The only way you survive is you continuously transform into something else. It’s this idea of continuous transformation that makes you an innovation company.

Ginni Rometty

Innovation defines the American experience:

Innovation is critical to life and growth and success in pretty much anything we care about, from relationships to learning to business to recreation to cooking to our lives of faith and more.

It’s one of the reasons I find Presbyterian reformed theology so compelling. Not just reformed but reforming. The great irony of course is that so many “reformed” congregations are so stuck and resistant to innovation that they are well on the way to rigor-mortis.

This is what was so cool about Monday’s visit to the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. Rebekah and I got up early, enjoyed breakfast, then spent as long as we could wandering around the amazing collections illustrating just how critical imagination and reinvention has always been to the American experience.

Energy, intelligence, imagination….

Ah, there we go again back to thinking about reformed theology. In Rebekah’s ordination vows (almost the same as those taken by elders), she promised to – among other things – lead with “energy, intelligence, imagination, and love.”

There sure was a boatload of intelligence and imagination on display at the museum Monday in Detroit.

I’m not sure what captured me the most, and there will be many more photographs to share once I download from my Nikon z50, but I was blown away by – for starters – the following:

• JFK’s presidential limousine…
• the humongous locomotives…
• the race cars…
• the Rosa Parks bus…
• the glass collection…
• the Julia Childs exhibit (very very cool)…
• the American furniture exhibition…
• the practical demonstration of mathematical probability.

And of course so much more. But these all represent breakthroughs and new ways of thinking. And of course breakthroughs come – in response to real world challenges – from imagination and hard work and creativity and innovation.

Curating a collection like this involves asking a lot more questions than simply, “Is it old?” or “Is it of historical significance?” But also, always, taking into account the story of innovation. It’s a narrative The Church must learn – and embrace – if it is to be at all relevant in the future.

So here are just a few iPhone pics from the time Rebekah and I spent at Henry Ford’s museum. We could easily have stayed around for a couple more days! (We tend to read the background material too, and it’s not hard to become so engrossed we stay in one section for an hour or more.)

Enjoy, and keep your eyes open for more to come. It’s going to take a couple of weeks to debrief and edit and process it all after we return to North Carolina this coming weekend.

– DEREK