Page 3623 – Christianity Today (2024)

Whatever resources God had given us were enough to accomplish his will in our place at this time.
—Bill Giovannetti

I didn’t choose to become a church pianist. I was in high school, attending Grace Gospel Church in Chicago, when our regular pianist moved away. Since I had endured piano lessons, the mantle fell on me. My skills hovered somewhere between John Thompson Levels II and III. I was hardly ready for prime time.

For the big day, I learned “To God Be the Glory.” The leader led, the people sang, and I played. I finished the song about two measures ahead of the congregation (what I lacked in technique I made up in speed). But it didn’t matter. They loved me enough to overlook my mistakes, and they loved God enough to worship him anyway.

Each week I practiced one new song, and each Sunday our congregation endured not only my narrow repertoire but also my nervous accelerando. We had heart, and we had spirit, but no one would have accused us of excellence.

I blush a little as I think about it. Still, when I am tempted to envy big-league churches with their drama, orchestra, and professional singers, my mind slips back to those days on the piano. Was our worship any less spiritual or powerful for its modesty? I don’t think so.

Since becoming a pastor, though, I have often forgotten that truth. Years after my not-ready-for-prime-time debut, I found myself striving for perfection in worship and giving my small church a lot of headaches in the process.

What I had to relearn was that it is possible to worship God well with modest means. Here are the values that helped us do that.

Authenticity over excellence

Before planting Windy City Community Church, I had been pumped up by speakers inspiring church leaders to excellence. So I committed myself to avoiding sloppiness. Everything we did would be done with excellence.

In pursuit of musical excellence, though, I became oppressive. I pressured our music directors to recruit better singers, to wave a magic baton to make them sing better than their ability. No matter how much pressure I exerted, however, our musical teams could not satisfy me. We were a small church with a limited pool of talent, and I was raising the bar to a height only a large church could clear.

Then I stumbled upon an uncomfortable truth: What I had nobly justified as excellence turned out to be something else—my ugly need to impress. What my church needed to worship God was not Broadway musicals but authenticity—people worshiping God in spirit and in truth. Authenticity, relating honestly to the Lord, was more important than excellence, doing something well.

Authenticity, however, isn’t an excuse for laziness. Excellence is a legitimate value within the church. It’s tough for the congregation to worship when they’re squirming because the worship leader or special musician is embarrassingly flat.

But when we pursue excellence at the cost of authenticity, the church suffers. I’ve learned to be satisfied if worship leaders possess decent musical skills. And if some of them are exceptionally talented, that’s a bonus. But in recruiting worship leaders, we look first for authenticity—and just enough skill not to embarrass the congregation.

This sends an important message to the congregation: a person doesn’t have to be spectacular to serve the Lord. If we say that God uses ordinary people, why promote only extraordinary people?

Shifting from excellence to authenticity has changed the songs we sing. Just as a football coach must send in plays the team can run, so the music director must select songs the church can sing. We won’t be singing Handel’s Messiah anytime soon; we enjoy a treasury of hymns and praise songs that are simple, singable, and powerful.

We occasionally tinker with the music to make a song easier to sing. For example, “Great Is the Lord,” by Michael W. Smith, contains a big finish with the words “Great is the Lord” repeated five times. On the last repeat, the music instructs us to sing something like “Great is the (pause four beats) Lord!” Every time we tried that, people belted out “Lord” during the pause and were embarrassed. What makes a dramatic finale for a performance makes for a confusing flop in congregational singing. So we eliminated that pause.

Putting the stress on authenticity over excellence has also affected my preaching.

For the first five years of my pastoral ministry, I preached from manuscripts. In the writing phase, I labored over every word. On Sundays before church, I made last-minute corrections on the computer and printed out thirteen pages of notes. I brought them into the pulpit and basically read my manuscript to the church. Though I occasionally ad-libbed, I normally stuck close to the notes.

One Sunday disaster struck. Halfway through printing my sermon, a fuse blew and damaged the disk. I could neither access nor print my sermon notes. A week’s study was electronically imprisoned. I had to leave for church, so I scribbled my outline on a single sheet of legal paper, dashed out the door, and preached (on the subject of the Holy Spirit). It went surprisingly well.

Why? In part because I was forced to shift from a focus on performance to authenticity. Instead of giving words, I was giving myself. That day authenticity became more important to me than excellence. Through this little calamity, God taught me to quit fussing over my sermons till they were like overcooked eggs.

W. H. Griffith-Thomas advised young preachers:

Think yourself empty
Read yourself full
Write yourself clear
Pray yourself keen
Then enter the pulpit
And let yourself go!

Leadership over musicianship

Pastor Jones needed a music pastor. He contacted Melody Smith, an old friend from seminary days whose musical gifts were beyond question. An excellent pianist, she could sight-read, transpose, arrange, play in a band, and accompany both soloists and the congregation with equal skill. She displayed an obvious love for the Lord; her character was above reproach; she related to others in an authentic way. It seemed she was the ideal choice.

After considerable discussion, Jones invited Melody to join his staff as music pastor. Patting himself on the back, Jones thought, That’s one less ministry to worry about.

When Melody arrived, she quickly won the hearts of the people. Her solos led them into the presence of God. She radiated godliness.

A few months passed in sweet harmony, but then discordant notes began to be heard from the music ministry. A persistent discontent surfaced among the two dozen music volunteers. They bickered over song selection, solo schedules, even the tempo of the music. Musicians arrived late to rehearsals. Though church attendance was growing, the number of musicians stayed the same.

Morale plummeted into the bass clef. Melody grew increasingly upset and finally asked Pastor Jones to intervene. After all, God had called her to make music for his glory, not to referee fights.

Jones had already noticed other problems in the music ministry. Little things. Week after week during morning worship, the slides that projected song lyrics were out of order. On a regular basis, the soloist began with a dead microphone. Stage lights burned out without replacement. Melody wanted to play music, not worry about details.

But most disturbing to Pastor Jones was that while the quality of music had improved, the congregational singing had deteriorated. They had moved from being worshipers to being observers. The music ministry had become a performance.

For months Pastor Jones spent considerable time troubleshooting the music ministry, wondering what was happening, trying to get to the root of the problem. One day the root problem became clear: at the head of the music department was a musician, not a leader.

It takes a leader to inspire a congregation to enter wholeheartedly into worship. It takes a leader to create a system to care for the details. It takes a leader to resolve conflict and maintain morale. It takes a leader to motivate others to volunteer for service.

Melody’s love for God and her musical talent could not compensate for her lack of leadership. The most important strength of a music leader is leadership, especially when the person is working with volunteers.

Your church may not have the resources to attract topnotch musicians, but the best person to lead the music department may be sitting under your nose: a man or woman who loves the Lord, who has decent pitch and tempo, and who can lead people.

Gifts over imitation

Early in the life of Windy City Community Church, we experimented with “seeker sensitive” worship services. We tried drama, Christianity 101 messages, and shorter worship periods.

Attendance dropped. One Sunday, after sitting through a particularly painful skit (I forced the drama group into it before they were ready) and preaching a weak, uninspired message, I knew something had to change. What we had been trying was foreign to us.

I began asking myself questions: Who are we as a church? Who am I as a pastor? Just what is our mission anyway?

Then I did what many pastors do when all else fails: I went to a seminar. I figured that might help me discover my personal mission and the mission of my church. With a dictation recorder in hand, I interviewed dozens of pastors from all over the country, asking one question: “What is the mission of your church?” (I didn’t have the answer, so I hoped to borrow someone else’s!)

It turned out we were all in the same boat. Some pastors spoke vaguely about the three E‘s: evangelism, edification, exaltation. Some talked about their church constitution and their mission statement that filled ten pages. Others confessed they didn’t know what their mission was. No one answered with a concise, clear sentence. We were like sermons without propositions.

Almost in despair, I approached the seminar speaker. Like me, he pastored the church he had planted. I stuck out my tape recorder: “What is the mission of your church?”

Without hesitation, he replied, “To mobilize an army to fulfill the Great Commission by developing nonreligious people into fully formed followers of Jesus.” He explained that fully formed followers of Jesus “love God with their whole hearts, love the body of Christ, and love the world for whom Christ died.”

“How can I decide,” I pressed, “if my church should be seeker sensitive?”

Without batting an eye, he asked, “What’s your passion?”

That question of four years ago still echoes in my mind. God has wired some leaders one way and me another way. My God-given passion is to expound the Word to believers. I’m not a Christianity 101 kind of guy. I get excited about Christianity 201. That’s my contribution to the Great Commission. I don’t have to do it all.

All of a sudden, like a dog that gets out of the yard, I felt release. Free at last! I could be myself.

I could also let my church be itself. We started to organize our church around our gifts. We planned our worship around the people we had instead of around the people we wished we had. Whatever resources God had given us were enough to accomplish his will in our place at this time.

God expects us to give him only “such as we have.”

Small church, great God

We’re surrounded by media offering practical help in the Christian life. Publications, seminars, and counselors offer ways to better marriages, relationships, finances, parenting, and self-esteem.

What the church offers that these resources cannot is meaningful corporate worship.

What makes for meaningful corporate worship?

While the list of important qualities is long—biblically true, practical, relevant, sensitive to the culture, visual, focused, and so on—only one rises head and shoulders above the rest: transcendence.

Transcendence means we catch a glimpse of God and his throne and recognize we are in his presence. Transcendence is what makes a worship service meaningful. Our two most significant tools, singing and preaching, must lead people to God.

Transcendence means doing for our people what Elisha did for his servant. When the servant saw the Syrian army surrounding them, he panicked. At that moment Elisha could have talked about confidence and self-esteem. He could have probed the source of the servant’s fears. Instead Elisha prayed that God would lift the veil and give his servant a glimpse of heaven’s victory.

Elisha gives us a model for meaningful worship. We may not have drama, exceptional music, or even well-crafted sermons, but the quality of transcendence week after week will provide our people with a bedrock foundation for life.

Transcendence, at first glance, seems easier to convey in a large church with high, vaulted ceilings, a powerful sound system, and an aesthetically inspiring sanctuary. How do you get people meeting in a country church or grade-school gym to lift their eyes to the greatness of God?

It’s not a matter of money. Transcendence comes from the content of preaching and singing. It’s seeing who God is, and leading people to see themselves in light of who God is.

Someone has said that if you want to convey to people how scary a certain road is, you don’t tell them that it is scary; you show them what it is about the road that terrifies. Likewise we convey transcendence when we help people see the greatness of the invisible God.

That’s done by praying and singing about the glory of Christ in heaven, which a church with modest means can do. What’s important is not what people see around them but what we help them see with their imaginations.

Preaching recently on the despair many people feel, I said, “If we could take such people into heaven, where they could stand before the risen Christ, with myriads of angels on their right, millions of saints on their left, gold under their feet, and then help them see what God is doing, their emotions would change.”

When Martin Lloyd-Jones, the great Welsh preacher, came to Aberavon, Wales, he came to a bleak, despairing coastal town. The working-class community had suffered economic depression, high unemployment, and low education. Yet Lloyd-Jones was determined to preach God’s transcendence. He brought a great vision of God. Not surprisingly, the church flourished under his ministry.

When the church of my youth let me play the piano, I learned a lesson that will last a lifetime. I learned we can worship God meaningfully even if our means are modest.

Copyright © 1995 by Christianity Today

The trouble with our church or any church is not lack of members or money; it is lack of ingenuity, creativity, and courage.
—James Stobaugh

Our collection one week recently was $691.30. We needed $1,300 to meet budget.

Standing at the front door of our brownstone church, saying farewell to our eighty congregants, I saw Robert, a street person in our neighborhood. He asked a member for a quarter. We barely have a quarter to give you, I thought.

It wasn’t always this way. In my closet sits a photograph of our turn-of-the-century congregation. Healthy-looking men and parasol-laden women encircle a whole block. Written in optimistic white ink is “The Church in Friendship.” Pittsburgh was thriving, and so was the church. It boasted a huge Sunday school, active youth group, and overflowing morning worship. The softball team won the all-church league! The church’s potential seemed unlimited.

But the steel industry faltered: our armies won two wars but our businesses lost the import war. Superhighways enticed people to the suburbs. A few stalwart souls continued to commute to our declining church, but their children yearned for modern bathrooms and carpeted nurseries. A popular pastor retired. By 1960 we were a shadow of former glory. By the early eighties, we were only a handful of dazed saints.

By now the community hardly knew we existed. Robert and his friends had nothing in common with us. Their world was full of drugs, unemployment, and juvenile delinquency. Our world was quiet afternoons with a Sunday paper. Except for when this community mugged us, raped us, or stole our cars, we were effectively ignoring it. Most of us hoped to escape.

To our credit, we felt conviction. God wasn’t pleased with our negligence. This was our time and our place. These were our people. Like it or not, God had called us here to represent his Son. What were we going to do about it?

Conviction, though, is one thing. The fact was, we didn’t know how we could help anyone. We simply didn’t have the resources. We were in a large, older building, and our expenses, even cut to the minimum, were often double our weekly offering.

Recognize existing resources

Where could we begin?

With what we did have.

No, we didn’t have a lot of discretionary income. Our budget was overstrained. But as we assessed our resources, we realized we have more than we thought we did.

For example, we have a large building. That gave us space to host a variety of ministries and programs without having to worry about finding or renting room for them.

Second, we have a church office with a manual typewriter and a copier. We can handle, slowly, the basic communication and correspondence needed in any outreach.

Third, though our congregation is small, it’s resourceful. Most of us have learned the hard way how to get the most for our money.

Most important, we have an omnipotent God. And our community needs an omnipotent God: unemployment is almost 40 percent; 84 percent of community families are led by single parents; most children are born out of wedlock; and crime is as bad as anywhere in Pittsburgh. But our God is bigger than even these staggering problems.

Once we had seen all we did have, we could put those resources to use. For example, we were concerned about the mental health of our community, but we couldn’t afford a part-time counselor, let alone a full-time one, to address the staggering needs. So we went to a local Christian ministry and offered office space in our building—for free—if they would provide a counselor available to people in the community. They agreed, and we now have a counselor in our church a couple of nights a week. We were able to provide far more counseling help for the community than we could have otherwise. The trick was recognizing the value of an existing resource—our building—and using it.

Network with other groups

That experience illustrates another principle we’ve learned: When you can’t afford to do it by yourself, don’t. Work with other groups.

One widespread and growing problem in our church neighborhood is chemical addiction. Why not ask a chapter of Narcotics Anonymous to come to our church? we thought. We couldn’t afford staff to tackle the problem, and Narcotics Anonymous had expertise in this area. And to be honest, we were new to all this, and we felt more comfortable risking our building than ourselves!

Narcotics Anonymous came, and within a few months we had the largest chapter east of the Mississippi meeting in our church. Every week, from 350 to 700 people flowed through our church. A few came to our worship service. More important, the community supported our efforts because their families benefited. Feeling co*cky, our board refused any rent, except a small stipend we immediately returned to another community ministry. “I’ve never been loved this way,” a surprised NA representative told us.

There were problems, like the time some recovering addicts stole furniture and ruined two carpets. But our board had tasted victory for the first time in decades. We still were receiving about $700 per week and spending more than $1,000, but we were finally doing something that was changing our world.

We looked around for other ways to affect our community. We remembered that each year we paid dues—$100—to East End Cooperative Ministry, a coalition of forty churches that runs a food closet, soup kitchen, meals-on-wheels program, shelter, halfway house, and employment agency. We decided paying dues was not enough. The board and I volunteered to serve in these ministries. Before long our tiny congregation was logging more than one hundred hours in these ministries every week—more than an hour per member! It didn’t cost a nickel, but we started receiving rich spiritual returns.

We began to support, along with other churches and groups, a Jubilee housing project. The project buys abandoned houses, refurbishes them, and allows low-income people to live in them at modest rates. The only stipulation is that they must take good care of them. If they do, in twenty or so years they will own their own homes.

Before long, other people on the block painted their houses and cleaned their yards. Tenement owners made needed repairs. A feeling began to spread: This community is worth taking care of! It wouldn’t have happened without many groups working together.

Focus on areas of greatest need

One painful realization for any pastor is that you can’t do everything. The number of needs in any church and community is simply too great. We feel this acutely. With so much that needs to be done, and so little money, what can we do?

We have decided, by necessity, to focus on the areas of greatest need. In our community right now, one of these is our young people. One of every twenty young men on our block will die before age twenty. Four of every five young women will be pregnant before age fifteen. At least two youths will die of an overdose of drugs during the year.

Neither I nor my predecessor was equipped for this challenge. We both asked the Lord for a financially affordable way to do something about this dilemma. He sent us Joe.

A few years before I came, a middle-aged Mafia enforcer named Joe Bellante was shot twice by the mob because he owed them $10,000. While in the hospital, Joe committed his life to Christ. Some of our Session members heard about Joe’s situation and got to know him. A few of them raised enough money to make a financial settlement with the Mafia, and thus they literally saved Joe’s life.

From this amazing beginning, Joe became an assistant to the pastor and took responsibility for youth ministry. We added a line to the budget, and members who could afford to give extra did. It wasn’t easy, but if we were going to stretch anywhere, it would be for this area of great need. Joe began youth clubs, and soon our basem*nt was filled with kids on Wednesday nights. His knowledge of the street was invaluable; the police used him to defuse crises; he went to Florida to retrieve runaways; he held junkies all night to keep them from harming themselves.

After a while, we realized Joe’s ministry could be even greater if it weren’t restricted to our church. Joe formed an independent ministry named Urban Partners, and its budget is now larger than ours. Members of our church continue to be its biggest financial contributors, and some of our members serve on Urban Partners’ board.

Again we faced the problem of funding a staff person to reach young people. Returning to our principle of networking, we talked with East Main Presbyterian Church in Grove City, Pennsylvania, outside the city. They got excited about the potential and agreed to fund a staff person who would be responsible for developing new ministries to young people and others.

Avoid dependence

This raises a key question for churches trying to build a major ministry with modest means: How much can you depend on others? To refuse funds is to refuse opportunities for ministry. But to accept them is to open yourself to an insidious cycle of dependence.

We’ve tried to resolve the issue by determining what the funds are for. If they’re for operating expenses—lights, heat, my salary—we refuse them. That’s our responsibility. We are committed to dying as a church before we accept others’ money for basic expenses.

On the other hand, we will gladly accept money for ministry and mission. Our vacation Bible school reached almost a hundred kids. We felt fine about Nabisco’s giving cookies for the school. The next summer, the city provided free lunches. In a cooperative effort with three other churches, we provided a hot lunch for more than half the children in our 9,200-member community. The difference was that these gifts weren’t given to keep Fourth Presbyterian alive; they were given to help children who might not eat as well otherwise. That was why we rejoiced that East Main agreed to fund Cindy Schartner, our new staff member. She’s not an associate pastor or director of Christian education. Her primary responsibility is to coordinate ministries directed outward, to the community.

The “avoid dependence” principle works the other way too: we try not to build an unhealthy dependence in the people we serve. A few years ago Bob Lupton, executive director of the Family Consultation Service in Atlanta, introduced me to the idea of “dignity ministries,” programs that build not dependence but dignity. I knew these were needed because in our community I’d seen, for example, people receive donated, hand-me-down Christmas toys for their kids. The people were losing their dignity in having to depend on handouts, in not being able to choose and buy toys for their children. So last Christmas we opened a Christmas store. We asked area churches to provide new toys, and we made sure the toys were both nonviolent and appropriate for people in our community. But instead of giving them away, we sold them—at 30 percent of retail price. (We also made Bibles available.) For many customers, it was the first time they had been able to buy Christmas toys for their children.

If folks couldn’t afford to pay for the toys—and it was surprising how many could—we allowed them to work for them. They joined others from the community who were already working in the store. These weren’t empty, made-up jobs, but real ones. People cleaned the store, set up displays, unloaded boxes, priced items. We made people come to work on time. If they didn’t work the whole time they were scheduled for, they weren’t paid. In all, we employed twenty-five people, and it was exciting to see homeless people and others of varying financial status gain work experience. When we finished the project, we had actually made a little money, which will give us a start on this year’s store.

By minimizing dependence, we maximize impact.

Don’t settle for second-rate

I’ll be the first to admit we’ve never had enough money to do anything the easy way. For example, we host a drop-in center for homeless people in our basem*nt and we can’t afford a separate phone line for it. If a person wants to reach the church office, he or she may have to call twice: once when it’s picked up downstairs, and again while the people downstairs let it ring. But in our ministries to the poor and powerless, we endeavor to provide excellence. We think our Lord demands nothing less.

As we seek to rehabilitate the homeless, for example, we draw on the services of East Liberty Family Health Care Center, an independent Christian health ministry. At the same time an orthopedic surgeon and a dentist in our church offer care to needy street people. The church does not have to take a back seat to any organization in America.

Not settling for second-rate means, among other things, that when you enter new areas of ministry, you have to ask for advice. Recently we took over an eleven-unit apartment building in our neighborhood to house elderly and homeless people in our congregation. We recognized that as a small church we didn’t have a lot of expertise in housing ministry.

So we formed an advisory committee, a blue-ribbon panel of committed Christians from outside our church who are specialists in various areas. They examined the facility, helped with legal questions, and guided us through a maze of nonprofit matters.

To help with the renovation, a contractor who belongs to East Main Presbyterian has agreed to bring his workers for a week this summer. We’ll provide the materials, while he generously provides the labor. Here again, by tapping others’ expertise, we’re able to make sure the project is done right.

A simple fact

I will never forget the day we invited Robert into our church and handed him a cup of coffee. We and East End Cooperative Ministry had opened a drop-in center for the homeless. Here people come to get warm, to find counsel. Each Monday evening, for example, some of our members lead a Bible study at the center.

A simple fact dawned on us: with no increase of our budget, we had become a powerful church. We were becoming respected, even loved, by people in our community, and some of them started coming to church. Eventually some became officers; gradually we were becoming a community church again. We had no more broken windows or walls defecated on because this was their church.

One day a drop-in person stole our VCR. Frankly, I never expected to keep a VCR in an inner-city church—they were hot commodities on the street market. So I wasn’t surprised when it was stolen. But I was surprised when it was returned by another drop-in. “Hey, man,” he scolded the thief, “what you doin’? This is our VCR. This is our place. Don’t go stealing from our place!”

Our budget is still $72,000 a year, and we still have 79 members. We still receive $691.30 some weeks. But more and more the congregation offers $1,000 or even $1,500. We have begun to meet budget for the first time in years. Last year, we ended up $7.30 in the black!

One glaring weakness of our work over the last few years is that we haven’t been able to incorporate the homeless and recovering addicts into our congregation in a substantial way. We are still searching for ways to make them feel welcome upstairs as well as in the basem*nt. Now anything we start has to be connected closely to the church. When we started an aerobics class, four members committed themselves to come every week so people in the class would get to know people in the church.

And we need more money. I certainly haven’t preached enough on stewardship. We need to be challenged to be more responsible in our giving.

Meanwhile, much work remains. Unemployment, for example, poisons our community. We hope to start a small business someday that will employ neighborhood people.

I have never been tempted to indulge myself with any sort of prosperity theology, since prosperity is absent from my world, but I believe the only limits are what God does not allow or we are unable to dream. The trouble with our church or any church is not lack of members or money; it is lack of ingenuity, creativity, and courage.

The book of Esther has meant a lot to me over the last few years. Esther had to act decisively, courageously, and quickly, or the nation of Israel would perish. After praying and fasting, she left her apartment, turned the corner, and peered into the face of the greatest, most powerful force for evil in her day. In every community, the church is turning corners and finding itself face-to-face with King Xerxes. Esther risked everything. We have to risk everything too.

We are the church of Jesus Christ, and we have to be more than a good feeling or an attractive building. Our communities are counting on us.

Copyright © 1995 by Christianity Today

Being cramped is a part of ministry at every turn, at every level of growth—and probably at every church.
—Larry Osborne

When I first came to North Coast, the walls of the “sanctuary” were not lined with stained glass. They were spotted with the remains of innumerable food fights. While we rented the facility on Sundays, Monday through Friday it served another function: lunchroom for the local high school.

Obviously, it wasn’t an ambiance that lent itself to traditional worship. One Sunday, a dog wandered up the aisle in the middle of my sermon, nuzzling and sniffing at the faithful. Another Sunday, a boisterous gang of adolescent skateboarders decided to show off their skills right outside a row of large Plexiglas windows.

On top of that, I had taken a cut in pay from my previous salary as a youth pastor in a large suburban church. As the new pastor of a fledgling church plant, I no longer had at my disposal a secretary, copy machine, or many of the other trappings of civilized ministry. Instead, my new office was a refurbished garage with a beat-up desk that my previous church had given me as an act of charity.

After a quick start (we jumped from 120 to 150 in a few weeks), we leveled off. It soon became obvious that ministry from a cramped position would not be a short-term aberration but a long-term way of life.

As a twenty-eight-year-old rookie pastor, I had two choices: adjust or quit. I chose to adjust, all the time thinking that if I hung in there long enough, the day would finally come when ministry from a cramped position with significantly limited resources would be a thing of the past.

That day never came. I’ve since discovered that there is no time in ministry when something doesn’t hinder ministry. Today we have more staff and volunteers, and larger facilities than I ever imagined, yet I still often feel cramped. We always need more space, money, and workers to do ministry right.

Being cramped, then, seems to be a part of ministry at every turn, at every level of growth—and probably at every church. We have no choice: if we are going to minister, we’re going to have to learn how to do it from a cramped position.

Here are some things that have helped our church succeed in less-than-ideal circ*mstances.

Ignore some cramps

Pastors commonly—and mistakenly—assume that if something is wrong, we have to fix it. Whether the pressure comes from well-meaning and caring members or from our sense of duty, I’ve learned that, in many cases, it’s a good idea to ignore these pressures and let the problem be.

Yet one of the hardest facts to accept when ministering from a cramped position is that you’re not going to have a well-balanced ministry. When you’re working under severe budgetary constraints, for example, shoring up one program inevitably means taking away from another.

During a critical stage of our church’s growth, we had a lot of young families with small children, and we had some older adults. But we had almost no families with junior high or high school kids. So we poured our limited resources into creating a topnotch children’s program. As a result, we attracted more people with young children. But we had a huge demographic gap where youth ministry was supposed to exist.

Still, there were a few families with junior and senior high kids. It was hard to look them in the eye and say, “I’m sorry, but we just can’t minister to your kids right now.” But that’s exactly what I had to say to one man I dearly love, the father of two high school girls. He understood our limitations and continued to support me and the church, and he’s one of our elders today. But it was hard for him—and for me—to ignore this area of weakness in our program.

Of course, it’s a lot easier to ignore pressures if we offer the congregation a compelling alternative. Peter Drucker calls it building on our islands of strength—which we did by focusing on families with young children.

That’s why, when we hired our first full-time staff person, we resisted the powerful temptation to make youth work part of his job description. I went to the board and asked them to make a rule that Mike would not work with youth. I wanted the church officially to declare that we were going to ignore this area of weakness and focus on building our strengths, which at that time were our children’s ministry and home groups. The board agreed. Eventually, those islands became so strong and brought in enough new people and new funding that we were able to develop an outstanding youth program. But the key was waiting until the time was ripe rather than trying to fix it at the first sign of brokenness.

This principle continues to guide us today. Right now, for example, our missions effort is anemic at best. Because our church has been growing rapidly, we’ve put a lot of effort into absorbing and ministering to new people. So our missions emphasis has taken a back seat.

Does this mean that we don’t care about the Great Commission? Of course not. We were active in missions during the years when growth was stagnant. I’m confident we’ll be a missions church again in the future. But right now, we’re expanding the kingdom by focusing on the corner of the kingdom that is bulging our own walls.

“Be what you are—don’t try to be what you are not” is a slogan that helps me work effectively within limitations.

Give volunteers a break

Since I was the church’s only paid employee, and there was no funding for support staff, I had to rely heavily on volunteers.

In the beginning, I was frustrated. I had previously relied on an efficient secretarial pool. Volunteers were well-intentioned but often inconsistent, inefficient, and unreliable. They didn’t do things the way I wanted them done.

But I’ve learned how to work from this cramped position. First, I’ve changed my attitude. I now realize that while a church ministry is my life and my career, it is only a side dish on the volunteer’s plate. A volunteer can and will call in sick at the last moment when a paid staff person might drag him or herself to work. That’s a pain. But the truth is, many times I would love to do the same but don’t only because I’m paid to be there.

Still, volunteers are fabulous, dedicated, committed people. In addition to the demands of their jobs and families, they give hours of time and energy to keep the ministry of our church humming. To begrudge their inherent limitations is to miss out on one of God’s special blessings.

Second, I make sure they’re given the best tools to do their jobs. Good volunteers may save the church money, but keeping them isn’t cheap.

I once observed our volunteers folding bulletins and newsletters by hand, and I thought to myself, This is boring, lousy grunt work. If these people are going to volunteer their time, they deserve to have the job made as easy as possible. So even though our church was still small and struggling, we bought the best folding machine available. It’s a pattern we follow today. No matter how tight the budget, we try to ensure that our volunteers have reliable copy machines, efficient computers, and trustworthy printers. Quality tools make a big difference in morale and in ministry.

Third, we’ve taken the pressure off some of our volunteers by making the job as manageable as possible. For instance, we found that our volunteer Sunday school teachers were often ill-prepared when they stepped into the classroom. You know the routine: sometime late Saturday night, the teacher cracks the David C. Cook lesson book for the first time and ends up reading or stumbling through the lesson on Sunday morning.

There’s an old rule of thumb in business: if three people in a row fail at the same job, the problem is not the people; it’s the job. In a similar vein, if volunteer after volunteer comes to class underprepared, perhaps the job needs to be redefined.

That’s what we did. We got rid of the traditional teacher and class setup and replaced them with storytellers and shepherds, and we began a program called “Kids’ Praise.” We brought all the kids together for a fast-moving, entertaining, Sesame Street-type program led by a good storyteller. (We’ve found it’s a lot easier to find four or five good storytellers than to recruit eighteen Sunday school teachers.)

These leaders conduct a program of music, humor, and fun; the gathering then breaks into small groups. An adult “shepherd” leads each group of children through a simple, loosely structured craft and discussion time. There’s no lesson to teach, nothing to prepare for. While they lead the children in a craft, the shepherds encourage the kids to talk about the lesson presented in the larger group. Their function is not to teach but to be a loving, adult presence—a much easier job description for volunteers.

Look for partners, not helpers

As the church grew, we reached a point where we needed to add support staff. There was enough money to hire a part-time secretary and a part-time ministry assistant. Naturally, I felt I needed a full-time person at each position!

At first, I decided to lessen my load by hiring a part-time assistant to do all the things I hated doing. But before long the relationship soured, and I had to let him go.

Back to cramped square one. This time, though, I took a fresh approach: I decided to ignore my needs for support staff and hire ministry staff.

I pooled the money that would have been spent on a part-time secretary and part-time assistant and hired a full-time associate pastor. Instead of being hired to do what I didn’t want to do, he was hired to do what I couldn’t do. He brought a set of ministry gifts and skills that complemented mine. My overall workload wasn’t reduced, but our ministry was multiplied. He’s still with us years later, and he now shares the preaching load. But in those early years, it meant I didn’t have a secretary. Still we were capable of doing a lot more for the kingdom.

Frankly, sometimes I found it hard to share ministry with a partner. To have a secretary or ministry assistant would have sometimes been easier on my self-esteem, like the first time someone in our church asked Mike to perform a baptism. Until then, I had done all the baptisms, so Mike told this person, “I’m sure it will be no problem, but let me check with Larry.”

He came into my office and asked me about it. I had somewhat of a relationship with the person being baptized, and I remember wondering why this person chose Mike over me. But I said, “Sure, go ahead.”

After Mike walked out, another associate, Paul, whom we had later hired, stepped into my office and closed the door. He had overheard the conversation. “That was tough, wasn’t it?” he said. “How do you feel?”

“Not so great,” I said.

That conversation gave me helpful insights into myself. Yes, it did hurt a little. I should have been happy that someone asked Mike to do this baptism. My goal, after all, was to create a shared ministry. In the long run, such discomfort is worth it.

Improve it

No matter how many ways you adapt a building, it always seems to prove inadequate in one way or another. Figuring out how to minister in a less-than-ideal facility is one of the most challenging aspects of ministry.

A year after I arrived, we moved out of our elegant cafeteria with its spaghetti-bedecked walls, and we rented space in a church that held its meetings on Saturdays. Though it was a definite step up, we still had plenty to complain about: the lighting was terrible, the sound system was inadequate, and we were still squeezed for classroom space. Furthermore, we felt stymied by being renters, not owners. Cramped again.

The temptation was to crank up a building fund to escape, but that would have taken years to accumulate. And the financial drain would have stifled our fledgling ministry.

Then it dawned on us: Why not offer to improve the facility at our expense? Our landlords were pleased to let us invest in their facility, so we fixed the lighting, improved the sound system, and even paid half the expense of a building-expansion program. We couldn’t fix our problem, but we sure could improve upon what we had.

As our congregation continued to grow, we ran into a new problem. Our landlords decided we were getting too big for their facility, and they informed us that they were breaking our lease—without notice. In effect, they were kicking a church of eight hundred out in the street!

We could have sued and forced the church to honor the remaining four years of the lease, but we felt it would be unbiblical to take another church to court—and it would have given the local press a religious scandal to run with. So we decided to pack our bags and go.

Our congregation was too large to move into a storefront, we didn’t have enough time or money to put up a building, and no other church properties were available. But by God’s providence, we found a large building in an industrial complex. It was a retail frontage, with a warehouse and loading docks in the back. It had plenty of parking. And it was the only place in the area that was large enough to permit us to grow.

But many hearts sank when folks first saw their new “church”—half the floor was at ground level, and the other half five feet lower running back to the loading dock. It made some long for the good old days in the cafeteria!

Again we were forced to find a way to improve what we couldn’t fix. We angled the cement drop-off and created a ramped floor, which gave us a creative and functional sanctuary space. Ours may be the only retail space in America with such a fabulously sloped floor!

Make lemonade

Cramped quarters can also make discipleship a challenge. All along we’ve had trouble getting adequate classroom space, especially for adults. Not having adequate facilities for formal or large gatherings can lead to one of two things: you can complain about what isn’t or make creative use of what is. We’ve chosen the latter. If we couldn’t meet in Sunday school classes on Sunday morning, we could at least meet in small groups in homes in the evenings.

As a result, home fellowship groups have become the hub of our ministry (and ironically, the most significant contributor to the health of our church). Today more than 70 percent of our Sunday morning worshipers attend one of these groups. They study in greater depth the Scripture passage preached on Sunday, giving everyone a common focus and allowing people to deepen their knowledge of Scripture and relationships with one another.

This is perhaps the best lemonade we’ve made from the lemons we’ve been handed. We wouldn’t go back to adult Sunday school even if we had the space to do so.

That’s ministry

As I write this, the 1980s are commonly being viewed as the decade of consumption and the 1990s as the decade of limits. It may well be that a lot of pastors and churches will have to learn to live within their limitations and find creative ways to minister from a cramped position.

Does that mean we have to trim our idealism and vision for the future? Must we downsize our goal of expanding the kingdom of God? Absolutely not! Limitations don’t have to diminish our effectiveness. Limitations just force us to be more creative as God expands his kingdom.

Looking back, I believe my greatest mistake when first confronted with cramped quarters was comparing my situation with others. I began feeling I couldn’t do anything because I lacked the resources others had. I periodically slumped into a mood of paralysis and defeat.

But no more. I now look at limitations from a new perspective, tinker with solutions, and try to come up with the most enterprising and inventive answers I can. Our church is not something we’ve planned or engineered. It has evolved as we’ve looked for creative solutions to our cramped circ*mstances.

In fact, I’ve come to believe that restricted ministry is in some ways part and parcel of ministry: it’s a string of cramped positions, where problems and limitations are just disguised opportunities for ministering in new and creative ways.

Copyright © 1995 by Christianity Today

I see a strong relationship between creativity and renewal.
—James Rose

I once preached 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.

Depending on whom you’re talking to, the word creativity can evoke a positive or negative response.

In the church setting, creativity is the ability to develop forms different from the ones that presently exist—forms that freshly touch the generational and cultural groups around you. Naturally the younger members and artsy group love creativity because it means breaking with traditional forms. An emphasis on creativity invites them to the banquet table. But as the Jonah episode illustrates, some people will never warm up to innovation.

I helped found a church in Clearwater, Florida, in the 1970s with creativity as one of our watchwords. I also pastored Calvary Baptist, a historic, tradition-rich church. Take it from me: Creativity is much easier in a new ministry than in an old one. But creativity may be even more crucial in a historic church; it’s the only way to breathe new life into old.

The need

For several reasons, creativity is more important today than it was a hundred years ago.

First, the culture is changing so quickly.

The Bible gives us our functions, which don’t change—evangelism and discipleship, for example. We express these functions in our forms—the type of musical instruments used, for example—which must change if we’re to touch the cultural groups around us. If we’re not creative, we wind up freezing in time, locking into 1955 forms. What was creative at one time is institutionalized. People lock in whenever “it happened” for them, their great era. Those raised on fifties music tend to listen to the oldies station. One reason people are listening to the oldies is the instability of our times. The familiar gives security.

While some forms are of lasting benefit, you have to keep going back to your mission or vision statement and asking, “Are our forms helping or hurting us in accomplishing what we’ve set out to do?” I question whether God is in evangelistic forms that nobody would understand or come to because they’re forms out of the forties. We’ve got to know what kids are tuned in to; it’s easy to miss the next generation.

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.

Second, creativity is more important today because we’re facing greater and greater needs.

We have a generation growing 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. At Calvary Church, we ran a rap program on Saturday nights as an outreach that also taught reading and writing.

In New York we couldn’t tell the kids to drive down to the youth program on Friday night. People in Manhattan don’t own cars. If kids came to a night meeting, they couldn’t go home; you couldn’t ask fourteen-year-olds to get on the subway after ten o’clock at night and go tooling over to Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx. They would get beat up. They had to spend the night at the church.

I’ve also had to be creative in staffing. When I began interviewing people to come on staff, I found it was difficult to get good people to move to New York: “Where are you? New York City? Well, nice to talk to you.” The cost of living was so high. We had to learn to distribute creatively our assignments.

Third, leadership today demands creativity. In some measure I need to stay one step ahead of others in the church. I need to know where the culture is going. I don’t need to be ahead of everybody; I have people in the church who are ahead of me in various areas, and I rely heavily upon them. But somebody must have an overall vision.

To develop that 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. They don’t have to be pastors. One person in this group is an ex-advertising man who has a great creative mind. The point is to keep in touch with today’s people.

I find the process refreshing. Sometimes when I’m writing an article or a sermon, I’ll intentionally start off in directions I’ve never tried before. I may never use that approach, but drafting it pushes out my mental parameters. On occasion there’s value in planning a service that “pushes the envelope,” exercises the mind, keeps you from thinking in boxes and corridors, helps you break out.

Creativity run amok

Having emphasized the importance of creativity, however, I must note that innovation can be overdone.

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 memorable mistake 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 worship service wasn’t creative; it was weird because it didn’t connect. To be creative without getting weird, you must be in touch with your various groupings, from the old guard to the teens.

Creativity also gets out of control when you feel you have to top the efforts of last week. When that happens, as it did on occasion for us in Clearwater, creativity becomes a tyrant. 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 found, for instance, that interview videos on the topic “Sex, Money, and Power” were a success, so we used that format again. But eventually we needed to ask, “Is that still working?”

Another way creativity can run amok is when a particular worship service simply has too much diversity. 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 fit all this together.

“Just wait,” he said. “It’ll all come together.”

People in a worship service often have the same reaction if a service is too diverse. No matter what the style of music employed, the service needs a dominant theme. 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.

Hope for the historic

While ministering at Calvary Church, I saw movement toward greater innovation. Several things encouraged that.

Recall the past. I pointed to the history of our congregation to show that they had a history of creativity. We were 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 while being thoroughly biblical, the church has also been creative. For example, in the late 1910s when flatbed trucks first were sold, Calvary bought one and went to lower Manhattan and ran 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! Since 1931, the Salisbury Hotel has helped underwrite the ministry of the church.

Find like-minded people. I try to 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, though, because they’re ready to blow the place up with bizarre ideas.)

Move at a snail’s pace. Change will always be slower in a historic church than in a church plant. In a historic 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 will be going down the street.

In the church I founded in Clearwater, Florida, we received widespread publicity and eventually had pastors and their entire boards coming 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. You have to move slowly, though you must still move. You eventually come to a watershed where the church must decide to go forward or stay put.

Preach suitable themes. First, preach on the mission of the church: What are we about? How do we win people?

If you can get people asking, “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 focused on God’s original intent. The religious establishment resisted Christ because he didn’t fit their traditions.

Third, stress God’s creativity. While we’re singing the same old tired hymns, God says, “Sing unto me a new song.”

Choose innovation zones. You have to accept that there are limits to what you can do with those locked into a particular style of ministry. Innovate where you can and accept where you cannot.

I must balance people’s need for security and familiarity with their need for the fresh and unexpected. At Calvary Church, the musical forms of our Sunday morning service—which was the biggest issue—never changed much. We were located in the middle of a classical-music mecca, with Carnegie Hall across the street and Lincoln Center just minutes away, so our worship music stayed classical. While maintaining the historical on Sunday morning, we focused most of our creativity on Sunday night and other occasions.

That wasn’t a failure in any way. I believe in creativity, but I also believe we need to keep some of our rich history alive. One great problem today is that 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.”

Calvary Church was loaded with busters and boomers, young adults who had moved into the city. They told us, “We love your teaching and the discipleship groups, but it’s hard for us to connect with your worship.”

We couldn’t use rock music in worship, but we found hymns that used a traditional melody but with up-to-date words. We also launched a “seeker service” on Sunday nights, once a month. The music was contemporary—jazz, black gospel, American folk.

At Calvary Church we also found ways for the artistically gifted to use their abilities. We ran an “Arts Fest” every year that included an exhibition of graphic arts, painting, and sculpture. We had concerts with various music forms such as a jazz band and a classical ensemble. We also sponsored mime (though we never broke into interpretive dance), and I often preached on the arts and creativity.

* * *

Although creativity can be abused and will face some opposition, I’m willing to take the risk. I see a strong 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 leading 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.

Copyright © 1995 by Christianity Today

We specialized not in prescriptions but in diagnosis.
—Raymond Bakke

John Wooden, the successful basketball coach at UCLA for many years, can teach us something about pastoring.

When Wooden began his “ministry” of coaching, he won a national championship with a team whose tallest member was only six feet five inches. He had a fast-guard offense, a high post, and a lot of backdoor plays and quick screens. Wooden kept his players moving all over the court.

Then he was fortunate enough to recruit a couple of seven-foot centers, so he totally changed his system. He went to a low-post and strong-forward system. And he kept winning championships.

For Wooden, the goal was to win, not to run a particular offense. He changed to incorporate the gifts of his players.

Pastoral ministry demands similar flexibility. If Wooden was a pastor, he wouldn’t insist on preaching the same way everywhere. He wouldn’t try to run the same church program in every context. Pastors need to understand the environment in which we’re called to preach the Word. We need to exegete both the Word and the world.

Exegeting my church

If we don’t take time to understand the environment of our ministry, we’re in danger of franchising it. Instead, we need to custom-build each ministry—move into a community, exegete the context, exegete the Scripture, and bring the two together.

I pastored ten years in the inner-city Chicago neighborhood of Humboldt Park. To exegete the culture the first thing I did was get to know the loyal core that had kept that church alive over the years. Their urban church was now declining. It was losing touch with its community and prided itself on programs that ran every night whether anybody needed them or not. Meanwhile houses on the block were burning, and the neighborhood was up for grabs.

So I turned away from programs. That wasn’t easy for me. I had been associate pastor in three churches during college and seminary and had been a master of programming. I even received the Christian education director-of-the-year award from the local Sunday school association. I knew how to run programs. But if you’re going to catch fish, you have to change the bait and go where the fish are.

What really taught me the importance of this was reading the story of Henry Ford in Amitai Etzioni’s Modern Organizations. Ford made a perfect car, the Model T, that ended the need for any other car. He wanted to fill the world with Model T cars. But when people started saying, “Mr. Ford, we’d like a different color car,” he remarked, “You can have any color you want as long as it’s black.” And that’s when the decline started.

Back in Humboldt Park, I saw churches doing the same thing. Pastors were franchising programs rather than doing what an anthropologist does—learn the language and communicate Jesus with concepts people understand.

I had to learn that the hard way. I tried to run youth retreats at out-of-town camps. But when I invited Spanish kids and black kids from the neighborhood, some white parents resisted. The camp retreat program didn’t work here.

So I went back to the basics. Eleven people ran the Fairfield Church, the youngest of whom was 54. They provided 90 percent of the funds. I spent an evening with each one and asked three questions:

1.How did you become a Christian?

2.What is your history with this church?

3.If you could wave a magic wand and bring about a future for the church, what would it look like?

On the way home, I dictated my responses to those interviews and later studied the transcriptions.

I was profoundly moved by those eleven people and their commitment to this church. At the same time I realized they didn’t want to change. Because the world outside their doors was fluctuating so dramatically, they wanted to grab the church and say, “I dare you to change it!” It wasn’t because they were inflexible people—as young people they had gone through a dramatic Swedish-to-English language change. But now, because they were proud of what their church had been, they were resisting another major change to make their church more relevant to a Spanish-speaking neighborhood. They had come full circle; now they were the group resisting change.

Their expectations of what the church should be were almost completely different from mine. They wanted a shepherd to feed the sheep. I was up there saying, “Onward, Christian soldiers!” That’s what you call a conflict of images, of expectations. (Both are biblical—in fact, there are almost a hundred different images of the church in the New Testament; the context a church finds itself in decides which models are most appropriate.) I decided that if the church were to survive, I needed to disciple one new board member per year, to replace the ones who would be moving away. It would take at least five years before the board would commit to change. That’s what it took.

We were in effect replacing many of the backward-looking people with forward-looking ones. But you need both. In pastoral work, this means taking the ethos of a group of people—the great memories and traditions of the church—and showing how they can be translated into present-day deeds that best serve the future.

One way we did this at Fairfield Church was to hold monthly memory dinners at which we could remember how God had blessed us. I began to lift up their memory. I had an older Swedish woman tell me stories by the hour of the great acts of God in the church’s past. Then, when I was preaching about something contemporary, I could say, “What I’m asking you to do is not new; this church did this back in 1902.” I became a broker of their memory rather than somebody trying to take away the church and make them do things they didn’t want to do.

Understanding my neighborhood

I also made it a priority to exegete my neighborhood. I spent one day a week “networking.” I went to all the pastors in the neighborhood, introduced myself, and asked them, “What is the most important lesson you have learned about being a pastor in this neighborhood?” Some of them took me by the hand and showed me the community—where kids hang out, where drugs are dropped, where things happen.

I also visited all the agencies in the community. At the police station, I asked, “What kinds of arrests do you make in this neighborhood?” I went to the schools and asked the principals, “What kinds of school problems do you have?” I went to the public-aid office and the legal-aid clinic. I went to forty-four agencies the first year.

I also visited businesses. I met presidents and personnel managers. They told me the history of their businesses, the way they related to the community, the problems they had doing business here. The barber, the gas station attendant, the person who runs the fruit market—these people can tell you better than anyone what makes the neighborhood tick.

Such networking, of course, leads to opportunities for ministry. In one case the owner of a little factory with eighty employees told me he needed people who could run machines. Over the years, I sent him a number of people. In another case, someone walked in the office in desperate financial trouble because his social security checks weren’t coming. Well, I had been to the social security office and knew whom to call, so I cut through a lot of red tape quickly.

Networking also made me streetwise to the con games people try to play on churches, especially young ministers. I could say to a public-aid mother playing a rip-off game, “I really admire you. You’re like a mother in the Bible, Moses’ mother. During a hard time she let her baby son float down the river to the princess who eventually hired her to mother her own child. I have a feeling you’re a little like that.” (There’s always a way to affirm a person without getting conned.)

Five distinct groups

To educate myself further about the people I was pastoring, I studied ethnic backgrounds and cultural units. I was a country boy surrounded by strange people. I identified at least five groups I needed to study: youth gangs, Swedes, Appalachians, Puerto Ricans, and Poles.

The youths in the neighborhood all belonged to gangs, so I studied gang structure and how to work with them. I learned these groups miss certain things in the mainline culture, such as a feeling of belonging to something. But when they try to create these things on their own, they sometimes exaggerate them, and the gang becomes deviant.

I came to a church pastored by old Swedes, so I studied Viking history. I learned it took one thousand years for German missionaries to make Swedish Baptists out of violent Vikings. I studied the missions strategy used to bring about that conversion. And I preached about that on a day after two Puerto Rican kids were killed in our neighborhood. I said, “Who better than a Swedish Baptist church to be in the middle of this violent community? We’ve been through this before—on the other side. Maybe it will only take five hundred years for us to convert Puerto Ricans.” That’s how I used people’s history in my preaching.

I also studied the Appalachians. I had a problem with them: If their kids got too involved in the church, often the parents pulled them out. I couldn’t understand what was happening until I learned about clan structure. In the hills of Kentucky, the patriarch of a clan is powerful. But in the inner city he loses much of his power. I realized I was competing with the father, who was feeling emasculated. So I changed the way I dealt with them.

When you pastor a clan culture, the significant events are weddings, funerals, fires, and fishing seasons—these get the clan together. I stopped seeing people as individuals and began ministering to a whole clan as much as possible. Our missionary strategy could no longer be to look around the fringes of a group for some disaffected person being disciplined by the tribe.

I studied the Puerto Ricans and began to understand their feelings of being used. Five European nations conquered Puerto Rico in a period of three hundred years, using it as a military colony while they plundered South American gold. In the first year of their independence in 1898, we became the sixth outside power to occupy them. Now there are more Puerto Ricans on the U.S. mainland than in Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, about 65 percent of the Puerto Rican population is on public aid. Learning this made me far more sensitive to their feelings of disenfranchisem*nt.

Learning their history and telling the great stories of Puerto Rico from the pulpit really affirmed the Puerto Ricans in our church. The same with the Polish and the Irish. It built a great sense of identification with the church.

Clearly we didn’t worry too much about hom*ogeneous units—although in some cases it’s a useful principle. I had a student named Craig Burton who started a church in Chicago’s Loop. Before he started, he asked, “Who is unreached in the Loop?” He profiled a twenty-five- to forty-five-year-old, bar-hopping, wine-and-cheese-party-going, vocationally-identified professional. After getting a feel for these people, he asked himself, “What would a church have to look like to reach them, and how would I have to pastor it?”

That’s using the hom*ogeneous principle to good advantage. I have trouble, however, when the principle is misused to resegregate the body of Christ. I’ve seen pastors work in just the opposite way Craig did. They say, “I’m going to find out what I’m comfortable with and then build a church out of those people.” That cuts the nerve of any sense of mission into the world. This country is internationalizing, and our churches have to deal with that. At such a time we can’t afford to cater to a siege mentality.

This has become especially real to me since we adopted a black son. One of my other sons brought him home one day, and Brian stayed. Eventually we went to court and made it legal. It was electric in the Fairfield Avenue Church for the pastor to have a son who was not white. It affirmed a lot of things about our ministry. A church with a racially mixed membership roll can model care in a world of prejudice.

Helping the church understand itself

Another big part of the pastoral task is discovering people’s expectations. You must discover them for two reasons: so you can effectively speak to them, and so you can make the people aware of them if they aren’t already. You study the church’s history, read the annual reports, find out where they spent their money—which may contradict what they say they want to do. You don’t have to be in total agreement with those expectations. But that’s where you have to start.

If I were pastoring the Loop church Craig Burton started, I might take a group on a retreat and lead them through an exercise of designing a logo for their church. I’d give them four ground rules:

First, the logo must be biblically and theologically sound. We’d see who they were spiritually, what they considered central to their beliefs.

Second, the logo must have some sense of history. As I mentioned before, these people see themselves not as cultural or ethnic groups but as vocational groups. But even then they bring history to any situation, and that will show up in subtle ways. They may have been the protesters of the sixties, or involved with the Jesus people. Those experiences still affect their lives.

Third, the logo must communicate God’s concern for people, the pastoral dimension.

Fourth, it must be intelligible to the unchurched as well as to members.

After agreeing on a logo, we would discuss it. “Does this capture who we are?” If the answer is yes, then I would suggest using the logo to identify Loop Church in the future.

Exegeting the culture in this case means studying the tradition not of an ethnic group but of a cultural one.

Missionary calling

Often when we exegete the culture of our church and town, we will come face-to-face with how different we are from the people to whom we feel called to minister. You’re called to Poplar Bluff, Missouri, for example, and you’re originally from Boston. In such circ*mstances how much of a chameleon should you be? Should you buy a pickup truck and listen to country music?

These are missionary questions. You have clearly crossed a culture to minister, and you’re doing just what a missionary is doing. You’re stammering in a new language, trying to understand how people think, and trying to keep from thinking your culture is superior. Yes, you may want to buy a pickup. Try out the culture. You may come to love it.

But you may never love that culture; in fact you may hate it. The ability to be bicultural is a gift, so if you don’t have it, that’s God’s will. But I think it’s a more widely distributed gift than people allow for. It’s one I covet for myself and others. Pastors need to give a church a good shot before they decide it’s not for them.

After ten years at Fairfield Church I felt God telling me to move on. I was gratified by the progress we saw. When I came in 1969, we had about 100 members on the roll, mostly poor families. We had a fairly significant youth group but no middle class and no middle age. Sunday attendance averaged between 110 and 120. The neighborhood was just starting to change; we had a turnover rate of 70 percent on the block that first year. Many of the white people moved away, so the bottom dropped out of our traditional “market.”

Still, we managed to survive, even grow a little. When I left, we had about 140 members. We had helped spawn seven Spanish daughter churches. If you added up all the ministries of Fairfield Church, we were touching at least 200 families a week. We had many ways of reaching out and touching people but never tried to pull it all into one building. Our theory was that in a diverse neighborhood, smaller, multiple churches were the way to go.

What enabled us to have such a diverse and, others say, effective ministry was the effort we put into understanding the church and the neighborhood. When we came to Humboldt Park, we specialized not in prescriptions but in diagnosis.

Copyright © 1995 by Christianity Today

Programs seldom produce the spiritual dynamic necessary for growth; rather, the right spiritual climate produces programs that enhance growth.
—Donald Gerig

After many years of attending pastors’ conferences, I have heard my share of formulas for church growth, revival, and renewal. I have done the “pastoral drool” while listening to stories of skyrocketing attendance. I, too, have visited other churches hoping to find the key to growth. But the only church growth I had ever experienced was the plodding, gradual growth that no one writes books about.

Then it happened! We started seeing our monthly attendance rates 30 percent ahead of the previous year. Before we could get used to that, we found ourselves with more than seven hundred in worship. How did it happen?

The disconcerting thing was that we really could not put a finger on any single cause. I could not give any glorious stories of personal renewal to account for the growth—God had been good to me throughout my time here. No new programs had been introduced.

Yes, we had moved into a new building, but that was five years before. And yes, some families had transferred in from a troubled church across town, but the significant growth spurt did not start until later.

It began to dawn on me that what attracted these people, more than anything else, was our climate. Realizing how intangible that word is, I began to analyze it, and I discovered we had encouraged the components of a growth climate for several years without even realizing it.

In that reverse way, I learned an important lesson. Programs seldom produce the spiritual dynamic necessary for growth; rather, the right spiritual climate produces programs that enhance growth. That is why you can visit seven growing churches and discover seven different programming emphases. In each case, the right climate already existed and became the fuel for effective programming.

What we need, then, is a clearer understanding of the components of a healthy climate. From our experiences and those of other growing churches, I’ve identified six atmospheric conditions that contribute to growth. These are the elements common to growing churches regardless of their specific programs.

1. A positive atmosphere

I risk beginning with an overworked topic, but still it is true: Growing churches emphasize what God can do, not what we cannot do; what is best in people, not what is worst; how we can build each other up, not tear each other down.

This has to begin at a personal level. Every church has an ample supply of negative people. What is desperately needed to balance these are other individuals who practice a positive faith in their walk with God as well as their relationships with people.

Walking through our sanctuary one Sunday morning while the choir was rehearsing, I overheard the director say, “I refuse to have a bad performance today. We will get this right!” The choir laughed, rehearsed one more time, and did a magnificent job in the service that day. That happened partly because one person decided to expect the best. He chose to have positive expectations.

The runaway bestseller The One-Minute Manager reminded us to be eager to catch people doing something right rather than always looking for something wrong. That spirit is catching!

When individuals with that attitude relate to other individuals as well as God, a climate of expectation can begin to build. The emphasis in a church can begin to shift toward what we can do with God’s help. Challenges can be dreamed and accepted.

Recently we had a special drive to raise $100,000 toward the building debt. The willingness to accept that challenge was simply the logical extension of a positive spirit that had grown in the church over several years. Had the climate not been right, the challenge could not have been accepted.

By the way, on the last day of the campaign, receipts passed $103,000.

2. Trust

The burden in creating a climate of trust rests on the one wanting to be trusted, not the one being asked to trust. You don’t command trust; you earn it. At the risk of sounding trite, it must be said that trust exists when people are trustworthy.

There is no magic to trustworthiness. For church leaders, it means “going by the book.” I am sure part of the trust I have earned has come because I have never tried to circumvent the established order for operation. That means presenting proposals to the proper boards or committees before action has begun. It also means being willing to “lose” graciously on an idea and not seek other means of implementing my plan. It means living by the budget and not seeking to get what I want by “special gifts.”

Once I proposed an organizational change that involved revising the constitution. It went through the appropriate study committee and the church board before going to the congregation. At the congregational meeting it was increasingly apparent that this revision was being resisted. I could have fought. But I chose to lose gracefully on that issue, and to this day we are using the old system and making it work. We made no backdoor attempts to circumvent the congregation’s wishes. And it has paid off with a level of trust among us that makes progress possible.

If I were to lock horns with our lay leadership or congregation on an issue I felt could not be compromised, I would have to openly persuade them to my position or leave. I would never resort to underhanded means of getting my way. Trust is too important to take that lightly.

3. Excellence

Excellence in ministry is not one arbitrary line that measures all situations. If so, we could paint the perfect church and all seek to imitate it. Instead, excellence is each of us, individually and congregationally, doing our best with the unique resources and limitations we have.

Too often we’ve made peace with mediocrity, rationalizing our substandard efforts. People are not attracted to that. Our goal must always be our best in every part of ministry. This emphasis on excellence is nothing more than being consistent with the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31). God deserves our best—whether in the way bulletins are printed or how sermons are preached—and that level of excellence is a key ingredient in a climate of growth.

For six years in a row, our church has hosted a concert by the Chicago Staff Band of the Salvation Army. This outstanding brass band is built on excellence, fine music, and clear testimony. It has been interesting to watch our crowds grow from year to year. We have not increased our advertising, but people have come to know this band will always be at its best.

That can happen to an entire church. If people know we will be at our best in ministry, methods, and facilities, they respond.

4. Oriented to Outreach

Ingrown never equals growing. Many churches establish an antigrowth climate without even realizing it by allowing their predominant focus to become the needs of those already in the church. This, I’ll admit, is the easiest path to follow, but it will not produce growth.

The mentality of a growing church is continually one of reaching out to others. Even the personal development of current members will be seen in light of increasing their ability to genuinely care about others and minister to them. The minute we start to plan for others rather than for ourselves we create a climate where we develop and the church will grow.

This, of course, is easier said than done. Every step we take to facilitate ministry to those outside our congregation causes us to struggle past our own comfort. Once we went to two worship services and two Sunday school sessions to make it possible to handle more people in our present facilities. Though there is nothing unique about this plan, we had to rethink our commitment to outreach. As long as our growth demanded no change from us, it was comfortable. But the minute we had to attend at different hours, divide classes, get used to new teachers, and face the recruitment of additional lay staff, the “cost” of outreach became apparent. Because of their commitment to outreach, however, our people made the changes.

The same outreach mentality has spawned new ministries—ministries that attempt to say we care about others, such as support groups for the divorced and for parents of wayward children. When the church climate is one of genuine concern for those outside the church, growth can happen.

5. Flexibility

The willingness to experiment, to innovate, and even to fail is part of flexibility. You cannot program this spirit, nor can you command it, but a few people placed in key positions can model it. By their own flexibility as well as their ability to allow (even encourage) such flexibility in others, the attitude can spread.

Perhaps a strategic time for instilling this spirit is after someone has taken initiative and flubbed.

I felt we started to see this spirit when a holiday outreach activity ended up going very poorly. I’m not proud of that failure, but I was pleased we could fail without its becoming an all-consuming issue. Rather, our attitude was one of appreciation for the willingness of those who planned the program—at least they were doing their best to reach out. We learned some things about outreach events, and more important, we demonstrated love in spite of failure. That encourages true flexibility.

Another element is the ability to adapt. Almost no program is so good that it never needs to be changed. We once tried to identify whether various evangelistic programs are “sowing, cultivating, or reaping” events. That means we must try to understand the people we are trying to reach and plan events to reach them where they are. Ten-year-old programs probably will not work because people have changed in those ten years.

When the climate is right, when risks are allowed and even traditional events can be adapted, it helps develop sensitivity to the changing culture around us, which is essential to effective ministry and church growth.

6. A Serving Spirit

In a sense, the serving spirit is a summary of a growth climate. Where people truly want to serve and minister, they will be positive, trustworthy, devoted to excellence, oriented to outreach, and flexible.

Just about everything in our society, however, militates against this spirit. It takes a conscious effort to serve rather than be served. We are encouraged today to look out for ourselves or be “fulfilled” (whatever that means). Every opportunity ends up being viewed in light of what we can get out of it.

This attitude easily turns our relationship to God around 180 degrees. Instead of asking what we can do for God, we find ourselves wondering what God can do for us. Christians raised on a pop faith that suggests God is little more than a handy twenty-four-hour heavenly banking service find it hard to relate to a word like service or, worse yet, sacrifice.

Thus in church we catch ourselves asking if people want to serve. Put that way, of course, many choose not to, and so dies the growth climate. A better way is to start with the assumption that God’s people will serve. That is a given. The question is not if people will serve, but where and how they will serve. That assumption and commitment to service make up the necessary mind-set for growth.

Again, these components of a growth climate cannot be programmed. Rather, they can only be practiced and modeled. They will begin not with action but with attitudes. They will not be limited to certain settings but will be applicable to all situations. Whatever style church growth may take, underneath will be an atmosphere that is positive, trusting and trustworthy, devoted to excellence, oriented to outreach, flexible, and committed to service.

The beauty is that a growth climate does not have to wait for action by the official board. One individual can begin to model the components of this climate and have an incredible influence. Obviously, when church leaders are the models, growth can happen more quickly. But any person can be the first line of influence.

I recall sitting in a restaurant one Christmas Day. I went in expecting the atmosphere to be grim. After all, who wants to work on Christmas? Much to my surprise, it was almost like walking in on a party. One waitress had obviously decided that if she was going to have to work, she would make the best of it. She had bells tied on her shoes and was joking with customers. She was having a great time, and thanks to her, so was everyone else in the restaurant!

Perhaps that is what it takes in each of our churches—one or two people determined to influence the climate of the church. We may not be able to change weather conditions, but when it comes to the church atmosphere, we can not only survive the elements but adjust them to help the harvest.

Copyright © 1995 by Christianity Today

If you twist the arm of someone who doesn’t like your idea, you get an elbow in the chops.
—Craig Brian Larson

“We have to face reality,” I announced to the congregation one bright October Sunday morning. “We are not bringing people to Christ.”

Before me, seated on stacking chairs in a grade-school gym, were our fifty adults and a few children, appearing as civilized as landed gentry (toddlers excluded).

“The Great Commission is our mission,” I continued. “We have to do whatever it takes to become a church that leads people to Christ.”

Our church was nine years old, and I had been the pastor for two years. We had grown from thirty-five to eighty on a bang-up Sunday, but I wasn’t satisfied: it was transfer growth. We weren’t reaching unchurched people.

I took responsibility and resolved to do something about it. I blocked out time in my schedule, prayed intensely about the problem, and birthed an idea—a seven-step strategy for breaking out of our shell.

Confidently and with great expectations, I handed the congregation my baby.

The coming-out party

The first step was prayer, and on this Sunday morning, I was using my sermon to introduce it.

“James 4:2 says, ‘You do not have, because you do not ask God,'” I said. “We must base our outreach on prayer.” For the next thirty minutes, I introduced three key prayer requests based on three Scriptures.

As we drove home after the service, my gentle wife didn’t say anything about my sermon on this watershed day in our church’s epic history. Finally, hoping that things had gone better than I had sensed, I asked, “How did it go?”

“Well, it went okay. But maybe you should have focused on just one Scripture and one prayer,” she said. “I think people got a little confused.”

“Three Scriptures, and they’re confused?” I said incredulously. I had felt insecure; now I was burned. I had offered a clearly biblical message, presented it with passion, and the only response was a tepid critique of my sermon structure. I looked at my wife as if she were Attila the Hun holding my firstborn.

In the next few weeks, I discovered my wife’s reaction was one of the most positive. My intensely felt vision wasn’t immediately celebrated by the rest of the congregation. The reawakening of passionate prayer, the resurgence of evangelism, wasn’t ushered in by my introduction of the seven-part strategy. I was crushed.

When we develop a creative idea, it becomes our baby, the most wonderful, beautiful, intelligent, and promising child ever to grace the earth. However, the time soon arrives for proud parents to bring their brainchild into public, and that can be traumatic.

When we present our idea for approval and support, others may frown at our baby. They have the gall to scorn our baby’s looks! If we place our baby in their arms, they hand her back without gushing over her. Some actually seem bent on harming our beloved offspring.

Often that’s our own fault. Although the people we lead are thoroughly “civilized,” we sometimes present creative ideas in ways that provoke what seem like savage reactions. Upon reflection, I realize more members of my congregation would have welcomed my ideas if I had done five things differently.

Keep it simple, sir

I love to analyze. I can multiply points like children spawn excuses for cleaning their bedroom. Give me several weeks to develop a plan, and it can rival a computer chip for microcomplexity. Here was the thumbnail sketch of our evangelism strategy’s first step—the prayer plan:

1.We would make three specific requests each day. “Make our church and me fishers of men.” “Send us as laborers into the harvest.” “Show me the people you want me to share Christ with.”

2.We would develop a “Love List” of ten friends, family members, neighbors, and fellow workers and pray for them daily. Those who were willing would turn their list into me, and we would compile a church Love List we all could pray for.

But I wanted us praying more specifically than “Save Aunt Mildred and Becky Sue.” So I developed a list of sixteen scriptural prayer requests (two to the fourth power, no less!) for non-Christians. For example, “Convince —– of sin and righteousness and judgment” based on John 16:8.

In our church meetings, I modeled these prayers, and in newsletters I explained them. After a few weeks I wanted to involve others, so at the close of a meeting I asked anyone who felt prompted to pray our three strategic, evangelistic prayers.

Silence.

Silence that lasted longer than it takes to reach a human being when a voice-mail system answers your call. (There is no deeper silence on our vast planet than that which engulfs a room of people when no one wants to pray.)

Finally, thoroughly frustrated, I prayed.

On another occasion I popped a spontaneous quiz. “What are the three requests I’m asking everyone to pray daily?” Two out of three was the best the congregation could do.

Further removed from my baby, I can now see my plan was too complex. The people weren’t obtuse. The plan simply struck them as so complex, they didn’t want to start. And this was only step one!

If Jesus had adopted this plan to evangelize the world, Peter and the Sons of Thunder would have gone home with an industrial-strength headache. If people ever get the idea something is complex or beyond them, many won’t even try.

Here’s the painful but simple truth: The more complex our brainchild, the more concentration required to understand it, the more others will seem to us like barbarians.

Be realistic about others’ commitments

Once I had begun developing my new outreach strategy, it became my bonfire-sized passion. God answers prayer; I knew it would work. Many lives would be changed, and our church would turn into a pulsing evangelistic center.

Naturally I implemented the plan into my life, as best I could. Incorporating the three key prayers into my day was a snap. I did so once or twice daily.

But then I also began praying for the twenty-five people on my Love List. I found if I named each person and made my sixteen specific requests for the whole group in a heartfelt manner rather than just mouthed words and names from a list, it could take twenty minutes. When I prayed for people individually, it was a schedule buster. I had many other things to pray about as well.

I soon found it challenging to keep praying for my personal Love List even every other day, and I only prayed for ten or twenty names from the church’s accumulated list of several hundred names once a week. If such difficulty in follow-through beset me, the originator of the plan, the one for whom the whole church enterprise was most dear, it’s no surprise church attenders did less. A few implied they used the prayer guide sporadically, but most discreetly avoided the subject.

I still think the prayer program was a great idea for some, but an unrealistic theory for most. Getting adults to do anything out of the ordinary is as difficult as outdueling the American Gladiators; if we ask for significant commitment, we find significantly fewer people ready to respond.

Douglas Hyde, in his book Dedication and Leadership, says if you ask for great commitment, you get a great response; ask for Mickey Mouse commitment and you don’t even get that. I first read that while ministering to idealistic collegians, and I still subscribe to it. But I’ve also learned that asking for a significant commitment rarely gets a quick response from the majority of set-in-their-ways adults.

Ask people to baby-sit your brainchild for a few minutes, and there’s a good chance they’ll agree. But ask them to adopt her, support her from their own means, and promise to send her to a private college, and you’ll have far fewer volunteers.

Remember you are the adoring parent

I presented the prayer strategy to the church in a way I hoped would seize attention, using the church’s desktop publishing program to design a professional-looking handout. I chose a distinguished-looking type font and a large point size for easy reading.

Then, like an artist penciling in the eyelashes of a portrait, I painstakingly enlarged and put in bold the first letter of each prayer request. When it was ready to print, I stood with anticipation watching my 24-pin Epson craft the words line by line onto paper. I took the original to the office, copied it on goldenrod paper, and immediately slipped one copy into a vinyl sheet protector in my desk-size Day-Timer. (Compulsives keep the stockholders of sheet-protector producers rolling in dough.)

The next Sunday, with concealed pride, I nonchalantly handed those precious documents to the ushers to distribute to the congregation, keeping my eye on them lest any be dropped. (I resisted the temptation to put every copy in a sheet protector.)

After my sermon explaining each of the prayer requests, I urged everyone to “take this intercessory guide home, keep it with your Bible, and pray these requests regularly for the people on your Love List. And do a Bible study of each Scripture so you see how it inspires the prayer.”

We closed the service in prayer, and I walked to the hallway, ostensibly to greet people, actually to garner rave reviews. After shaking the last hand—no one said much about the sermon—I returned to the gym and found to my dismay a number of the goldenrod prayer guides littering the seats. In shock, I went through the rows picking them up. Some had been scribbled on with crayons, folded into airplanes, or doodled on by adults—desecrated.

To many in the congregation, this was just another handout, church junk mail. To me it was the master key to our church’s future, the product of weeks of thought and prayer, something that in my daydreams I could see helping hundreds—perhaps thousands—of people find a relationship with Christ. (The truth is, I saw it on the same scale as Bill Bright’s Four Spiritual Laws!) And there it was, left behind like trash in an alley.

No one adores our high concepts—these reflections of our intelligence, personality, and vision that resemble their parents so closely—as much as we do. We usually believe God inspired the idea. We felt the concept grow in the womb; we labored to give her birth; we nursed and cared for her in the middle of the night. We’re emotionally, permanently bonded. To others, our baby-powdered idea is just another one of several billion unexceptional children born into the world each year. Cute, yes, adorable, maybe, a prodigy, we’ll see. Even if they’re warm to the idea, they won’t fall over themselves to support it, yet.

I needed to present my ideas not like a mother proudly presenting her newborn in public but like a pregnant woman who sincerely wants help from a midwife. Church innovations are team efforts.

Give people freedom to choose

Conferences and books are hazardous to a pastor’s health. A few months before conceiving my prayer strategy, I read a popular secular book on leadership. With the book’s emphasis on communicating vision fresh in my mind, I campaigned for my prayer program through every available means.

I reminded the congregation of our “three prayer requests” in every weekly newsletter. At the end of our church services, I closed in prayer with them.

In my sermons and pastoral comments during services, I told stories of how I had seen those prayers fulfilled in my life during the week, seeing opportunities arise to share Christ and feeling equipped to do so.

I “asked” all church members to sign a form saying they would commit to pray daily. “We need everyone to join in this effort,” I emphasized repeatedly from the pulpit. “We have to be a team.” A dozen people complied (anything to placate me).

I even asked people one-on-one, “What do you think of our prayer plan? Have you started praying regularly?” In short, for about four weeks I was twisting limbs as relentlessly as a cranky KGB interrogator.

I felt the awkwardness of my putting people on the spot, and I softened it with a laid-back smile and demeanor, but everyone in the church soon knew that there would be no exceptions and no anonymity. No one had the freedom to say no and remain in a comfortable position with me. I hadn’t given a challenge; I had set a policy.

I didn’t feel guilty about drafting GI’s rather than recruiting volunteers. Strong leadership is appropriate for a mission church. We needed a highly committed, special-forces-type platoon to fulfill our reason for being. We might lose a few people, but at least the ones who remained would be fruitful.

That may be true, but I quickly found that the more a leader pressures followers to adopt an innovation, the more resistant and resentful many become. If you twist the arm of someone unmotivated to support an idea, you get an elbow in the chops.

My first inkling of dental trauma was a letter from a woman explaining she planned to leave the church because, for one thing, I was “pulling teeth” to get everyone to support my prayer program.

That startled me. For the first time I realized what I had been doing for the previous month. I don’t consider myself a manipulative person. I doubt if anyone from my previous church would have described me as such. In my previous pastorate, when I challenged people to commit to deeper involvement, I offered optional programs, growth tracks for volunteers, and didn’t pressure the uninvolved. But my urgency to reach out coupled with my convictions about the need for strong leadership had changed my leadership style.

Within weeks nearly a dozen people in the church had become strong opponents of my leadership. I learned that the more we coerce people to adopt our brainchild, the more they will seem to us like barbarians.

Give extra attention to “educators”

Church opinion leaders with a clearly defined, albeit unwritten, philosophy of ministry are as likely to stonewall avant-garde ideas as Kathy Lee Gifford is to have her mouth wide open in a magazine photo.

“Alan (name changed), how do you feel about our prayer plan?” I asked one of our men. “Are you using it to intercede for others?”

“Not really,” he answered. “I try to pray under the leading of the Spirit, and so I don’t use lists or written prayers.”

“But the prayers are based directly on Scripture,” I responded. “Isn’t it possible that a prayer based on Scripture could be Spiritled?”

I continued to argue my case, but our conversation ended with Alan unconvinced. Deeply committed to prayer and evangelism, he had his own well-established ideas about how both should be done. He had read a lot of books, and his mind was sincerely made up on most things related to the Christian life.

Expertise, real or supposed, often causes hardening of the categories. Just as a specialist in early childhood education may test a girl’s intelligence and conclude she belongs in the “slow” group, only for the world to later discover she’s a genius (for example, as children, both Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill were deemed slow learners), so “experts” in the church often dismiss a brainchild as stupid.

But church opinion leaders can’t be bypassed. As I look back, I think one of my biggest mistakes was presenting my prayer strategy to the whole church rather than first going to the opinion leaders one-on-one, inviting their feedback, giving them time to process the idea, and then presenting it to the congregation. People in the know take kindly to being consulted, require extra attention and respect, and need both early in the process.

The people in my church who said “no thanks” to my pinkribboned baby weren’t the Teutonic hordes. If they seemed like it, that was largely my fault.

Frankly, with perspective I see that few of my brainchildren are wunderkinds and many of my ideas are stupid (though I still think these prayers will replace the Four Spiritual Laws, no offense, Mr. Bright). What’s more, most good ideas require considerable feedback to truly find “the mind of the Lord.”

And so although it never feels like it, I’ve decided the “barbarians” in my life just may be godparents in disguise.

Copyright © 1995 by Christianity Today

Creativity is far less subjective and ethereal than some make it sound.
—Gary Gonzales

Someone once asked William Barclay how he had become such a prolific writer. The key, he said, is learning to apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair.

Creativity is far less subjective and ethereal than some make it sound. As much a function of our habits as our “genius” or inspiration, creativity takes discipline.

Here are four ways to enhance your creativity.

Know your moods

Perhaps you’ve heard the old saying about diet: “Mornings are gold, lunch is bronze, and dinner is lead.” Well, the same applies to personal energy levels.

A few months ago, a lay leader handed me a newspaper article outlining the body’s daily rhythms. It underscored how, for most people, mornings provide peak energy and concentration. Quick recall and analytical reasoning are strongest in the a.m.

Conversely, the infamous “afternoon grogs,” the inability to focus, hits from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., with a short reprieve from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m., especially in recall.

By evening most people are downshifting, except for the late-night geniuses who hit their creative stride from 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.

Knowing this, I safeguard morning hours for the challenges of praying, studying, writing, and creative thinking. I no longer feel guilty when my engines are revving low. I pace myself, husbanding my energy for creative times.

I’ve also learned how to improve my energy and lessen the negative rhythms.

Soon after moving to the Twin Cities from southern California, I thought about joining a fitness club. But I wondered, With my mornings scheduled full with message preparation and my evenings already overflowing with meetings and programs, how can I realistically expect to add an exercise regimen?

But I had heard others describe how a workout increased their energy level, so I decided to experiment. I discovered that a sixty-minute workout during my lunch hour or after 3:00 p.m. worked wonders. Regular exercise dramatically increased my endurance, making my low periods less low—and I feel better about myself. As an added bonus, I find thinking and praying easier while on the NordicTrack or between weight-lifting sets.

While getting into shape, I learned another valuable lesson: If I work out on Friday, resting or going easy on Saturday, by Sunday morning I’m primed to preach. A one-day layoff between workouts enables my body to bounce back with renewed vigor. I can’t recall a time in my previous fifteen years of ministry when I’ve been so clearheaded—able to think creatively and spontaneously—in the pulpit.

Write it down

Someone has said, “Opportunity is like a horse that gallops up and then pauses for a moment. If you don’t get on, before long you hear the clatter of hoofbeats dying away in the distance.”

Great ideas are just such opportunities.

Whenever you hear, see, or think a worthwhile thought, write it down before another moment passes. Experience has taught me to keep a pen and paper handy on my nightstand. I never know when a brainstorm will strike—and quickly vanish!

That’s also true of the ideas we learn from others. For several years I’ve kept a journal handy at my office. Whenever I come across a good quote, I immediately jot it down and document the source. Often, when I’m stymied while preparing sermons, I thumb through this journal to stimulate ideas.

Others’ ideas provoke my ideas. While paging through my journal recently, I ran across the statement, “Leaders are to be imitated, not gold-plated.” It triggered a thought: I’ve wanted to do a series on leadership for some time. Why not develop a series of seven messages on leadership principles using one-liners as memory hooks?

I’m now reading and gathering ideas, illustrations, and resources on that theme.

Let it simmer

Most creative ideas mature over time. So, whether I’m planning a sermon series, a special holiday service, or a seminar, I arrange my time to give it as much advance thought as possible. My mind works best when I’m not clawing for ideas at the last minute.

I don’t get overstructured too early. A good idea has a ripple effect, soon suggesting other ideas or applications. At first, all I want to do is grasp the big picture—even if only a piece of it.

Useful ideas sometimes come to me after months of simmering.

Several years ago, I heard the story of Larry Walters, a thirty-three-year-old man who decided he wanted to see his neighborhood from a new perspective. He went down to the local army surplus store one morning and bought forty-five used weather balloons. That afternoon he strapped himself into a lawn chair, to which several of his friends tied the now helium-filled balloons. He took along a six-pack of beer, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and a gun, figuring he could shoot the balloons one at a time when he was ready to land.

Walters, who assumed the balloons would lift him about 100 feet in the air, was caught off guard when the chair soared more than 11,000 feet into the sky—smack into the middle of the air traffic pattern at Los Angeles International Airport. Too frightened to shoot any of the balloons, he stayed airborne for more than two hours, forcing the airport to shut down its runways for much of the afternoon, causing long delays in flights from across the country.

Soon after he was safely grounded and cited by the police, reporters asked him three questions:

“Were you scared?”

“Yes.”

“Would you do it again?”

“No.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Because,” he said, “you can’t just sit there.”

His answer caught my interest. I pondered that story and its implications for several months. Then, as I was preparing a sermon, “The Crisis Called Christmas,” my thoughts came together. I used the Walters story in the introduction to set the stage for the idea that each of the birth narratives called for a response—or a reaction—from its participants. When it comes to God’s intervention in our lives, we can’t just sit there.

Talk about it

Creativity is often synergistic, so I cultivate people in formal and informal settings who cultivate my ideas.

When I write an article, for instance, I’ll often send it to a writer-friend in San Diego who gives me an honest, professional critique. After he returns the manuscript, I usually get on the phone with him for a late-night, long-distance dialogue about it.

When I’m planning my six-month preaching calendar, I’ll frequently gather select groups of thoughtful people for brainstorming sessions. Such conversations help to both generate ideas and refine the ones I already have.

Creativity isn’t reserved for the Einsteins, Shakespeares, and Spurgeons of the world. It isn’t something we either possess or don’t possess. Creativity is encouraged by developing the habits that create an environment where new ideas can germinate and grow.

Copyright © 1995 by Christianity Today

The preacher’s job, finally, is to look at every moment of time, every inch of space, to find there the old, old story and to keep reminding everyone who will listen that the curse shall not have the last word.
—John Ortberg

There is an old story about a mother who walks in on her six-year-old son and finds him sobbing.

“What’s the matter?” she asks.

“I’ve just figured out how to tie my shoes.”

“Well, honey, that’s wonderful.”

Being a wise mother, she recognizes his victory in the Eriksonian struggle of autonomy versus doubt: “You’re growing up, but why are you crying?”

“Because,” he says, “now I’ll have to do it every day for the rest of my life.”

Preaching is like that. Sundays just keep coming. Like the Energizer power bunny. Like death and taxes and Slim Whitman Christmas albums. Some months, every other day is a Sunday.

One of the most celebrated of all I Love Lucy episodes features Lucy wrapping candy as it passes on a conveyer belt. In the mistaken belief that Lucy is handling the candy with competence, her supervisor throttles the conveyor belt up to warp speed. An occasional piece of candy gets wrapped, but most of them end up getting stuffed in her mouth or various other places on her person. There just isn’t time to handle them properly.

Preaching is like that too.

In a world where Sundays can’t be postponed, where they keep coming ready or not (usually not), how is it possible to move from survival mode to creativity?

God in every inch

Books of illustrations are generally the homiletical equivalent of canned sitcom laugh tracks. And television shows are okay once in a while, but if we use them too often in our sermons, people will start wondering what we do with our time. Having preschool children at home is better from a preaching standpoint, but it gets expensive after a while, and it’s hard to keep your spouse motivated to continue having them (unless she is unusually committed to the ministry).

Much of what I learned about the possibilities for creative preaching I learned from Ian Pitt-Watson, who teaches preaching at Fuller Seminary. And more important than any techniques was gaining clarity on what preaching is really about.

I had been brought up to think of preaching as teaching bits and illustration bits. You can teach people for a while, but unfortunately, human nature being what it is, people get bored, so you have to throw in illustrations at regular intervals to hold their attention. Illustrations are spoonfuls of regrettably necessary sugar that make the medicine of doctrine go down.

Ian pointed out that the Bible itself does not teach this way. If God were like most preachers, he would have laid out the Bible entirely differently: “My Attributes. Chapter 1: I Am Omniscient,” and so on. Instead, God chose to reveal himself in history, which is to say in stories.

In particular, Jesus taught in stories. This was not a concession to human weakness. To me there’s something arrogant about a preacher who boils down the parables to their “basic principles” as if the story is so much fluff that can be analyzed and safely discarded. Jesus was perfectly capable of laying out “Five Principles to Dynamic Praying,” and the fact that he didn’t should make us reflect.

Abraham Kuyper once wrote, “There is not one square inch of the entire creation about which Jesus Christ does not cry out, ‘This is mine! This belongs to me!'”

The reason for Jesus’ creativity and freshness in his proclamation was not that he was really clever at choosing illustrations. It was that he really did live in the kingdom of God, so that for him not an inch of space, not a moment in time, existed that did not speak about the work of God. So he could look at, say, a seed that must die in the ground before it yields life, or a woman turning her house upside down to find a lost coin, or a flower, or a sparrow, or a great party, and say, “Here is God at work. See him in this inch, this moment.”

Ian put it like this: “If we really believe that our crucified Carpenter is the agent of all creation … we must expect to find anywhere, everywhere, the handwriting of the Author of both the text of Scripture and the text of life—God in Christ revealing himself to us through the power of the Spirit.”

The phrase “creative preaching” then, is a redundancy. Preaching is what happens when I faithfully explain the text of Scripture and the text of life, when the world of the Bible and the world of the listeners collide in Christ. So my task is to find those things that will help me see Christ in the world and see my world in the Bible.

Two times alone

Only God can create ex nihilo. If I start with nihilo, I end with nihilo. I need at least a little chaos to hover over. Certain conditions do exist under which I’m more likely to be creative.

The first one is the most painful: I have to be alone a lot.

In a thoughtful book called Solitude, an English psychiatrist named Anthony Storr writes that the capacity to create is inseparably connected with the capacity to be alone, that often people who are frequently alone in childhood become supremely creative (C. S. Lewis is a well-known example). He even says, “It is not unknown for creative people, once they have achieved an intimate relationship, to lose some of their imaginative drive.” (I sometimes use this quote to explain why it would not be wise for me to spend all day helping shepherd the kindergarten class outing to Knotts Berry Farm.)

Creativity overlaps spirituality when we’re alone. Every character of great spiritual development in Scripture is marked by the use of and desire for solitude—particularly Jesus. (Storr speaks of prayer as the capacity to be alone in the presence of God.) Edward Gibbon wrote, “Conversation enlarges the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.”

For me this means I need two kinds of solitude.

Utilitarian solitude is devoted to preparing sermons. I found, over time, this time was eroding to blocks of a few hours here and there, so now I devote one full day a week to being alone to work on the sermon. I may need to give it some other time during the week as well, but I find a day of utilitarian solitude is worth more than the same number of hours broken up during the week.

Perhaps more important, though, is nonutilitarian solitude. This is time alone, but not devoted to sermonizing or anything else related to my job. It is time set aside for praying or reflecting or looking at the ocean. The agenda is not to get inspirations or ideas for the church. In fact, its purpose is to free me from my compulsive need for ideas, to remind me that I am not my job, so that my preaching can be about Christ, not about my own need to succeed as a preacher.

Feeding on doses of joy

Being creative is much more likely to happen when I’m relaxed and joyful. This leads to a Catch-22: I tend to obsess over sermons, and the more I obsess, the less creative I am, which leads me, in turn, to become more anxious and obsessive.

I remember Saturdays when I’ve actually hoped I would get sick so I wouldn’t have to preach that sermon the following morning. (I would have begged off, but I couldn’t conjure up a creative enough excuse.)

I’ve since discovered a helpful insight: Even in a task as significant as preaching, while I have to take the subject matter seriously, playfulness must be part of the process.

Anthony Storr writes that there is always an element of play in creative living: “When this playful element disappears, joy goes with it, and so does any sense of being able to innovate. Creative people not infrequently experience periods of despair in which their ability to create anything new seems to have deserted them. This is often because a particular piece of work has become invested with such overwhelming importance that it is no longer possible to play with it.”

I’ve had days where sermons come with all the speed and spontaneity of Chinese water torture. I’ve also had days where they seem to write themselves. The most common variant for me is how relaxed and joyful I am when I sit down to write.

There is even some research to back up the joy-creativity link.

Some time ago a group of social psychologists gave people the task of finding a way of attaching a matchbox to a wall with no tools other than the box of matches and a candle. They divided the subjects into two groups: one group was shown a very depressing documentary before being given the task and the other watched Marx Brothers movies. Those in the latter group were something like ten times more likely to discover how to solve the problem. (If you send me a check for $9.99, I’ll send you the actual solution.)

What preachers need to be creative, then, may not be a better filing system for illustrations, or even an administrative assistant, but a good jester. For me that means I need to schedule sermon writing when I’m at my freshest. If possible, I try to make sure that I get to do something fun, or at least something that will put me in a relaxed mood, before I get started. Often I’ll begin by “mind mapping,” a kind of written-down version of free association where you put a word in the middle of a sheet of paper and then write whatever words come to your mind around it.

The freshness of the familiar

My creativity also increases, I’ve noticed, when I don’t pressure myself to be creative.

I had just moved to my first full-time job as a pastor, and our church was planning to host the monthly ministerial association get-together. I sent out invitations with a tongue-in-cheek postscript that both the pope and Robert Schuller would be joining us, but that in the event they canceled, everyone should bring outlines of his two best sermons: at least we could swap messages and not have to crank out new ones all summer.

To my amazement, one member of the group, at the close of the meeting, approached me and demanded to know when the sermon exchange would be made. Not only had he brought two outlines, he had made enough photocopies for everyone to take home!

The pressure to manufacture creativity can produce forced and pretentious preaching at best and tempt us to sheer plagiarism at worst.

In fact, pressuring myself to be creative caused me to miss for a long time one of the most powerful weapons of preaching—the familiar. It is, after all, the old, old story that we long to hear the most and, when told right, is somehow always new. Sometimes my horror of saying the obvious is a curse and not a blessing.

I discovered this, somewhat to my chagrin, after returning from a two-week trip to Ethiopia a few years ago. Not having much time to prepare, I simply told the story of the church in the book of Acts and relayed the story (largely the same one) of the church in Ethiopia. It connected with people at a level far deeper than what I usually experience with much more carefully prepared messages.

Fred Craddock wrote that preachers are called not only to speak to the congregation but also to speak for the congregation.

My job is not to say something no one has ever said before on a text no one has ever preached before. This syndrome Craddock calls “overlooking the treasury of the familiar.”

“No one builds a church,” he says, “by leaping off the pinnacle of the temple every Sunday.… If a minister takes seriously the role of listeners in preaching, there will be sermons expressing for the whole church, and with God as the primary audience, the faith, the doubt, the fear, the anger, the love, the joy, the gratitude that is in all of us. The listeners say, ‘Yes, that’s my message; that is what I have wanted to say.'”

Or as C. S. Lewis put it, Jesus’ command to Peter was, “Feed my sheep,” not, “Try new experiments on my rats.”

I’m often tempted to be creative merely for the sake of being creative. Nothing is more excruciating than the knowledge that you’re boring a roomful of people, except, of course, being one of those bored people in the room. In one of my first sermons, I knew how badly things were going in part because one of the listeners (and it was a small crowd) actually fell asleep. On the way home, I said to my wife, “Nancy, next Saturday, you’ve just got to get to bed sooner.”

But it isn’t safe to allow people’s response to be the ultimate criterion by which a sermon is judged. G. K. Chesterton wrote once that God shares with children the capacity to delight in what appears to be routine to people who are neither children nor God, but merely adults:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

“Say it again,” God says. When we say it again, when we get it right, it’s as if our words were being said for the first time. The old, old story has again become a new song.

Looking for the Prince to come

Preaching is the coming together of two worlds: the world of the Bible and the world of the listener. It is the intersection of two stories—God’s and mine.

When my oldest daughter was old enough to give me an excuse for doing so, I took her to her first Disney movie. I remembered vividly going with my own parents to see Snow White; it hardly seemed possible I could be going now with my child.

For Laura it was as if she entered into the world on the screen. She laughed at Dopey and got mad at Grumpy and cringed before the evil queen, with real tears running down her face. She had been transported.

And then Snow White began to sing, “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and Laura’s eyes shone. She squeezed my hand and said, “Daddy, the prince is coming.”

But at one point the story goes all wrong: the bride tastes the fruit, falls under a spell, and then falls asleep. The dwarves cannot wake her. They, too, are waiting for the prince to come.

In this familiar fairy tale, I began to see hints of a deeper story, one that always and everywhere seeks to break through if only we’ll have eyes to see and ears to hear.

For we have all tasted the forbidden fruit, all eaten the poisoned apple. We have all fallen under the spell—the curse—and all fallen asleep.

The preacher’s job, finally, is not to figure out how to be novel or distinctive or say something no one has ever said before. Ours is a more humble one: to look at every moment of time, every inch of space, to find there the old, old story and to keep reminding everyone who will listen that the curse shall not have the last word. One day the Prince will come for his bride and take her home.

And every once in a while, in the midst of (and often in spite of) the preacher’s words, the Prince comes even now and kisses his bride. And somebody, somewhere, wakes up.

Copyright © 1995 by Christianity Today

Original thinking is seldom original.
—Robert J. Morgan

For a long time, I didn’t consider myself creative. The very term intimidated me. I’m a traditional guy at heart, a little staid and stuffy. I don’t bungee-jump or tie-dye. I prefer Bach to rock, and G. F. Handel to M. C. Hammer. I enjoy the doxology on the Lord’s Day, and we still have Sunday night services.

But I wasn’t always that way.

As a child, my imagination resembled a kitten in a room of windup toys. I chased every idea, scratched every itch, and pounced on every adventure. My secondhand bicycle became alternately a helicopter and a powerboat. I unraveled mysteries and swept starlets off their feet. I composed poems and plays.

When I lurched into adolescence, my imagination followed like a shadow. It questioned boring traditions, dreaming of better ways and better days. It wondered why no one had ever done a thousand doable things. I was an impressionable teen when Bobby Kennedy campaigned for the presidency with his passionate claim, “Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?'”

Why, then, twenty years later, didn’t I consider myself an innovator? What had happened between adolescence and adulthood to silence my imagination? I Think I Can’t, I Think I Can’t.

Lack of self-confidence is the biggest barrier to creativity, according to the Center for Studies in Creativity at the State University of New York. We become set in our ways, afraid to change, too old to dream—or so we think.

“The way we talk about creativity tends to reinforce the notion that it is some kind of arbitrary gift,” echoes John Briggs, author of Fire in the Crucible: The Alchemy of Creative Genius. “It’s amazing the way ‘not having it’ becomes wedded to people’s self-image. They invariably work up a whole series of rationalizations about why they aren’t creative, as if they were damaged goods of some kind.” That was me.

But I realized something else: the acceleration of change in our society makes creativity increasingly important. The ancient message requires up-to-date ways and means to stay relevant with contemporary culture.

“Customers came to us and said if we didn’t change, they’d go somewhere else,” says David Luther, corporate director of quality at Corning.

That’s why in the business world nearly one company in three offers creativity training for its employees. That’s why dozens of books, tapes, games, and software packages focus on creativity exercises and processes. That’s why increasing numbers of universities offer degrees in creativity training. That’s why many experts call creativity “the survival skill of the nineties.”

I still appreciate the benefits of the traditional, but I don’t want to be confined by its liabilities. I want to be “like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old” (Matt. 13:52). God sowed the seeds of creativity in the furrows of the left side of my brain, and I realize now is the time to cultivate for the harvest.

So I made an irrevocable decision: to once again think of myself as an imagineer. I would guide my staff and church to “dream things that never were, and say ‘Why not?'” I’ve learned to do that by keeping five steps in mind. I call them my M&Ms, and I use them to feed my imagination.

Milk

“I milk a lot of cows, but I churn my own butter,” said one preacher. Original thinking is seldom original; it just looks that way. I begin by milking all the ideas I can from others. I read, study, interview, inspect, dissect, and observe. I take classes and endure seminars. I subscribe and ascribe, describe and transcribe, gathering premium ideas wherever possible, for only God can make something from nothing.

Take existing ideas and play with them, turning them upside down and inside out. Challenge them, change them, and channel them in unlikely directions. Churn milk into butter, then press it into different molds.

I worried for a long time about providing adequate pastoral care for my congregation. When I originally came to the Donelson Fellowship, the membership was small enough for me to shepherd. But as the church grew, my availability shrunk. Staff additions didn’t help much because their responsibilities weren’t always in pastoral areas. Finally I read of a program called the “Family Flock” developed by another denomination. I decided to import it into our church. We divided the congregation into ten groups and with some fanfare assigned our deacons over the groups.

The fanfare didn’t last long. Some of the deacons, despite their good intentions, lacked pastoral skills, and others had logistical problems finding their fold. Our family flock ministry sputtered along for a while, then fizzled. I learned the hard way you can’t take an idea and slap it up like a piece of wallpaper.

You have to take a lot of them and mix them together like custom-colored paint. We started reading everything we could find about lay-pastoral programs. We attended “Equipping the Laity for Ministry”-type seminars. We visited churches, telephoned pastors, reviewed notebooks, and conducted surveys. We blended colors, used others as enamel highlights, and ended up with our own uniquely designed program. We commissioned our own lay pastors, who are now doing an admirable job.

“An idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements,” wrote James Webb Young in his classic treatise on creativity, A Technique for Producing Ideas. Young contends that gathering the data is what most people neglect.

Instead of working systematically at the job of gathering raw material we sit around hoping for inspiration to strike us. Every really good creative person in advertising whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk.

Meet

Once you’ve milked all the available cows, the next step is to gather the butter-makers into one room for brainstorming, a time when we gather around the table with our pails of milk and start splashing each other. We suspend criticism and toss around ideas capriciously.

“To have a good idea,” said Edison, “have lots of ideas.”

Brainstorming provides them. A great time for this is the beginning of our staff meetings before we’ve exhausted our mental energies on calendars and budgets.

Just today, for example, we took ten minutes at the beginning of our weekly staff meeting to discuss a problem in the previous Sunday night worship service. We had placed a call to a missionary in France, but it didn’t channel through our sanctuary audio system.

“What can we do about it?” I asked.

“Well, we could buy the equipment to do it right,” one staff member suggested. “It would sound like the call-in shows on the radio or like the ‘Phil Donahue Show.'”

“How much would that cost?”

“Six hundred to a thousand dollars.”

“That’s an awful lot of money for an occasional phone call to France.”

“Well, there are other things we could do with that technology.”

“Like what?”

“We could call our missionaries during our annual missions conference and let them preach to us via the phone lines.”

“We could have them join us for special prayer times.”

“They could bring us news flashes live from the field.”

“Is there anything nonmissionary we could do with it?”

“We could call our aged, sick, and shut-ins.”

“What about calling people who are absent and ask them why!” (Laughter)

“We could call disaster areas for live updates from Christian organizations on the scene.”

“And we could call noted authors and well-known Christians. Suppose we devoted a service to the disabled. We could call Joni Eareckson Tada. We may never be able to have her at our church in person, but perhaps we could arrange for her to share with us for five minutes during a service. We could project her picture on our screen while she’s speaking to us.”

“This would appeal to the unchurched visiting our services because they’re used to seeing that on television.”

“We could involve noted authorities on our panel discussions, and with a wireless mike we could go into the audience for questions.”

“Like Oprah.”

In only ten minutes, we had generated a set of possibilities and generated enough excitement to carry us through the remaining fifty minutes of our meeting with enthusiasm.

Mist

But there’s a problem.

The brainstorming process usually ends in the fabulous frustration of too many ideas. We become too involved to be rational, too hot for cold calculation, too close for objective thinking. A thick mental mist descends.

Solo creative efforts such as sermon preparation also involve this stage of perplexity. After we’ve exegeted the text, read the commentaries, and gathered the data, the question arises: Now what? What do I do with all this stuff? What direction do I take? What application do I make? What outline do I follow? It’s like fighting through a corridor thick with cobwebs.

Earlier this year when our minister of worship resigned, we appointed a large committee to search out a replacement. We collected resumes and ideas from many sources, and we refashioned the job description and salary package. We developed options and brainstormed potentials. But the committee couldn’t agree on anyone, not even on the profile we wanted to follow; we had too many options. I began dreading the meetings—not because of discord but because of the confusion of too many ideas coming from too many people.

But as a reborn imagineer, I eventually recognized it as a good sign. It meant we were right in the middle of the creative process, on our way to the fourth phase.

Mull

For the creative, leisure is no luxury. We need time and solitude. Imagineers walk frequently around Walden Pond. They are children of Isaac who “went out to the field one evening to meditate.” That’s why creative people often appear absentminded.

I periodically go for a couple of days to a state park an hour’s drive from my house with cabins that rent cheap. I think of it as Camp David—my version of the president’s weekend stomping grounds. I retreat there to ponder and pray. Our church staff withdraws there annually for the same purpose. Ideas must incubate awhile before they’re hatched. They must wander through the chambers of the mind before they’re ready for debut. That often happens as I wander through the forests of the Cumberland Mountains.

Failing that, a hammock in the backyard will do. Or a jog around the block. Or a bit of pacing in the family room.

As I hike, sway, jog, or pace, I ask a lot of questions. I visualize. I throw words into the air and see how they land. I squeeze ideas like oranges to see if they render any juice.

In a word, I mull.

The words mull, mill, and meal all come from an Old English root meaning the pulverizing of corn in a grinder. To mull over a subject is to ponder it, to pulverize it in the millstones of the mind.

Mulling is critical for creative problem solving. Last year, my wife and I took an alcohol and cocaine abuser into our home. He became like a member of the family.

Then he relapsed, and for months he flirted with death. I was so distraught over his condition that I couldn’t pastor effectively. My wife and I wept for him as though he were our son.

As I mulled over my discouragement in the light of Scripture, I slowly realized that our relationship, which had begun with my friend being dependent on me, had ended with my being dependent on him. My ability to function depended on his ability to stay straight. I had lost my emotional and spiritual well-being.

When I realized what had happened to me, I changed my attitudes. Pondering my problem in the Lord’s presence helped me to straighten out my emotions creatively and victoriously.

Two other elements help me mull:

Prayer. For the Christian imagineer, pondering involves praying. My best ideas come when I’m on my knees.

Someone asked Catherine Marshall, “What advice would you give someone seeking to be more creative?”

“That’s easy,” she replied. “I would tell them to stay intimately attuned to God.”

The reason is obvious. He was and is the Creator. And since we are made in his image, I assume that one component of Christlikeness is creativity, or at least a sanctified imagination.

I experienced the relationship between prayer and creative problem solving when our church needed someone to develop a ministry to adults, but we lacked money for staff expansion. I felt pessimistic about our options, and I was out of ideas.

When the man I wanted to hire received a tempting offer from an advertising agency, I knew we needed to act. We knelt in prayer and specifically asked God, if he pleased, to show us how to fund the position.

A few ideas came to us, and we discussed these ideas with others. A few days later, a businessman, hearing about our desires, offered to underwrite a third of the funding. We restudied our budgets and developed a set of creative proposals. Within two months, the Lord had provided our minister of adults.

Seeding the subconscious. My junior year in college, a nearby church asked me to preach. Having recently dissected the first chapter of Jeremiah, I decided to base my message on the weeping prophet’s call to ministry.

I began work on my sermon, but I found that I couldn’t formulate an outline. I thought about my text day and night, but I had preacher’s block. The mist had descended.

One day I took an hour’s stroll through the woods around the dormitory. As I rambled, an outline shot into my mind like the sudden blast of a hunter’s rifle. It was perfect. It had come from the Lord via my subconscious.

A few years later, I was stumped by another text. I pondered it day and night, but its truths resisted me. I traveled to a denominational meeting, and that night in the motel I dreamed I was preaching from that text. I awoke, jotted down the outline, and preached it the next Sunday.

I’ve read of the same thing happening to others. In October of 1920, Dr. Frederick Banting was working on his lecture for the following day. His medical practice was too new to be lucrative, so he supplemented his income by teaching. He worked far into the night on the problem of diabetes, but medical science provided scant data on the dreaded disease, and no cure had yet been discovered.

He fell asleep. At two in the morning, he awoke with a start. Grabbing a notebook, he penned three short sentences; then he collapsed again in sleep. But those three sentences later led to the discovery of insulin.

A century earlier, Elias Howe’s fertile mind had imagined the sewing machine. He worked and worked on his invention, but its stitches were jagged and uneven. One night, he dreamed that a tribe of savages had kidnapped him. They threatened to kill him if he didn’t invent a sewing machine in twenty-four hours. He failed, but as the spears flew at him, he noticed they had holes near their tips. He awoke with an idea: put the eye of the needle near the tip.

He patented his sewing machine in 1846.

“I am supposed to be one of the more fertile inventors of big ideas,” said advertiser David Ogilvy, author of Confessions of an Advertising Man. “But big ideas come from the unconscious mind. This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. Stuff your conscious mind with information; then unhook your rational thought process. You can help this process by going for a long walk, taking a hot bath, or drinking a glass of claret. Suddenly, if the telephone lines from your unconscious are open, a big idea swells up within you.”

“You remember how Sherlock Holmes used to stop right in the middle of a case and drag Watson off to a concert?” asks James Webb Young. “That was a very irritating procedure to the practical and literal-minded Watson. But Conan Doyle was a creator and knew the creative processes.”

That’s why I almost always stall for time when I’m confronted with a problem, a need, or an aspiration. Sometimes we want to milk another’s ideas and jump immediately to implementation. That’s almost always a mistake. Sometimes we want to make snap judgments on big issues. That’s seldom wise. Instant ideas are usually more futile then fertile, for “a prudent man gives thoughts to his steps” (Prov. 14:15).

Map

After I’ve worked through the above steps, I usually get my hands on an idea or vision ready to be mapped out in action steps. Perhaps it’s a sermon to be preached, a program to be implemented, a technique to try, or an innovation to launch. I have to take my big idea and do the hard work of working out the details of implementation.

Thousands of good ideas have never seen the light of day because the persons who conceived them didn’t have the ability to take what’s in their heads and execute a plan. Like Joseph, the expert in dreams who also masterminded the administration of the huge Egyptian food plan, I have to be both a dreamer and a doer, an imagineer and an engineer.

I know there’s a price to be paid for creativity. There will be changes and risks. As time goes by, implementing my ideas will require large doses of evaluation and correction. Many will be tried and discarded. But that’s all right. I’m ready. The imagineer has returned.

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