The Well-Fed Imagination

Original thinking is seldom original.
—Robert J. Morgan

For a long time, I didn’t consider myself creative. The very term intimidated me. I’m a traditional guy at heart, a little staid and stuffy. I don’t bungee-jump or tie-dye. I prefer Bach to rock, and G. F. Handel to M. C. Hammer. I enjoy the doxology on the Lord’s Day, and we still have Sunday night services.

But I wasn’t always that way.

As a child, my imagination resembled a kitten in a room of windup toys. I chased every idea, scratched every itch, and pounced on every adventure. My secondhand bicycle became alternately a helicopter and a powerboat. I unraveled mysteries and swept starlets off their feet. I composed poems and plays.

When I lurched into adolescence, my imagination followed like a shadow. It questioned boring traditions, dreaming of better ways and better days. It wondered why no one had ever done a thousand doable things. I was an impressionable teen when Bobby Kennedy campaigned for the presidency with his passionate claim, “Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?'”

Why, then, twenty years later, didn’t I consider myself an innovator? What had happened between adolescence and adulthood to silence my imagination? I Think I Can’t, I Think I Can’t.

Lack of self-confidence is the biggest barrier to creativity, according to the Center for Studies in Creativity at the State University of New York. We become set in our ways, afraid to change, too old to dream—or so we think.

“The way we talk about creativity tends to reinforce the notion that it is some kind of arbitrary gift,” echoes John Briggs, author of Fire in the Crucible: The Alchemy of Creative Genius. “It’s amazing the way ‘not having it’ becomes wedded to people’s self-image. They invariably work up a whole series of rationalizations about why they aren’t creative, as if they were damaged goods of some kind.” That was me.

But I realized something else: the acceleration of change in our society makes creativity increasingly important. The ancient message requires up-to-date ways and means to stay relevant with contemporary culture.

“Customers came to us and said if we didn’t change, they’d go somewhere else,” says David Luther, corporate director of quality at Corning.

That’s why in the business world nearly one company in three offers creativity training for its employees. That’s why dozens of books, tapes, games, and software packages focus on creativity exercises and processes. That’s why increasing numbers of universities offer degrees in creativity training. That’s why many experts call creativity “the survival skill of the nineties.”

I still appreciate the benefits of the traditional, but I don’t want to be confined by its liabilities. I want to be “like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old” (Matt. 13:52). God sowed the seeds of creativity in the furrows of the left side of my brain, and I realize now is the time to cultivate for the harvest.

So I made an irrevocable decision: to once again think of myself as an imagineer. I would guide my staff and church to “dream things that never were, and say ‘Why not?'” I’ve learned to do that by keeping five steps in mind. I call them my M&Ms, and I use them to feed my imagination.

Milk

“I milk a lot of cows, but I churn my own butter,” said one preacher. Original thinking is seldom original; it just looks that way. I begin by milking all the ideas I can from others. I read, study, interview, inspect, dissect, and observe. I take classes and endure seminars. I subscribe and ascribe, describe and transcribe, gathering premium ideas wherever possible, for only God can make something from nothing.

Take existing ideas and play with them, turning them upside down and inside out. Challenge them, change them, and channel them in unlikely directions. Churn milk into butter, then press it into different molds.

I worried for a long time about providing adequate pastoral care for my congregation. When I originally came to the Donelson Fellowship, the membership was small enough for me to shepherd. But as the church grew, my availability shrunk. Staff additions didn’t help much because their responsibilities weren’t always in pastoral areas. Finally I read of a program called the “Family Flock” developed by another denomination. I decided to import it into our church. We divided the congregation into ten groups and with some fanfare assigned our deacons over the groups.

The fanfare didn’t last long. Some of the deacons, despite their good intentions, lacked pastoral skills, and others had logistical problems finding their fold. Our family flock ministry sputtered along for a while, then fizzled. I learned the hard way you can’t take an idea and slap it up like a piece of wallpaper.

You have to take a lot of them and mix them together like custom-colored paint. We started reading everything we could find about lay-pastoral programs. We attended “Equipping the Laity for Ministry”-type seminars. We visited churches, telephoned pastors, reviewed notebooks, and conducted surveys. We blended colors, used others as enamel highlights, and ended up with our own uniquely designed program. We commissioned our own lay pastors, who are now doing an admirable job.

“An idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements,” wrote James Webb Young in his classic treatise on creativity, A Technique for Producing Ideas. Young contends that gathering the data is what most people neglect.

Instead of working systematically at the job of gathering raw material we sit around hoping for inspiration to strike us. Every really good creative person in advertising whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk.

Meet

Once you’ve milked all the available cows, the next step is to gather the butter-makers into one room for brainstorming, a time when we gather around the table with our pails of milk and start splashing each other. We suspend criticism and toss around ideas capriciously.

“To have a good idea,” said Edison, “have lots of ideas.”

Brainstorming provides them. A great time for this is the beginning of our staff meetings before we’ve exhausted our mental energies on calendars and budgets.

Just today, for example, we took ten minutes at the beginning of our weekly staff meeting to discuss a problem in the previous Sunday night worship service. We had placed a call to a missionary in France, but it didn’t channel through our sanctuary audio system.

“What can we do about it?” I asked.

“Well, we could buy the equipment to do it right,” one staff member suggested. “It would sound like the call-in shows on the radio or like the ‘Phil Donahue Show.'”

“How much would that cost?”

“Six hundred to a thousand dollars.”

“That’s an awful lot of money for an occasional phone call to France.”

“Well, there are other things we could do with that technology.”

“Like what?”

“We could call our missionaries during our annual missions conference and let them preach to us via the phone lines.”

“We could have them join us for special prayer times.”

“They could bring us news flashes live from the field.”

“Is there anything nonmissionary we could do with it?”

“We could call our aged, sick, and shut-ins.”

“What about calling people who are absent and ask them why!” (Laughter)

“We could call disaster areas for live updates from Christian organizations on the scene.”

“And we could call noted authors and well-known Christians. Suppose we devoted a service to the disabled. We could call Joni Eareckson Tada. We may never be able to have her at our church in person, but perhaps we could arrange for her to share with us for five minutes during a service. We could project her picture on our screen while she’s speaking to us.”

“This would appeal to the unchurched visiting our services because they’re used to seeing that on television.”

“We could involve noted authorities on our panel discussions, and with a wireless mike we could go into the audience for questions.”

“Like Oprah.”

In only ten minutes, we had generated a set of possibilities and generated enough excitement to carry us through the remaining fifty minutes of our meeting with enthusiasm.

Mist

But there’s a problem.

The brainstorming process usually ends in the fabulous frustration of too many ideas. We become too involved to be rational, too hot for cold calculation, too close for objective thinking. A thick mental mist descends.

Solo creative efforts such as sermon preparation also involve this stage of perplexity. After we’ve exegeted the text, read the commentaries, and gathered the data, the question arises: Now what? What do I do with all this stuff? What direction do I take? What application do I make? What outline do I follow? It’s like fighting through a corridor thick with cobwebs.

Earlier this year when our minister of worship resigned, we appointed a large committee to search out a replacement. We collected resumes and ideas from many sources, and we refashioned the job description and salary package. We developed options and brainstormed potentials. But the committee couldn’t agree on anyone, not even on the profile we wanted to follow; we had too many options. I began dreading the meetings—not because of discord but because of the confusion of too many ideas coming from too many people.

But as a reborn imagineer, I eventually recognized it as a good sign. It meant we were right in the middle of the creative process, on our way to the fourth phase.

Mull

For the creative, leisure is no luxury. We need time and solitude. Imagineers walk frequently around Walden Pond. They are children of Isaac who “went out to the field one evening to meditate.” That’s why creative people often appear absentminded.

I periodically go for a couple of days to a state park an hour’s drive from my house with cabins that rent cheap. I think of it as Camp David—my version of the president’s weekend stomping grounds. I retreat there to ponder and pray. Our church staff withdraws there annually for the same purpose. Ideas must incubate awhile before they’re hatched. They must wander through the chambers of the mind before they’re ready for debut. That often happens as I wander through the forests of the Cumberland Mountains.

Failing that, a hammock in the backyard will do. Or a jog around the block. Or a bit of pacing in the family room.

As I hike, sway, jog, or pace, I ask a lot of questions. I visualize. I throw words into the air and see how they land. I squeeze ideas like oranges to see if they render any juice.

In a word, I mull.

The words mull, mill, and meal all come from an Old English root meaning the pulverizing of corn in a grinder. To mull over a subject is to ponder it, to pulverize it in the millstones of the mind.

Mulling is critical for creative problem solving. Last year, my wife and I took an alcohol and cocaine abuser into our home. He became like a member of the family.

Then he relapsed, and for months he flirted with death. I was so distraught over his condition that I couldn’t pastor effectively. My wife and I wept for him as though he were our son.

As I mulled over my discouragement in the light of Scripture, I slowly realized that our relationship, which had begun with my friend being dependent on me, had ended with my being dependent on him. My ability to function depended on his ability to stay straight. I had lost my emotional and spiritual well-being.

When I realized what had happened to me, I changed my attitudes. Pondering my problem in the Lord’s presence helped me to straighten out my emotions creatively and victoriously.

Two other elements help me mull:

Prayer. For the Christian imagineer, pondering involves praying. My best ideas come when I’m on my knees.

Someone asked Catherine Marshall, “What advice would you give someone seeking to be more creative?”

“That’s easy,” she replied. “I would tell them to stay intimately attuned to God.”

The reason is obvious. He was and is the Creator. And since we are made in his image, I assume that one component of Christlikeness is creativity, or at least a sanctified imagination.

I experienced the relationship between prayer and creative problem solving when our church needed someone to develop a ministry to adults, but we lacked money for staff expansion. I felt pessimistic about our options, and I was out of ideas.

When the man I wanted to hire received a tempting offer from an advertising agency, I knew we needed to act. We knelt in prayer and specifically asked God, if he pleased, to show us how to fund the position.

A few ideas came to us, and we discussed these ideas with others. A few days later, a businessman, hearing about our desires, offered to underwrite a third of the funding. We restudied our budgets and developed a set of creative proposals. Within two months, the Lord had provided our minister of adults.

Seeding the subconscious. My junior year in college, a nearby church asked me to preach. Having recently dissected the first chapter of Jeremiah, I decided to base my message on the weeping prophet’s call to ministry.

I began work on my sermon, but I found that I couldn’t formulate an outline. I thought about my text day and night, but I had preacher’s block. The mist had descended.

One day I took an hour’s stroll through the woods around the dormitory. As I rambled, an outline shot into my mind like the sudden blast of a hunter’s rifle. It was perfect. It had come from the Lord via my subconscious.

A few years later, I was stumped by another text. I pondered it day and night, but its truths resisted me. I traveled to a denominational meeting, and that night in the motel I dreamed I was preaching from that text. I awoke, jotted down the outline, and preached it the next Sunday.

I’ve read of the same thing happening to others. In October of 1920, Dr. Frederick Banting was working on his lecture for the following day. His medical practice was too new to be lucrative, so he supplemented his income by teaching. He worked far into the night on the problem of diabetes, but medical science provided scant data on the dreaded disease, and no cure had yet been discovered.

He fell asleep. At two in the morning, he awoke with a start. Grabbing a notebook, he penned three short sentences; then he collapsed again in sleep. But those three sentences later led to the discovery of insulin.

A century earlier, Elias Howe’s fertile mind had imagined the sewing machine. He worked and worked on his invention, but its stitches were jagged and uneven. One night, he dreamed that a tribe of savages had kidnapped him. They threatened to kill him if he didn’t invent a sewing machine in twenty-four hours. He failed, but as the spears flew at him, he noticed they had holes near their tips. He awoke with an idea: put the eye of the needle near the tip.

He patented his sewing machine in 1846.

“I am supposed to be one of the more fertile inventors of big ideas,” said advertiser David Ogilvy, author of Confessions of an Advertising Man. “But big ideas come from the unconscious mind. This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. Stuff your conscious mind with information; then unhook your rational thought process. You can help this process by going for a long walk, taking a hot bath, or drinking a glass of claret. Suddenly, if the telephone lines from your unconscious are open, a big idea swells up within you.”

“You remember how Sherlock Holmes used to stop right in the middle of a case and drag Watson off to a concert?” asks James Webb Young. “That was a very irritating procedure to the practical and literal-minded Watson. But Conan Doyle was a creator and knew the creative processes.”

That’s why I almost always stall for time when I’m confronted with a problem, a need, or an aspiration. Sometimes we want to milk another’s ideas and jump immediately to implementation. That’s almost always a mistake. Sometimes we want to make snap judgments on big issues. That’s seldom wise. Instant ideas are usually more futile then fertile, for “a prudent man gives thoughts to his steps” (Prov. 14:15).

Map

After I’ve worked through the above steps, I usually get my hands on an idea or vision ready to be mapped out in action steps. Perhaps it’s a sermon to be preached, a program to be implemented, a technique to try, or an innovation to launch. I have to take my big idea and do the hard work of working out the details of implementation.

Thousands of good ideas have never seen the light of day because the persons who conceived them didn’t have the ability to take what’s in their heads and execute a plan. Like Joseph, the expert in dreams who also masterminded the administration of the huge Egyptian food plan, I have to be both a dreamer and a doer, an imagineer and an engineer.

I know there’s a price to be paid for creativity. There will be changes and risks. As time goes by, implementing my ideas will require large doses of evaluation and correction. Many will be tried and discarded. But that’s all right. I’m ready. The imagineer has returned.