I was talking with a friend this week about one of the most talked about water cooler books of the last many years, Malcolm Gladwell’s, The Tipping Point, and was reminded of how good it was and how it helped me when I was planting Village Church. It emphasizes an important basic biblical principle – that little things matter because they lead to big things.

Why did God take the kingship away from Saul? Because he didn’t wait for Samuel. Why didn’t God let Moses go into the Promised Land? Because he hit a rock with a staff instead of speaking to it.

It’s the little things. They are everything.

What is a Tipping Point?
The Tipping Point revolves around the little things as they relate to social epidemics. What is a ‘Tipping Point’? Gladwell says:

It’s the name given to that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It’s the boiling point. It’s the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards. AIDS tipped in 1982, when it went from a rare disease affecting a few gay men to a worldwide epidemic. Crime in New York City tipped in the mid 1990’s, when the murder rate suddenly plummeted. When I heard that phrase for the first time I remember thinking – wow. What if everything has a Tipping Point?

He says there are three things that cause something to ‘tip’:

(1) The Law of the Few: “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social skills.” Gladwell describes these people in the following ways:

• Connectors are the people with a special gift for bringing the world together. To illustrate, Gladwell cites the midnight ride of Paul Revere, who was successful not because he had a loud voice or just because the message was important (the Red Coats are coming!) but because he knew everybody. He was connected.
• Mavens are “information specialists”, or people we rely on to connect us with new information. They accumulate knowledge, and know how to share it with others.
• Salesmen are “persuaders”, charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills. They tend to have an indefinable trait that goes beyond what they say, that makes others want to agree with them.

(2) The Stickiness Factor: the specific content of a message that makes it memorable and have impact. The children’s television programs Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues are specific instances of enhancing stickiness and systematically engineering stickiness into a message.

(3) The Power of Context: Human behavior is sensitive to and strongly influenced by its environment. “Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.” For example, how “zero tolerance” efforts to combat minor crimes such as fare-beating and vandalism on the New York subway led to a decline in more violent crimes city-wide such as murder. Here he talks of the now famous ‘broken windows theory.’

For the Christian/pastor/church planter
For a Christian in general, and more specifically a pastor, and a church planter, studying social epidemics and how they spread is pretty well mandatory if we want to be successful at spreading the most important social epidemic in history: the advancement of the gospel of Jesus. I read this book asking: How do we use these basic principles of a spreading epidemic to reach more people with the message of Jesus?

How do we make the gospel the fastest growing epidemic to bring about change the world has every seen? Such is the challenge before the church.

We use the Law of the Few, recognizing that like most things in life, the 80-20 rule is true about reaching people for Christ as well – large amounts of people are going to be reached and impacted not by the masses (for a plethora of reasons) but by a few – ‘connectors’ – gifted and called by God to reach people. For a planter, strategically, one needs to be good then at identifying, pouring into and leveraging these ‘few’ people for the cause of Christ. A hard thing to admit but just true.

We use the stickiness of the message of the Bible to reach our culture? The beautiful combination of history (reason) and art that it is. Which is why Jesus was both a great theologian and a great story teller. A Rationalist and a Romantic.

We use the power of context – including church communities, their personalities, attitudes, and behaviors, and how those all interact with and at times subvert their host culture, for the spreading of the message of Jesus.

These of course are just suggestions of how we could use the lessons of The Tipping Point to serve the God. Take them or leave them. The bottom line is we as the church should be working day and night on the small things which are going to have big impact – and pray that the message of Jesus ‘tips’ in our generation – for the glory of God and the good of people!