Most people think once or twice in a lifetime. I’ve made a reputation of thinking once or twice a month.
H. G. Wells
“Every time I turn around, it’s Sunday!”
You know the feeling. Wasn’t it just yesterday you last preached? And now another sermon stares you in the face. Time again to be wise, profound, and creative. Especially creative.
How do you do it? Telling people to be creative is about like asking them to stand on a stage and act natural. We don’t simply turn on creativity. We can’t buy it or borrow it.
Yet we still desire creativity, for without it the sermon barrel empties and the minds in the pews switch to pause. Without a fresh and interesting approach to each sermon, we preach not to convince; we preach to concrete.
Fred Smith has learned that creativity can be cultivated. Smith is a career businessman in Dallas, Texas, with a lifelong love affair with the church. His own creativity rests not in paintbrush or guitar but in his ability to see things with clarity and cast new light on hackneyed practices.
In this chapter, he ventures some thoughts about developing that much-desired attribute — creativity.
The word creative has become a cliché. Everybody uses it whether he can define it or not. Creativity is expected of ministers no less than of advertising copywriters and fashion designers. If you’re not certified “creative,” your future is in big trouble.
The blunt fact, of course, is that no one is creative. We live in a closed universe; there is nothing new under the sun. What we are instead is inventive; we rearrange and reposition things that have already been created.
Throughout this chapter I will use the words creative and creativity even though what I am talking about is inventiveness. This will seem more natural to our speech patterns. And I hope the Creator will not be offended.
Creativity has to do with more than just the arts — painting, sculpture, music, architecture. In my view, creativity is survival. When an institution loses its transitional quality in a moving market, a moving culture, a moving world, it doesn’t survive. The railroad industry wanted to stay as railroad companies rather than transportation companies. The transition was toward airplanes and private automobiles, but they liked railroading. Many went out of business.
In the parachurch we have some excellent examples of using creative solutions to satisfy spiritual needs: Torrey Johnson saw wandering crowds of World War II soldiers looking for something to do on the streets of Chicago, so he created Youth for Christ. When secularism swept the West Coast campuses in the sixties, Campus Crusade for Christ was the creative answer. Bill Glass, All-Pro football player, found prisoners wouldn’t come to hear preaching, so he started sports clinics for them.
I’ve been depressed recently by a statistic from a major denomination: the average tenure of its pastors is now eighteen months. When I asked why, the answer was “Because that’s about how many sermons they have.” By the end of eighteen months, they’ve preached to the bottom of the barrel, and the only choice is to move.
Apparently no springs of creativity have been nurtured so that new (or at least repositioned) things are bubbling up from inside. That’s why I say that for people in leadership, creativity is not a luxury; it’s survival.
Eight Essential Qualities
Those who may rightly be called creative show the following characteristics:
1. Wide association. While most new ideas are conceived by a single person sitting alone, such a moment does not tell the whole story. The truly creative people I know stay in touch with other creative people. Bright ideas may hit them at three in the morning, but they come out of an environment of creativity.
You have to set up an almost constant discipline to maintain your vitality through association. Creative people ask you the right kind of questions. They probe you. So you stay in touch with them.
2. Special areas. Ralph Carmichael, the trend-setting Christian musician, and I were talking about marketing one day, and he said, “Fred, if you want to talk fast to me, talk music. I can talk music fast, but I have to talk business slow.” I know exactly what he meant, because it’s the opposite with me! In the area of a person’s gift, he can race along. His pores are open. He knows all the nuances and ramifications; problems in this area excite him.
When I find individuals trying to function in an area that threatens them, I usually say, “This must not be your area.” People who battle stage fright shouldn’t be public speakers. All good speakers have nervousness, yes, but they are able to use it. It creates energy; it revs up the mind. Christian leaders who are immobilized by the big problems of their lives should question whether they’re working in their area of strength.
John R. W. Stott says expository preaching is chewing on a verse like a dog on a bone. I’d advise most ministers not to spend their time in that way because they’re not John Stott or G. Campbell Morgan. If you’re not creative in finding new meanings in the nooks and corners of Scripture, then put your energy into another area. I’d hate to see a tremendous communicator like Chuck Swindoll spend time gnawing on individual verses. He’s far more creative at mixing words and pictures to convey old truth in a new and vital way.
3. Dissatisfaction. Some people call it noble discontent. Whatever its name, creative people are infested with the idea that the way things are being done today is not the way they can be done best.
Roger Bannister didn’t believe a mile run had to take four minutes. Something inside told him that if he’d break down the mile into four separate parts and go to work on each quarter of the mile, he could cut off seconds. Now, of course, four minutes is old and slow.
That spirit of discontent is crucial to creativity. I’m trying to instill it in my grandson, who plays golf with me occasionally. He loves the game, and when he gets off a good drive down the fairway, he’ll say, “Perfect.”
“No, Greg,” I’ll say. “It’s good, but it’s not perfect.”
“Well, it went where I wanted it to go.”
“Yes, but it didn’t go where it could have gone.”
We don’t have to be negative or critical to be dissatisfied. Van Gogh was both creative and miserable — that’s not what I mean. We can believe in a positive way that everything can be better. Every organization can be improved, every formula perfected.
Once I asked chemist George Schweitzer, “Why do scientists revere Einstein?”
“Because he put more formula into one formula than any other scientist.”
“Well, what’s the aim of all science?” I asked.
“To put everything into one formula.”
What a challenge! No wonder great scientists are dissatisfied.
Great preachers and theologians are dissatisfied, too, not because they want to be authors of truth, but because they want to expand it, to understand it more fully, to rearrange it so people can utilize it better.
One minister asked me, “How do I develop creativity?”
I replied, “Pick out a few of your common problems and think of all the various ways to solve them. You’ll have to think very hard, but do it anyway.” When Robert McNamara was president of Ford, he would assign his associates problems to work out, and when they would come in to report, McNamara would say, “Now I’m sure this isn’t the first solution you thought of. What was another one?” It was his way of forcing everyone to think of at least two ways to solve every problem.
Creative people love to have options. They love to drive home a different route each day. They refuse to drop down on the floor like a toddler and start crying, “I can’t.” They know there are multiple ways to do almost everything.
If you don’t give yourself a lot of options to consider, how do you know which one’s best? One of the reasons I’m convinced of original sin is that I rarely see anyone accomplish the best the first time. If there weren’t some basic problem with humanity, writers wouldn’t have to rewrite their material five times, engineers wouldn’t have to return to the drawing board, and preachers wouldn’t have to rebuild sermon outlines from scratch. It takes awhile, but eventually quality floats to the top if we are dissatisfied long enough.
4. Awe. An expanding concept of God and his world is another part of creativity. While dissatisfaction moves us toward change, awe moves us toward exploration. The great astronomers can hardly change what they see in space, but they are moved by awe to explore it, nevertheless.
I’ll never forget traveling as a young man from my native Tennessee up to New York City. Standing on the corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue one day, I suddenly realized the situation was beyond me. There was simply no way to know all those people, as I did back home. I was overwhelmed. The God I had brought along was too small. He had to be bigger than I thought to take in a place like New York.
From that time, I have had an expanding concept of God. This has not intimidated me; rather, it has pulled me along to grow creatively as I see more and more of him.
5. High physical and mental energy. A lot of people have wonderful ideas but lack the energy to explore them. Einstein once said nature holds almost no secrets that cannot be found out by prolonged concentration and intense study. We only have to bear down.
Some creative people bear down so hard that they burn out early in life. Some of the great musicians died very young, for example, as did some inventors. Others have lived longer but found they couldn’t burn the midnight oil like they used to. All of them were — to be honest — unbalanced. They couldn’t help it when they became fascinated with an idea.
One of the most fortunate things in life is when a highly creative spirit comes in a highly energetic body. Let others criticize if they will; great things will result.
And when they do, the creative person will supply his or her own strokes. Some of the most creative solutions I have found in my business were things only I knew about. The acclaim of others was not necessary; I knew I had solved a problem.
6. The ability to think in principles. Less than 10 percent of the population can do this, I’m told; most think only in techniques. And I don’t really know how to develop this ability. I only know I can recognize it by listening to a person.
If a speaker thinks in principles, he shows it by his breadth of illustration. He draws from many different fields, not just his particular specialty, because he sees the principles that weave throughout. If a speaker always tells stories from one field, or if his illustrations do not extrapolate accurately, then we know he does not understand the principle.
Mathematicians talk about the elegant answer and the grotesque answer. I mentioned to one mathematician that I had never liked math in school. “I can understand that,” he said, “because they taught you the grotesqueness of arithmetic instead of the elegance of mathematics.” Great mathematicians work through the welter of technique until they come to a marvelous principle; pi, for example, or the discovery of the zero, which happened in India and revolutionized our ability to work with numbers.
This, incidentally, is why many great mathematicians are musicians. They have moved past drudgery and grotesqueness to elegance.
At a university conference on business, I was scheduled to speak after the dean of engineering. He opened his speech by saying, “I am a scientist. I deal only with hard facts — things you can see and feel.”
When it was my turn, I said, “I don’t mean to be discourteous, but most of life is made up of soft facts. I respect hard facts, but when I take the long view, I notice that the rocks and the riverbank do not control the water that flows in the stream; the water forms the rocks and the bank.
“All matters of the spirit are soft, but they ultimately control. Armies, formulas, and scientific technology do not guarantee that a civilization will survive. That is up to other factors. The soft is just as factual as the hard, but more difficult to deal with.”
In the ministry, we are constantly dealing with the power of soft facts. When we see that as a principle, then we can start to think creatively about it.
7. A style that is uninhibited (but not undisciplined). Creative people cannot let themselves be hemmed in by tradition.
A member of the Tarrytown Group said recently, “The world is between trapezes. We’re leaving the one we have known and trying to catch one we do not know.” I like that metaphor. We often feel that way about our own lives. Maybe life is a series of trapeze jumps; maybe each day is a new trapeze. Certainly the creative person is always leaving one trapeze and hurtling toward the next.
We Christians limit ourselves too much. To me, the Bible has always been a compass. I am not afraid to wander in anybody’s woods so long as I have a compass.
I have friends who are unbelievers, and some of them never do get out of the woods. Others get out only by chance. But with a compass, you can relax; you can wander far off the paths, because any time you need to get out, you can. You can feel competent to wander in almost any company, any group, any set of ideas, because you have Scripture to guide you out at the necessary moment.
Too many Christians are worried about the wagon instead of the load. If any idea comes in a wagon they don’t like, they reject the load without even looking it over. I don’t care whether creativity comes from an atheist, an agnostic, a liberal, or whomever — if the idea is good, I want it, and I’m not going to fuss about the mode of transportation.
Being uninhibited, however, does not mean being out of control. A vice-president of General Motors once told me, “We want people with disciplined imaginations.” A leader, though tremendously creative, cannot be loose in his behavior.
Pastors are sometimes caught in a unique squeeze when their attempts to be free in ministry are read by the congregation in behavioral terms only. Take Sunday morning, for example. Many Christians have gotten to the place that the eleven o’clock service is nothing more than a ritual. There’s no spiritual vitality; there is only habit. This problem has to be solved very, very slowly.
A dear friend of mine, pastor of a large church, a man of great integrity, came to the pulpit one Sunday morning and said, “You look to me for God’s message. I have struggled all week, and God has given me no message. Therefore, let us stand and be dismissed.”
If I had been there, I would have stood and applauded.
But he almost got thrown out of his church. Although he had done the honest thing, people were outraged. Some had brought friends that day — not to hear a message from God, but to hear their preacher. And he didn’t perform.
He did invite them all back to the evening service, for which he felt he had a message. He delivered it that night as expected.
While such a shock may be dangerous, it is imperative that we work gradually but steadily toward making Sunday morning more than ritual. As a guest speaker, I can tell a dramatic difference in audiences. Some have been trained to listen — really listen — and others have not.
The other day I was invited to do a laymen’s service in a church that usually has mediocre preaching. (The reason I know is that the pastor told me he dreads no day like Sunday.) As I spoke that day, I was half through before they started listening. What a contrast with a church like Key Biscayne Presbyterian in Florida, where they hang on every cough. The people are so used to listening intently that a guest is fascinated by the immediate attention his words receive. This kind of discipline takes time.
But it can be built. Most big problems are not solved fast.
A young pastor here in Dallas has decided to open the floor for ten minutes of questions following his sermon each week. It’s most stimulating; he gets some hard queries now, because people have come to believe he wants them. He isn’t opening up the service to be complimented, but to clarify. The problem he is attacking is people going home misunderstanding what the preacher said.
That’s creative.
Sunday morning problems must be attacked creatively and diplomatically, but always with an eye toward the ultimate goal of vitality. Our thinking must be uninhibited, even when our behavior is not.
Evaluation. I know brainstorming is supposed to be a marvelous technique for creativity, but I think it is a silly fad. To sit around spouting ideas with no evaluation makes fools of everyone. Disciplined creativity must ask the following questions:
•”Is this practical?” Does this solution make enough difference to be worth the time and energy it will cost?
Will Rogers once listened to an admiral describe the menace of German U-boats during the First World War. Eventually, Rogers raised his hand and asked, “Tell me, can those things operate in boiling water?”
“No,” the admiral replied, “I’m sure they can’t.”
“Well, then,” said Rogers, “you’ve got your solution. Just boil the ocean.”
The admiral gave him a blank stare and then muttered, “How?”
Rogers smiled, “I gave you the idea — you work out the details.”
• The second question is “Does this violate scriptural principles?” I make a subtle difference between fulfilling the Bible’s principles and not violating them. I probably will never understand the Scripture fully enough to meet all that it teaches, but in my motives I can at least keep from being dishonest.
• “Is this factual?” Does it coincide with truth, the way the world really is? Christians can live in fantasy land as easily as non-Christians. The love of truth is more of a scholarly trait than a religious trait, and we must all cultivate an absolute dedication to facts.
These are just three of the checkpoints creative people must employ. Most of us are fortunate to have one good idea out of ten, and so we must screen out the nine. We must be willing to submit them to the judgment of other people, who will help us.
I was bouncing a new thought off a lawyer friend one day, and I’ll always remember the way he smiled and said, “Fred … that’s not one of your better ideas.” He did me a great service. I’ve used his line ever since with others who have brought their creative ideas to me for assessment.
Pastors and boards must do this work together. When a pastor or a deacon says, “I know I’m right. Sometimes you have to stand with God though everyone else stands against you,” he is flirting with arrogance. Theoretically he may be correct, but in most cases he needs to listen to the evaluation of colleagues.
Does God Inhibit Creativity?
If you were to conduct a street interview on whether Christians or non-Christians are more creative, I have a hunch the majority would vote for the non-Christians. That is partly because they think uninhibited behavior is a sign of creativity, when actually it is a sign of rebellion.
Christians are constrained in their behavior, but that does not need to transfer to their thinking. If anything, Scripture equips us to think as widely as possible and still be secure.
I’m always amused after I make a bold statement, that people will comment, “Well, I wouldn’t say what you just said.”
I smile and say, “God doesn’t know your thoughts, does he?”
They’re acting as if God knows only what he hears — in English. They’re afraid to verbalize their thoughts for fear God won’t like it.
God knows our thoughts, good and bad, creative and trite, spoken and silent. He is entirely in favor of our thinking freely about his world and our particular place in it. These flights of imagination are not frivolous. They are essential to survive.
Copyright ©1986 Christianity Today
