Easter is over, and now it's time to take a quick breath before you begin planning for Christmas; which is fine because all you have to do is come up with something super memorable, or relevant, or whatever it is your church values. But one way or another, it's your responsibility to make it awesome.
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| Photo courtesy of Ramnath Bhat at Flickr.com |
Easy right? maybe not. If you're anything like me, the pressure of having to make everything awesome can make feel crushing. From time to time, I find myself sitting at my desk, staring at a blank page, with a dumb gaping stare. I feel filled with fear and doubt about whether or not I'll be able to come up with anything worth while. But here's the problem with that. My fear and doubt don't show very much trust in God.
When I give into insecurity about my creative abilities, I'm also doubting that God has done a good job at guiding my life. It's like I'm indirectly saying God, you screwed up. You could have selected a better profession for me, or given me a different set of spiritual gifts. But that's a bad way of looking at my life, obviously. It keeps me from seeing the blessings of who He made me to be.
The truth is, God didn't give me a highly advanced sense of creativity. And it's also true that my job, like yours, requires a high level of creativity. But my job description never says anything about me needing to be the creative person on my team. And I'm guessing yours doesn't either.
As a leader, your job isn't to do everything for your church. Your job is to get other people to do things. And it's no different when it comes to creativity. As I've pursued creative programming ideas at Moon Valley Bible Church, I've landed on these two methods for accessing the best creativity of my life. They're a great way to discover more potential in your leadership and your team. They are also a sure fire way to access the best, most creative ideas your team has to offer.
1. A team of creative weirdos. I'll never forget the conversation I had with a worship leader from one of Arizona's largest churches. During our conversation, I asked him how he comes up with creative ideas for the services at his church. He told me that it was easy. He told me to look for the most creative people I could find. I think his exact words were you want the type of guy who would wear a lamp shade on his head. Then he advised me to have quarterly meetings with these creative people and talk about upcoming sermon content, and how we can connect people with the topic of the sermon. I've been doing this for a short period of time, but the results have been amazing.
2. Just steal someone else's idea... but also give them credit. Sometimes, the best idea for you is one someone else has already thought of. This year for Easter, I 'borrowed' an idea from North Point Community Church in Atlanta. Last year they made a video for a Christmas song they wrote called Christmas in Bevelton. It was brilliant, and well worth the watch.
North point is a church of 27,000 people. My church is a fraction of that size, and we have considerably less resources. But we still pooled our resources to create our own song for Easter. In the end, everyone loved it. I've been getting emails all week asking for a link to the video. This borrowed idea was just the right thing for my church. It was fun, engaging, and creative. And I didn't have to do any creative work to think of it.
Easter Song | Written by Children from moonvalley on Vimeo.
So if you struggle with creativity. Ask yourself this simple question: Is creativity part of your job description, or can you outsource creativity, and stay focused on the things that you're really good at?
Question: How do you approach creativity?
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