Week 8: Structured Creativity

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Permalink Reply by Nate Woodward on April 15, 2009 at 10:59pm

Interesting that Greg separates the visioning process from the creative implementation. More than that, he says his creative people will get burned out if they have to be a part of the visioning process. I can see how that is a benefit, but it does run the risk of turning the creative process into something of an assembly line.

I've found it can be a big hurdle to get people to move from "I want to help; just tell me what to do" to "what if we did this?" So I am constantly inviting people into the visioning process because without their understanding of vision, they are workers but not creators. Workers are great help, don't get me wrong--but my hope is to foster creativity, not just productivity.

I do agree that creativity requires structure. My creative process usually starts with the text, which is one reason I value the lectionary and the seasons of the church: they give me a starting point that I know is fundatmentally connected to God's character. Whenever we start with implementation--"let's do some Taize songs" or "what if we had stations?"--we invariably end back at the drawing board, because those elements had no purpose. Meditating, reflecting, and conversing about this gets me to the Theme of the service. Right now, this process is usually between me and my pastor(s), though some others in our church also are learning how to reflect about this.

Usually, the next part is a rarely-linear process of going from Theme to order of service. When leading a team, my focus is on the narrative arc of the service--where do we start and where to we end? We can start to brainstorm about what specificallly we want to do, but we have to keep asking "how does this move us from start to end?" It is a conversation between content and structure, where our ideas about what to include--a particuarly appropriate song, an embodied worship element, a film clip--can influence how we get from start to end.

Usually, we arrive at a pretty set structure before we come up with everything. Then it is a matter of filling in the gaps, coming up with the song set, determining the way we will serve communion, etc. This might be the place where I will ask someone to find something specific. For example, for our good Friday service, I asked one person on our team to come up with a responsive reading for Psalm 86.

Finally, the details of implementation: this is where it's easy to find people willing to lend a hand if we need folks to help set up, obtain supplies, bring food. Finding and rehearsing readers, musicians, or other creative perfomers is also part of this.

The further in the process we get, the more people I invite into it, since the latter stages require less commitment and less reflection.

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Permalink Reply by Josh Linman on April 28, 2009 at 11:11pm

Thanks for sharing your process Nate. The separation of visioning and execution is an interesting idea. As a video production guy, I'm kind of with you, it's hard for me to have someone else bring me an idea and say, shoot this, edit this, etc. without giving me the opportunity to add my own voice and ideas to the mix.

On another note, I was just talking the other day to one of the video producers at Church of the Resurrection about the whole concept of worship as a story...and being really intentional in the planning process about crafting the story...the narrative flow, introduction, rising action, climax, conclusion, etc. If you've got any more to share about worship as a narrative I'd love to hear about it (maybe in a blog post or conversation?)

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Permalink Reply by Nate Woodward on May 7, 2009 at 2:11pm

Josh Linman said:

I was just talking the other day to one of the video producers at Church of the Resurrection about the whole concept of worship as a story...and being really intentional in the planning process about crafting the story...the narrative flow, introduction, rising action, climax, conclusion, etc.

Thanks for the suggestion Josh. I've just written on this on my blog: http://lamentations323.blogspot.com.

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