8 The Architecture Problem: Optimizing the Wrong Thing

As an engineer and “Expert in Residence” at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, home of the #1 ranked School of Architecture in the world, I can tell you: architecture and design determine outcome.

You cannot build the 500,000-ton, 2717-foot Burj Khalifa (the Mission-Impossible-Tom-Cruise-climbing, “world’s tallest building,” in Dubai, a Harvard Architect product) on a foundation designed for a three-foot doghouse.

You cannot modify a bicycle into an F-16 no matter how many parts you replace.

You cannot optimize a failing system into success if the system itself is wrong for the task.

Would you try to fix Alaska to grow an orange tree? Perhaps optimizing Alaska weather isn’t the right solution. If Orange Tree Habitat Life is the goal, why not try to grow any Lifeform in the place it grows naturally?

It is the same with “Growing a Christian.” Why not use the Ecosystem God Designed for JesusLife in humans, that they might grow as mightily as they possibly can in the shortest amount of time, to harvest the best fruit? And that CANNOT be the System of Sunday attendance, programs, missions, and clergy.

A grove of orange trees covered in snow in a snowy field in Alaska.

Similarly, learning how to dribble an American football is a really dumb thing to try to optimize. Why not just do it right in the first place? Trying to optimize the wrong System versus allowing the Ecosystem to flow.

Two basketball players trying to dribble a football.

But That Is Precisely What Christianity Has Tried For Centuries:

Optimizing a thing Jesus never designed. Jesus designed a “walk along with Me daily real-life apprenticeship,” and the apostles then of course did the same with those they encountered and shared life with: the priesthood of ALL believers.

Just to demonstrate further why “The Master Teacher” chose to bring an Ecosystem of Life from Heaven, a daily hand-to-hand apprenticeship (the Greek word for “disciple” is well-translated apprentice), rather than a classroom or “study” or speech, is convincingly portrayed in the book On Combat, by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman.

Colonel Grossman tells of the necessity of “high fidelity” training, true life training rather than classroom or theoretical incomplete practice. Everything is different when life is authentic, rather than theatrical or an academic exercise or information dump.

Here’s how it went. A police officer in training practiced disarming an intruder or criminal who was pointing a gun at him. Literally, hundreds and hundreds of times he had friends and family members surprise him with a replica dummy gun pointed at him. The policeman understudy would practice responding instantly, by snatching the gun out of the hand of the bad guy. Again and again. He became very, very proficient at snatching the gun in a smooth, lightning-fast move. He would then hand the “gun” back, and they would soon sneak up on him again—training, training, training.

Then, finally and predictably, came the moment of truth. As the rookie police officer was in a convenience store bodega with a partner, he stepped around an aisle and a criminal pointed a gun, close range, at the officer. They were both shocked at how fast he disarmed the thief. Good on you!

And both the officer and the criminal were also equally shocked when the officer, having magically stripped the gun right out of the gangster’s hand, proceeded to hand the gun back to the criminal. Just as he had practiced 1000 times with his friends and family members. True story.

Hall of Shame Police Academy Training story. And that truth matters to us.

People do not rise in real “combat” to the level of their information, aspirations, and hopes, or the great discussions and classes and studies they’ve had. They sink to the level of their training, hopefully a high-fidelity apprenticeship.

But if instead, in a religious attendance-based System, we practice, practice, practice words and emotions and information, even if all true—we will never have one-tenth of the Transformation that we might have had if we were living in an apprenticeship of the DAILY priesthood of believers, each “considering how to spur one another on to love and good works.”

Ritual, attendance, and clergy are not bugs, but FEATURES of the System that is not the Bible. But if we are serious about “the full measure of the stature of Christ” then “I am in the pains of childbirth until Christ, Anointing, is formed in you.”

General Jack Keane mentioned in an interview that there is no such thing as Abrams Tank training on weekdays for a few hours, with summers off. Paraphrased, “If you want to learn how to fly an F-16 or drive an Abrams tank or operate a Patriot Missile battery system, there’s no such thing as a school week. Seven days a week, 14 or 15 hours per day, is the way to learn anything meaningful. Immersion.”

Why did the American school system fail? There’s your answer. Why does American religion fail to help their teens and their marriages? There’s your answer. A System is not how God Designed us. Both the Scriptures and the Fruit support that we should direct our energy towards the 59 “one another” daily verses and thereby discover the overflow Ecosystem of Life He came and suffered unspeakably to bring us from Heaven.

And yet, here are the most common “fixes” leaders pour their energy into:

But no amount of optimization or programming can transform the System into the Ecosystem.

Imagine trying to fix the Titanic by:

None of that fixes the fundamental flaw—the architecture and path are wrong.

The System’s Architecture Produces:

The Ecosystem’s Architecture Produces:

The problem is not the people.

It’s a faulty blueprint.

The System Fails, Not Because Christians Are Weak…

…it fails because the architecture cannot produce strength out of the inevitable starting places of weakness for all of us.