Open Source Gets Focused

As someone who uses the blogging platform wordpress, I get access to a feed that tells me all about the latest developments going on with wp.  As I was logging in to the blog today I noticed a little article about setting scope.  Click here to read the article.  One of the things I didn’t know about the development cycle of WP is that they were basically adding every cool idea to a new release whenever it came up.  This of course extended their release cycle by months because of all the debugging and testing that each new feature or piece of code added to their timeline.  They want to narrow the focus and stick to a specific set of community-determined features and let the other features wait for a different release.  This will normalize their release timelines and make for better and more efficient upgrades.  I think this is a great example for us to see.  In many churches we operate in a similar way to open source projects, we have leaders but in many churches much of the direction and scope of the church fluctuates and changes based on current events and specific people.  Churches are naturally people pleasing places because so many of the events and activities are the result of reactions to circumstances and ‘cool ideas’ instead of focused values.  Churches thrive when they are focused on a set of core values and put in the time and energy to evaluate, refine, align and embed those values consistently in everything they do.  What would happen if more churches lived within the value of focus?  There is incredible freedom and respect that happens when good boundaries are set, so on that note I hope things go well for WordPress…