{"id":87,"date":"2023-10-17T16:58:49","date_gmt":"2023-10-17T16:58:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wesleys.uk\/latest-news\/?p=87"},"modified":"2024-05-29T14:26:05","modified_gmt":"2024-05-29T14:26:05","slug":"the-change-the-church-needs-will-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wesleys.uk\/latest-news\/2023\/10\/17\/the-change-the-church-needs-will-come\/","title":{"rendered":"The change the church needs will come"},"content":{"rendered":"

Change might not come from within.\u00a0 It may not come from where we plan, or expect.
\nChange will come from ‘Bethlehem’ rather than ‘Jerusalem’.\u00a0 Micah 5v2<\/span><\/p>\n

The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev died in 2022<\/a>. He was 91.<\/p>\n

He is remembered in the West fondly for ending the Cold War. He is remembered less fondly in Russia for ending the Soviet Union. The thing is, he didn\u2019t try to do either originally. What he was trying to do is, through\u00a0Perestroika<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Glasnost<\/a>, reform the Soviet Union. Keep the system, but just remove some of the more unpleasant and inefficient bits from it.<\/p>\n

But once he started the process the whole thing started to unravel, and the entire country imploded. And that was that. Once it all collapsed, the Soviet Union ceased to exist within weeks (and nobody in the West or the East saw it coming, by the way), they\u2019ve been trying to pick up the pieces ever since.<\/p>\n

So \u201cGorby\u201d is an interesting case. A fellow who tried to do something good failed miserably but somehow ended up on the right side of history nonetheless. He will be missed. We could use more like him.<\/p>\n

Thirty years later after the fall of the Soviet Union, it\u2019s still an interesting question. Starting from where Gorbachev was standing, what would one have done differently? Hard to say.<\/p>\n

Like Marc Andreesen said, once a culture gets to a certain state of stagnation, internal reform is impossible. Nothing to do but let the outside world eat its lunch. Let that be a lesson.<\/p>\n

The image was inspired by something Marc Andreessen<\/a>, the legendary VC said in a podcast (The Knowledge Project #129)<\/a>, namely that when an organization gets to a critical mass of bureaucracy and stagnation, it can no longer be reformed from the inside. The only thing that can happen is that it can be toppled from the outside<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Credit (including image):\u00a0 www.gapingvoid.com<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

..but it might not come from within, and even if it does, it might not come from where you expect,
\nChange will come from ‘Bethlehem’ rather than ‘Jerusalem’.\u00a0 Micah 5v2<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":89,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-leadership","category-the-future"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wesleys.uk\/latest-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wesleys.uk\/latest-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wesleys.uk\/latest-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesleys.uk\/latest-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesleys.uk\/latest-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/wesleys.uk\/latest-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93,"href":"https:\/\/wesleys.uk\/latest-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions\/93"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesleys.uk\/latest-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wesleys.uk\/latest-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesleys.uk\/latest-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesleys.uk\/latest-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}