Movements of the Gospel

Brandon J. O'Brien

• Publisher: Redeemer City to City
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780578539751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Written for City to City Europe’s conference in Krakow, Poland, in 2018, this collection of essays represents the perspectives of church planters and practitioners pioneering new kinds of ministry throughout Europe in the early twenty-first century.

Chapter 1

How the Gospel Makes Us More Creative

STEPHAN PUES

Why Creativity Is Important

Creativity is hip. A lot of people talk and think about it. Innovation hubs for entrepreneurs launch startups and test creative ways of leading meetings and developing processes. Every young leader is educated in creative thinking. Creativity is no longer just a thing that painters, musicians, or writers use. It seems to be important for everybody.

Richard Florida, in his book The Rise of the Creative Class, argues that creativity will be the main skill of workers in the 21st-century marketplace. The times when most people worked in production or service are coming to an end—machines and computers do more and more of those jobs every day. Instead, the skills required from us in increasing measure are innovation and creativity.

This is especially true for people in cities. Edward Glaser argues in his book Triumph of the City that almost all innovation in the world comes from urban centers. There are several reasons for this (density, diversity, experts, the arts), but the relevance of having creative and innovative skills is even more important in cities than anywhere else. Because more and more people are living in cities, innovative skills have become more and more crucial.

Creativity is even more important for people in the startup scene—people who are starting a business, a non-profit, a new initiative, or planting a church. They have to be able to think outside of the box and create new projects, models, programs, and ministry expressions. They must be good at troubleshooting, contextualizing, and learning from mistakes, rather than simply acting as agents of continuity or tradition. If they lead organizations, businesses, or churches, they can’t just be innovators —they must also be innovation leaders. They need to know how to stimulate creativity not only in themselves, but in those they lead.

When my family and launch team moved to Frankfurt in 2009 to plant a new church, we were twelve young believers with a vision: start a church for people in Frankfurt who wanted nothing to do with the church or Christian faith. Previously, we were all members of existing churches where things were done the way they always had been done. Changing something was always a challenge. But now we were in a church plant.

We spent eighteen months learning to understand our context and planning what our new church would look like. Innovation was crucial to us. We tried to be as creative as possible. We brainstormed, visualized, storyboarded, conducted studies. We asked people in Frankfurt what a church they would go to would look like. For most team members, this was new. As a leader, I not only had to think creatively, but I also had to lead an innovative team and stimulate creativity in everyone around me. Later, when the church gained momentum, a friend said to me, “You have a very creative church.”

I took that as a compliment.

Urban church planters in the 21st century are, by definition, innovators. Creative skills are crucial to their task. This means City to City is a movement of urban innovators. We need to understand the importance of creativity and have the skills to stimulate and lead innovation in order to see movements of the gospel in the cities of Europe.

Who Is Creative?

The normal response I get when talking to people about creativity is, “I am not the creative type.” The idea they are expressing is that some people are born creative and have innovation in their DNA, while others do not. But is that so? I want to challenge that idea with two perspectives—one educational and one biblical.

Educational Perspective

In his book Out of Our Minds, Ken Robinson argues that our schools are not built to develop creativity because they were designed for an industrial age. As a result, learning mostly means memorizing content or doing things correctly, and the creative subjects like painting, dance, or poetry are deemphasized. Since most education does not support and stimulate creativity, many people don’t think of themselves as creatives. But the opposite is true.

Pablo Picasso said, “All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist when we grow up.” It is amazing how much creativity kids have. They are comfortable with fantasy and have the freedom to play, to imagine, to try and fail, to learn, to dream, and to test everything. Children are born creative—my own four-year-old son proves that every day. Take all electronic devices away and leave him alone in his room; he turns into Batman, fights the Joker with a superweapon, and saves the world. We may call it chaos, but in the end, it is true creativity. And everybody is born with it. All humans have creative capacity, even if they don’t think they do.

Biblical Perspective

Christian ideas about God, the world, and humans are very positive about creativity. God himself claims the name “Creator.” And he created humans as innovative creatures in an environment that has maximum potential for innovation.

1. The source of creativity

At the beginning of the Bible, God presents himself as the Creator of the universe. He designed the heavens and the earth. He imagined all of the plants and animals and breathed them into existence. He designed chemistry, biology, medicine, DNA, time, and natural laws. Like a painter, he brought amazing galaxies, beautiful mountains, colorful flowers, and tasty fruits to life. Out of nothing, he made the sun and the moon. And at the culmination of it all, he created man and woman in his image. God is the most creative being of all. Creativity is obviously one of his attributes. That is why so much beauty exists in the world—our God is an artist.

In faith, we pray to the Creator of the universe. We have a direct, personal connection to the source of creativity—the one who is creativity himself. Just as a piece of art reflects the artist, the world mirrors its Creator in beauty and ingenuity. As children of God, we are like the kids of the most famous artist of the world.

When we think about how to learn, stimulate, and lead with creativity, our connection to the source of creativity—our God—may be unexpectedly helpful.

2. The call to creativity

In Genesis 2, God calls the man he has just created to join him in the process of innovation; God gives him the task of naming all the animals. Picture this scene: there are thousands of animals waiting in line. God pulls up chairs for himself and Adam, gets a notebook and a pen and says, “Okay. Now it’s on you. Tell me their names!”

And Adam begins. The first species comes forward. “Elephants.”

“Alright, next one.”

“Eagles.”

And so it goes on for hours.

One of the first things God taught our forefather was to be creative. God could have given Adam a list of the animals’ names, but his desire was for humans to join him in the creative process. And that was only the beginning. God put Adam and Eve on a whole planet full of raw materials teeming with incredible potential. Today, thousands of years later, we are still discovering new aspects of this creation. God could have had it all finished—technology, medicine, science—but he didn’t. Especially in our age, when the revealed potential that God bestowed upon nature is so enormous, the idea that God wanted us to be creative is obvious. God called humans to be creative from the beginning. And that is still one of our callings.

For many centuries, the family of God, the Church, was a main supporter of and venue for creativity and art. Much of Europe’s rich cultural history (Michelangelo’s paintings, Bach’s music) emerged in and around the church. As Christians, we use creativity and art to praise our God by singing songs, building amazing cathedrals, and creating other works of art and praise. Anyone who has ever walked into Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona or listened to one of Bach’s concertos has experienced an example of creativity used to glorify God.

What Is the Problem with Creativity?

There are many factors that can limit or hinder our creative potential—traditional paradigms tell us that things have to be done the way they have always been done. Pragmatism that puts efficiency above all other values allows no time to be creative. Lack of resources restricts the freedom necessary for innovation. Add to this most leaders’ lack of awareness and inability to stimulate creativity. But even if you remove all of those other limitations, there is one more that kills almost all creativity: the fear of failure.

To be creative, we need the freedom to explore, dream, and test new ideas. Only in an environment that encourages us to try, fail, and try again can we learn new things and to innovate. While inventing the light bulb, Thomas Edison made hundreds of mistakes. Later, he said, “I didn’t fail a thousand times. The light bulb was an invention with a thousand steps.” However, the fear of failure or the paradigm of perfection can kill creativity. If we always play it safe, we never come up with something new.

As a German, I know this quite well. Germans are known for their high standards. This is why “made in Germany” is a quality guarantee recognized worldwide. But the reason for this is actually that we are afraid to fail. There is not much risk-taking or innovative potential in our culture. In fact, we professionalized this fear so much that it became a technical term—the so-called German Angst (the German word for “fear”). To be and to stay creative is a challenge, especially in environments with an intense pressure to succeed.

A multitude of voices speak this creativity-killing paradigm of fear into our lives. Here are three:

The Teacher

The first person who teaches us to avoid failure is our teacher. Ken Robinson points out that our whole education system is built on the motivation to avoid failure. Teachers train kids to do everything correctly. Through our whole education, we learn that the best grades are given to the ones who make no mistakes. If you succeed in school, you are groomed to be a no-mistake professional.

Church planters are often educated theologians trained by religious experts and teachers. In the more conservative wings of theological education, the fear of heresy and the desire to be right can become innovation killers. Of course, there is great value in good, solid theology. A sound and detailed understanding of the gospel is crucial. But theological perfectionism, which can become a legalistic fear of failure, is an innovation killer. There was not a lot of creativity amongst the Pharisees, but the early church, driven by the gospel of the freedom of Christ, was a movement filled with innovation.

The Boss

When we leave school and enter our professional work lives, the next person who tells us to make no mistakes is our boss. Not every boss is like this, but many jobs create an atmosphere where mistakes are not seen as positive. Innovative companies like Google or Yahoo give their workers a significant amount of time to try new things and make mistakes, and they are celebrated for it, but this form of leadership is still not the rule.

In the church planting world, the expectations of some denominational leaders, donors, and mentors of what it looks like to “succeed” pose a real challenge. The expectation of moral perfection, goals for the growth of the church plant, or basic expectation to raise enough funds for your project can lead to paralyzing fear of failure. It extinguishes the innovative spark a church planter needs. Of course, there need to be goals and boundaries, but innovators also need the space to be creative. Urban church planters need an environment with enough healthy freedom to be innovators.

So, our teachers tell us to avoid failure during our education, our boss does the same at our job, and on top of this comes:

The Pastor

His message is often the same: do no wrong! Live a good, moral life that pleases God. If you do so, you will be blessed and welcomed by God. This message—sadly, often the message of the church—leads to fundamentalist traditionalism and adds to the voices that make us fearful of failure.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. I appreciate teachers and think they do a great job. There are many gentle and fair bosses in the world. And I am a pastor myself. But it is important to see that the way we run our schools, companies, and churches may hinder creativity rather than encourage it.

We need a voice that helps us deal with failure differently and counteract the narratives of fear. What can help us?

How the Gospel Makes Us More Creative

There are many strategies to help people experience freedom to try, fail, and keep trying. Many of the young tech companies and entrepreneur hubs do a good job of stimulating creative thinking in their workers by giving them freedom to start a project that may not even work out in the end.

But the fear of failure is often a deeper, more personal struggle. It is connected to our self-worth, our desires for security and approval, and, oftentimes, our concept of spirituality. If my fear of failure is not only a matter of getting time at work to invent new apps or products but is more deeply rooted in my personal need not to lose face (or my salvation!), then a more fundamental freedom is needed.

The Christian faith is often viewed—by both Christians and non-Christians—as a religion about keeping...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents 
• * Introduction: Europe as the Missional Frontier
• 1. How the Gospel Makes Us More Creative
• 2. At the Intersection of Faith and Culture: A Vision for Christian Cultural Expressiveness
• 3. Integral Life: Building Multi-Ethnic Christian Communities
• 4. Developing Gospel-Shaped Social Businesses in the City
• 5. Transforming the Gap: The Arts as Mediator between the Church and the City
• * Notes
• * Bibliographies
• * About the Authors