I see a strong relationship between creativity and renewal.
—James Rose
I once preached a first-person sermon on Jonah. I came out barefoot, soaking wet, with seaweed all over me. Ninety percent of the congregation thought it was wonderful. But 10 percent were irate that their pastor had no shoes on. The seaweed wasn’t a problem. The wetness wasn’t a problem. No shoes was the issue. For that group, what I had done was undignified for a pastor.
Depending on whom you’re talking to, the word creativity can evoke a positive or negative response.
In the church setting, creativity is the ability to develop forms different from the ones that presently exist—forms that freshly touch the generational and cultural groups around you. Naturally the younger members and artsy group love creativity because it means breaking with traditional forms. An emphasis on creativity invites them to the banquet table. But as the Jonah episode illustrates, some people will never warm up to innovation.
I helped found a church in Clearwater, Florida, in the 1970s with creativity as one of our watchwords. I also pastored Calvary Baptist, a historic, tradition-rich church. Take it from me: Creativity is much easier in a new ministry than in an old one. But creativity may be even more crucial in a historic church; it’s the only way to breathe new life into old.
The need
For several reasons, creativity is more important today than it was a hundred years ago.
First, the culture is changing so quickly.
The Bible gives us our functions, which don’t change—evangelism and discipleship, for example. We express these functions in our forms—the type of musical instruments used, for example—which must change if we’re to touch the cultural groups around us. If we’re not creative, we wind up freezing in time, locking into 1955 forms. What was creative at one time is institutionalized. People lock in whenever “it happened” for them, their great era. Those raised on fifties music tend to listen to the oldies station. One reason people are listening to the oldies is the instability of our times. The familiar gives security.
While some forms are of lasting benefit, you have to keep going back to your mission or vision statement and asking, “Are our forms helping or hurting us in accomplishing what we’ve set out to do?” I question whether God is in evangelistic forms that nobody would understand or come to because they’re forms out of the forties. We’ve got to know what kids are tuned in to; it’s easy to miss the next generation.
If a church is going to speak to people in a particular setting at a particular time, somebody must have a creative edge. Either the senior pastor must be a creative person, or the pastor must gather creative people around to keep the forms fresh.
Second, creativity is more important today because we’re facing greater and greater needs.
We have a generation growing up that doesn’t know the Bible, and we have many kids who can’t read and write, so we have to be creative in education. At Calvary Church, we ran a rap program on Saturday nights as an outreach that also taught reading and writing.
In New York we couldn’t tell the kids to drive down to the youth program on Friday night. People in Manhattan don’t own cars. If kids came to a night meeting, they couldn’t go home; you couldn’t ask fourteen-year-olds to get on the subway after ten o’clock at night and go tooling over to Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx. They would get beat up. They had to spend the night at the church.
I’ve also had to be creative in staffing. When I began interviewing people to come on staff, I found it was difficult to get good people to move to New York: “Where are you? New York City? Well, nice to talk to you.” The cost of living was so high. We had to learn to distribute creatively our assignments.
Third, leadership today demands creativity. In some measure I need to stay one step ahead of others in the church. I need to know where the culture is going. I don’t need to be ahead of everybody; I have people in the church who are ahead of me in various areas, and I rely heavily upon them. But somebody must have an overall vision.
To develop that vision, I read to keep up with the culture. I meet several times a year with people who are creative just to talk about the culture, about fresh ministry, about ideas, about what they’re doing. They don’t have to be pastors. One person in this group is an ex-advertising man who has a great creative mind. The point is to keep in touch with today’s people.
I find the process refreshing. Sometimes when I’m writing an article or a sermon, I’ll intentionally start off in directions I’ve never tried before. I may never use that approach, but drafting it pushes out my mental parameters. On occasion there’s value in planning a service that “pushes the envelope,” exercises the mind, keeps you from thinking in boxes and corridors, helps you break out.
Creativity run amok
Having emphasized the importance of creativity, however, I must note that innovation can be overdone.
When I pastored in Clearwater in the seventies, we did a lot of creative things but also some weird things just to be different. One memorable mistake was a Sunday morning concert. I had heard an itinerant hard-rock group ministering at high school assemblies and giving their testimony. I suggested to the church leaders we should put together a morning worship service with the group. One of our leaders said, “Do you really want to do this?”
“Oh, yeah. It’ll be great.”
I walked into the auditorium the day of the concert and saw large banana speakers hanging in front. When the lead guitarist tuned his electric guitar, he cleared my sinuses. We’re in trouble, I thought.
Sure enough, nobody could relate to it as a church form. At that time most church people hadn’t heard much hard rock. That worship service wasn’t creative; it was weird because it didn’t connect. To be creative without getting weird, you must be in touch with your various groupings, from the old guard to the teens.
Creativity also gets out of control when you feel you have to top the efforts of last week. When that happens, as it did on occasion for us in Clearwater, creativity becomes a tyrant. In that case, you’re into creativity for creativity’s sake.
We eventually realized what was happening and made three “rules”: (1) We don’t have to do something new every week, (2) don’t do more than one new thing in a service, and (3) if you find something good, hold onto it for a while.
We found, for instance, that interview videos on the topic “Sex, Money, and Power” were a success, so we used that format again. But eventually we needed to ask, “Is that still working?”
Another way creativity can run amok is when a particular worship service simply has too much diversity. After reading the first three chapters of one adventure book recently, I was thoroughly confused. Each chapter was a different story that seemed to have nothing to do with the others. I said to my son, who had read the book, “I have no idea where the author’s going. Is this a series of short stories?” My mind was struggling to fit all this together.
“Just wait,” he said. “It’ll all come together.”
People in a worship service often have the same reaction if a service is too diverse. No matter what the style of music employed, the service needs a dominant theme. If we’re going to use black gospel music in our Sunday evening meeting, it will be exclusively that. Yet next week we may use jazz. The human mind fights for unity and cohesiveness, so I resist having a shotgun service. Just as every sermon has to cohere, so does a service.
Hope for the historic
While ministering at Calvary Church, I saw movement toward greater innovation. Several things encouraged that.
Recall the past. I pointed to the history of our congregation to show that they had a history of creativity. We were building on a tradition of adjusting to the opportunities.
Calvary will be 150 years old in 1997. One reason Calvary has survived and prospered is that while being thoroughly biblical, the church has also been creative. For example, in the late 1910s when flatbed trucks first were sold, Calvary bought one and went to lower Manhattan and ran evangelistic programs on the truck. Other churches excoriated them for it, accusing them of selling out the gospel. But they persisted in innovative outreach.
Then, in the 1920s, they began to realize that to survive in midtown Manhattan, they needed an endowment. Few inner-city churches can survive without some form of financial subsidy. Since John D. Rockefeller had left the church to go build Riverside, the church fathers decided to use the church’s land to house both a church and a hotel—a creative solution! Since 1931, the Salisbury Hotel has helped underwrite the ministry of the church.
Find like-minded people. I try to identify individuals who are ready to try new things. In a church of any size, you’ll always have a few willing to risk. You have to gather a creative team. (Sometimes you have to calm them down, though, because they’re ready to blow the place up with bizarre ideas.)
Move at a snail’s pace. Change will always be slower in a historic church than in a church plant. In a historic setting, I can’t say to those who don’t like what I’m doing, “If you don’t like this, there’s another church down the street.” In a church where others have been there thirty years, the pastor is the one who will be going down the street.
In the church I founded in Clearwater, Florida, we received widespread publicity and eventually had pastors and their entire boards coming to see what we were doing. We’d tell them, “Take our principles, but go slow when you implement them back home.”
Yet we heard of pastors who went back, tried some of our creative worship forms, and in weeks were literally out of their church. You have to move slowly, though you must still move. You eventually come to a watershed where the church must decide to go forward or stay put.
Preach suitable themes. First, preach on the mission of the church: What are we about? How do we win people?
If you can get people asking, “Why are we doing this?” you’ve solved the problem. People don’t like creativity because they’re locked into what’s comfortable rather than into the mission of the church.
Second, you deal with Christ’s ministry. Jesus was always shattering human assumptions because he focused on God’s original intent. The religious establishment resisted Christ because he didn’t fit their traditions.
Third, stress God’s creativity. While we’re singing the same old tired hymns, God says, “Sing unto me a new song.”
Choose innovation zones. You have to accept that there are limits to what you can do with those locked into a particular style of ministry. Innovate where you can and accept where you cannot.
I must balance people’s need for security and familiarity with their need for the fresh and unexpected. At Calvary Church, the musical forms of our Sunday morning service—which was the biggest issue—never changed much. We were located in the middle of a classical-music mecca, with Carnegie Hall across the street and Lincoln Center just minutes away, so our worship music stayed classical. While maintaining the historical on Sunday morning, we focused most of our creativity on Sunday night and other occasions.
That wasn’t a failure in any way. I believe in creativity, but I also believe we need to keep some of our rich history alive. One great problem today is that people don’t know anything about history. C. S. Lewis said one thing that disturbed him as he spoke to people about Christ was that not only did they not buy Christianity, they didn’t even buy history. They didn’t know why things happened, and they didn’t care. That’s called “chronological snobbery.”
Calvary Church was loaded with busters and boomers, young adults who had moved into the city. They told us, “We love your teaching and the discipleship groups, but it’s hard for us to connect with your worship.”
We couldn’t use rock music in worship, but we found hymns that used a traditional melody but with up-to-date words. We also launched a “seeker service” on Sunday nights, once a month. The music was contemporary—jazz, black gospel, American folk.
At Calvary Church we also found ways for the artistically gifted to use their abilities. We ran an “Arts Fest” every year that included an exhibition of graphic arts, painting, and sculpture. We had concerts with various music forms such as a jazz band and a classical ensemble. We also sponsored mime (though we never broke into interpretive dance), and I often preached on the arts and creativity.
* * *
Although creativity can be abused and will face some opposition, I’m willing to take the risk. I see a strong relationship between creativity and renewal. Creativity causes people to think about what they’re doing. Creative preaching forces people to think about the Bible. Creative worship causes people to think about God. That’s why God says to sing to him a new song. If you do the same thing in worship every week, you just settle and die.
I was with Joe Bayly, the author and publishing executive, when he was leading a seminar in Florida. Joe said one of the characteristics of every great revival has been a new form of worship.
To stay fresh, to be renewed, to be where God wants you to be, you need a creative edge.
Copyright © 1995 by Christianity Today
