Resources & Ideas

Creativity in the Local Church (published in ::seven::)

When Apple Computer was creating the Macintosh computer, the Mac developers ran pirate flags over their building and changed the locks keeping all other the other non-Mac people out. Steve Jobs knew how important it was to keep the best employees and their most creative people from being ground down by those who didn’t share their values or vision of what they were trying to do.

There are many days working in ministry where I find myself looking for my own locks and a pirate flag to fly to keep the non-creative people from killing my ideas and vision. One of the truths that I have come to grips with while serving in a local church is that creative people and great ideas are in short supply. I am not just talking about people who are artistic but people who have fresh ideas, new insights and like blazing trails. They just don’t seem to be active in the majority of churches today.

It didn’t take me long to realize why. Many times a great idea of mine is questioned with, "Well, have Willow Creek or Saddleback done it? What was their result with it?" In other words, lets not lead, let’s follow what others have done. Church leadership gets defined as the "road already safely traveled" or in the world of many churches, the "road that I can download". It isn’t just lack of courage, there are numerous reasons why creative people are not part of many western local churches. Here is my list of things that can be major stumbling blocks to creativity in the church.

1. We all want to blame the seminaries and Bible colleges for our woes but the problem is not just what is being taught there but the kind of students that they attract. Many people who are called into ministry and seminaries come from church backgrounds that were very positive experiences for them. For many young seminarians or Bible College students, they want to recreate the environment that they came from. I have a friend of mine who is repulsed by my website and many of the sites that I link to because it represents a perceived threat to the church he is pastoring but also his ideal of the church background that he came from. He takes it as an attack on his pastor, his family, and everything else that he holds dear. The idea of changing the church is moving him out of the environment that he considers safe and ideal and he can’t think that way. He is an extreme case but for many church leaders who have been trained by the church, creativity and new ideas put the old institution at risk. They are more comfortable as guardians rather than leaders. To ask them to change or lead in innovative ways is like asking for water from a stone. They may be a great pastor and shepherd and speaker but it is a rare person who is comfortable taking risks in church leadership and is willing to take the consequences for failure. That is not part of many pastors DNA. From a denominational or hiring perspective, looking for graduates of seminaries and Bible colleges to bring about revolutionary change will be difficult (although not impossible). A friend’s local church was looking to hire a person and they wanted someone with long denominational ties (in other words someone from the right family and education) but wanted a "change agent". I told them that if they were looking for a change agent they were much better looking at someone with the wrong kind of education and from the wrong family. They got the right family person and a staff member who considered changing his hair a big deal. Another person I know just got back from a bad experience in YWAM. He didn’t fit the mold there because he questioned authority too much. I would love to serve with him for the creativity and chaos he would bring to a church. The reality is that with his dress and outside the box worldview, most churches and organizations fear him rather than see than the fresh blood and ideas that he could infuse into the ministry. Churches need to look less for the right pedigree and appearance and more for those who break the mold.
   

2. Immediate satisfaction. Churches preach against the notion of instant gratification but in our own operations, we want to see quick fruits to our labors. At Lakeview I came up with the idea of a very participatory worship installation for Ash Wednesday of 2003. Despite the fact that we have had nothing going on Ash Wednesday since the Reformation in our church, everyone wanted to know what the attendance was going to be like. What is the payoff going to be? Luckily there is an understanding that the journey is sometimes just as important as the payoff. Really great ideas and products need development time. It took three years for Microsoft Windows (3.0) to be an overnight smash hit (and another decade to stop it from crashing non-stop). It takes some time and some patience to move an idea from an esoteric thought to a practical idea. Sometimes a lot of effort and time will produce no measurable result except for lessons learned. Modernism taught us that we need to be able to measure things, (kind of like the "Force" in "Star Wars: Episode I"), but often the greatest innovations come from hard to quantify experiences along the journey. Most churches are fine with the trial but fear the error. Error is equated with failure instead of learning.
   

3. Investment of resources. Another factor in lack of creativity is the reluctance to invest in the kind of resources that are needed to move outside the box. How we spend our resources shows what we value. Is it building and comfort things for the saints already there or are we going to spend on reaching people outside the church? In my journeys I see one characteristic of many growing churches, their buildings are beat-up. They are not in disrepair but the message is clear, the physical structure is secondary to the ministry it facilitates. I am not saying upgrading a churches vacuum isn’t important but at the expense of something really great, it becomes a symptom of a bigger problem. While not all of my ideas are feasible, being nickeled and dimed to death sends a clear message about how the church values what I am doing. Many people have no idea how hard it is for someone with talent and an eye for design to just "throw something together". When you can see the possibilities but know that anything is acceptable, it is hard to be motivated to try outside the box solutions. We may not want to ask for to much but always asking for the simple and mundane can kill the desire of people with talent. Sometimes it is worthwhile to pay a little extra for excellence and allow creative people to create. I know there are limitations and stewardship issues involved in ministry but without investment in the new and unproven, is it any surprise that local churches stay the same for decades at a time?
   

4. The size factor. Lakeview Church has 15 staff members, three governance teams, several outspoken lay people who all know how to say NO quite loudly. Whether it be real or perceived, a no by any number of people takes the fun out of a great new idea. It just doesn’t happen at Lakeview. Seth Godin writing in Survival is Not Enough asks this question,

   "Why does the New York Times still run the stock tables? Does anyone read them anymore? I mean, if you really care about what AOL stock is worth, the Internet is faster and easier to use and has bigger type. They certainly don’t run them because they make a profit—they are essentially no ads on those pages.

   The answer is that it’s easier to keep running the tables than deal with all the internal meetings. And its’ easier to keep running the tables than to deal with the one thousand angry letters from reactionary readers who miss them.

   A recent idea I had involved me asking almost the entire staff for permission to run with an idea that affected some things. At almost every stop I was questioned if I had the mandate to make those changes (hmmm, not really). Everyone was also so concerned that I wasn’t stepping in someone else’s turf (hmmm, I might have been). No one had any real answer for whose turf it was but they all want to make sure that the boat wasn’t rocked. We rocked it anyway because I hated to see a good idea die. Modern institutions by there very nature don’t like new ideas. Innovative and creative ministries will find a way to allow their creative people to make changes and challenge and change the status quo despite what the institution says it wants.. Dealing with church structure may not be a spiritual gift but it will be a leadership art for churches who want to stay current with culture.

5. Creative people need a safe place to work. Steve Jobs was smart enough to create some space and room for the Mac development team to work. The idea of some sort of safe creative space in many churches is a hard one for people to get their minds around. That space doesn’t have to be much. For some a bar fridge under a counter defines it. When the pop is flowing, so are the ideas. For others it is a time of day. Evenings when the pizza is on the way and the atmosphere is more casual, everything is one the table. Why can’t this happen anywhere and everywhere? Many friends complain that as soon as they get an idea, it gets squashed. I am lucky enough to work for a church that gives me a lot of freedom to explore and the time to flesh those things out. I also know that I am in the minority. Steve Jobs knew how hard it was to create new and exciting ideas in an environment where many people had a vested interest in keeping the status quo. In the church we elevate and spiritualize the present route we are on at almost any cost. (that plays into my next point) Those who propose a path that is discontinuitous with the past are considered reckless and a threat to the church. Instead of hearing them out, we want to shout them down. You need to create a safe place for creative people to interact, question, and experiment. Ideo, which is a famous industrial design firm is famous for its icons that it uses to represent creative areas. From a mock-up of a train car to a wing of a DC-3, Ideo offices are defined by their creative spaces. Most churches don’t have the physical space to hang a DC-3 wing but you can create creative spaces by your actions. My boss at Lakeview Church is human like the rest of us and probably doesn’t appreciate the amount I question him but one thing Dean does extremely well is stay out of the creative process when it is not his idea and it is in its infancy. Once it matures and is ready to see the light of day, Dean is there to question it, probe it, and even kill it if it needs to be killed. He is also a provider of a safe place and does defend his creative people even when we are in a slump of good ideas or are very early in a process. Dean is also pretty open about his own biases so I know when I am going to have a tough sell. While we don’t have pirate flags, we do have some room to create and the assurances that we will be supported along the way.
   

6. We need to rethink how we see the idea of the visionary leader and how we see the senior pastor of many churches. I have been to many a conference when the speaker starts in on the all-important topic about the spiritual gift of leadership. And not just leadership, visionary leadership. The vision has to come from the leader. Without vision you can’t call yourself a leader. On and on they went. The theme that has been sold for so long is a hierarchical model where the leader is the visionary. When the ideas have to come from the "da leader", it redefines the role of other people around him or her as just lackeys. The people under the king/icon/senior pastor have no good ideas until they are leaders of their own churches. The problem in thinking like this is that as Gary Hamel writes in Leading the Revolution, in most cases, many revolutionary leaders only come up with one truly great or revolutionary idea in their life. This is why authors just keep saying the same thing, software companies fail to capitalize on their success, why many academics fail to keep up with new ideas and why many churches never change over the tenure of their pastorate. Creative ideas come from all sorts of places but if you are going to insist that the idea must come from the top, those sources will dry up. Many people will endure through lack of money, hard times, and a lot of adversity but one thing that creative idea people can’t endure is being ignored, disempowered, or shut out. They go to where they can make a difference.
   

7. We need to think in terms of releasing the idea instead of copyrighting it. I understand the desire to keep control of an idea. One of the hardest things about letting an idea go is when you see someone wrecking it (in your opinion). I think in churches we need to stop thinking of copyrighting and more in turns of an open source church where improvements are shared and built upon by other creative people. The web lends itself to that but instead of mass sharing and improvement we are seeing people wanting to control and sell. One of the things I am excited about seeing how it works is TheOOZE’s soon to be released OOZETANK. It is an online collaborative workspace where pastors, poets, artists, storytellers, and prophets can all leave their wares to be improved, used, and tweaked with the idea of expanding the Kingdom and not own kingdom. Mars Hill latest worship CD, Tension was released using the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s Open Audio License. A version of the open source license that made Linux such a popular OS. Improvements can be made but just keep them free too and give credit to the original author. I talk to friends on multiple staffs and they complain about the lack of collaboration even within churches. While there is much to say for the importance of the quality of good ideas, quantity of ideas can help and your good idea can be a great idea to advance the kingdom in a different setting.

The problems that face churches that are more than a decade old are huge. They are based on a worldview that is in decline and is not attractive to a new emerging way of thinking.  For many churches the idea of closing is a better option than dealing with the new realities of ministry.  For others the challenges will be in moving from a command and control based structure to something more chaordic, it keeps some order but allows for the new.  The net has changed how many postmoderns see the world.  It has changed my viewpoint from a passive watcher to an active creator.  A decade ago only the wealthy could put together the resources to create a magazine.  You needed a publisher, a distribution channel, a large staff and even then you had to battle just for survival.  Today thousands of online magazines (like seven) bring in more viewers than many traditional magazines could hope for.  I just don't surf the net, I help create it.  The church has to come to grips with a postmodern mindset that says, "I don't want to just come to church, I want a far more active part in creating it".  How we engage with that statement will go a long way in determining the future of our church.

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