fact any church/diocese/denomination anywhere) were starting from scratch today would they go about things with their church in every suburb (exaggeration)/saturate the market geographically strategy?

Is what we do in any situation ever the best model just because it’s been developed from experience? Or should we step back and reinvent the wheel at every turn. And do you need Google’s billions to do that?

This isn’t a groundbreaking concept by any means, I just haven’t really thought it through with regards to everything I do before. We tend to be so keen on natural progression that it rules out lateral decision making at every step of our processes.