Growing Edge - Christianity Today

Creativity and the Hairball

And why this metaphor sticks with you.

Why should a pastor read a book written by a “corporate holy man”? Well, the great metaphor in the book’s title, the quirky doodles, and beautiful graphic treatment are reason enough. Plus, this just might be the best book you’ll ever read on leading creative people and developing creative ministry: Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace (Viking, 1998).

Author Gordon MacKenzie spent 30 years as a writer and artist at Hallmark Cards. To an outsider, a greeting card company would seem to be an environment where creativity was encouraged. Not so, says MacKenzie. It was at Hallmark that he encountered his first “Hairball,” that tangled, sticky, impenetrable mass of rules, systems, and prescribed processes that sooner or later stifles creativity in corporate life, including churches.

The Hairball phenomenon is especially problematic when you consider that those who create are every organization’s best hope for a bright future.

The book’s title offers the secret to giving creative endeavors a chance, whether in an established business or an established church. “Orbiting is responsible creativity: vigorously exploring and operating beyond the Hairball of the corporate mindset, beyond ‘accepted models, patterns, or standards’—all the while remaining connected to the spirit of the corporate mission.

“To find Orbit around a corporate Hairball is to find a place of balance where you benefit from the physical, intellectual and philosophical resources of the organization without becoming entombed in the bureaucracy of the institution” (p. 32).

In other words, orbiting the ecclesiastical Hairball means allowing a new ministry or initiative or worship service or church plant the freedom to find a place where it is related to—but not controlled by—the bureaucracy below.

This is easier understood than implemented. The greater the mass of a planet, the greater its gravitational pull. The bigger, older, and more established a church, the harder it is to launch something away from status quo. The only people who can pull it off are mavericks and courageous rebels who can withstand the name calling, shaming, and nay-saying that will surely come their way. Most churches go out of their way not to recruit such types. No wonder so many pioneers fight the gravitational pull—and some break loose entirely—and are lost in space.

The solution: orbiting.

The other metaphor that has great implications for ministry is that of the Pyramid and the Plum Tree. It’s a great story told with a clever graphic presentation. The pyramid symbolizes traditional organizational structures. The leaders are at the top. The product creators and producers are crushed at the bottom. (Can you spell denomination?)

The plum tree grows out of the dust in a crack of the pyramid, and becomes the icon of a different structure—one in which leaders form the trunk of the tree, existing in order to funnel resources and support to the product creators and producers who live at the top of the tree near the sunshine and fresh air.

“A pyramid is a tomb while a tree is a living organism … plum trees are more bountiful than pyramids” says MacKenzie (p. 179).

Hmmm.

Jesus called some clerics “white-washed tombs” and talked about pruning those he loved so they would be more fruitful. Reckon the Hallmark guy’s on to something here?

I lead our church’s worship planning team—a whole cat herd of musicians, graphic artists, actors, dancers, sound and light technicians, and producers of imaginative video. Creative-types ‘R’ Us. We’re blessed to have more than our fair share, attracting more all the time. Why? Because we work to keep them in orbit above the congregational Hairball. This is invigorating and affirming to them.

And the Hairball (I use that term with all due love and respect) gets to feast on the vitality and imagination they breathe into congregational worship.

Is there any ministry out there that can’t benefit from a big shot of creativity? Here’s a way of thinking that allows you to get around that slippery, tangled mass that ministry can become, and find the freedom and the results you always dreamed of.

Because “only the Renegades in Orbit, removed from the Hairball’s obsession with quantifying everything, are free to reap the unpredictable bounty of the inscrutable creative process.” For us in ministry, that means seeing lives transformed by the pure gospel, unhindered by the Hairball of non-biblical traditions and ineffectual institutions.

Ed Rowell, teaching pastor The People’s Church Franklin, Tennessee erowell@thepeopleschurch.org

Dying for Leadership

Leith Anderson assesses another decade and what it takes to guide the church in the new century.

Leith Anderson is showing his age. The pastor who told us ten years ago that the church “is not your father’s Oldsmobile” has turned his gaze on a new era. This time he is less concerned with ministerial tailfins than applying classic principles of leadership to ministry.

Anderson has grayed, and so has the language he brought to the ecclesial arena in his seminal work, Dying for Change, in 1990. His new book, Leadership that Works: Help and Hope for Church and Parachurch Leaders in Today’s Complex World (Bethany House, 2000), would be an opportunity for Anderson to say “See, I was right. All that I predicted has come true.”

It has.

His earlier book pointed to the rising discourse over flashpoint social issues, diversity as a trend, and tolerance as a value. Anderson wrote of the increasing importance of images and individualism and the shift to a consumer orientation among church goers.

What was mist in Anderson’s crystal ball ten years ago is now commonplace and commonly accepted. Church boards are more likely to debate demographic-based ministry than doctrinal issues. Church members regularly talk about boomers and busters, which Anderson called at the time “a generation in the shadows.” And we have moved on in our search for descriptions of those who will come along after Generation-X.

But Anderson doesn’t crow. Instead, after a few chapters summarizing the times, he addresses the more transcendent principles of pastoral leadership that work in most any decade. If the church in the last decade was dying for change, then pastors today must be revived to lead it.

Leading the naughties

While demographers decide what to call the decade of the naughts (oh’s? zeros?), pastor-leaders deal with the oughts: how should I lead now? A recent conversation I had with a church staff member reveals the gap. My 30ish friend described his new pastor: “He’s sooo boomer.”

Anderson contends that what worked well for our predecessors won’t work now. (He said that in the first book, too.) Even our own successes can’t be repeated (a more pertinent warning for boomers pastoring busters or busters pastoring millennials). In one story he tells how his father had a great ministry in 1950s New Jersey but failed miserably in Florida in the 1980s using the same tactics.

That lesson is in part about changing times. Anderson devotes a chapter to it. His then and now statements in “Who changed the rules?” are an excellent summary of the evolution of congregational expectations in the 1990s.

More important is the timeless lesson. “The situational nature of leadership adds exponentially to the difficulty of the leadership task. No leader may ever assume that what works well in one place will work well in another. The truth is that if Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Jr. traded places in history, we probably would have never heard of either one of them. They were the right leaders in the right places at the right times” (p. 21).

Anderson exegetes the times, but ultimately he says that good leaders are those who can read the times and adapt to them. The basics of good leadership don’t change, only the way we apply them.

This isn’t Dying for Change. The insight into our era that was so fresh to a seminary student a decade ago is today a given. Because of that, Leadership that Works is a slow read at first. I was more propelled by the later chapters, full of stories from Anderson’s ministry at Wooddale Church in metro Minneapolis. In them he gives pastor-leaders the assurance that we’re not alone in the task or in our feelings about it.

And in the second half, we see Anderson’s shift from seer to sage. He advises in “Finish Well,” the closing chapter: remember tomorrow, invest in others, and don’t do anything stupid.

That works for me.

Eric Reed, LEADERSHIP associate editor

Top 100

Publisher ranks best “spiritual” books of the twentieth century.

C. S. Lewis made the list. So did Karl Barth, Richard Foster, and both Niebuhrs. You’ll also find Gandhi, Jung, two popes, and Jack Kerouac.

HarperCollins solicited nominations from scholars and editors and compiled the 100 best “religious and spiritual books” of the past century. Most religions are represented, and many works are Christian.

Here are the ten best, selected by the publisher, in alphabetical order:

Black Elk Speaks by Black Elk

Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I and Thou by Martin Buber

Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton

The Four Quartets by T. S. Elliot

The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki

The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The Story of a Soul by St. Therese of Lisieux

Waiting for God by Simone Weil