from the Leadership Collective email from November 2017
I grew up listening to the music of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s and couldn’t have told you the Top 40 Hits for most of the early 2000s. I still love listening to music from that era. Jordan and I often listen to songs from bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival, Led Zeppelin and Neil Young and wonder how they tapped into the creativity that they did (sans the occasional recreational drug use).
It begs the question, ‘If they were able to access the creativity that they did, apart from a relationship with THE Creator, what would it look like for the Church and her people to step into their full creative potential when we have access to the One who created the universe?’. What if instead of simply ‘doing church’ the way we’ve always done it, we decided to step out of the box and our comfort zones. This applies to outreach, worship, assimilation, communications, kids, youth and the list could go on.
I think many of us have discounted ourselves as ‘creative’ because we’re a Type A personality (I’ll raise my own hand to that one) or we think that creative people never fail and so when we fail it means we’re not creative or insert any other number of limiting things we believe about ourselves and our creative identity.
Discovering your creative genius is not about becoming someone you’re not meant to be but identifying and unleashing YOUR form of creativity to YOUR area of influence, whether that’s your ministry, your family, your business or wherever you find yourself.
Proverbs 25:2 says, ‘It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings’. Can we be so bold to search out God for the answers to questions that plague society? Can we ask for the solutions that end gang violence in Chicago and the refugee crisis in Syria? Can we seek God for the things that bring beauty to a world desperate for hope and joy?
Erwin McManus, pastor of Mosaic Church in LA, says, ‘Creativity is born of risk and refined by failure’. Are we willing to take the risks, despite our fears, that is needed for us to be the agents of change?