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Cultivating Creativity
The inexact but essential art of bringing freshness to ministry.
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We pulled out flip charts and laptops and began to write down ideas, beginning with what to call the series. (I believe that titles are too often overlooked, but they are your first chance to capture and hold someone's attention, and should not be ignored.) We soon came up with "The Ulti-Mate," God's ultimate mate for your life. From there we started sharing dating stories and listing biblical principles. By the end of the meeting, we had a solid concept and basic outline for an entire sermon series. In a later meeting, our creative team, those responsible for the music and visual arts helped me frame the ideas into three messages. For the first message, I wanted to talk about how people's fallacies about dating are like nursery rhymes. For example, "Hickory, dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock" illustrated how the incessant ticking of the biological clock causes both men and women to rush into a serious relationship before they're ready for the commitment of marriage. I was going to recite the rhymes myself at various points in the message, but one of the team suggested having children do it. That creative idea took a lot more work—finding children able and willing to get on stage at all three services, practicing, and coordinating how the rhymes would flow in concert with the message. Aside from the audience "aahing" over the cute kids, having children recite the rhymes created a unique memory for listeners. The visual and emotional effect created an important connection between listener and message. For the second weekend, we planned to discuss defective dating. The idea came up of comparing premarital sex to taking a car off-road. We have a pretty big stage at Fellowship Church, and I wanted to drive a car across it to illustrate the point. Our team's response was, "Ed, driving a car on stage is a pretty tall order for just one point. Can you use it for the whole message?" I went back to Starbucks, where I do much of my studying, and came up with several bad habits of ineffective daters. Each habit linked to a different part of the car: looking in the trunk illustrated finding the emotional baggage of the person you're dating, looking behind the wheel symbolized finding out who's driving (Jesus, or someone else?), taking the car off-road was a word picture of misusing God's gift of sexuality. Of course, we had to find a car. We wanted something luxurious and expensive to show that God has the ultimate spouse in mind for each person. A man who has been investigating Christianity and attending our my small group for a while owns a car dealership, so we called him up to see what he could do. The next day he brought a new Mercedes 500 SL to the church. He said he was thrilled to help. |             | |||||||||||||||||||
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