live, from austin: theology, webdesign and other stuff

I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about how spiritual growth happens, and how our church community can be intentional about moving each other toward maturity. I know there are all sorts of methods and programs and models for this. Some are helpful to a degree, and some, not at all. I don’t think maturity happens through methods and models, but I do think they can create some helpful framework for dialogue. Like this one:

I found this graphic last week while reading Emotionally Healthy Spirituality by Peter Scazzero. He, in fact, borrowed it from another book called The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith. It’s captured many of my thoughts over the last few days, and stirred some good dialogue with others in Mustard Seed as well.

I see a few things in this graphic that are significant:

• Those first three stages certainly seem to jive with my own journey, and with walking alongside so many others in practical ministry. And perhaps we walk along this road too well. I think much of my ministry experience has been leading people through these first three steps, but it tends to get pretty muddy beyond that. Some of that is because of:
• The Wall. This was an eye opener, but makes great sense with my own experiences. There is this inevitable wall that one hits if faith. I’ve also heard it called the dark night of the soul, or the desert experience. It might come across in many different ways: doubt, crisis, sin, apathy. But it creates some kind of tension or friction that is hard to live in the midst of, but leads to:
• Beauty on the other side. Stages 4-6 are in some ways less tangible, but stir a sense of longing for who I would want to be and what kind of people I want to be around. This is where true spiritual maturity starts to show it’s fruit.

So the question that I’m stuck with is this: How does a faith community walk people through these stages of faith? As I’ve said, I’ve seen stages 1-3 done well. They are easy to lay out for people and walk through with them. It gets a lot messier once you get to the wall and beyond. Sad to say, I think it is too common a story for people to get lost in the mix of a church when they start moving into the Wall. For a church that is focused on moving people through its stages and making its programs happen, I can see why. Life in the wall and beyond is not very efficient or measurable.

I long to live a life in the stages beyond the wall, and I want to be part of a community of people that dwell there too. But I don’t have many answers yet, other than asking the Spirit to lead the way. Which is probably the best answer of all.

This past weekend, I participated in Denver 2010 — a regional gathering for the Ecclesia Network. I was one of 12 speakers who gave 14 minutes presentations on a particular topic as it relates to mission. Below is the second half of my manuscript. Part one was posted yesterday.

First, creative work, when properly understood, takes the shape of an eschatological expression of hope. The faulty understanding of creativity as a means of expression alone is rooted in dualism. Ultimately, creativity seen this way serves only as a physical means to a spiritual end, ideally the saving of individual souls or advancement and growth of our churches.

But creativity as hope recognizes that this world is not doomed to complete destruction but to a renewal, a purging of corruption as God once again joins heaven and earth. The Bible begins with God walking among humans in a garden, but it ends with God living among humans in a city. Could it be that some of our most meaningful and beautiful artwork, songs, stories, even architecture have some kind of place in this renewed earth that we long for?

If that is the case, and I think that it is, then our creative work is co-creating with God in expectation of this final day of renewal. This is an understanding we have struggled to hold to in the west, and one where we can learn from our brothers and sisters in the Eastern church. Greek Orthodox theologian Angelos Vallianatos describes it this way:

“The human being, endowed with God-given qualities, then becomes God’s co-creator. God who is love thus demits from the right to be the only creator on earth, and in his love he calls the human being to take the “very good” world in his hands and lead it to its immortality. If the human being chooses this way of life, the whole of creation will follow it.”

For Vallianatos, as humans interact with God’s very good world, we take an active role not only in demonstrating, but in pulling the renewed and recreated world from the future into the present.

Alongside hope for a future not yet realized, creative work also serves as an act of love in the present. The very core of creative work is an act of giving of one’s self. It has a cost. Speaking specifically about writing, Anne Lamott describes it this way:

“You are going to have to give and give and give and give, or there’s no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.”

The Creator was the first creative, and that first act of creating was an expression of love. A few years ago, I was researching for a paper on creation, and I was stunned by one shared insight that came up again and again. Theologians from all backgrounds kept finding their own ways to state that God’s work of creation was borne out of love. Here’s a sampling of what I found:

“The creation of the world was the free outpouring of God’s powerful love. The one true God made a world that was other than himself, because that is what love delights to do.” — NT Wright

“Because God is love, God is self-giving. Because God is self-giving, God willingly creates the world.” — Stanley Grenz

“But to confess that God is creator is to say more. It is to say that the free, transcendent God is generous and welcoming…The act of creation is a ‘fitting’ act of God. It fittingly expresses the true character of God, who is love.” — Daniel Migliore

“It was so much like God to create, to imagine possible worlds and then to actualize one of them. Creation is an act of imaginative love.” — Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.

“God’s loneliness and God’s need for the other is the beginning of creation.” — Dorothy Soelle

God initiated this world with a burst of love. And every creative act since, in it’s most pure form, is an act of love. It is a gift to others, an invitation to life and goodness. The strokes of a pen, the dabs of paint, the strums of a guitar — any act of creativity is a partnering with God in re-creation.

So whatever role you may find yourself in, a pastor, a teacher, an evangelist, I pray you will see it as an act of creative work. The compulsion I feel, and you feel, to make something new is crying out from the core of our humanity. It is calling you to give yourself for the benefit of others. And that is why it is hard, and why sometimes you feel blocked. The part of you that is broken, the part of you that only wants to be concerned about the protection of self, is trying to hold back who God created you to be. You bear the image of the Creator.

May you be a re-creator
A co-creator
A dreamer
A maker
An imaginer
An artist
An entrepreneur

An agent of hope toward a renewed creation
And a giver of love in this broken creation

This past weekend, I participated in Denver 2010 — a regional gathering for the Ecclesia Network. I was one of 12 speakers who gave 14 minutes presentations on a particular topic as it relates to mission. Below is the first half of my manuscript. I will follow with part two tomorrow.

Two years ago, our family moved from the Seattle area to Austin, following God’s leading that had begun four years before. Austin is often compared to Seattle, and so I’m often asked just how similar they are. I’ve been pleasantly surprised that so much of what we loved about Seattle is present in Austin. I would even venture to say that Austin is a little more independent feeling than Seattle, as the university has a little more prominent role in Austin than it does in Seattle.

There is one difference however, that cannot be missed. When people visit Austin and ask what they should do, the first destinations that come to mind are all restaurants. I was hesitant to move to Texas, but there was one part of Texas culture I had no trouble embracing…the food! Austin has plenty of BBQ, Tex Mex, and more traditional Mexican food — all of these put a smile on my face. Now I have learned to see that there is more to Austin than great food, but my experience is not unique. More than once have I been in conversation with someone who tells me what dining experiences they had on a visit to Austin.

In Seattle, on the other hand, I have to confess the food was lost on me. I’ve never enjoyed sea food. But when someone asks me what they should see in Seattle, restaurants are nowhere near the top of the list. I can quickly overwhelm a would-be visitor to Seattle with a list of places to see, both in and outside of the city. I grew up about an hour north of where we stand right now, but I wouldn’t hesitate to say that the Pacific Northwest is as beautiful as it gets.

While we lived in Seattle, our dear friends Justin and Erin came for a visit. Wanting to make the most of our time on their brief visit we took them for a drive over Deception Pass and down Whidbey Island. Justin and I sat in the front, and as usual, his keen and inquisitive mind led to rich discussion. Along the way, we pondered the question of what it means to be made in the image of God. As I took in the beautiful scenery sweeping past the windows of our sporty minivan, I came to a realization that had never occurred to me before…

To be made in the image of God is to be made a creative being. I had always considered that being made in the image of God means that we have the core characteristics of God’s image imprinted on our soul, no matter how broken we may be. Every human shares God’s need to give and receive love, compassion, pleasure and relationship. Likewise, a person who makes, who creates, is a human who is straining into the image of God that sits in their soul.

Now you might have realized long ago that to be creative is to exercise the image of God within. But for me, it was a fresh, important, and empowering shift in how I view the nature of creative work. Throughout my life, I’ve been labeled as a creative, and usually it was meant in a positive way. But in this conversation, this label gave new meaning to how I viewed myself and my part in the Missio Dei. It was not just who I was, but who I am meant to be. And whether or not you’ve been told you’re creative, it’s who you were made to be as well.

I don’t know what kind of labels you might carry. Some of you might call yourselves creatives, or even artists. Others might have never progressed beyond the stick figure stage, convinced that you have little creativity, let alone artistic impulse. I’ve been in more than one church leadership context where the creative types are marginalized, characterized as the free thinkers, or even trouble makers, who disrupt the work of the pragmatists who can really get things done. And yes, I do caricature a bit, but not as much as you might think.

Often, in the church today, we settle into some kind of understanding that arts of one type or another primarily function as a means to communicate our message, wrapped around and propping up the spoken word as the primary communication of the Gospel. At best, creative work is a tool we use to convey the message. At worst, creative work is something that type A, results oriented pastors and church planters tolerate as a means to illustrate the preaching.

Everything I’ve said this far, and everything I will say after pivots on this one point — creativity is not merely an expression of the Gospel. Inviting another to imagine, to dream, to create and to make is to invite them to live into the image of the Creator God they are formed after. Creativity is not only an expression of mission, it is an act of mission itself.

It’s helpful here to give some shape and definition to mission. What is mission? How is the church to partner with God? As I define it, the mission of God’s people is the ongoing announcement and demonstration of the Kingdom of God. We are a global community offering a verbal and visual indication of what life looks like as God intends it to be.

To be creative, then, is to re-create, to put back together the pieces of God’s broken image of a creator — to live into humanity as we are intended to be. In these remaining few minutes, I’d like to offer two instances of the practice of creativity particularly serves as a demonstration of God’s kingdom.