Tim Clark’s Blog

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!

This Thanksgiving day I’m very grateful for…

1. An amazing Lord who is full of never-ending love, grace and and power.
2. A wonderful wife who is a true best friend, ministry partner, and fellow traveler on this great adventure of life.
3. Bright, creative kids who surprise me every day with what they can do and who they are turning out to be.
4. A fantastic family who has taught me to put Jesus first in everything.
5. Faithful friends who have been there to celebrate the great times, and who have been there to support me through the tough times.
6. National freedom that provides me with opportunity to impact my world with the Gospel of Christ.
7. Godly pastors and mentors who are never afraid to tell it like it is, and who, through encouragement, counsel and correction, have shaped me to be a more godly man.
8. The unmistakable call of God into a life of vocational ministry leadership that I would never have chosen on my own, but now wouldn’t trade for all the riches in the world.
9. The humbling opportunity to have influenced, encouraged, trained and sent leaders who now, in turn, impact people all over the globe.
   
   And finally…

10. Turkey, pumpkin pie, football, Charlie Brown, crisp weather, talks & walks with the family, Christmas decorations, leftovers, naps and all the other little pleasures that come with this particular weekend!

Every once in a while, I post some devotional observations. I have a pattern of daily digging into the Word through a  devotional reading plan that our church works through together. Here are some things that I meditated on from Matthew 14-16 yesterday:

1. Jesus withdrew—a lot! He got away and prayed. Often when He was alone, people found Him and He ministered to them anyways, but He always made sure to spend time alone with the Father, and sometimes His team. I think that gave Him the energy to do what He did.

I think I’ve gotten it backwards sometimes: I minister hard and then try to find time to withdraw to be with God and recover. I’ve learned over the last few years (and I’m still learning) that withdrawing regularly first gives me the life I need to pour out to the people I’m called to serve.

2. In the story where Jesus walks on the water, the disciples didn’t recognize Him. Jesus tells them it is Him, but they are still not sure—except Peter has the boldness to say, “Lord, if it’s really You tell me to come to You on the water…and Jesus said, Come!”

I feel like Jesus has been walking around a particular patch of rough water in my life lately, and I’ve asked Him to call me out—I’m waiting for the word, and as soon as I hear Him speak I’m committed to step into the raging waters (what an adventure!). This was an encouraging reminder for me that He is in charge of the wind and waves, the calling, the miracle…all of it!

3. Religious Pharisees were often really offended at Jesus. It always amazes me how much religious folks just didn’t like what He was all about. I wonder if prideful, super-legalistic, ultra-religious people feel that way about me? I wonder if they should?

4. Feeding the 5,000: The disciples give him some food; He blesses it and gives it back to them; they distribute it to many more people than they ever could have on their own.

That’s how I feel when I’m ministering (for me many times it’s preaching). I start with relatively little compared to the need—as I prepare, I give what I have to Jesus—He does something amazing and miraculous with it, and when He gives it back through me a whole lot more people are blessed than would be possible if it were just me.

I sure don’t deserve it. I’m always humbled by the miracle grace of God to regularly work through me to bring life and freedom to others. But I’ve learned to serve and lead confidently dependent on His grace, and I will keep walking deeper into that pattern for the rest of my life.

Continued from Part 1

If the church is a reflection of an infinitely creative and original God, then how does a congregation manifest that creativity? How do we start to climb out of the boxes we’ve learned to live in?

I think it starts with an understanding. We can choose to be—in the words of one of my hero’s, Ron Mehl—either “prophetic or parasitic”. The essence of a prophetic community or leader is that they hear and repeat God’s voice. A prophetic congregation is intently listening to the Holy Spirit and reflecting God’s unique design and desire for it. A leader with a prophetic perspective may learn and implement quite a bit from others, but will always first filter it through the distinct things about which God is speaking to him or her.

In other words, prophetic congregations are never built with cookie cutters or from following “5 easy steps to growing your church.” Every church that has ever impacted me has had a unique spark—the styles from church to church were massively different, but there was in each of them an original quality that distinctively reflected the heart of God for its own context. This quality drew me, and kept me, and changed me, and it transformed much of the surrounding culture, too.

Parasites, however, must feed off of other life in order to be sustained. Many congregations and leaders are always looking for the next big thing, and forgetting that God has something unrepeatable and miraculous to do through them. They miss it, because their strategy is to simply try to copy other “successful” church strategies so they can give off the perception of originality, creativity, and success. They want to be the next Saddleback, Willow Creek, Northpoint, Mosaic or Mars Hill (Seattle or Grand Rapids—take your pick), but they forget that each of those ministries was birthed out of a unique context, was full of unique people, was led by a unique pastor in a unique city, and was called of God to fulfill a unique purpose.

In other words, congregations are like snowflakes; no two of them are alike. Though we can and should learn from the wisdom of others, parasitic leaders will drive staff and congregations aimlessly ragged as they attempt to reproduce the flavor-of-the-month church or ministry, hoping it provides something that will create much-desired momentum.

The other day I read something that Joshua Blankenship from New Spring Church discussed regarding how this copy-cat ethos can do damage: “Ultimately, copying doesn’t affect the person being ripped nearly as much as the one doing the copying. After all, rarely is the faux as compelling as the original. But when you copy, you do yourself a disservice. You cease to do work. You cease to be inspired.”

True creativity is not manufactured or replicated; it is inspired (God-breathed) and it will inspire a sense of joy, and awe, and energy, and life, and passion in and through a congregation. When that starts to happen, people can’t help reflect the unique call of a living, loving, powerful God in a way that truly impacts the community and world God has placed them in.

Next, we’re going to learn from the ultimate example of a unique, inspired, creative individual doing ministry…

(To be continued)

“In the beginning God created…” (Gen 1:1 NIV)

The very first thing we learn about God in the Bible is that He is creative—and for the first 26 verses we see God at work masterfully creating an unfathomable cosmos, life-sustaining systems, invisible atoms and everything else imaginable (and unimaginable).

Then, as a grand crescendo He creates human beings (have you ever considered that people are so valuable to God that we were His grand finale? What a mind-blowing thought!) And this is the first thing we learn about people:

“Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature…” (Gen 1:26-The Message)

The first word on God is that He is a creative God; the first word on humans is that we are a reflection of that creative God.

Creativity is primary to our essence. People are born with creative capacity because it is part of the basic package that makes up humanity. However, separation from God (Gen 3) caused the special spark of God-reflecting creativity to be dimmed. Humans remain creative without God because its part of our design, but without relationship with God we are missing the connection to the ultimate source of originality, beauty, and inspiration. Redemption turns us back towards a pre-fall state, but we tend to forget that getting back to inspired creativity is a huge result of breaking the curse of sin.

If this is the case, then the Church—the body of Christ—ought to be the most creative force on the face of the planet. However, far too often the Church is not creative; in fact we are frequently copycats of a culture that is missing that Divine reflection, or we duplicate other churches that seem to have tapped into this creative capacity. And that is tragic because God wants to do something uniquely beautiful in each person and through each congregation.

Perhaps you are a Christian, possibly even a pastor, and you think, “But I’m not creative—I can’t sing or write or draw to save my life…and there is nobody very creative in our church, either!”

That’s because when we think of creativity, our minds immediately go to the artistic—but creative and artistic are not the same thing.

Art is about shapes and shades, sounds and syncopations, esthetic beauty and spacial relations. An artistic person who is creative can form amazing and impacting pictures, sculptures, novels, movies, etc…

However, artistic capacity reflects only one set of gifts. Add creativity to any gift and it brings out beauty and uniqueness through that gift. Think about it: Have you ever seen a creative businessman, a creative homemaker, a creative schoolteacher or a creative public servant? These are not artistic endeavors, and yet we are amazed and attracted by the beauty they can produce in their unique fields.

So, it follows that if the Church is the body of Christ, if we all contribute from our unique gift-mix in a way that reflects the creative capacity of God, we should have the most wonderfully original God-inspired things happening through the church that anyone has ever seen!

But that is going to take getting out of our boxes…

(To be continued)

Recently I was asked what kind of a leader I was—did I lean more towards micromanaging or releasing? I didn’t really answer the question: “I’m a collaborative leader,” I said, “somewhere in the middle.”

So, what is a collaborative leader? A picture might come to mind of a person who brings everyone together and takes a vote, “majority rules” style, or worse, “we’re going to lock ourselves in this room until we all come out in full agreement.”

That’s not collaborative, and it’s not leadership for that matter. Collaboration is not the same thing as consensus. Collaboration reflects a team of people working hard together to create something of value. But a collaborative team still needs to be led.

Within collaborative leadership, there continues to be a point person who has the authority—and often the necessity—to call the plays, but that leader does not hold up somewhere while repeatedly making and delivering unilateral decisions from a vacuum. Sure there are times for Moses to come down from the mountain to deliver the commandments, but until we’ve spent a month in the direct presence of God and He has given us tablets of stone, let’s be careful about comparing ourselves to Moses.

A secure, collaborative leader wants to be surrounded with a team of the strongest, smartest, most competent people available, and then listen to what that team has to say, even when there is disagreement. The whole team works together to bring their wealth of experience, insight, and discernment to the table. In strategic decisions, every angle—positive and negative—will be explored so that its impact is well understood. While in some situations a vote is called for, more often, one leader must make a courageous decision based on all the facts at hand.

Collaborative leadership ensures that a decision is made with the best information available. Collaborative leadership encourages putting passion for the vision above the desires of an individual. Collaborative leaders aren’t interested in credit; they are interested in impact.

But how does that speak to the original question, “Where do you stand between micromanaging and laissez-faire leadership?” Well, when you first start out in leading an organization, you need to work closely with those you are directly leading to help them understand your heart and to make sure they grasp your values. The more time you spend collaborating with a ministry team that you know gets your heart, the easier it is to trust those team members to make the right decisions without your constant input.

But even then, direction is the leader’s ultimate responsibility. So when “releasing” goes south, that usually either means that the leader didn’t communicate the vision and values well enough or that the leader did communicate adequately, but isn’t willing to keep the team member accountable to uphold that visions and those values. Either way, while a collaborative leader always shares the credit, he or she will personally embrace the responsibility for failure, too.

We sang a song at church this morning that has been with me all day. I’m guessing most of you know the song, but in case you’ve missed it the lyrics are below.

This is really representative of my passion for my life and for the church right now—the cry of my heart is especially reflected in the words in the bridge: “Heal my heart and make it clean—Open up my eyes to the things unseen—Show me how to love like You have loved me—Break my heart for what breaks Yours—Everything I am for Your Kingdom’s cause…”

Yes, Lord. Break our hearts for the things that break Your heart. Let us really see into the eternal as we go about our day-to-day lives; give us Your perspective. We want to notice those around us who are broken and lonely and lost, and extend grace and love to them in the same way that You have loved us.

We don’t want to settle for the status quo that we have come to value, but to live in such a way that Your Kingdom is really first in our lives. This is a choice we make, Jesus, to be incarnated into those situations where we must set aside any position of comfort we may have and be ready to touch all those who need you.

Our families need to be transformed; our neighborhoods and cities desperately need to be transformed; our schools and places of employment must be transformed; and our churches will die a slow but certain death if they are not open to being radically transformed by Your power towards Your purpose.

But first, transform our lives. Bring real revival to our hearts, and then let it flow through us and out to our world so that people who meet us will have a radical, life-changing encounter with You.

I see the king of glory
Coming on the clouds with fire
The whole earth shakes
The whole earth shakes
I see his love and mercy
Washing over all our sin
The people sing
The people sing

Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna in the highest

I see a generation
Rising up to take their place
With selfless faith
With selfless faith
I see a near revival
Stirring as we pray and seek
We’re on our knees
We’re on our knees

Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna in the highest

Heal my heart and make it clean
Open up my eyes to the things unseen
Show me how to love like you have loved me
Break my heart for what breaks yours
Everything I am for Your Kingdoms cause
As I walk from earth into Eternity

“These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also…” (Acts 17:6)

Equilibrium (def.): A condition…resulting in a stable, balanced, unchanging system.

It’s common for church leaders to work very hard to maintain constant equilibrium in their congregations. They try not to upset anyone, especially anyone with a voice that might negatively affect the status quo. In this situation, they do all they can to make as many people as happy as they can. And sometimes to make one group (or person) with more power happy, they need to do something that makes the group (or person) with less power unhappy— then next time they might switch sides to keep the equilibrium.

This can create a growing congregational tension that will eventually snap and cause massive destruction, or it might simply produce long-term complacency and addiction to the status quo. Alternatively it could generate what John P. Kotter in his book A Sense of Urgency (HBS Press, 2008) calls a “false sense of urgency” that keeps everyone in the body busy with unproductive and anxious activity.

Impact (def): The striking of one body against another; the force or impetus transmitted by a collision; the effect or impression of one thing on another.

I also know church leaders who feel they are called to make an impact by encouraging the people in their congregations to be open to transformation. An impacting church is a stretching place: Not always comfortable, but lovingly challenging the status quo in lives and programs for the purpose of positive and radical Kingdom change.

Oddly, many of those who really want to create an atmosphere for making an impact are also working hard at maintaining a culture of constant equilibrium. I say oddly because these are two opposite concepts: Impact always disturbs equilibrium in some way. We can’t have a stable, balanced and unchanging church at the same time that collisions and impressions are happening to it. A collision will upset any balance going on. When I am truly impacted, it always changes me and messes up something about my status quo.

I’m not suggesting that we should constantly seek to upset equilibrium with impact. In fact, I think it is vital to wisely discern the right time and place to encourage stability and balance. Often, when one part of the church (or our life) is experiencing impact, another part desperately needs stability. Too much impact all at once can make us (or our church) feel like a car-crash!

One of the best things I have read on this subject came from a book by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky called Leadership on the Line (HBS Press, 2002). These authors say that leaders are like thermostats, sometimes turning up the heat and sometimes turning it down. As a younger leader, I constantly leaned towards heating situations up to influence change. In the last decade, I’ve learned the great value of strategic stability as I engage in turning the world upside down for Christ! More importantly, I’ve accepted that God is the One who makes an impact through me and that I must be discerning to match the leadership temperature I’m setting to the temperature the Holy Spirit has determined to select.

Here’s a leadership nugget from that book:  “To stimulate deep change within an organization, you have to control the temperature. There are really two tasks here. The first is to raise the heat enough that people sit up, pay attention, and deal with the real threats and challenges facing them. Without some distress, there is no incentive for them to change anything. The second is to lower the temperature when necessary to reduce a counterproductive level of tension. Any community can take only so much pressure before it becomes either immobilized or spins out of control. The heat must stay within a tolerable range—not so high that people demand it be turned off completely, and not so low that they are lulled into inaction.” (page 108)