Your Kingdom Come in Our Creativity
We were talking through the Lord's Prayer this past Sunday night, and I shared some thoughts about how homogenization and commodification steal away creativity which is, I think, a central feature of our identity and life as beings created in the image of God. Okay, now that's going to need some 'splaining.
God creates. God creates human beings. God creates human beings in his image. Now, people have argued about what that phrase, 'in his image' means for years, but part of what that communicates is that in some ways God has made us like him. We bear the marks of personality, capacity for personal relationship marked by love, and creativity. Creativity is the ability to bring into being something which is an expression of yourself. Whether it is an expression of your interpretation of life through art, or an expression of your applied learning through invention or engineering, creativity is about unique expression of the self.
Creativity involves breathing life into something. God spoke the universe into life and life into the universe. God spoke and created plants and animals and fungi and all kinds of living things. God breathed life into human beings. The universe itself is one unique expression of God's being.
Again, creativity is about unique expression and it brings life.
Now, let's look at what is happening in USAmerican culture. We have a giant movement of homogenization--making everything the same. Even the variations have this kind of homogenaic imperialism about them. "Do you want to be a rebel? We have you're wardrobe ready at Hot Topics!" "Do you want to be a sexy teenager? We have your prepackaged life...I mean, look...at A&F." "Do you want the good life at a great price? We've got your Kenmore appliances at Sears."
I think there are many people who sense what all that Mall of America culture is doing--it is stealing life. It is robbing people of any need for creative self-expression. Everything is already color coordinated and pre-packaged. Not only do you not have to make your own clothes (something that even my mom did when she was a teenager), you don't even need to go to the people who make the clothes (in fact, you couldn't if you wanted to!). You have mega-companies doing all the deciding for you. They even tell you what to wear (think of GAP commercials).
No more thinking. No more creating. No more self-expression. Only consuming and advertising for more consumption. Humanity is suffocating itself here in USAmerica.
Now think about art. When art is commodified, mass produced, and mass-distributed, it loses value. There is something about millions of people buying Thomas Kinkade prints that robs them of value. What was art is now wallpaper. Creativity is suffocated by cheap, readily available, mass-produced images. Not only do I not know what that painting or photograph at Target is about, I really don't care as long as it matches my sofa.
This attitude is nowhere more diabolically present than in what we USAmericans call a "worship service." To pick on music alone would be unfair, but let's look at it a minute. How many truly creative, unique, self-expressions of worship in song are shared in believing communities on any given Sunday (or any other day for that matter)? I would guess that the percentage is shockingly low. How many communities have songs that tell of their unique interaction with God and his faithfulness to them? I guess that it is very few. In fact, the good, creative stuff usually ends up in the playlist of thousands of other communities who have abdicated their creative self-expression for the convenient creativity of others. Vamping off of someone else's experience with God is what many communities end up doing. What was art is now wallpaper. (Maybe we'll have a book called "Wallpaper Worship.")
Now, I don't doubt that people can be encouraged and helped by the stories and songs of other communities, but when we completely abdicate our own songs and stories, something is robbing life from us: death is creeping in.
So then, take the next step and think of creative self-expression of worship in things other than songs. The reality that for many people worship is (only) singing betrays the fact that we have lost creativity. Some people told us that worship is singing. Others went further and told us that it was singing in a certain style, etc.
I hope you can see what I'm getting at here. Breathing life into a community happens not when we take on someone else's format, music, teaching style, etc., but when we honor the latent creativity (in whatever forms it takes) in the people who are already there. I think when that happens, God's revolution has come to that people: God's Life floods into that community in refreshing and unexpected ways.
Emerging communities need to be careful that they are not vamping the experience of other communities. Yes, we can learn from others. Yes, we can share and benefit from the creativity of others. But let's not do it without expressing the unique creativity
that flows from our own experience with the Creator and his creation. Let's respect our own unique vocation as creative kingdom agents and help each other to discover and embody our particular expression of our calling.
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