(This post was originally published at Sydney Anglicans).

I needed to transfer some money to a friend’s account. My everyday account is with St George, and I usually transfer money from this account. However, I also have an account with Westpac, and this time was required to transfer the money from this account. I’d never done this before, and perhaps you like me thought that the process of transferring money would be the same from bank to bank. It was actually very different experience with Westpac. Despite what you’ve read so far, this post isn’t actually about banking, but for the curious, here’s what was different:

• I was provided with lots of helpful explanatory notes along the way (this was good),
• I discovered that the space to write a description about the payment was limited me to 18 characters (this was bad),
• I was sent an SMS with a special security code to enter to finalise the payment (this was good).

I thought that there wouldn’t be many differences between banks in this simple process, but I was wrong. My lack of experience and awareness of how others do the same things, had limited my view about what was possible. St George could learn from Westpac, and vice versa.

And there’s a lesson here for us – it’s easy to get familiar in doing things the way we always do it, and forget that there are other ways. We can learn a lot just by taking a look at what others do.

It’s good to go exploring, to see how other people do things, and learn from them – taking the good (for our context), and leaving the rest.

For example (and these example just related to technology and communication):

• are there other ways of producing your PowerPoint slides with the service order, songs etc each week. How could this be done differently to help people following along and participate in the service?
• are there different ways your church could communicate with its members that would be more effective? Perhaps its creating a Facebook account. Perhaps it’s giving people the weekly newsletter on their way out of church, rather than on their way in.
• what can you learn from other church websites about navigation, content and layout, and how could these lessons be applied to improve your church’s website?

Lets not fall into the trap of thinking that the way we do things is the only way. And let’s share what we’ve learnt and what works well with other churches. Of course, we’re limited in the time we can spend visiting other churches and chatting with others about what they do. But that’s one of the reasons why this weekly column exists, and why I created Communicate Jesus.