After four months of frenetic labor, the Alignment Task Force delivered a report to our Elders that bewildered us. The goal was to line up our core values, ministries, and future plans to be sure we were aligned and weren't diffusing our efforts.
But you know how these things go. They couldn't sort everything out by the deadline we gave them, so they handed us a nearly 40-page hodge-podge of strategic analysis, pet projects, and complicated structures. That set off another four months of long Elder Board meetings. We exchanged pages of responses, charts, and clarifications. We didn't quarrel. We just didn't know how to go forward. We needed a clear imaginative solution.
When we need to accomplish something, we tend to scurry around looking for ideas the way kids look for Easter eggs.
Imagination in ministry is usually messy. It doesn't matter if we're trying to plan a sermon series, help a counselee, plan effective outreach, or create a new logo. It doesn't matter if we're working with a team or on our own. Nine times out of ten, we don't come up with one clear direction; we have lots of possible directions. What seems pretty straightforward at the beginning turns into a snarl of threads in our meaty fingers.
When we need to accomplish something, we tend to scurry around looking for ideas the way kids look for Easter eggs. Why don't we just do what Andy Stanley did, or Tim Keller? Surely there's a conference we could attend somewhere or a book that will give us a game plan. I know! Let's brainstorm!
Most of the time, brainstorming is trying to get something for nothing. Maybe we can spin gold from flax. I'll grant that sometimes dry ideas gather up energy and ignite like kindling. But—tell me the truth—doesn't it often feel like a walk through a second-hand store?
Brainstorming doesn't usually deliver all we'd hoped for because nobody prepares.
Ministers are uniquely privileged to work in a vast, bright, miraculous space between salvation and heaven.
Recently I sat with a graphic designer who was developing a new logo for our church. She had several pages of notes—words, phrases, core values. She'd drawn lines and circles trying to find the heart of the idea. She had photographed all manner of things in our building and built a color palette from the shades in our stone and beams. She'd looked at hundreds of typefaces, and drawn more. And in the end, the idea still wasn't quite right. She's back to the drawing board. So why don't we just get a bunch of people and brainstorm a logo? Because thinking of really good, enduring, sacred ideas is hard work.
Brainstorming only works if our brains are seeded, the way clouds are sometimes seeded to coax out rain.
Creative people often have a particular space set aside for their work, like a bare desk overlooking woods. Minimal distractions, maximum inspiration. Ministers are uniquely privileged to work in a vast, bright, miraculous space between salvation and heaven. Whatever the Lord sets us to doing, redemption is in the air. Re-creation is all about us. All paths lead up to Zion. Anything good is possible. Even death itself has been conquered.
Imagine that there's a secret panel in your office. You push on a certain old book on a high shelf, there's a soft click, and the panel slides back, opening to three secret connecting rooms.
Reorientation room
Before you start filling yellow pads or white boards with ideas, before you scope out books and blogs or set your team a-brainstorming, go into this small, simple room. Take the others with you or go alone. Close the door. Be quiet. Pray. Clear the clutter in your soul. Gather your spiritual wits about you. Bow before the Lord and put him in charge. Repent of self-sufficiency or bossiness or whatever it is within you that contradicts the grace of God. Name your weaknesses and your apprehensions. Thank God for this royal work.
Before anything creative can happen, reorient your distractible self to truths like these:
Your weakness is God's advantage.
Love will be necessary and love will show.
You are yoked with the Lord Jesus.
The path ahead requires righteousness.
Sin is the worst enemy of vital imagination.
Vulnerability is usually where ministry creativity gets traction.
Remember that when all is said and done, God's grace will be the real story.
Take your time in the Reorientation Room, and leave the door open when you leave. You'll likely need to go back.
The grace place
Next, I imagine walking into a big light-washed studio. Sketches from past projects on walls. Broad, cluttered tables. Paints and pens and iPads. Old ideas crumpled on the floor. People putting their heads together. Some argue. Some laugh. At first glance, this looks like imagination work anywhere.
We expect God to bring something undeserved and unearned to our work. Walls may fall down. An ax head might float. Water might turn into wine.
But ministry imagineering isn't like any other. God's servants work in a unique medium—grace. We expect God to bring something undeserved and unearned to our work. We believe it will change everything. Walls may fall down. An ax head might float. Water might be converted to wine. Jesus may come suddenly.
Imagination works best in metaphors. Work with the Lord to find a unique metaphor to capture your task, and where better to look than the Bible? In our previous church, the board was wrestling with overcrowding in our building. We debated whether to start a new children's ministry because we didn't know where we'd put everyone and we weren't sure we were ready to tackle a building program. We prayed. We gathered information. We debated. Time passed. One evening, Harold mentioned that he'd been reading the story in 2 Kings 4 about the impoverished widow and her tiny jar of oil. He read the line, "They brought the jars to her and she kept pouring." He said, "I think God will bring us people as long as we keep making space." So our guiding principle became, "More jars!" The biblical metaphor stirred our imagination.
Ask God for a metaphor—a word or a story from Scripture—to give your imagination a little world in which to create. In that dilemma facing our Elders, it dawned on me one day that I work best thinking about an environment rather than processes. And when I thought about how I'd describe the environment of our church, I thought immediately, "Home!" That clicked with our board, and then our entire congregation, and is shaping how we work out our ministries.
Anyone who has tried it knows that God's grace doesn't necessarily make the work of ministry imagination all that much easier. It can still be a grind. Messy, complicated, tense, tedious. And if that isn't hard enough, we also have to behave ourselves. The Lord says, "Do nothing out of vain conceit or selfish ambition. Rather, value others above yourselves." Frankly, it doesn't seem like the most efficient way to get things done. But grace insists on it. There will be no saving grace in any idea that comes from loveless people. That's one reason you leave the door open back to the Reorientation Room.
Jesus wants to be there in the thick of things with us. When Jesus comes to our planning, problem solving, or preaching, he will bring a beauty and life we could never imagine. Thus, the third room.
The gallery
Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, "I wouldn't give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity."
"Simplicity on the other side of complexity" is the elegant solution: simple and lovely, with a life of its own. Nothing is so elegant as God's creative work infused with grace. When God brings grace to our imagination we get more than we bargained for. We improve. People are loved. We have something to show for our work that is better than clever or shrewd or slick.
When Jesus comes to our planning, problem solving, or preaching, he will bring a beauty and life we could never imagine.
Remember the graceful help Jethro gave to Moses? Nehemiah building walls from Jerusalem's rubble? The way meals for widows opened doors for the gospel?
Good pastors and good churches have galleries of graceful stories. Someone says, "Remember how we thought there was no way we could come up with the funds?" And people smile to look again at the beautiful outcome. Pastors talk: "I couldn't see any way that couple would ever reconcile, but we kept working and praying … " And at the end of the story we shake our heads at God's masterpiece.
There in those hidden rooms God sanctifies us and our ideas. Holiness happens. And our God-graced work hones our imaginations for the elegant work of heaven.
Lee Eclov is pastor of Village Church of Lincolnshire, Illinois, and the author of Pastoral Graces: Reflections on the Care of Souls.
Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
