Let’s Make 2010 The Year The Church Become Original

Posted on January 04, 2010
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(40) comments

The Associated Press ran a story over the holidays about how “Christian products” and spoofing commercial brands and logos. You’ve seen them… the cheesy Christian t-shirts that someone, somewhere thought was creative or witty. The article shares some good (bad) examples:

The Facebook spoof t-shirt: “Jesus Christ wants to be your friend”
The Abercrombie & Fitch logo transformed into “Abreadcrumb & Fish”
iPray, instead of iPod.
A myriad of rip-offs of the “got milk” campaign
The Obama “Hope” image was transformed from Obama to Jesus

I agree with my friend Brad Abare, who heads the Center for Church Communications when he calls all this stuff “Jesus Junk”. Brad comments that he thinks this type of thing is just dumb: “It’s not a true reflection of creativitiy.”

In fact, what would our churches look like in 2010 if re really tried to be creative, rather than ripping off other people’s ideas?

What if we came up with our own unique sermon series titles rather than taking the low hanging fruit of a series based on the movie Avatar?

What if we came up with our own ideas to reach our community, rather than buying a curriculum or copying some program from a church 3,000 miles away with 15,000 move attendees than our church has?

My guess is that the church would be actually much MORE creative and much MORE effective.

As church leaders, we must, of course, glean the best ideas from other leaders all around the country. We should constantly be on the lookout for trends and things we can use to reach our community. But our community is OUR community. There are ways to reach our own local community that Andy Stanley and Perry Noble haven’t thought of for one major reason: they don’t live in our community.

I firmly believe that the local church is one of the greatest incubators for innovation that exists. But in order for innovation to thrive in your church, you have to champion it. You have to empower people to be creative, take risks, and see what happens.

If and when you do this in 2010, you’ll find that you have a large number of failures. But you’ll find one or two jewels that will work like a charm in your local setting.

Let’s make 2010 a year of originality and innovation in our local churches. Are you in?

Have a great week!

Todd

SOURCE ARTICLE: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/58625

Comments

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Peter Hamm on Mon, January 04, 2010

John writes [The reason I went in this direction is because it�s in the place of deep prayer, in a prophetic atmosphere, where we�ll hear God, receive his designs, his blueprints� serious anointing that will enable the church to be �creative forerunners�.] And that’s where we can get creative (back to the original point), isn’t it!

I will caution you that study of the Bible hasn’t entered into your argument (I trust it is in there). And I mention that because I’ve seen too many “prayer abuses”, where prayer was the only place people heard from God and the Word was never consulted. I’ve seen prayerful people use what they “heard” in deep prayer an excuse for horrible things, divorce, theft from a ministry, stuff like that…

Michael, not the right forum to have that discussion. You can click on my link to my blog and email me. That would be great. I guess I mean that prayer is in everything we do. It’s not just a separated activity, although it is often that.

But we are WAY off point.

Thanks, guys!
John Burton on Mon, January 04, 2010

When people hear about the call to pray 4+ hours a day, it often stresses them out… there are a few reasons for this:

1. They presume prayer to = petition. Petition driven prayer can take mere minutes. Revelation driven, prophetic prayer is a whole different story.
2. They presume prayer to be continually ‘active’. At IHOP, for example, four hours goes by fast… as we are on our face, letting God search our hearts, meditating on scripture, etc.
3. They don’t have an impossible vision or a bigger mission to contend for.

When we go to that deep place, where dreams, visions and encounters are no longer rare, creativity won’t be an issue whatsoever. Can you imagine having a God given dream, or having a visitation and having a boring sermon?
Michael Dixon on Mon, January 04, 2010

Peter,
Thanks
Jim on Mon, January 04, 2010

Wow - this has gone way astray from last I looked on!!!!!!!!

At the risk of returning to the topic: I don’t think anyone has said that creativity for creativity’s sake is the goal. I just hope that this year we get real serious about doing something that is meaningful - as evaluated by God’s standards - not church growth or seminar standards. Also my bent regarding music and the arts is scriptural - we desperately need “new songs” not for another CD or the royalties we can collect - but because new songs/new art express something that is happening inside of us individually - or sometimes expresses things that grow out of what God is doing in our congregations.
Jesus was creative in his teaching. His examples and parables drew from local culture and local understanding .

God is creative - we were made in His image - we are to become more like Him. Let’s get creative!
Michael Kern on Mon, January 04, 2010

The original question was on creating new and unique content vs. using well known imagery or creative work. My perspective comes as the former creative director and product manager for a church marketing company, and now as a logo designer for churches.

My main objection to using imagery from well know TV shows, movies and other organizations is that it isn’t very ethical. Those organizations have invested a ton of time and money to build their brand and by using their imagery, we’re essentially taking their work and using it for our own benefit. I’ve seen my work ripped off and the typical explanation is that they “captured it” from the Internet and didn’t know it wasn’t free. How convenient. Stealing doesn’t honor God.

Ideally the church should be creative as it’s a reflection of God’s character. A church will feel stale if it consistently lives on a diet of materials from other sources.

From a practical standpoint though, I agree with Peter - most people in ministry don’t have the time to create original work all the time. If all out time and energy goes into creating totally original work, I’m sure ministries within the church will lose out. When inspired ideas from Rick Warren, Ed Young or others is made available and it speaks to where our local church is at, why not use it from time to time? Or even adapt it so it fits with the local church.

The other reason to tie into ideas from our culture is that it speaks to a common language. On Mars Hill, Paul used the statue of an unknown god to make known Christ. His audience didn’t know Christ, but they were familiar with the statue. So we use icons from our culture that are known both inside and outside the church to make Christ known. Familiar ideas can become a bridge to people outside our church.

By all means, be creative! But I don’t think the church should have to reinvent the wheel every single time.
John Burton on Mon, January 04, 2010

That’s a good point… I do web/graphic design and I’m shocked at the number of people who think using images from Google searches is ok.

They are shocked when I tell them that most images are not usable, and we may need to purchase what we want to work with.
CaroleTurner on Mon, January 04, 2010

This reminded me of the book, The Divine Commodity by Skye Jathani. We truly have forgotten how to be creative but I also think most Christians believe we don’t have what it takes, we doubt God has blessed us with the creativity we see outside the church. It’s a confidence issue, we have to start creating and we will see that IT is there and we should not doubt it.
Michael Kern on Tue, January 05, 2010

Good point Carole regarding confidence. Todd made the point in his blog post that many efforts to be creative will end in failure. Being creative means doing things that haven’t been done before. People don’t always embrace new things - they like the old and familiar, so we take a risk when we do new things. Failure is part of the process, but it sure feels good when it works well.
jud on Wed, January 06, 2010

Expository Bible teaching !!! I’ve heard my last 30 minute Oprah-ized illustration laden message where the Pastor mostly either attempts to talk about himself (or worse his book) or attempts to charm the crowd into liking him. I’ve seen too many examples of men who place pleasing people / wanting to be respected personally above rightly dividing the Word. Let’s preach the Bible and leave the wooing of souls to the Holy Spirit please.
Richard on Fri, February 12, 2010

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