5 Essential Skills for Church Creatives…
that have nothing to do with musicianship, graphic design, communications, FOH engineering, et al.
Hey there creatives serving in a local church environment! We all probably found ourselves serving in the church because we are passionate about what we do. I know I did… As a kid, I loved making music; my parents put me in lessons, I joined bands (most of which were terrible and featured me and my brother do pseudo-screamo music — aka, melodic-core — about how ‘rough’ our amazing childhood was) and voice memo’d them on a tape recorder… For the Gen Z’s on the blog, a tape recorder is… never mind, forget about it, just google it on your iPhone 21…
All kidding aside… as we mature in our roles as more than just musicians, artists, cinematographers, _____ insert your unique title or role here (assistant to the regional communications director…), we learn that more than just the skills of our craft are essential to the way that we serve our local church communities.
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Quick aside — I do feel like the term ‘creatives’ needs to be defined in this instance. Let’s create a working definition that, even if you disagree with, will provide clarity moving forward in this post. We are ALL creative. As Christians, we believe that God is the Creator and that as we are made into the image of His Son, Jesus, we carry a creative element. I think there are people who use creativity in every area of their lives from accounting to stay-at-home parenting to physiotherapy and honour God with their gifts, talents and abilities. So why do we use the term ‘creatives’ to describe people who are musicians, artists, designers, etcetera? I think we’ve adapted this term from the medium in which many of those individuals express their thoughts, emotions and ultimately, their worship: “creative arts”. So we would define creative in a local church sense as someone who uses creative arts to bring their worship to the Lord and lead others in focusing their attention on Jesus. That title is ultimately diminishing in local church staffing environments but I can still remember being hired as a ‘Worship and Creative Arts Pastor’ which basically meant that your role is all encompassing anything in which the lead pastor deems an element of creative arts. The ambiguity of local church job titles is for another post… Ok, back to your regularly scheduled programming…
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I’ve used this adage before and, at the risk of it getting stale, I think it applies here as well.
“Your talents will get you in the door, your character will keep you there.”
The more time that I’ve spent serving in local churches and coaching creatives from every different denomination and flavour, the more I’ve come to realize that the fruit of a ministry is rarely contingent upon the talent of a creative. If we’re trouble shooting areas of a ministry that aren’t working or discovering friction that exists between a creative and their team or leadership, it’s probably going to be something in this list that doesn’t really exist. Rarely is that they suck at music… or graphic design… or audio engineering… because they wouldn’t have gotten the role in the first place if that was the case. More often, one of these essential skills — that actually have nothing to do with they do but are non-negotiable if they want to see impact and longevity in their ministry — is lacking.
Here are my five essential skills for church creatives.
Intimacy with the Lord.
Passionate art that connects an audience with a theme, emotion or truth in a transcendent way comes from a place of personal experience and authentic expression. For me, that’s why sitting in a Coldplay concert as the first three bars of ‘Fix You’ feels like a supernatural experience. Art communicates in ways that other mediums struggle to articulate. Nowhere is this more true that in the church.
“Consider the saying, ‘you can’t take people somewhere you haven’t been before.’ Creatives who are responsible for art that focuses people’s attention on Jesus must have their attention focused on… Jesus.”
Sometimes, creatives can find themselves stuck in a place of spending time with the Lord so that their performance or art doesn’t feel hollow, meaningless or superficial. I know I’ve wrestled that tension. Sunday is coming up so on Saturday I’m cramming in some time with God so that I can download a revelation and walk up on the stage and feel super spiritual. So note this, cultivating an intimate relationship with the Lord is a discipline. Much like in a marriage where, as the honeymoon period fades and real life resumes, staying intimate on every relational level with your spouse becomes a discipline. Sometimes I don’t feel like loving my spouse; it’s not rainbows and butterflies and let’s just explore each other… More commonly, I have to make the active choice to remove distractions and focus my attention on her. This discipline — of intentionally spending time with the Lord in prayer and meditating on Scripture — is not only essential for you as an individual but will shift your perspective and ultimately should fuel your creativity.
Knowledge of the Bible.
Theology — the study of knowing God — isn’t just for pastors who work in your church’s spiritual formation department. As people of influence in our local churches with mediums that commonly communicate in ways that are vivid and memorable, we must be students of the Word of God. We do more than read the Bible for a little truth nugget that we can throw into our team huddle or call to worship… We study the Scriptures. We commit to a life of learning that not only inspires but informs every project that we give ourselves to.
“In the pursuit of creating relevant, powerful and evocative art, creatives can sometimes be guilty of cutting theological corners.”
I think that we accept ambiguity in our art that can lead people to believing half-truths or intersecting their faith with secular culture, popular opinion or other religious beliefs in — what can be deadly — syncretism.
Speaking from my experience as a songwriter… The songs that I’ve written and that have been published have had to be laboured over lyrically. I have to invite other people in that I trust on a theological level to take a fine-tooth comb to my work. Am I concerned that I’m a heretic? No. I know the Word of God, I’ve studied it relatively extensively. Am I concerned that in an effort to employ literary elements that I could subconsciously lead people into a half-truth? Absolutely. That in trying to paint contrasting imagery I accidentally give in to a fallacy like dualism. I remember being a part of writing a song called ‘God Of Faithfulness’. In the second verse, the original lyric was…
‘In my failures, you love me as I am. You look past them, You’re the God of second chance.’
“You look past them” was where we got stuck. We took the lyric to our lead pastor to wrestle it. At the end of the day, we felt like while God doesn’t focus on our failures and mistakes, He also wants to process those within grace that is found in repentance and that that lyric didn’t fully represent the truth of the Scriptures. The final lyric ended up being…
‘In my failures, you love me as I am. You embrace me, You’re the God of second chance.’
We are responsible for putting words in putting mouths, images in people’s minds and art in people’s hands that they use to express their love for the Lord and their journey of faith and life. Making sure we get it right isn’t just important; it’s essential.
Organization.
I can still remember sitting in a workshop with Brian Johnson at Bethel’s WorshipU and him looking out at a room of over a thousand creatives from across the world and asking them ‘who here has great creative ideas for their local church?’ Hands across the room fly up. ‘Ooo, ooo, ooo, me — if my leadership would only listen I’ve got the best ideas!’ And he looks out and says, ‘well guess what… if you can’t make it on time to the meeting, nobody cares to hear your ideas.’ GOT ‘EM!
Keeping a schedule… Responding to emails… Being punctual… Are all things that creatives are infamously poor at. In the ‘real world’, these are just basic expectations of employees and leaders. For some reason, creatives have embraced ‘being different’ to a point of ‘being flaky’. I would actually rather work with someone who is half as creative as the most creative person but can actually show up, get a project done and make deadlines. Remember, no one cares about how inspired, prophetic of creative you are if you didn’t make it to the meeting in the first place.
Committing to accessing available tools and accepting accountability in areas of your life and work that disorganized is essential. Whether it’s a whiteboard and calendar on your iPhone OR a subscription based project management software — at least do something. You will notice that people will want to start collaborating with you and that your productivity increases.
What’s the number one complaint that I hear from creatives that serve in local church environments? ‘I can’t find a healthy work-life balance.’ Commonly, the more that we go digging to discover what the root cause of unhealthy workplace boundaries are, the more we realize that the creative’s dysfunctional and disorganized lifestyle and work environment is the main contributing factor. Being organized isn’t optional, it’s essential.
Pastoral Heart.
At the end of the day, everything that happens in the church comes back to people. As the individual has a revelation of the Lord, their life is transformed and begins to influence others within their context — their family, their workplace, their school… As creatives, it can become easy to self-insulate, only focusing on the projects in front of us or the people that we create with. People are messy and difficult… They take time and energy… You know who never hurt me? Ableton… Ableton never hurt me…
Without real relationships the art that we create can lack the power to connect with our audience. We don’t create art for arts sake; we create art to reach people with the message of Jesus.
It’s essential that we make the time to cultivate deep and rich relationships with people inside and outside of our immediate context. Join a small group instead of just posting on social media about how important they are; trust me, it’s actually a genuinely life-giving thing to be a part of. Leave the green room and go to the lobby in between services so you can meet people who aren’t also on your team. You’ll find that the friendship that you create with help to inform your creativity and keep it relevant to your context.
This is the one that I wrestle with the most… It’s so easy to just put your head down, get the job done and only invest in the people that will help make that a reality. And there are ways as creatives that we can convince ourselves that that is the right thing to do. But ultimately, if we don’t actually know the people in our congregations and communities, I think we can easily find ourselves lacking purpose in the week-to-week rigours of creating art for the local church. A great example of this is preparing for the Christmas season. So many church creatives hit their heads against a brick wall struggling to find inspiration for how to blow what they did last year out of the water — stage design, productions, social media campaigns. LET’s GOOOOOOOO! But if you sit down and talk to the people that call your church home guess what they usually say they love about the Christmas season at church? Christmas trees… Christmas carols… Being reminded of the beauty of the Christmas story… Serve your church, not your portfolio.
Coaching lens.
The responsibility of serving the local church is rarely burdened on the shoulders of only paid individuals and creatives. Commonly, as someone in a leadership role, you are working alongside of volunteers who need to be motivated, trained, released, mentored and encouraged. Refusing to empower other people around you leads to a very lonely and exhausting existence as the weight of ministry wears on you.
Creatives need to be actively looking for and coaching people around them who show promise of affectively working you out of a job. Your goal is not to be the one that does everything, but to be the one that empowers and cheers on others as they use their gifts to create art and environments that lead people towards Jesus.
One of the best FOH engineers I’ve ever worked with started serving as a grip at a set-up-tear-down campus at the age of 12. It took him years to become the engineer that he is today but it all started with someone seeing an aptitude in him for production and pouring into that. Be the creative that is in someone’s testimony of how they got started and not where their ceiling was.
