Church Board

Some of the most successful people in history have done their best work in coffee shops. Pablo Picasso, JK Rowling, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bob Dylan. Whether they’re painters, singer-songwriters, philosophers, or writers, people across nations and centuries have tapped into their creativity working away at a table in a café.

There are many ways coffee shops trigger our creativity in a way offices and homes don’t. Research shows that the stimuli in these places make them effective environments to work; the combination of noise, casual crowds, and visual variety can give us just the right amount of distraction to help us be our sharpest and most creative. (So, no, it’s not just that double espresso.)

Some of us stick in our earbuds as soon as we sit down to work in a public setting. But scientists have known for years that background noise can benefit our creative thinking. Several studies have shown that a low-to-moderate level of ambient noise in a place like a cafeteria can actually boost your creative output. The idea is that if you’re very slightly distracted from the task at hand by ambient stimuli, it boosts your abstract thinking ability, which can lead to more creative idea generation.

And while that “Goldilocks” level of noise is different for everyone, audio stimuli in the background also help us improve decision making. Some have even dubbed it “the coffee shop effect.” So, the jazz music, light conversation, and barista banging coffee grounds out of the grinder aren’t a nuisance, they could help you come up with your next magnum opus.

There’s also the fact that in a coffee shop, we’re surrounded by people who’ve come to do the same thing as us, which acts as a motivator. “It’s analogous to going to the gym for a workout,” says Sunkee Lee, assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. “One of the biggest things about coffee shops is the social-facilitation effect: you go there, you see other people working and it puts you in a mood where you just naturally start working as well. Just observing them can motivate you to work harder.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Bible Study; Planning; Small Groups; Togetherness - There several intriguing applications here that range from the benefit of small group Bible studies in contrast to solo devotional times, to the benefit of having board meetings away from the usual setting. We all could benefit from surrounding ourselves with fellow believers who come together to motivate each other just by being in the same room.

Skye Jethani writes, in Immeasurable, about good versus bad complexity in ministry. He illustrates it this way:

Bad complexity is like a Rube Goldberg machine. Those are the massive, jerry-rigged contraptions that fill an entire room with moving ropes, ramps, bowling balls, and buckets. One small motion, like a marble rolling or a domino tipping, begins a long and complicated chain reaction. A Rube Goldberg machine is a huge, inflexible apparatus that accomplishes one simple task. It’s not very useful, but it can be immensely entertaining.

Good complexity, in contrast, is like a Swiss Army knife—an elegant, nimble instrument that can accomplish an impressive number of tasks. No one would say Swiss Army knives are simple. They are intricate, with many precisely engineered parts, but this complexity of design paradoxically makes them adaptable and easy to use.

Many churches are marked by bad complexity. They are like Rube Goldberg machines—not very effective, but very entertaining to watch. They construct massive systems of control that are far larger than what is required for the task, and they are dangerously fragile. If one element of the system or environment changes, the weakness of the whole church or organization is exposed.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This could be used as illustration of the difference between strong and weak, healthy and unhealthy, complex yet meaningful church organizations and ministries.

The city of Detroit was in a campaign to reforest its streets after decades of neglecting its depleted tree canopy. However, the tree-planters met stiff resistance: Roughly a quarter of the 7,500 residents declined offers to have new trees planted in front of their homes.

Researcher Christine Carmichael found that the rejections had more to do with how the tree-planters presented themselves than it did with how residents felt about trees. The residents understood the benefits of having trees in urban environments—they provide shade, absorb air pollution, increase property values, and improve health. But the reasons Detroit folks refused was not that they didn’t trust the trees; they didn’t trust the city.

A couple of African-American women Carmichael talked to linked the tree-planting program to a painful racist moment in Detroit’s history, when the city suddenly began cutting down elm trees in bulk in their neighborhoods. As the women understood it, the city did this so that law enforcement could have better surveilance on their neighborhoods from helicopters after an urban uprising.

However, the government’s reason was that the trees were dying off from the Dutch elm disease. But it was the women’s version that led to their decision to reject the trees. It’s not that they didn’t trust the trees; they didn’t trust the city.

The women felt that the city just came in and cut down their trees, and now they want to just come in planting trees. But they felt they should have a choice in this since they’ll be the ones raking up the leaves when the planters leave. They felt that the decisions were being made by someone else, and they were going to have to deal with the consequences.

Failing to meaningfully involve the residents in the decision-making is a classic mistake. After all, who would turn down a free tree? Perhaps these people just don’t get it.

One Detroit resident whom Carmichael interviewed told her: “You know, I really appreciate you today because that shows that someone is listening. Someone is trying to find out what’s really going on in our thoughts. And maybe next time they can do a survey and ask us, if they would like to have us have the trees.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Churches and small groups can learn from Detroit’s mistake. It is best to ask for members’ participation in planning and decision-making rather than making authoritative decisions without explanation or discussion.

Since 1995 when Toy Story was released, Pixar has created 11 feature films, all of which have become a huge international success. From its beginnings as a production company, Pixar has focused on the crucial value of teamwork and collaboration. Originally, the company planned to build three separate buildings with separate office spaces for the animators, computer programmers, and management. But Steve Jobs scrapped that plan and instead moved everyone into an old Del Monte canning factory that had one huge room with an atrium in the center. Jobs wanted to create a space where people throughout the company could bump into each other, deepen relationships, and share ideas.

But Jobs took it one step further: he moved everything—including mailboxes, meeting rooms, a coffee bar, and even the bathrooms—into the center of the atrium so people would be forced to interact. Initially, some of the employees complained that it was a waste of time to walk to the atrium every time they had to go to the bathroom or grab a cup of coffee. But Jobs kept telling Pixar employees, "Everybody has to run into each other." A Pixar producer called it "smooshing," and he added, "If I don't see lots of smooshing, I get worried."

Brad Bird, the director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille, eventually caught the vision for teamwork. Bird said, "The atrium initially might seem like a waste of space … But Steve [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company." It's no surprise, then, that the Latin motto for Pixar says it all: Alienus Non Diutius, or "alone no longer."