RiskI’m near the end of this series on curriculum series and I think one of the themes emerging more than anything is the idea that ministry leaders are pushing for advancement and change. However, one person commented that the majority of ministry leaders buying from the curriculum publishers are currently happy with the the way things are. Since this majority of ministry leaders make up the bulk of revenue for the publisher, they have little motivation to want to change things up.

That reminds me of when I was at a previous church and we were locked into a a check-in software that was absolute junk. When moving to this software, we were told that it would do everything we needed, including being a great solution for multi-site check-in. For the 18 months we used this software, it caused me nothing but headaches. Hours and hours of my life were sucked into the vortex of this software never to be salvaged. I went around and around with customer support offering suggestion after suggestion. Most of what I said fell on deaf ears.

The problem? This software company had very little of the mainstream and mega church market. The small to medium sized traditional church was their bread and butter. The big churches really didn’t pay much more for their services, so this company had little motivation to meet our needs. If it hadn’t been for the tens of thousands of bucks we’d sunk in to go with this company, we would have ditched them right away. Wow, I wish I hadn’t brought all of that up.

So here’s the main point. Many of us are being considered the noisy 5%. We want more, but publishers are reluctant to give us what we want due to financial risks if what we want doesn’t become profitable. It’s an understandable quandary. However, there’s got to be some middle ground somewhere, right? Meeting the needs of this noisy 5%, doesn’t meet starting a new line of curriculum from scratch, does it? Isn’t there room to modify, expand or tweak something that already exists? To some degree I’d think I’d say that there’s plenty of great material out there already, it’s just getting it in a form that more fitting for the noisy 5% is what’s needed.

Thoughts?