Prologue
“The most common mistake of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist.”
Every engineer knows this sickening feeling of creating a brilliant solution… to the wrong problem.
I spent a number of years teaching Systems and Design Thinking in the context of City Building at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. The students, participants in each year’s cohort, are global executives from fifteen countries, 15-20 years into shaping cities, nations, energy grids, transportation, and multi-billion-dollar projects.
At Harvard we discuss the necessity of seeing the Ecosystem, not just the jargon of IRR “internal rate of return,” NOI “net operating income,” waterfall structures and Mez Loans. Those things are necessary, but equally important is optimizing the fabric of life: community engagement, demographics of age and education, poverty, culture, transportation, investors, politicians on a four-year election leash, food deserts, health, density, and much more.
One of my websites, NIMBY.com, addresses this “Not In My Backyard” phenomenon. Only “Ecosystem” thinking can solve for, “It wasn’t my idea, so even if it’s great, I say Not In My Back Yard!” Thus, the internationally known acronymn and deal-killer NIMBY.
Systems and Design Thinking Asks:
“How do the parts interact to produce the outcome of the whole?”
But, the modern church world doesn't really ask that question as they should. Why not? Perhaps, they don’t hate bad fruit as they should? Or worse, maybe worldly complacence, compliance, and money are the obstacles?
Instead, the attendance System tries to optimize nameable external components. “If we only did these things a little better, God would descend and we wouldn’t have to keep embellishing our stories about how close to God we are, in spite of the bad fruit.”
- better sermons and conjured controlled participation
- better buildings and parking
- better music and performance
- better programs
- better branding and marketing
- better clergy training
- better small groups with better curriculum
- better attendance pipelines and convenient times and venue locations
But the parts never add up. Because the System Jesus designed was never a System at all—it was an Ecosystem. A living, interdependent organism, defined by daily relationships, spiritual saturation, priesthood, accountability, and devotion.
Do Read Acts 2:42-47…
to see what JESUS brought to earth, on earth as it is in Heaven!
The people of God ran…
- on Presence, not performance
- on daily life, not weekly rituals
- on Spirit, not structure
And then… quietly, gradually…
- Component parts replaced organic life
- Ritual replaced relationship
- “Not forsaking Attendance” replaced passionate life Together
- “Covering” replaced relationships with Gifts
- Spectators replaced disciples
- Clergy replaced the Priesthood of everyone with the Spirit
- Buildings replaced true daily living together
- Programs and placing membership replaced repentance
- Sermons and speeches replaced saturation in the nation of priests’ daily Life Together
- Control and rules and doctrinal adherence replaced faith
- “Safety” and predictability replaced trust of God’s Spirit in His People, the very Gift He promised, “for you and your children, and all who are far and near, and God is calling you into Him”
We optimized the wrong thing.
And the outcome is visible everywhere:
- shallow roots
- fragile faith
- moral collapse
- bored hearts
- exhausted leaders
- confused or depressed teens looking for more, somewhere
- spectacular defeats
- learned hopelessness
- spiritual anemia
- lost generations
- leaven of hidden darkness filling the batch unchallenged
- a wax museum or stained-glass Jesus instead of the Lion and the Lamb of God
I believe—deeply—that Gen Z is the first generation in centuries with the courage to say out loud what everyone feels:
- “The emperor has no clothes!”
- “This isn’t working.”
- “This isn’t Jesus.”
- “Show us what’s REAL—Show us JESUS.”
And that is why this book exists.
Because the Ecosystem Jesus designed is not gone.
It has simply been buried under centuries of cultural sediment.
It is alive. And it is rising.
Gen Z, welcome to the door.
What follows is the Path to the Jesus Life Ecosystem. It will cost you everything. That is to say, it will cost you everything you don’t need. But WORTH IT!!!! Boom!