Your Mother Should Know!

When I first set up a church in a pub in 1989, many church leaders rubbished the idea; some said the slogan ‘God & a pint’ was blasphemous. But within five years everyone was hailing it as a great idea, and invitations rolled in for me to talk about it. Churches, aren’t known for their progressive thinking.

But it’s not just churches: whenever someone jumps outside the box and comes up with a seemingly radical idea, there are always plenty of people shouting it down or saying why it can’t work. But many of yesterday’s bizarre ideas are today’s status quo.

Albert Einstein said that creativity is intelligence having fun. Perhaps that’s why we ‘play around’ with new ideas. Po-faced committees don’t generally come up with innovative plans, just safe repetitions of what has already been. Imagination requires playfulness: the willingness to think ‘what if…’

Playing around with ideas can’t always lead to success. But among dozens of nonsense thoughts, just one may turn out to be a stroke of genius.

Most of us are not great inventors or genius innovators, but life is all about having ideas that solve problems, create opportunities and make our existence more interesting. There are lots of voices (mostly within ourselves) that tell us to climb back into the box; lots of reasons to ‘be sensible’, to distrust our intuition.

Setting up ‘Holy Joes’, the church in a pub, turned out to be one of the best things I ever did – however stupid or ‘blasphemous’ it seemed to some people. And it wasn’t that innovative – Jesus hung out with ‘publicans and sinners’ long before me. The brilliant computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs said we shouldn’t be trapped by dogma, which is all about what other people think. Instead we should keep listening to our inner voice, and have the courage to trust our own intuition.

Muggins – a person who allows themself to be outwitted. Also a title used humorously to refer to oneself