Tim Clark’s Blog

You are about to cross over and take possession of that good land. Be careful not to forget the covenant of the Lord your God that he made with you; do not make for yourselves an idol… (Deuteronomy 4:22-23)

In much of Deuteronomy, Moses is telling the Israelites about their impending journey into the Promised Land. He’s reminding them of their deliverance from bondage, of God’s Covenant with them, and of the civil laws they must agree to live by. He won’t go with them, but he wants to set them up for success.

And in the middle of it all, Moses warns them about idols. These people who have seen the undeniable supernatural hand of God would be tempted to make and worship idols. This seems strange to us, but we quickly rationalize that it was a different culture, a long time ago, in a land far, far away.

But let’s not be quick to limit idolatry to little faux-avatars made of gold, wood or clay. We have idols, too; and not just cover girls, leading men, and fast cars. In ministry, our idols are much more subtle than those easily recognizable things.

I think we idolize methods of church growth. I’ve seen other churches and pastors made into idols. We idolize buildings, books, and broadcasts. Programs become idols, too.

It generally isn’t the fault of these things that they get made into idols. A few verses earlier, Moses was warning Israel not to make bird idols, sun and moon idols, men and women idols, even fish idols! Verse 19 says the Lord provided these things.

Big churches and impacting programs aren’t inherently bad, but when I secretly worship them I’ve allowed something else to take God’s place, and that isn’t good.

How do we worship those things? We put our hope of future effective ministry in them. We also give those tools the credit when ministry growth or fruit happens.

When God brings me into a place of promise and fruit, I am to give nobody else the credit. When you read Genesis through Joshua that is one of the great subtexts: These Hebrew people had nothing to do with God choosing them or God delivering them or God giving them the Promised Land. Every time they tried to take things into their own hands, they failed miserably. Their success wasn’t because they were good warriors or because they had the right strategy or because the Sun was on their side. They were wholly dependant on Yahweh for any success, and their part was always and only total obedience.

That’s our part, too. God speaks; we respond. Period. In ministry and in life there are many methods, tools, and strategies that can be good and God-given. I think we’re free to appreciate and use these gifts. But the minute we start giving them credit for what God is doing, we have crossed into idolatry—and God won’t share His glory with anyone, or anything, else!

About 10 years ago I was struggling with staying in a pattern of daily time with Jesus and, though I loved His Word, staying in it habitually had become a bit of a challenge for me. That’s when someone introduced me to the Life Journal. Pastor Wayne Corderio assembled a tool that kept me, and many of my friends, in the Scriptures every day. For me, it worked better than any plan in which I had ever engaged.

One of the greatest things about Life Journaling was that I could gather a group of folks to spend time digging into God’s Word together. Two or three times a week I would meet at Starbucks and pour over passages of the Bible with others, listening together for what the Holy Spirit was saying to us. It was good times. I still often practice that delightful discipline with people, and it is consistently one of my favorite times of the week.

However, there has been a dark side to this. Like I said, most of my daily reading and reflection was done at Starbucks and done with others. I got used to the company, the crowd, the noise, the smells, and of course, the coffee. All of that became an integral part of what my personal time with Jesus looked like every day.

But I started missing something: The time crying out on my face before the Lord, or singing at the top of my lungs while hacking away on my guitar, or sitting before God in a chair in the silence of my office. These things didn’t happen as much…until eventually they rarely happened at all.  I slowly but certainly became spiritually one-dimensional.

I shouldn’t be OK with limiting the bulk of my time with Jesus to Starbucks or Life Journaling any more than I would be content to restrict my relationship with my wife primarily to the breakfast table. The reality of any deep relationship requires dynamics: Intimate moments, fun excursions, gatherings with many friends as well as quiet one-on-one connections.

Furthermore, I think we miss out on some important spiritual needs when we get so one-dimensional. Intercession, meditation, reflection, personal worship, spiritual warfare—these are all things that can be challenging to practice in a coffee shop.

So over the last season I’ve been rebuilding my relational dynamics with God. I haven’t given up my Life Journal, my gathering and digging in with others, and definitely not my Starbucks. But I am remembering to add back the truly private time…time where my knees and face find the floor and where my voice finds it’s full strength.

For while devotions in a café and prayer in a church service are great, all of us still need time with the Father behind closed doors where nobody else is around (Matthew 6:6).

One of my favorite writers on organizational dynamics is Patrick Lencioni, author of such business fables as The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. He’s a sharp, engaging thinker and writer. He’s also a fellow Christ-follower, and many of his principles are Biblically based.

His brand new book, Getting Naked, is NOT about taking your clothes off; it’s about vulnerability in the corporate sector. It’s a good, quick (2 hours) read, and worth the cover price. While the book specifically deals with the consulting profession, I found it oddly applicable to pastoral work.

Here are the three main points of this book, along with one take-away from each topic. Through the story of a strategic consultant’s awakening, Lencioni tells us…

1. Don’t be afraid of losing the business: Too many pastors live in fear that if they make the wrong decision they will lose the church, or at least will lose someone important to the church. While leaders must steward responsibility well, we should always remember that is it not our church.  An unreasonable fear of losing the church can lead to some pastoral sins, including treating big givers with more respect than small givers (Luke 21:1-4), being overly conservative with investing Kingdom resources (Luke 19:11-26), worrying too much about what people will think (Luke 7:33-35) and not telling people truth that might challenge them too much (John 6:25-71).

Take away #1—Tell the kind truth: If I am afraid of loosing the ministry, I’m not going to be honest with people who need me to be honest with them. My goal must always be their growth, rather than my church’s attendance or financial position.

2. Don’t be afraid of being embarrassed: Fear of embarrassment is a major hindrance to ministry. If I am more concerned with making myself look good than I am with really helping someone out, I’ve lost any authority I have to minister into his or her life.

Take away #2—Ask Dumb Questions: We can’t be afraid to reveal that we don’t know it all. In fact, instead of trying hard to create an appearance of having it all together, we probably should work to intentionally reveal when we don’t have it figured out. Lencioni says that one way to do this is to ask questions to which everyone else seems to know the answer when you don’t. Often others don’t know the answer either, and by asking the question you have just articulated what is in their heart and helped them to not be embarrassed. And then you can figure out the answer together. That’s more helpful than acting like you know it all.

3. Don’t be afraid of feeling inferior: There is no room for a bloated ego in ministry. Pride is at the root of sin, yet pastors can be some of the worst offenders in this. Fear of inferiority will often lead people to be pushy and arrogant, and that rarely allows for true servanthood (Mark 9:35/John 13).

Take away #3—Do the dirty work: This is all about being a servant. Though I passionately believe in distributed ministry, and releasing tasks to others so they can do their part, this never lets leaders off the hook from doing the actual “dirty work” at times. You may be released to spend time in prayer and the ministry of the Word (Acts 6), but sometimes you’ve got to roll up your sleeves and wait tables (or clean toilets, or set up chairs, etc,) to support the value of the task and the greater value of the people who are doing it.

Psalm 13—For the director of music: A Psalm of David

How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me, and answer, O LORD my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death; my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,” and my foes will rejoice when I fall. But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to the LORD, for he has been good to me.

2009 was a bit of a tough year for me personally; and no, it wasn’t because I turned 40 (I was OK with that, really). It was just one of those seasons when everything sort-of went sideways. Perhaps you’ve had one of those years before: Maybe someone that you deeply love gets pretty sick; a job in which you are invested comes to an abrupt end; a dream that is long-held gets crushed; a relationship with a person you love is destroyed; some doors that seem wide open are slammed right before you walk through them; people who used to express a high opinion of you stop returning your emails and calls so quickly, or at all. I’m not saying those all reflect my life (though some certainly do), but it was the kind of year where surprises—and not the fun kind—met me around every corner. 

So often when you have a year like that you are thrilled to leave it behind and jump into the next one. January 1 comes and you hope for redemption; you can just smell it just around the corner. But when you hit mid-February and everything keeps rolling along like the New Year never happened, and you start getting even more tough news, discouragement can set in. I think a person can put up with just about anything for a year, but when year 2 or 3 kicks in, so can despair.

In Psalm 13 we find David, experiencing these kinds of emotions. Nobody knows exactly where he was when he wrote this lament, but I imagine he was on the run from Saul, leading a motley group of warriors who were tired of living in the desert, and who were just itching to take matters into their own hands. This David who had a great assignment as a general in Israel’s army, family position by virtue of marriage to the king’s daughter, and a bright future as the secretly anointed monarch, was now persona-non-grata among anyone who mattered during that time.

I like the way the Message paraphrases David’s opening thoughts: “Long enough, God—You’ve ignored me long enough.” Have you ever felt this way? You are not quite ready to identify with Job, but you can cry out with David, “Long enough, O LORD, will you forget me forever?” It’s when your prayers aren’t much more than utterances of questions, confusion and pain that you can understand what David must have been feeling here.

But I love the way he ends his Psalm: There’s hope! This isn’t empty hope either, but a rock-solid-trust in who he knows the Lord is. Though his emotions and circumstances tell him he’s been abandoned by God (and everyone else), David knows better. His God is the God of unfailing love and salvation. The LORD has been good to David, and He’s been good to us, too. Worship, and yes, even rejoicing, is a great, and appropriate response to a world that’s been rocked, because only He knows how it’s all going to turn out in the end.

My friend Charles Lee is starting a sermon series on the Book of Acts at the church he pastors. As a part of his presentation, he included the following video that briefly explains the Missional Church. I saw it tonight and I like it. Though I’m not certain whether it can come across as too black and white (I DO think that a church with a good preacher, good music and, yes, even occasional big events, can have at its core a Missional passion), the last 30 seconds simply but effectively represent my understanding of the Lord’s strategy and call for the church I pastor.

With appreciation to Charles…enjoy, and reflect!

“…And so Moses finished the Work. Then the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. Moses could not enter the Tent of Meeting because the cloud had settled upon it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle.” (Exodus 40:33-35)

When I read this I get hungry for the manifest presence of the Lord in my life. There is something in me that wants to encounter the Lord in such a tangible way that I have a hard time entering the room.  It’s what I’d like to see in our congregation, too. Though I fully embrace the understanding that we don’t need to ask the Lord “show up” when we gather, because He is already there, I can’t deny my longing for this kind of undeniable powerful encounter that would indelibly mark our community.

But this awesome and transformative event didn’t happen in a vacuum. As I pay attention to the text leading up to this beautiful moment in Exodus 39-40, I see sixteen times that explicitly say Israel did everything exactly “as the Lord had commanded Moses”.

Let’s be honest: Many of the things that God had commanded Moses to do seem a bit overly specific, maybe even, can I say, pedantic? Things like: Fastening a blue cord to a turban; putting bread on a table on the north side of the tabernacle outside of the curtain; ensuring that Aaron and his son’s were dressed just right, with the correct amount of ringing bells and cloth pomegranates alternating around the hem of their robes.

I’ve sat through classes that go on for weeks explaining how each of these details is somehow related to the bigger picture of salvation history. While I have no doubt that God had very specific reasons for this level of precision (many of which DO have to do with prophetic foreshadowing of Salvation issues), I also believe that a lot of the reasons are completely lost on us. We can analyze the actions commanded all day long and never figure out exactly why they were required.

And I think that’s part of the point. Moses and the Israelites didn’t know why they needed to do these things, but they did know that God required them. Because they knew this, a group of refugees stuck in the middle of the desert obediently complied; right down to the last detail. And when the job was completed, as soon as “Moses finished the work”, the palpable glory of God manifested.

Maybe it’s possible that we have issues in our lives that we know are not being handled exactly as the Lord has commanded, or that have been started but not finished. Perhaps we have been given important work to do and we’ve put it aside because it doesn’t make sense to us, or it’s just too difficult to engage. I’m not proposing a works-based theology—God loves us and saves us and is with us regardless of our effort—but there is blessing that springs from radical and exact obedience.

I want to take an opportunity this week to examine my life and discern where I may not be doing things exactly as the Lord has asked me to. As I walk in humble and precise submission to the Word of God, I provide an open door for the Holy Spirit mark me as a person wholly surrendered and submitted to Him; and that kind of life, I believe, is where God’s authentic Glory will manifest !

As a pastor I’ve always loved Exodus 18 and Acts 6 because of the wise and practical action that the leaders took to distribute the work of the ministry. I just think it makes good organizational and strategic sense to do this, and I’ve regularly revisited these passages to rethink how I could put those principles into practice.

This year, as I was meditating through Exodus in my devotional reading, I had a new thought. God told Moses at the time of his calling (Exodus 3) that He would use Moses to lead His people out of Egypt and into the Promised Land, and that the first important stop along the way was to be the mountain of God.

What happens at the mountain? This was where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, as well as where Moses stayed 40 days to receive the instructions for Worship. It’s where a motley but massive group of Jacob-descendants became transformed into the nation of Israel. If you had to pinpoint an important moment in the formation of over 4,000 years of Jewish History, or recognize an epochal event that would lead to the coming of the One who would fulfill the Law, I imagine that Moses’ time on Mt. Sinai would rank way up there at the top.

And here, the timeline is very important: Moses doesn’t get to go to the mountain (chapter 19) before he figures out how to give away ministry (chapter 18).

While he was busy being burdened “from morning till evening” sitting and having people come to him to make life and ministry decisions, he was never going to get to Sinai. Jethro’s advice to his son-in-law to distribute the leadership was not just a practical pastoral principle, but was an absolute mandate if God’s people were ever going to make it to their land of promise. Yes, the people had been delivered from bondage and formed as a community, but the Divine journey towards their ultimate destiny would not be reached if Moses continued to act as the hero-martyr and fill his days with things others could and should be handling.

Similarly, in Acts 6, the Apostles were not ‘above’ waiting on tables and serving widows, but they realized that if they were busy hoarding ministry from morning till evening, the things (prayer, preaching and distribution of ministry) that would move the infant church into its glorious promise would never happen.

How many congregations do we know that are right on the edge of amazing momentum into God’s design for them, but they will never get there because only the primary leaders are fully released to do ministry and make decisions? How many of those primary leaders can spend significant time listening to the Lord and responding in obedience while they are overwhelmed in the day-to-day needs of their people that others are competent to meet?

The life of the Kingdom was not ever meant to flow through only one person (in Exodus) or a small group of people (in Acts), and leadership bottlenecks often occur because of the pride of those who think they have to have their thumb on every decision. True, releasing ministry might make for mistakes and messiness (some of which will never even be seen or cleaned up), but if the alternative is a well-oiled machine that never gets a church to its call and promise, I’ll take the mess every time!

A couple of weeks ago my wife and kids and I took a vacation to visit family in Oregon. Our California kids kept asking if it would snow for Christmas; we told them the forecast didn’t look good, but they could pray. December 25th didn’t have snow, but the 28th—well that was a different story.

All I can say is: ‘freak snow storm’. Though driving back from Portland to Newberg took 3 hours (it usually takes 40 minutes), it was finally worth it when my kids dashed out of the minivan, threw on some gloves, and jumped wholeheartedly into joyful play in the cold white stuff. It was perfect snow, too: not soggy-wet but also not so dry that you couldn’t form and hold shapes. And enough stuck to the ground that we could play as long as we wanted!

So, the family built a snowman. Not just any snowman, but in typical Clark artistic fashion (disclaimer: the Clark kids are artistic, not the dad) this one had shoulders, a body and a face that made it look more like a Michelangelo masterpiece than a fake Frosty. It was a proud moment, and we all went to bed exhausted but satisfied with a job well done.

But, of course, it was Oregon, and the unexpected snowstorm was quickly followed by a very-expected warm rain. When the kids went out the next morning to visit our guy, my wife and I realized we’d have to explain something about snowmen; they are fun while they last, but they don’t usually last very long at all. And when they are gone, you pick up the carrot and the coal and the hat, and you appreciate the memory of building it.

Yes, snowmen die. So do a lot of other things. Living beings, of course, die, and that can be very sad. Death comes to that which is intangible as well: Visions, hopes, dreams, passions—each of those has the potential to die.

Of course, some dreams do come true and it is appropriate to pursue a God-given vision. We like to celebrate people who see their visions realized—we all love a good underdog story! But for every dream that comes true, there are many that die. Nobody likes to admit that, but it’s a fact of life.

It would be easy if we knew which dreams were destined for reality, because then we’d only pursue those visions we knew would be accomplished. But it doesn’t work that way. We can’t always know which dreams will materialize, so we do our best and we joyfully pour ourselves into bringing a dream to life, and in the end we trust God to bring about the dreams birthed by Him and to hold back the ones that are not.

And often it’s not the outcome that matters as much as the process we embrace. God is the Lord of the outcome; we are responsible to engage the process well. Proverbs 16:9 says, “In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps”. I think it’s essential to dream and important to plan, but it’s also vital to understand that God really does know what is best.

The wise man Theodore Geisel  (a.k.a. Doctor Seuss) once said, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” Sometimes the Lord blesses us with great experiences that in the end don’t turn out the way we think they ought to. We should learn to joyfully embrace those moments as part of the process He is using to get us not to the fulfillment of our dream for our lives, but to the fulfillment of His dream for us.

No one’s ever seen or heard anything like this, never so much as imagined anything quite like it—what God has arranged for those who love him. (1 Corinthians 2:9)

When I was in 4^th grade a group of friends and I were talking about our vision; we had just gotten our eyes tested. One member of the group had thick glasses and shared that he had 20/100 vision.  That meant what he could see clearly at not more than 20 feet away, the rest of us could see well from 100 feet. Thus the coke-bottle spectacles!

However, most of us fell somewhere closer to 20/20; that is the visual acuity required of a fighter pilot: Perfect sight—or so we thought. One of our friends finally piped up, bragging, “That’s not perfect sight…I have 20/10 vision”.

We didn’t believe him! None of us had ever heard of 20/10 vision. We had to go ask the school nurse if it was true, and we found out that it could be (I had to check ‘visual acuity’ on Wikipedia to make sure I remembered this fact accurately).

A person with 20/10 vision can see clearly from 20 feet away what the rest of us can only see from 10 feet. Though 20/20 is considered ‘perfect’ vision for most needs, it is possible for people to have better than perfect vision, though it is more rare.

I lost my 20/20 physical vision years ago, but I want to be a person who strives for 20/10 spiritual vision. What everyone else is content to see clearly at 10 feet, I want to contend to see from 20. I want to “fix my eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:17)

Is it possible that we can train ourselves to be that discerning and to change the condition of our sight? I have not known my physical sight to improve, though there are those who claim that you can make your eyesight better through vision exercises. I’m not sure what I think about that, but I do wholly believe that our spiritual vision can improve with constant conditioning. By being attentive to the Word of God and by responding to the reality of the spiritual world around us, the unseen but most important dimension is more and more engaged; it becomes clearer.

I want my vision for this period leading to the year 2020 to be based on clear 20/10 spiritual sight. That way I will see more quickly and distinctly what the Lord is leading me towards in this decade. Things like: What kind of man I am to be in 2020, how I will have loved and developed my kids as they are getting through their teenage years (10 years from now), how I will have grown in the Lord, stayed healthy, built a solid marriage, been effective in my assignment, etc… And when I am able to view those year 2020 issues accurately from far away—both from the year 2010 and with 20/10 vision— I can better prepare to follow Jesus towards those goals.

Ok, it’s Christmas today! I would not be posting, except that my nine year old son Caleb got a tablet to draw on this morning and just sketched his first cartoon….I left him with a blank slate and came back 1/2 hour later to this (which he said was a test to learn the software)! I told him we could post it on my blog: He’s pumped! I’m afraid that this may give away our sometimes wry sense of humor!

He wants you to know that if there was sound the guy would be saying, “Hey, where did my eyeballs go?” after the explosion after his eyeballs had run away and his mouth is moving.

Merry Christmas!!!

I recently ran across a powerful quote about friendship: “A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words” (Donna Roberts).  I have friends that fill that role in my life. These are people who know me so well that they keep me accountable to being who I am supposed to be. There is no way to pull off a lack of authenticity or function in any kind of pride or false humility when you are around friends like these because you realize they will call you out…and you know you are better for that. Furthermore they can encourage you when you feel you have lost your way, because they remember where you were heading in the first place.

At the core of leadership is the need to provide this role in an organization. Michael Hyatt, the CEO of Thomas Nelson, recently wrote that when people in organizations forget why what they do matters—when their work becomes about going through the motions—that is when great leadership is indispensible.  “Leadership is more than influence”, he writes, “it is about reminding people of what it is we are trying to build—and why it matters. It is about painting a picture of a better future. It comes down to pointing the way and saying, ‘C’mon. We can do this!”

There is an old story about a man who came across three brickmasons who were at work. He asked the first one what he was doing; “I’m laying bricks” was the answer. The second worker was asked the same question; his response was “I’m building a wall”. Finally the man asked the third workman what he was doing. His answer: “I’m working on a beautiful Cathedral.”

Has your organization forgotten the words to the song in its heart? Do the people connect their daily work to the larger story? If you are a leader, one of your responsibilities is to remind people that there is a song at the heart of the organization and to point people back to the masterpiece they are contributing to. If you can do that, you won’t have to drive or force people to do what you want them to do, but you will be able to lead people into doing together what they, in their hearts, have really wanted to do all along, but just couldn’t figure out how.

Here is my family’s 2009 Christmas card. I pray that you are deeply enjoying Christmas already and that you are finding time in the midst of a busy and distracting season to sit at Jesus’ feet and be amazed at the mystery and incredible gift of the incarnation: “The Word was God…and the Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.” (John 1:2 & 14, The Message).

Grace and peace be with you over the next couple of weeks as you fully celebrate the Life that gives light to everyone who will receive it!

Groups of people (companies, organizations, churches, etc,) develop traditions that are based on strong values, but the tradition may continue long after the underlying value is forgotten. This can become a problem; when traditions start to conflict with values, then we have trouble my friend (“with a capital “T”).

Eleven years ago I was in Seattle planting a church and working for Starbucks. The coffee company was considering whether to replace the manual espresso machines with much more efficient, effective, and consistent automatic ones. However, the new equipment just wasn’t the same: there was fear of losing the “human touch”; the sound of clanking and tamping, etc…

It’s a long story, but I had the opportunity to write a fable and get it into the hands of Howard Schultz (the CEO) who was concerned about the change. The narrative was about a woman who had fond memories of going to her grandma’s house for the best fresh peach pies she’d ever had. One day she had a vision to open up a bakery that sold those pies and also replicated the culture of grandma’s house: Swing music playing, 50’s style furniture, table games out—the total “grandma’s house” experience. Since grandma always claimed that the perfect pies were a result of the oven, this young woman bought the exact oven from her mother (who now owned grandma’s house) and used it in her first store.

The concept exploded. City people loved the country desserts as well as the oasis of a down-home family space. Soon more stores opened, and the oven—including its glass front and manual dials—had to be duplicated. Ten years and hundreds of stores later, the company was doing great, but the experience had started to deteriorate. Some of the employees didn’t understand the culture very well, and the original idea of having a “place to come home to” had morphed into lines out the door while people waited for fresh baked goods to take home with them.

One of the biggest challenges was that the ovens which had served the stores well at first were not so great for the exponential demand. The original appliances were temperamental and a bit slow. Though R & D could design equipment that would work more consistently and twice as fast, the founder was worried that the experience would be compromised—after all, the ovens had always been the centerpiece of the store design and feel; one of their biggest traditions.

After replacing the oven in a few stores, it was quickly discovered that customers could get their product more quickly, and that the employees had more time to devote to maintaining the culture and values upon which the stores were initially based.

I never found out if my story influenced Howard’s decision—but hey, within six months all the manual machines were being replaced by automatic ones (a guy can dream)!

Five months ago Brad Abare wrote something I’ve been chewing on since. Traditions aren’t always bad, but where they don’t fully support the values, they should be seriously examined and probably adjusted.

Here’s what Brad said:

Traditions guard.

Values guide.

Traditions perpetuate the good and the bad.

Values parse the good from the bad.

Traditions make way for the predictable.

Values make way for the potential.

Traditions are inherited.

Values are imbedded.

Traditions can stall progress.

Values can stimulate progress.

Traditions can be eliminated.

Values can be illuminated.

Traditions can stop a company.

Values can sustain a company.

Traditions are neutral to meaning.

Values are necessary to meaning.

Traditions are contextual.

Values are collective.

Continued from part 2…

If God is a creative God and humans were created to reflect that image, then all-God/all-man Jesus paints a picture of what a fully creative human being might look like. In the first chapters of Mark, we discover a few things about creative, out of the box ministry from the life of Jesus:

1. Creative ministry is fueled by prayer. Mark 1:35ff “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.”

There are congregations that want to be on the cutting edge of creative ministry but they don’t want to put in the time to listen to the Lord. If a church is known as creative but is not deeply driven by prayer, it may be hip and relevant to someone, but it won’t be truly prophetic to the world or relevant to God. 

2. Creative ministry does things in ways they have never been done before. Mark 2:12 “we’ve never seen anything like this.”

Jesus certainly did this; David did, too. David took on the giant with a method that would drive the “experts” crazy. He had confidence that he could do the job, in God’s power, by using stones and sling. NOBODY had ever seen a battle won that way before, but young David was anointed by God; connected to God; and his questionable but creative and obedient actions immediately turned the waning momentum in Israel around.

3. Creative ministry is not just about novelty, but carries spiritual authority. Mark 1:27 “What is this? A new teaching —and with authority?”

Doing something in a new way is only good if it is done with anointing and authority. Many churches are caught up in looking for what is new, what has never been done before, what can set them apart from all the other churches, but their ministries lack real authority. I’ve learned that something can’t just be a “new teaching” (or program or style, etc,) it must also come “with authority.” It must spiritually and practically impact people at their core.

4. Creative ministry elicits a response. Mark 1:17 “come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

Creativity is winsome. Creativity in ministry draws people into a conversation in which they are asking themselves questions about how they are going to respond with their lives. French writer Antoine de Saint Exupéry once said “If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” Both are important, of course, but the latter (an unquenchable desire to cross the ocean) will fuel the former (inspiring people to build a ship).

The goal of creative, prophetic communication is never to simply give information, but it must often result in powerful transformation.

Finally, a quote from Mosaic Pastor, Erwin McManus (who I think does an outstanding job of cultivating creativity for Kingdom purposes through the church he leads): “We risk too little; we dream too small. Each church has enough creative capacity in it to make a huge debt on the problems of humanity.”

If only we’d follow Jesus out of our boxes!