24. Imagination and Creativity
Imagination and Creativity
At the beginning of our quest, we met Hushai and Ahithophel and learned from them something about words and the “picture gallery” of the human mind. Now, as we near the end of our quest, we need to get acquainted with Bezalel and Oholiab and listen to what they have to teach us about creativity in the service of the Lord.
In case you’ve forgotten, Bezalel and Oholiab were the two craftsmen God chose to supervise and implement the artistic work involved in the building of the tabernacle (Ex. 35:30-35). Because they were filled with the Spirit of God, they had the required “skill, ability, and knowledge” for following God’s plans and making the tabernacle the way He wanted it. These two men encourage me because they remind me that the Holy Spirit is able to help us use our abilities to work creatively for the glory of God. Imagination and creativity should be a normal part of the Spirit-filled life.
At this point, you probably want to raise two objections.
Objection #1— “But Bezalel and Oholiab had a God-given pattern to follow, and the Israelites brought them more than enough material to work with. When we prepare sermons, we have to find our own material and develop our own pattern. What kind of encouragement is that?”
Never minimize the power of the Holy Spirit in your life! He is “able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us” (Eph. 3:20). Some of us need to “fan into flame the gift of God” (2 Tim. 1:6) and trust the Spirit to use our training, skills, and studies in creative ways to the glory of the Lord. After all, if the Holy Spirit enabled Bezalel and Oholiab to make a material building for ministry to His people, shouldn’t He be able to help us prepare messages that will help edify the saints and build the spiritual temple? (Eph. 2:19-22)
Objection #2—“I’m just not the creative type. I don’t have much of an imagination.”
Who told you that?
“Imagination grows by exercise and contrary to common belief is more powerful in the mature than in the young,” wrote novelist W. Somerset Maugham in The Summing Up; and I agree with him. If you and I are created in the image of God, and if God is infinitely original, then surely He can help us be creative too. If the mind He put within us is a picture gallery that responds to the world He put around us, then we must have the ability needed to think and act creatively. The problem isn’t that we lack imagination but that we haven’t exercised it as we should.
“Are You Creative?” is the title of the cover story of Business Week for September 30, 1985; the subtitle reads, “Research Shows That Creativity Can Be Taught—and Companies Are Listening.” The article describes the work of three “gurus” who are preaching “the gospel of creativity,” including Roger von Oech, “The Creativity Consultant of Silicon Valley” and author of A Whack on the Side of the Head, a best-selling primer on creative thinking. “By the age of 40,” says the article, “most adults are about 2% as creative as they were at 5”; and the blame is put on modern education that “stresses logic [and] seems to squelch creativity.”[1]
So, the first step toward a more creative ministry is to thank the Lord for giving you an imagination and to ask Him to help you exercise that imagination so that it will be used by the Spirit as a powerful creative force in your life. Each morning, in my own personal devotional time, I yield my body, mind, will, heart, and imagination to the Lord (Rom. 12:1-2) and ask Him to use me to be a transformer, not a conformer, and a creator, not a destroyer. Whether I’m studying, preaching, writing, counseling, or chatting with friends, I want my imagination to enrich me and help me have the insights I need to minister at my best.
Granted, some people have greater gifts in this area than do others; but all of us can still do a better job of using what we have for the glory of God. If that 2 percent imagination were increased to only 10 percent, we’d have five times the creativity we used to have; and that’s a giant step forward!
“I’ve read several articles on creativity and I just don’t think I qualify,” somebody protests. “I don’t have the marks of a creative person.”[2]
I’ve read some of those articles. However, I rate most of them as helpful as those Sunday supplement tests—“Are You Fit to Own a Parrot?” or “Are You a Closet Kleptomaniac?” Applying “pop” psychology to the challenges of life is something like trying to nail shadows to the wall, and I wouldn’t worry about it too much if I were you. Rest assured that you have an imagination, you can learn to exercise it more effectively, and the Lord will help you do it.
How do we as preachers and teachers of God’s Word develop the imagination and use it to serve the Lord? Let me answer that question by suggesting these ideas:
1. Creativity is a way of life and not just a series of techniques applied to a specific challenge. In their desire to be creative, too many people look for guaranteed formulas and quick shortcuts instead of following the disciplines that make for a creative life. Whether you’re learning to swim, to speak Swedish, or to bake a cake, you start by obeying certain time-tested rules that everybody follows; and you don’t break the rules until first the rules have broken you.
Once such principles become a part of your inner person, they will liberate you and enable you to practice them creativety in your own way. People who are dominated by rules become imitators; people who are liberated by rules become innovators. Rules have to be digested and become “second nature” to us before they can do us much good. Once the rules are digested, they help us develop a creative lifestyle that seems to ignore the rules but actually never forsakes them.
Creativity is the result of the imagination bringing together both science and art and allowing them to interact.[3] Creativity is both left-brain and right-brain, both analysis and synthesis. Analysis deals primarily with facts and concepts, synthesis with truths and pictures. The scientist in you takes the text apart (exegesis) and the poet in you puts it back together (homiletics) so that concepts become pictures and information becomes motivation.
So, you do your homework, exegete the text, and gather all the information you can. You “brood over it” and look for pictures and relationships that help explain and apply the text. Then you step aside for a time of “incubation” when your inner faculties, guided by God’s Spirit, are free to “process” the information you’ve studied. Often during this “incubation period,” ideas and insights will come unbidden, and these, of course, must be tested by the truth of Scripture. There are times, however, when gestation and delivery are slow and painful. Be patient and prayerful at these times, and avoid panic. Pressure smothers creativity, so be sure to give yourself enough time for sermon preparation.
I repeat: creativity is a way of life, and only you know the best schedule to make for accomplishing the work God has given you to do. When you find yourself pressured by the calendar and sense that the creative juices are drying up, evaluate your schedule and see if you don’t need to start saying no to some invitations and opportunities. In my own ministry, I’ve found that the regular preparation of weekly messages for the church family was the best thermometer for testing my spiritual life and my daily schedule. When preparing messages started to become a secondary burden instead of a joyful priority, I knew something was wrong with the schedule; and I had to start saying no. If you want to be a creative preacher of the Word, you and the Lord must control your schedule; and there will always be a price to pay. We don’t choose merely between the good and the bad; we choose between the better and the best.
2. The creative lifestyle is balanced. The eccentric “mad professor” or “oddball poet” is often a pose or a caricature; for while there may be exceptions, truly creative people are normal and balanced. However, most of them do have certain traits in common.
For one thing, they’re alert and pay attention to life around them. They use their eyes and ears and other senses to “take in” the people and circumstances around them and learn all they can. They “breathe” experience the way mammals breathe air. Short-story writer Eudora Welty said, “My imagination takes its strength and guides its direction from what I see and hear and learn and feel and remember of my living world.”[4] To paraphrase poet John Ciardi, “The preacher’s task is not to talk about experience, but to make it happen.”[5] But the preacher who steers himself against the experiences of life will have a difficult time making the Christian experience described in the Bible real to others. To the creative person, no experience is a wasted experience.[6]
Creative people get the most out of life’s experiences, both happy and tragic, because they pay attention; they look and listen; they “drop their guard” and, like little children, wonder and marvel unashamed. They aren’t afraid to use their senses or to express their feelings.[7] While other people are aiming cameras or camcorders, making records to look at later, creative people are first living the scene and imbibing its elements with all their senses. Only after they’ve done that will they get the cameras out of the car and take pictures; and when they view the pictures later, it’s mainly to recreate experiences and not to remember places.[8]
I said before that the lifestyle of creative people is balanced. Creative people work hard, but they also know when to get away from their work and devote time to play and relaxation.[9] In fact, play and rest are a part of the creative process. When we’re relaxing after the mind has been hard at work, the imagination often starts to produce exactly what we were looking for. It isn’t enough that we gather information and study it. We must also take time for incubation, when the inner person can digest the material and give the imagination opportunity to make something out of it.[10] Creative people never consider relaxation a waste of time.
The busy schedule of the “pastoral CEO” can be the greatest enemy of creativity in ministry, no matter how successful the pastor’s work may appear to the watching church. If you don’t have margins to your life, you have no room for growth; and without growth, there can be little or no creativity. The worker can be pressured, but the creative artist demands leisure.[11] When I was in the pastorate, I usually took Thursday as a day off. I found that the change of pace helped to accelerate the creative juices, and often I would awaken on Friday morning with the outhne of the Sunday message nicely developed in my mind. After hours of intense study and concentration, that brief incubation period gave my imagination just the margin it needed to do something creative.
The minister’s annual vacation should be a time of re-creation as well as recreation. (Too often the annual holiday gets so demanding it becomes wreck-reation!) Body, mind, and spirit need refreshing and renewal, but at the same time the relaxing minister must be alert to capture ideas that will start to appear. During vacation, I usually carried a 3 x 5 card in my pocket so I could write down the ideas that came to me while my body was resting but my imagination was still at work, not only sermon ideas but ideas for whole series of messages. Once you develop a creative lifestyle, ideas will come to you at unexpected moments; and you’d better be able to hold on to them.
No two people are identical when it comes to work habits, and only you can determine when you are at your creative best. I happen to be a morning person and can get more work done between 6 A.M. and noon than at any other time of the day, but some of my creative friends burn the midnight oil. The British writer and critic Samuel Johnson could write a masterful essay thirty minutes before the printer needed it, and Charles Spurgeon prepared his Sunday evening message on Sunday afternoon after his nap. You must dare to be yourself—your best self—and plan to do your creative work when you function best.
There are times when the preacher just needs to get away for mental and emotional “ventilation.” Blessed are those churches that give their pastors occasional mini-sabbaticals and full sabbaticals, because they’re investing not only in the welfare of the pastor and his family, but also in the welfare of the entire congregation. We “get away,” not to escape, but to be able to come back with new perspective. Many a weary pastor, drained of his creative juices, would have been saved from a premature resignation if he had only taken time off for re-creation.
3. Creative people are readers. Like any other human faculty, the imagination must be “fed” if it’s to be healthy and strong. If the imagination isn’t nourished with the best, it will turn to the worst; and the worst will defile it and debilitate it. Creative ministers feed their imagination by what they hear, see, read, and ponder; and reading is a particularly important source of nourishment.
You’ll recall that one of the functions of imagination is the building of bridges, the relating of things to each other that seemingly have no relationship at all. Because of this, it’s important that we read widely and not focus only on authors we agree with or books that relate specifically to our work. Certainly the expositor must specialize in biblical studies; but if that’s the only diet we get, our imagination may find itself painfully undernourished. I’ve discovered that even the comics can give my imagination something to chew on![12] When you develop a creative lifestyle, you find yourself discovering insights and ideas in the most unexpected places.
When I read a book, I often use a 3 × 5 card for a bookmark so I’ll have something to write on when ideas spring out of my reading. I usually keep a dozen or so books “working” on my reading shelf, and I read them as I feel motivated, depending on my mood and the time available. I don’t feel compelled to complete a book in any given amount of time; in fact, I might not complete the book at all.[13] I’ve learned that books are tools, and a tool that helps one worker may not help another.
There are the “books of the hour” and the “books of the ages,” and the creative reader is careful to keep a balance. I’ve never found it necessary to read all the bestsellers, secular or religious, or all the classics that my professors told me I couldn’t live without.[14] It’s impossible for the average person to read even 10 percent of the books being published today, so make up your mind that you’ll have to be selective and occasionally a bit abusive when some well-meaning member of a book club wants to assault you with a new volume.[15]
The remarkable thing is this: as you read contemporary and classic writings in many fields—fiction and nonfiction, history and biography, poetry and prose, science and the arts—you start to see “patterns of truth” as your imagination puts things together. You discover firsthand that “all truth is God’s truth” and all truth intersects. Your mind is enriched from many sources and your imagination shows you how all of these things relate to the eternal truths in God’s Word.[16] “The imagination must be fed,” wrote English critic John Ruskin. “The most imaginative men always study the hardest and are the most thirsty for knowledge.” The imagination doesn’t work well in a vacuum; you have to give it something to digest.
I must emphasize again that creative people don’t neglect the developing of their technical skills. Painters study the works of other artists, classic and contemporary, and seek to perfect their own techniques; and musicians and writers do the same. Likewise, creative preachers listen to other ministers preach; they read and study printed sermons[17] and expose themselves to the best in homiletical thought and communications theory; and then they trust the Lord to help them use all of this information imaginatively in the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
If we are to be creative preachers, we must effectively keep in touch with four different worlds: the world of creation and humanity around us, the world of feelings and insights within us, the world of ideas in the arts and sciences, and the unchanging world of the Bible which is the basis for our ministry. Like the Holy Spirit described in Genesis 1:2, the imagination hovers over this mass of material and brings order out of chaos.
Before leaving the subject of creative reading, I want to say something about poetry. Yes, real men read poetry and aren’t ashamed to admit it! Reading good poetry is one of the best ways to challenge your intellect and stretch your imagination, provided you experience what you read.[18]
Poetry has been defined as “distilled emotion.” The fact that God reveals Himself in the Bible through poetry ought to assure us that there’s nothing wrong with the genre itself.[19] The problem with most of us is that we were introduced to poetry at a time when we didn’t know how to approach it or appreciate it and, like a vaccination, we got just enough not to be able to “catch” the real thing.
When in January 1965, Time magazine reported the death of T.S. Eliot, I wondered why a poet should get that much attention; so I decided to see what he had to say. That launched me on an exciting and enriching journey into the vast and expanding universe of poetry, a journey that I wish I had started sooner. I now enjoy browsing through poetry anthologies to discover new poems and poets and new experiences. Carl Sandburg described poetry as “the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.” He said poetry was “the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”[20] No wonder poetry can nourish the imagination!
4. Creative people build their vocabulary. Words are lamps that help us see, tools that help us build, handles that help us grasp, and sometimes weapons that help us fight. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “The limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world”; so, when your vocabulary grows, your world gets bigger.
The best way to increase your vocabulary is to use a good dictionary when you read and to be diligent to “digest” each new word you meet. “Digesting” a word means much more than simply discovering its meaning and learning how to use it. It also means knowing where the word came from and what pictures might be hidden in its background. Sometimes a new word will introduce you to a whole new family of words and you can have a great time getting acquainted with all the cousins! We don’t drop these new words into every sermon just to display our erudition,[21] but we do add new words to our bag of tools—or verbal arsenal—so we can use them when needed. Remember what Proverbs 12:27 says about the lazy hunter.
Along with a current college-level dictionary, your library ought to contain a dictionary of synonyms; and don’t settle for a thesaurus or “synonym book,” as helpful as they are. A dictionary of synonyms will tell you how one word differs in meaning from another, and this is important to good communication. I get considerable help from consulting my Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, edited by C.T. Onions (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1991) and also my ancient Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language by Walter W. Skeat (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1901). Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, by Eric Partridge (New York: Greenwich House, 1983) is helpful, as is Cassell’s Latin Dictionary, edited by D.P. Simpson (New York: Macmillan, 1968).[22]
All this counsel may seem light years away from the burden you carry of preaching the Word week by week and shepherding God’s people, but it really isn’t. Words are very important to ministry; if you doubt that, read the Book of Proverbs and see how much it says about human speech. The Holy Spirit has chosen to reveal God’s truth in words (1 Cor. 2:13), and He has called us to use words to convey that truth to others. Just as the carpenter and mechanic take care of their tools, add to them regularly, and use the right tool for the right job, so the preacher must protect his “toolbox” of words, add to it steadily, and learn which tools will best accomplish what he wants to do.
5. Creative people aren’t afraid to do new things. Innovation always involves risk, but creative people are willing to take reasonable chances and are not afraid to make mistakes. Ministers who are comfortable with the ecclesiastical routine and satisfied with their homiletical skills may be in great danger and not know it. What started out as a trench on the battlefield may have become a grave in the cemetery.
“The curse of our calling, brethren, is professionalism,” writes Bishop Gerald Kennedy. “It makes us more desirous of protecting our status than saving souls. We would rather die in rigid respectability than risk being caught with our dignity down.”[23]
I’m not suggesting that we become careless and rash in our quest for creativity—that approach to ministry might frighten the flock and leave the shepherd alone to ponder his clever new ideas. Perhaps you heard about the teenager who decided to be different by parting his hair from ear to ear instead of in the usual manner. The experiment wasn’t at all successful: he got attention, but people kept whispering in his nose. Unfortunately, some people can’t distinguish between being odd and being different.
Spurgeon warned his pastoral students that “suddenness leads to shallowness,” so let’s be sure that we’ve prayed and pondered before we engineer important changes. Let’s also be sure that we know the difference between creativity and novelty. But when the wind of the Spirit is blowing in new directions, and we’re sure God is at work, let’s not be afraid to set our sails and move, even if the breeze takes us to parts unknown. We need to meet new people, read new authors, meditate on new passages of Scripture that we’ve long neglected, face new challenges, consider new procedures, and take the risk of acquiring some new wineskins. This doesn’t mean we abandon the foundation of our faith, but it does mean we’re not afraid to rearrange the furniture and even occasionally throw away some dusty bric-a-brac.
As we move along the road of life, comfort and competence become the enemies of creativity. The Lord has a way of sending thorns to disturb our comfort; and if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that we still have a lot to learn no matter how competent we may think we are in our technical skills. Always be content with the Lord’s will, but never be satisfied with yourself. We need to take to heart the words of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich: “A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.”
In our ministry, you and I probably won’t say anything that hasn’t been said before, but let’s at least try to say it in a fresh way that will capture the imagination of our listeners. Originality in the product may be heresy; what we need is originality in the packaging and the delivery. Allow the Holy Spirit to use your imagination and you will be pleasantly surprised to find new principles in familiar truths and new applications for old ideas. That’s what the church is waiting for.
“Preaching is truth through personality.”
“The imagination can express truth in its own unique way for the glory of God and the edification of people.”
“We would do well to labor with [Jonathan] Edwards to find images and analogies that produce impressions in our people comparable to reality.”