It’s time to reclaim creativity

Things change. Styles change, sensibilities change, manners change, language changes. It feels as if everything is changing and there’s no going back.

In “The Adaptation Advantage,” their book on the future of work, Heather E. McGowan and Chris Shipley write, “We are in the greatest velocity of change in human history, and somehow we’ve got to keep up.

“The thing is, we will never keep pace by doing the same things faster.”

In life, in work, in faith — including congregational ministry — I think the primary task of navigating change is to keep learning. And as part of the learning process, I occasionally look back and remember what we’ve left behind.

When I look back, one thing I notice is the way language changes — my kids and the youth at church remind me of this every day. And though I grieve it slightly, it’s fine. Life progresses and trends come and go.

As I’ve moved through adulthood and grown as a minister over the past 25 years, my vocabulary has changed as well. In many ways, it began to mirror the language of theologians and congregational leaders around me.

For the most part, this has been good, but there’s one word I wonder if I threw out too soon: “creativity.” We used to use “creative” all the time. However, it seems to have fallen out of favor in the past decade or so, often replaced with “design thinking.”

In some ways, it’s just a trend, the way “dude” became “bruh” in teen slang. The “Coordination Teams for Creative Ministries” of the 2010s have become “Design Teams for Collaborative Implementation” in 2025. But I think it goes deeper than this.

Many, including myself, have been shaped by theologians L. Gregory Jones and C. Kavin Rowe and the concept of “traditioned innovation.”

“Only God creates out of nothing …; the rest of us are always creating in conversation with the past,” Jones said in a 2021 interview.

The work of these two mentors on design thinking and traditioned innovation resonated with me in my ministerial and academic work. I wanted to be precise. I did not want to overstep my limits by claiming to do something that was God’s to do.

I stopped using the word “creativity.” God brings new things to life; we design, rearrange and redesign as faithfully as possible. I leaned into the concepts and practices of design thinking and embraced the simple mantra “Only God creates; we design.”

However, there were unintended consequences of avoiding the notion of human creativity completely. I actually think I put too much responsibility on human agency. Shunning the idea that we can create seemed to disconnect the systemic design work of the church from the realm of God.

At least until I picked up music producer Rick Rubin’s book. In “The Creative Act: A Way of Being,” Rubin writes, “To create is to bring something into existence that wasn’t there before.”

I love this. Though Rubin is not a theologian, he describes God well here. God brings things into existence in ways we don’t.

Rubin’s definition gave me pause. I had ceded creativity to God alone and adopted an indifference to it. It was God’s work to do, not mine.

And yet since creativity is about bringing something new into the world — God’s work — Christian people must participate in this work, right? We must adopt postures and practices that make space for God’s creative work among us. I got so busy designing that I left behind many of the Christian spiritual practices that can make space for our creative God.

This doesn’t mean rejecting the idea of traditioned innovation; creativity invites us to make room for God to do what only God can do. Everything we do could be made better through attention to the Spirit. And that means we play our role in cooperation with our God who exists to create.

I once heard a consultant in a meeting say, “We church folks are really good at doing things we know we can accomplish on our own, without God’s intervention.” That hit me hard.

In my roles as pastor and denominational leader, I’ve seen how true it is. Even well-meaning clergy and lay leaders often lack the imagination to dream and explore beyond their own capabilities. Instead, we settle for redesigning, which in fact reduces our need to depend on God’s creative power and expands our sense that it’s all up to us.

When we rely on only the things we know how to do, we cling to what once worked. We look back with nostalgia and forward with confusion. We get “design stuck,” in need of space for creativity so that God can open us up into something we couldn’t have imagined on our own.

The hard part about embracing God’s creative presence is that it means also embracing uncertainty. When we plan, imagine and experiment beyond our own design, we don’t know how things will turn out. We can’t control the outcome. And we have to open ourselves to places of holy discomfort.

But it’s in these situations that we realize most that God is present. And by stepping into spaces that hold creative, design and spiritual practices together, we align ourselves with biblical mentors and spiritual exemplars — those who stood close enough to God’s creative work that their stories are still told thousands of years later.

As hard as they may try, God’s congregations cannot design their way to renewal. They cannot simply pray their way into thriving. And as appealing as it might seem, congregations must utilize more than optimism to meet the needs of the world today.

Therefore, the church must reclaim creativity. In doing so, we are admitting that we don’t have it all figured out and declaring that we cannot do it alone. By reclaiming creativity, we commit to making space to attend to the God who creates. And by trusting God in a creative tension with the living traditions that hold us and the innovative strategies that might inspire us, congregations and leaders can lead the way in becoming a church that transforms lives, communities and the world God so deeply loves.