Leading in Creativity

I have been thinking a lot about what it means to image God, and to be fully alive (inspired from the Leadership block course I did in May). I have been relating this to the creative arts, as our God given ability to be creative comes as part of our imaging our immensely creative Creator-God. Now I have to be careful here as my involvement in the creative arts is mainly as an appreciative audience (our ability to appreciate beauty also images God who was able to look at the world and say it is good). I don’t think as Christians that we are really living up to our full potential in this area. Centuries ago the church was in the forefront of creative arts: “From the church proceeded philosophy, music, art, and literature.” (Robert Webber).

Why are those days gone? As Christians we should be delighting in our creativity and leading the field in innovation in music, art, poetry, sculpture, architecture and anything else. . However our music tends to be boring and derivative. We have a tendency to see that a certain thing is popular and then try and jump into the trend. For example there is a lot of hero worship of Brooke Fraser, (and she makes a strong stand for her faith which is admirable) but frankly girl with a guitar fluffy pop music has a certain following so she has managed to enter that rather safe and dull market but without changing anything or increasing the interest or quality of that genre of music. Over and over I see Christians being reactive instead of proactive, as Christians our call is to set the trends to lead the way in creativity, not to follow the existing trends. Why are we as Christians so often just plain boring? What is stopping us living up to the fullness of creativity that God had placed in us?

Christina

Lighten Up!

Do we have enough fun as Christians?

Sometimes it is hard to have fun as a Christian – I know for myself that as a Christian I am more engaged with the pain of the world than some non-Christians are. Sometimes that can prevent us from having fun. Predominately however I see Christians sitting at one extreme or the other. Either we are too deeply intense and serious, or we come across with a superficial Hollywood style –Christians are Happy all the time attitude.

I have been thinking about this in the context of evangelism. Do we actually have fun sharing our faith or is it something we do because we think we should? Often the people who share their faith are the ones who come across as overly intense and serious. I’ll never forget being out with a Drug Arm team and one of the women that we were serving a hot drink too, said that she never understood the trinity – The body language of the three people I was with changed immediately. I think the best simile would be that they were like a pack of wolves moving in for the kill. How intimidating for the poor woman who had a question about the trinity! Often we talk about challenging people to ‘move out of our comfort zone’ to do evangelism. I think we should be talking more about how we can share our faith having fun rather than scaring people out of where they are comfortable.

I have also being thinking about this in relation to the bible. Why don’t Christians find studying the bible fun? Recently I heard of a Christian who discouraged a non-Christian friend from going to a bible study ‘because studying the bible is boring’. As Christians do we find the bible less exciting than non-Christians? This is a challenge to those of us who teach the bible. How well do we express how exciting it can be to discover things about God in its pages?

Our task then is to have fun with evangelism and the bible, but without going to the other extreme of thoughtless superficiality.

Christina