Do you remember going to Blockbuster Video (or whatever video store was in your community) on Friday Nights? Even my small community of Sheakleyville, PA, had a video rental store (which is saying something.) Friday nights were full of possibilities as you browsed the videos to see what you might be in the mood to watch.

The champion of video stores was Blockbuster, with its ubiquitous blue-and-yellow branding. They ruled the video store universe. There were other competitors, of course, but no one could knock off the king. 

Enter Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings. In the mid-1990s, they grew tired of the late fees that Blockbuster charged and the challenge of watching movies in a day. They dreamed of a better alternative. In 1997, Netflix was born as a mail-order service where you kept the DVDs as long as you needed and didn’t pay late fees. While Netflix’s business saw some modest success, it was never really profitable. In 2000, Randolph and Hastings offered to sell the company to Blockbuster for $50 million. Blockbuster executives laughed them out of the room.

In 2024, Netflix earned $39 billion. Blockbuster, which once had 9,000 stores, is down to one remaining store. What set Netflix and Blockbuster apart was that Blockbuster was very slow to adapt. At the same time, Netflix was willing to disrupt its own business model to discover and create a better, more successful one (hello streaming!). 

Within the church, we love stability and the status quo. For many, stability brings comfort and reminds us that God never changes. The challenge for the church is that we live in a rapidly changing world. These changes are disruptive to the church and can feel threatening. They are also opportunities to adapt and change our methods to meet the needs of our communities and point people to a saving relationship with Jesus Christ. If we remain committed to the status quo, we will go the way of Blockbuster and others who refused to adapt.

As leaders in the church, we must disrupt ourselves by asking good (and difficult) questions.

-“If our church ceased to exist, would anyone in our community notice?”
-“How much more effective would we be if we focused on the one thing we did best?”
-“How do we create a church community that reaches the unchurched?”
-“Do we love Jesus enough to do whatever is necessary to share that love with our neighbors?”

If we do not disrupt ourselves by asking good questions and adapting, the rapidly changing world will disrupt what we do and we will be slow to respond. Let us not die to the status quo, and instead do teh work to share God’s love in ways that bring life and transformation to our churches and communities.

(thanks to this article for some additional background on Blockbuster and Netflix. https://fortune.com/2023/04/14/netflix-cofounder-marc-randolph-recalls-blockbuster-rejecting-chance-to-buy-it/)