Bringing color and fragrance to a historic church is what you'd expect from a pastor named Rose.
Walk down 57th Street in Manhattan, one of the most expensive streets in the world, past the Hard Rock Cafe and across the street from Carnegie Hall, and you happen upon an anomaly: a Baptist church tucked next to and under the seventeen floors of the Salisbury Hotel.
Judging by the traditional architecture and the age of the buildings, you surmise that Calvary Baptist must have a storied tradition. And it does, dating back to 1847, and in this building since 1931.
Yet Calvary's current pastor, Jim Rose, says, "I'm always tired of what I'm doing two weeks after I've started it."
Prior to entering the ministry, Jim was a NASA engineer, helping to design space suits for the Apollo project. He enjoys classical music and the arts. He is committed to creativity in ministry, as evidenced by his first-person narrative sermons and the unconventional church he founded in Clearwater, Florida, in the 1970s.
How does this unusual man, who aims to be on the slicing and dicing edge of culture, work in a church proud of its past and its pipe organ?
LEADERSHIP editors Marshall Shelley and Brian Larson took the elevator to his fifth-floor office to find out.
Why would someone like yourself, known for innovative ministry, come to a historic, tradition-rich church?
Most creative churches are new churches. One reason I wanted to come to Calvary was the challenge to see (a) if the church could come out of yesterday, and (b) whether a church with this much diversity can have a creative edge. (Avant-garde churches tend to be very homogeneous.) After five years here, I don't know the answers to these questions, but we're working on them.
What do you mean by the term creativity?
In the church setting, creativity is the ability to develop forms that are different than the ones that presently exist-forms that express a freshness that touches the generational and cultural groups around you.
Does the word creative evoke a positive or negative response in your congregation?
That depends on whom you're talking to. Naturally the younger group and the artsy group love it because creativity means breaking with traditional forms.
I once did 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.
But for others in the congregation, an emphasis on creativity invites them to the banquet table. In this city creativity means the artistically gifted can use their abilities. Although the church generally has not had much of a place for artists, we do.
We run an "Arts Fest" every year that includes an exhibition of graphic arts, painting, and sculpture. We have concerts with various music forms such as a jazz band and a classical ensemble. We'll also sponsor mime (we haven't broken into interpretive dance yet!), and I preach on the arts and creativity.
How do you encourage a historic church to be open to fresh forms?
One thing I'm doing is pointing to the history of our congregation to show that they have a history of creativity, that we are 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 the church has been thoroughly biblical but also creative. For example, in the late 1910s when flat-bed trucks first were sold, Calvary bought one and went to lower Manhattan and did 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!
So since 1931, the Salisbury Hotel has helped underwrite the ministry of the church. And it's been a good wedding. It's worked well for us when we use it properly.
How do you begin to instill a creative atmosphere?
I 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 because they're ready to blow the place up with bizarre ideas.
But then, I have to realize change will be much slower than if this church were planted yesterday. In this 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'll be going down the street!
In Clearwater, Florida, I was founding pastor of a creative congregation back in the seventies. We received widespread publicity and eventually had people coming in for our weekend services-pastors and their whole boards-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. So you have to move slowly, but you have to move. You eventually come to a watershed where the church says either we're going to go forward, or we're going to stay put.
What themes do you stress in your preaching to encourage openness?
First, the mission of the church. What are we about? How do we win people?
If you can get people asking the question 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 was focused on God's original intent. The religious establishment resisted Christ because he didn't fit their traditions.
I also stress God's creativity. While we're singing the same old tired hymns, God says, "Sing unto me a new song."
But you have to accept that there are limits to what you can do with some people who are locked into a particular style of ministry.
How do you balance people's need for security and familiarity with their need for the fresh and unexpected?
In an established church, you need to blend the traditional and the creative. I doubt seriously if the musical forms of our Sunday morning service-which is the biggest issue-will change all that much. We're in the middle of a classical-music mecca, with Carnegie Hall across the street and Lincoln Center just minutes away, so our worship music is classical.
I'm big on creativity, but I do believe we need to keep some of our rich history alive. One great problem today is 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."
So we maintain the familiar on Sunday morning and focus most of our creativity on Sunday night and other occasions.
While I don't foresee us running as many as seven different kinds of services on a Sunday, as some churches are doing, I can see us having at least four different services. I eventually want to have an alternative Sunday morning worship service in which I preach virtually the same sermon as the traditional service but create a totally different contemporary "package."
We're loaded with busters and boomers, young adults who have moved into the city. They tell us, "We love your teaching and the discipleship groups. But it's hard for us to connect with your worship."
In a church like yours, you can't start using rock music in worship. How do you keep your services fresh?
Find hymns written recently that use a traditional melody but words that are up to date.
The other option, which we are pursuing, is to start alternative services. We've begun a "seekers' service" on Sunday nights, once a month, that's packing out with nonchurched people. The music is contemporary-jazz, black gospel, American folk-not wild by any stretch.
How does creativity impact your evangelistic efforts?
Creativity is more crucial today than it was a hundred years ago because the culture is changing so quickly.
Church people, however, tend to settle in on one way of thinking, freezing in time. What was creative at one time is institutionalized. People lock in when it happened for them, their great era. Those raised on fifties music listen to the oldies station. One reason people are listening to the oldies is the instability of our times. The familiar gives security.
Creativity is the ability to develop new forms that touch the generational and cultural groups around you in a fresh way. The Bible gives us our functions, which don't change (evangelism and discipleship, for example). We express those functions in our forms (the type of musical instruments used, for example), which must change with the times.
If we're not creative, we wind up locking into 1955 forms. While some forms are of lasting benefit, you have to keep going back to your mission/vision statement and asking, "Are our forms helping us or hurting us in accomplishing what we've set out to do?"
We've got to know what kids are tuned into, or we'll miss the next generation. They'll go and do something else. God is involved in those forms of outreach that are reaching non-Christians where they are. I question whether God is in evangelistic forms that nobody would understand or come to because they're forms out of the forties.
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.
Do you feel pressure to stay one creative step ahead of others in your church?
Partly, yes. I need to know where the culture is going. But I don't need to be ahead of everybody; I have people on staff who are ahead of me in various areas, and I rely heavily upon them. But somebody must have an overall 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. And they don't have to be pastors. One person in this group is an ex-advertising man who has a great creative mind. They keep me in touch with what connects with today's people.
Why do pastors feel pressured to be more creative?
We're facing greater and greater needs.
We have a generation coming 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. We run a rap program on Saturday nights as an outreach that also teaches reading and writing.
Here in New York we can't tell the kids to drive down to the youth program on Friday night. People in Manhattan don't own cars. If kids come to a night meeting, they can't go home because you don't get on the subway after ten o'clock and go tooling over to Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx because they'll get beat up. They have to spend the night here.
We've had to be creative in staffing. When I began interviewing people to come on staff, I found it's difficult to get good people to move here. "Where are you? New York City? Well, nice to talk to you." And then it costs so much in salaries because of the high cost of living here. We have learned to distribute creatively our assignments.
We need to be creative for our own refreshment. Sometimes when I'm writing an article or sermon, I'll intentionally start off in directions I've never tried before. I may never use it, but it pushes my parameters out.
On occasion there's value in planning a service that's out in spaceville. It "pushes the envelope," exercises the mind, keeps you from thinking in boxes and corridors, helps you break out.
Has that pressure impacted your preaching?
People are exposed to so much communication input, so much variety, we can't jump out from behind the same tree every time or they just won't hear us.
We're using more and more media, and if I had my druthers, we would use a lot more drama. For instance, we're presenting a video each week right now on sex, money, and power. We took a video camera up and down 57th Street interviewing people to find out their views. We play that on a screen in our service, and I follow up with my sermon. Our thrust is evangelistic.
What's the difference between creative and weird?
Creativity is weird when it doesn't connect. 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 of my most memorable mistakes 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 wasn't creative; that was weird. To be creative without getting weird you must be in touch with your various groupings, from the old guard to the teens.
Trying to be constantly creative is tough. How do you come to terms with can-you-top-this thinking?
Creativity can be a tyrant. We had that problem in Clearwater, where next week always had to be better than this week. 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've found, for instance, that our sex, money, and power interview videos have been a real success, so we need to use that format again. But eventually we need to ask, "Is that still working?"
Should a church find a single style of worship and stick with it, or strive for diversity?
A service ought to be rifle shot. No matter what the style of music, there needs to be a dominant theme.
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 find how all this fit together.
"Just wait," he said. "It'll all come together."
People in a worship service often have the same reaction if the service is too diverse. So 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.
What is the 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 doing 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.
Leadership Summer 1993 p. 17-22
Copyright © 1993 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
