There’s a new search engine for the internet, called www.cuil.com. It was made by ex-Google employees who left the company thinking they knew a better way to use the web but the company wouldn’t listen.

It’s funny how that sort of thing happens so often. An employee will go to their boss and say “I have this great idea how to expand our business!” and the management chain will tell them their idea is no good, so the employee quits and goes it on their own. I would suspect most times they fail but some of the success stories have been spectacular. In just the auto industry, for example, John and Horace Dodge once worked for Ford. Some guy with a funny name that sounds like pop or chocolate – I A Coca – also famously worked there. One of the guys who founded Chevrolet was a race car driver who though the could do a better job making cars than the ones he was driving. And so it goes.

I guess this shouldn’t surprise us, as you get a bunch of people of similar talent together working on something and they will likely come up with all sorts of ideas. The next thing you know someone gets unhappy about their job or just thinks they can do better and off they go, dragging several other workers with them due to their charisma or reasoning. One of the big reasons a bunch of great programmers left Atari and started Activision was over credit – Atari didn’t want their people to become famous and demand higher salaries. The games from Activision all prominently display the programmer’s name on the front of the label. Take that, Atari!

It also shouldn’t surprise us that lots of denominations started this way, too. Calvin was a Catholic, Wesley was Anglican, and Campbell was a Baptist. Of course there was this rather large disagreement between two large and religious cities, Rome and Constantinople, that resulted in the Orthodox church. (And now we have Calvinists and Lutherans. Take that, God!)

We like innovation, and in history many of these corporate “start ups” serve us much better than their parent company did – in fact in many cases the parent company is long gone (like, oh, Atari) while the spin off remains. But what about our church? Are we just another spin off by disgruntled men, men who thought so much of themselves that they thought they could do better than what God had provided and needed to add more? Baptists or Mormons, Methodists or Catholics. Because they all believe they have “value added” with their creed books, and undeniably they are different from each other as well as the bible.

Well, we here are simply Christians. We use the same book, unchanged and unedited for about 2000 years. Like air, or water, folks have fiddled with these things only to find they are best when you add nothing or take nothing away but leave them pure. However, we are in a way members of a startup, a spin off. Yes, a former Jew went out and founded a new, better way to do things. But really, that was the business plan all along. The company changed as designed and some employees who didn’t want to change with it got left behind. Which company will you invest yourself in? The one with stocks that have eternal value, or one of the spin offs bound for destruction? Will you be saved, or simply known forever as a “former employee.”

Randy