Week 8: Structured Creativity
Over the past two months we’ve been talking about two of the four main foundations for creative worship: vision and team. For the next five weeks we will be looking at the process surrounding creative worship.
Today we are going to start with a quote that I heard in one of my very first interviews for the Creative Worship Tour. My first stop was Jacob’s Well, a young church plant in Minneapolis. While I was there I captured this segment from Greg Meyer, their lead pastor:
Listen to this line one more time: “Creativity works best when it has both time and structure. Unstructured creativity is chaos.”
Creativity doesn't happen on accident. Yes, you may get lucky every now and again but the only way to sustain creativity week in and week out is to give yourself time and structure a.k.a give yourself a process to work through.
For Jacob’s Well, it was the Big Idea team feeding the Creative Arts team with some general information and this guideline: “Anything works as long as it feeds into this...” (i.e. this theme, verse, felt need, desired outcome)
What is your current process? Good or bad, write it down. Hold on to that and in the coming weeks we will evaluate your process and figure out how to improve and refine it.
Subscribe to this and other Creative Worship Tour community content here.
Today we are going to start with a quote that I heard in one of my very first interviews for the Creative Worship Tour. My first stop was Jacob’s Well, a young church plant in Minneapolis. While I was there I captured this segment from Greg Meyer, their lead pastor:
Listen to this line one more time: “Creativity works best when it has both time and structure. Unstructured creativity is chaos.”
Creativity doesn't happen on accident. Yes, you may get lucky every now and again but the only way to sustain creativity week in and week out is to give yourself time and structure a.k.a give yourself a process to work through.
For Jacob’s Well, it was the Big Idea team feeding the Creative Arts team with some general information and this guideline: “Anything works as long as it feeds into this...” (i.e. this theme, verse, felt need, desired outcome)
What is your current process? Good or bad, write it down. Hold on to that and in the coming weeks we will evaluate your process and figure out how to improve and refine it.
Subscribe to this and other Creative Worship Tour community content here. Tags: cwtu
Join This Conversation
-
Permalink Reply by Nate Woodward on -
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.
-
Permalink Reply by Josh Linman on -
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?)
-
Permalink Reply by Nate Woodward on
-
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.
Latest Activity
Wow, Tom. That was very poignant.
Some of your thoughts remind me of that movie "Pay It Forward". I also think about local church models: large vs. small. Typically, the larger church attempts to make a big splash and impact many at once. This is u…
I think it is much easier to pray for or want peace on a global or macro level and much harder to look into the mirror and pray and ask for peace in our own hearts. When we find peace with God we become a beacon of peace to our children, wife, husba…
I was sitting at my table, eating my breakfast cereal and minding my own business when WHAM! An overwhelming peace came over me.
I don't think it was from God - it wasn't that good - and yet the calm that I experienced was tangible. And, the usual…
Traditionally we had the sermon as central. Singing and scripture was around that with singing a very important part. Now I am not sure- performance?? We had many praise bands, and many different songs that get played. Do we sing. Not really. Not su…
In New Zealand Advent comes as Summer is full tilt. I don't find it stressful. I love it! I have so many wonderful memories of Advent Moments that its hard to know what to share.
1. I have described this in more detail in the book "The Art of Curati…
In 2000, I experienced the loss of my fiance, who died suddenly that April. As preparations began for Christmas, I was not very joyful and was at a loss for how to deal with my grief while others were celebrating. I attended a workshop at our local…
© 2010 Created by Creative Worship Tour.
Powered by 
.
