Mark Lau Branson’s Memories, Hopes, and Conversations: Appreciative Inquiry and Congregational Change explores how to apply appreciative inquiry in the Church setting.
AI is a change management technique that involves the entire body in a process of discovering what is best about a church, and building on that. Branson suggests that you should look over the history of your church and use these steps to form “provocative proposals” about what the church could become.
- Focus on an area of the church’s life and mission.
- Name the best examples of this in recent memory.
- Name specific factors that contributed to the church’s ability to be faithful to this mission.
- Building on the “best of what is/was”, envision “what might be.”
- Write out a proposition of what is possible, express as it is already true.
What do you think of Branson’s list? What would happen if your church followed created some provocative proposals?
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