What does the church have to do with creativity? And what does creativity have to do with the church?
In this video, Mike Cosper raises the questions on what liturgies we’re presenting to our congregations.
The question to ask is not whether or not we have a liturgy, but what kind of liturgy do we have? How is it forming us? How is it shaping us? How is the creative work that we’re doing as part of God’s Church shaping God’s people into who they are? We can error on all kind of directions on this, we can be too heady, we can be too emotive, in both of those cases we can fail to engage the whole person. We can have services centered on the sermon and the pastor in such a way that everything that comes before a sermon is just an appetizer, the main meal is the sermon and the main hero of the service is the pastor, who has the secret knowledge that knows it and brings it.
Then we wonder why we end up with a culture of celebrity around pastors, when we elevate the sermons in these ways. We can create services that are so much about hype that people think the Christian life is supposed to be this elevated, adrenaline-driven experience. Something Bart Simpson once described as lights, smoke, and tie-bow. We should ask in every case, we should look at the things that we’re doing, whether we’re worship leaders, pastors, or members of our church, we should ask:
