What roles to creativity and excellence play in ministry?

In the North American church we find a movement from the early 1990s to the present that focuses on creativity and excellence in church ministry. These aspects are most often applied to worship and promotion in the church. The majority of "church growth serminars" prevailent in modern church culture cite these two characteristics of ministry as highly important. But let's step back a bit and look at how creativity and excellence can be effectively applied--and misapplied.

Creativity is generally regarded in ministry as a desire to make the worship, teaching and promotional content original, inspiring or clever in such a way as to garner additional or more intensely focused attention on behalf of the worshippers or target audience. This goal in and of itself is not bad at all--original thinking can and does inspire people. I believe that God does want us to use creative gifts to glorify Christ through various church ministries. I believe in the tremendous benefits of creativity in ministry--to the point I have devoted a sizeable portion of this website to talking about it.

When we focus on creativity in ministry, we can easily miss the mark in two places. First, we can make originality the goal instead of Christ. This tendency is born out of the fact that we have a solid, unchanging, consistent Word that we have preached and lived for over 2,000 years--and in our hubris we think it's somehow "getting old". There's a bent in our fast-moving and ever-evolving culture to "make it new" or "different" or "relevant". This leads to prideful and self-centered churches with self-centered teaching.

In many churches, especially Gen-X, Gen-Y and Millenial Generation congregations, I see this reflected in self-focused sermon series ("your best life now") and so much eye-candy with set, lighting, video and other elements that I have to ask, "Where is Christ glorified in all this? How does anyone walk away from this wholly focused on the image and majesty of Christ?"

Secondly, creativity can be thought of as a way to excel in the secular media marketplace without a big budget. Obviously nearly all churches do not spend on promotion and advertising even a fraction of what is spent by even small local companies. So, we begin to think that if we can be more original, more clever and more outrageous than others, we can get more attention without spending more money. This misaligned thinking leads to churches doing media-friendly stunts giving out gasoline, buying ice cream trucks and promoting sermons about sex using provocative messages.

Am I saying that these things are not glorifying to God and misuse creativity in ministry? Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Remember, our focus as the church is never anyone but Christ. When we do stunts like this, our focus or target is obviously not Christ, but some audience we are trying to reach. And we mistakenly make the assumption that we can out-clever the secular marketplace with our interesting ministries or sermon series.

Folks, I'm sorry, but we are just not that good. These flash-in-the-pan ideas are here today and gone tomorrow and people do not care more about Christ because of them. We cannot rely on our own cleverness or creativity.

Creativity should never come at the expense of the Word and obedience to the commands and example of Christ. Remember, the church is growing in places like China, India, Afghanistan and Sudana at 10-times the rate of North American churches--and they don't care about or have any of the creative tools or strategies that we do in North America.

Creativity is not a goal of the church--it is simply a tool that can be applied to ministry selectively if it will help us further glorify Christ in the process. We must rely wholly on Christ--promoting His glory and His supremacy over all else. Publicity stunts simply do not fit into this mandate. If we put as much creative energy into discipling just one person as we do into some of these wacky ideas, we would be doing a much better job at influencing our communities for Christ.

Excellence is generally regarded as a desire to execute our various tasks and duties with our very best effort. This thinking comes from the biblical principle of giving God our best. Throughout the Word we see examples of God calling for our "first fruits", the very best of what we have to offer in all areas of life.

Excellence, then, is simply doing our best, all of the time. The opposite of excellence is laziness and apathy. I believe that excellence is not something to be selectively applied to ministries, but something that applies to every area of our lives in Christ--of which our tasks in ministries are but a part. So, we want not only excellence in our church ministries and programs, but excellence individually in our prayer, our study and application of the Word, our disciple-making, our roles as husbands, wifes, fathers, mothers and teachers and students, in our workplaces and in our schools. Does Christ expect us to do our best, all of the time? Yes, He does (Ephesians 6:7; Mark 12:29-31).

With excellence too we often see in the modern church a misapplication of the concept. We will spend millions on high-tech systems, children's facilities and playgrounds, and conveniences for our congregations all in the name of excellence. We often use excellence to justify getting whatever we think we need in ministry. Remember, excellence is doing your best all of the time, not having the best all of the time. That is self-centeredness, not excellence.

Another misapplication of excellence is as a defined standard. This is most often seen in church leadership, who will evaluate a ministry, event or initiative on the basis of whether it was "excellent" or not. Excellence is not a defineable standard, and therefore not a baseline for evaluation of anything. Excellence is applied to individual effort--not to the whole. We can ask whether a ministry was effective, well-attended, resulted in salvations--all of these are more observable, but even those to some degree are subjective.

About the Author. Eugene L. Mason has more than two decades of experience in ministry communications and technologies. More...