Congregational Creativity: Getting Out of Our Boxes
“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 spatial 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 aren’t 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 and 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 how do we do that? How does a congregation manifest that creativity? How do we start to climb out of the boxes we’ve learned to live in?
I think it starts with an understanding. We can choose to be—in the words of one of my heros, Ron Mehl—either “prophetic or parasitic”. The essence of a prophetic community or leader is that they hear and repeat God’s voice. A prophetic congregation is intently listening to the Holy Spirit and reflecting God’s unique design and desire for it. A leader with a prophetic perspective may learn and implement quite a bit from others, but will always first filter it through the distinct things about which God is speaking to him or her.
In other words, prophetic congregations are never built with cookie cutters or from following “5 easy steps to growing your church.” Every church and leader that has ever impacted me has had a unique spark—the styles from church to church and leader to leader were massively different, but there was in each of them an original quality that distinctively reflected the heart of God for its own context. This quality drew me, and kept me, and changed me, and it transformed much of the surrounding culture, too.
Parasites, however, must feed off of other life in order to be sustained. Many congregations and leaders are always looking for the next big thing, and forgetting that God has something unrepeatable and miraculous to do through them. They miss it, because their strategy is to simply try to copy other “successful” church strategies so they can give off the perception of originality, creativity, and success. They want to be the next Saddleback, Willow Creek, Northpoint, Mosaic or Mars Hill but they forget that each of those ministries was birthed out of a unique context, was full of unique people, was led by a unique pastor in a unique city, and was called of God to fulfill a unique purpose.
In other words, congregations are like snowflakes; no two of them are alike. Though we can and should learn from the wisdom of others, parasitic leaders will drive staff and congregations aimlessly ragged as they attempt to reproduce the flavor-of-the-month church or ministry, hoping it provides something that will create much-desired momentum.
The other day I read something that Joshua Blankenship from New Spring Church discussed regarding how this copy-cat ethos can do damage: “Ultimately, copying doesn’t affect the person being ripped nearly as much as the one doing the copying. After all, rarely is the faux as compelling as the original. But when you copy, you do yourself a disservice. You cease to do work. You cease to be inspired.”
True creativity is not manufactured or replicated; it is inspired (God-breathed) and it will inspire a sense of joy, and awe, and energy, and life, and passion in and through a congregation. When that starts to happen, people can’t help reflect the unique call of a living, loving, powerful God in a way that truly impacts the community and world God has placed them in.
_____________________________________________
So here we are: If God is a creative God and humans were created to reflect that image, then all-God/all-man Jesus paints a picture of what a fully creative human being might look like. In the first chapters of Mark, we discover a few things about creative, out of the box ministry from the life of Jesus:
1. Creative ministry is fueled by prayer: Mark 1:35ff “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.”
There are congregations that want to be on the cutting edge of creative ministry but they don’t want to put in the time to listen to the Lord. If a church is known as creative but is not deeply driven by prayer, it may be hip and relevant to someone, but it won’t be truly prophetic to the world or relevant to God.
2. Creative ministry does things in ways they have never been done before: Mark 2:12 “we’ve never seen anything like this.”
Jesus certainly did this; David did, too. David took on the giant with a method that would drive the “experts” crazy. He had confidence that he could do the job in God’s power by using stones and sling. NOBODY had ever seen a battle won that way before, but young David was anointed by God; connected to God; and his questionable but creative-and-obedient actions immediately turned around the waning momentum in Israel.
3. Creative ministry is not just about novelty, but carries spiritual authority. Mark 1:27 “What is this? A new teaching —and with authority?”
Doing something in a new way is only good if it is done with anointing and authority. Many churches are caught up in looking for what is new, what has never been done before, what can set them apart from all the other churches, but their ministries lack real authority. I’ve learned that something can’t just be a “new teaching” (or program, or style, etc.) it must also come “with authority.” It must spiritually and practically impact people at their core.
4. Creative ministry elicits a response. Mark 1:17 “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
Creativity is winsome. Creativity in ministry draws people into a conversation in which they are asking themselves questions about how they are going to respond with their lives. Creativity begets a higher purpose in people’s lives.
French writer Antoine de Saint Exupéry once said “If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” Both are important, of course, but the latter (an unquenchable desire to cross the ocean) will fuel the former (inspiring people to build a ship).
The goal of creative, prophetic communication is never to simply give information, but it must result in powerful transformation.
Finally, a quote from Mosaic Pastor, Erwin McManus: “We risk too little; we dream too small. Each church has enough creative capacity in it to make a huge dent on the problems of humanity.”
If only we’d follow Jesus out of our boxes!