Congregational Creativity: Getting Out of the Box (Part 1)
“In the beginning God created…” (Gen 1:1 NIV)
The very first thing we learn about God in the Bible is that He is creative—and for the first 26 verses we see God at work masterfully creating an unfathomable cosmos, life-sustaining systems, invisible atoms and everything else imaginable (and unimaginable).
Then, as a grand crescendo He creates human beings (have you ever considered that people are so valuable to God that we were His grand finale? What a mind-blowing thought!) And this is the first thing we learn about people:
“Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature…” (Gen 1:26-The Message)
The first word on God is that He is a creative God; the first word on humans is that we are a reflection of that creative God.
Creativity is primary to our essence. People are born with creative capacity because it is part of the basic package that makes up humanity. However, separation from God (Gen 3) caused the special spark of God-reflecting creativity to be dimmed. Humans remain creative without God because its part of our design, but without relationship with God we are missing the connection to the ultimate source of originality, beauty, and inspiration. Redemption turns us back towards a pre-fall state, but we tend to forget that getting back to inspired creativity is a huge result of breaking the curse of sin.
If this is the case, then the Church—the body of Christ—ought to be the most creative force on the face of the planet. However, far too often the Church is not creative; in fact we are frequently copycats of a culture that is missing that Divine reflection, or we duplicate other churches that seem to have tapped into this creative capacity. And that is tragic because God wants to do something uniquely beautiful in each person and through each congregation.
Perhaps you are a Christian, possibly even a pastor, and you think, “But I’m not creative—I can’t sing or write or draw to save my life…and there is nobody very creative in our church, either!”
That’s because when we think of creativity, our minds immediately go to the artistic—but creative and artistic are not the same thing.
Art is about shapes and shades, sounds and syncopations, esthetic beauty and spacial relations. An artistic person who is creative can form amazing and impacting pictures, sculptures, novels, movies, etc…
However, artistic capacity reflects only one set of gifts. Add creativity to any gift and it brings out beauty and uniqueness through that gift. Think about it: Have you ever seen a creative businessman, a creative homemaker, a creative schoolteacher or a creative public servant? These are not artistic endeavors, and yet we are amazed and attracted by the beauty they can produce in their unique fields.
So, it follows that if the Church is the body of Christ, if we all contribute from our unique gift-mix in a way that reflects the creative capacity of God, we should have the most wonderfully original God-inspired things happening through the church that anyone has ever seen!
But that is going to take getting out of our boxes…