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