I need your help with a great campaign name.

So here’s the deal:

If we choose your campaign name, we’ll give you $100 cash.

CREATIVE GUIDELINES

I hate to give you guidelines, but these are meant to set you free, so you won’t head down any rabbit trails.

The contest ends at the end of the day on Monday Jan. 30th. At that time, this post will be taken down, and a winner will be contacted. We’re pretty sure this campaign is gonna blow up all over the world – in churches, in men’s groups, and in coaching communities. And you might get to be a part of it. You might be able to say, “Oh. That athlete’s video-story thing? Yeah. I named it.”

Very cool.

The site launches at the beginning of March, with Lance Berkman (above, from a November interview we did with him). We’ll roll out one more story each month for most of 2012.

And I really want for the creative Christian community to be involved in naming this thing.

Ready? Go.

Help get the word out.

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______________________

Christians don’t need to create art for God. He doesn’t need it. Christians need to create art in response to God.

Because the world needs it.

The world needs art. The world needs your art. It doesn’t matter if it meets your own expectations. It won’t. Make your very best creative attempt to make visible the invisible God, and let Him worry about the rest.

The Psalmist provides one of the most beautiful artistic musings available anywhere.

“He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.  Many will see and fear and put their trust in the LORD.”

Psalm 40:3

The entire first portion of this Psalm is about God rescuing David.  Read verses 1-2, and  you can hear Bono’s vocals, soaring above that easily recognizable bass run.

 “I waited patiently for the Lord.  He inclined and heard my cry. He lifted me up out of the pit; out of the mire and clay.”

Psalm 40:1-2

Then in verse three, David (who is more of an artist than many) begins to word-paint what God did, and why He did it.

HE PUT

God initiated something. He put. He placed. He started. He always does that. We don’t put. God puts.

A NEW SONG

Music was a dominant art form among David’s culture. This artist is given a song that’s fresh and creative. He hasn’t possessed its melody yet. He’s not giving an old song a new feel, or adding a hooky bridge to an old hymn. It’s new.

Have you ever considered that music may potentially be the most powerful art form in existence, because a good song never leaves our memory?  When was the last time you left church humming the third sermon point?

IN MY MOUTH

David’s job was to respond to the gift that God gave him. For David, his response was singing. He didn’t put a new song in David’s bulletin outline. He put it in a place that demanded some response from David. He wanted him to sing it. So David sang.

A HYMN OF PRAISE TO OUR GOD

David has been given something, and His response is a piece of art (music) that glorifies God.

David’s response to God is art. Art that glorifies God. But not because God is an insecure teenager who needs His fragile self-esteem built up by telling Him how good His new pants fit.

God doesn’t need our glory just to hear us say it.

MANY WILL SEE AND FEAR

All the people who know of David will see his life’s response to God. They’ll view the art he’s creating, the song he’s singing, and the praise he’s displaying. They won’t see God and think He’s cool or relevant or casual or contemporary or traditional. They’ll see God and be scared.

AND PUT THEIR TRUST IN THE LORD

There it is. The goal of art. The goal of redemption. Trusting intimacy, wrapped in a sacred and holy reverence for God. That’s gorgeous, and more brilliant than any man could possibly invent.

So the answer to your question is yes – of course I’m reading into this passage.  I’m an artist bringing my own interpretation to shed light on what it might possibly mean. And of course I came to this verse with assumptions. I might be reading into it too much.

But I might not.

What’s abundantly clear is the intricate relationship between God’s saving work, a piece of art that’s created in response to that saving, and a world that’s invited to interpret that new piece.

I think that’s how it’s designed to work.  God saves, redeems, and resurrects. Artists respond to that work with art. And a world of onlookers looks on. Because at the heart of it all…

Art is missional. The point of art is to make visible the invisible God, for the world to see.

Christians don’t need to create art for God – He doesn’t need it.

Christians need to create art in response to God – Because the world needs it.

Help get the word out.

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When we came back after the Christmas break, Dave walked into the office with a script in his hand – a script that he wrote. He looked at us and said…

“I’m going to make a three-minute short film for a local film festival. I have three weeks until it’s due.”

Dave went on to tell us that he had already written a script (a really great script, by the way). Now, he needed to cast, find a location, gather a volunteer film crew, edit, color, balance audio, and pull the whole thing together.

The due date was January 23 at 9:00am.

So during the past three weeks, Dave has done everything I mentioned above. Many people think that owning your own creative company allows you to do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it. That’s just not true at all. Dave had other hard deadlines to meet during these three weeks. He was pulled into company meetings, and asked to lead other projects. Dave is also the father of three children, and is a great and ever-present dad to them. He’s also an amazing husband.

Dave is already busy enough.

And this morning, he sent his short-film to the festival.

The festival is local, and won’t land on any global map. At this festival, there is no voting for “best picture”, and there is no prize.

The only reward for Dave is the fulfillment of working through a creative process, and finishing.

As I reflect on watching Dave over the last three weeks, I’m inspired by how much he believes in this project. Dave worked nights and weekends to complete this project, and walked away from the Floodgate offices at 6:00am this morning. He didn’t put everything else on hold to complete the project. He added it to an already-overloaded production schedule.

Dave believes.

Every artist has excuses about why a creative project hasn’t taken shape for them. We use the excuses of money, time, resources, expertise, and people. We excuse ourselves because we don’t want to upset the work/family balance. I wonder if these excuses are simply the top layer of something going on underneath?

If there’s some creative project that you’re supposed to create for the world, and if you’ve continued to place that project on the shelf, I wonder if – at the core of it all – you don’t really believe.

I wonder if the primary reason our creative concepts never see the light of day is because we don’t really believe.

I feel like I need to be called back to the simple belief that creating something excellent and beautiful is always worth it.

And I feel like Dave’s story might serve to call you back to that, too.

Help get the word out.

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As your art grows and expands and reaches new eyes, you’ll find yourself managing simultaneous creative projects, meeting with pastors or department heads, following up on past-due projects, and staying up all night to meet hard deadlines. You’ll be forced to learn how to provide your own tech support for the hardware and software you use.

And if you don’t cheat something, you’ll unintentionally cheat what got you there in the first place.

Creativity.

You’ll cheat creativity.

There are two avenues God uses to infuse creativity into our lives. He uses the spontaneous moments, and He uses the planned moments.

Many of the artists I meet speak of creativity as something that’s either there or not – that it’s ALL spontaneous. They speak of creativity as something mysterious, rolling into their minds against their will, then leaving just as quickly. That’s spontaneous creativity, and it plays a role in what I do every day.

But for me, planned creativity trumps spontaneous creativity every time.

I have two planned moments where creativity can happen every day. My job is to place myself in both of these environments. God’s job is to speak creativity into my imagination, if He chooses. My role is to take both of these environments seriously. His role is lead the meeting once I’m there.

I TAKE LONG SHOWERS – Many artists and creatives can connect with this environment. Studies have actually been done that indicate how the hot water running down the back of our heads and neck stimulate the creative parts of our brains. Don’t ask me for a reference here, but I’m quite certain I heard that on cable somewhere. My point is this – I take long showers. And I listen to the barrage of ideas that fill my creative spirit. Most of these ideas will never see the light of day. But a few are amazing, and mine to own.

I SPEND ONE HOUR EVERY MORNING AT STARBUCKS – During this season of my life, I drop my youngest off at the local high school, and I pick one of three coffeehouses. I force myself to stay there until 9:00am. I blog, I plan, I write scripts, I read His word, I journal my prayers. During this time, God always speaks some creative concept or notion into my heart.

My point for you is simple. I beg you to find your own creative environment, and PLAN to sit there for a certain time limit. You’ll need to cheat something for this to happen.

Don’t cheat your family.

Don’t cheat your deadlines.

You may need to cheat your sleep, or your day job, or your church involvement, or your standard of living.

But please, please, please…

Don’t cheat creativity.

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Now more than ever, I believe that God’s primary working in our lives is to get us to let everything fall into His hands, and then for Him to redeem and restore the pieces.

Everything.

The problem is that most of us don’t really want to offer God everything in heart surrender. We stand and sing “I Surrender All” at the old-fashioned Sunday Night Hymn Sing, but we’re really singing “I surrender some”.  Given this reality, I feel like God uses one overwhelming thing to get many of us from “some” to “all”.

He uses desperation.

The final three years of my pastoral tenure were the most frustrating and anxious years of my life. I became extremely frustrated with people, with systems, and with my own inability to do the things I wanted to do (I lacked the skill). The constraints of our meeting space (a Middle School cafeteria), combined with an ongoing lack of financial resources provided an air-tight lid to the creative dreams being birthed in my heart.  My marriage was going nowhere good, and my daughters were beginning to see the hypocritical chasm between the guy on the stage, and the dad on the couch. I was putting in 55-60 hours every week, doing the same thing week after week, hoping that the results would be different.

And here’s what I want you to fully understand about every aspect of those three years - God actively pushed every single one of those things into my life. 

I know that’s a hard statement for many to reconcile theologically, especially if you come from a happy clappy Christian belief system. But make no mistake about it.

God was intentionally dropping every specific frustrating ingredient into my life’s caldron, mixing them all together, and setting the temperature to boil.

And He did this because He loves me beyond imagination (He pushed Jesus into the wilderness for 40 days, too – Matthew 4:1).

I can look back now, and see that the only way I was going to drop everything into His hands was if I became desperate enough to let go.

His goal was surrender. His means was desperation.

I had to become desperate enough to say, “It’s okay if I never work in a church again.” No matter what the outcome would become, I want you to understand how difficult it was to say those words, especially as I was shaking my fists at God.

But the only way I would ever entertain this notion was if I became too desperate not to.

Desperation is an awful, beautiful, psychotic blessing. It forces us to cry, to become softer, and to think outside of ourselves.

And what if God is using increasing desperation in our lives as a tool for our heart’s unconditional surrender? What if the deep desperation we feel isn’t working in opposition to our life’s calling, but in tandem with it?

For me, the answer was clear. I needed to quit. For you, the answer might be different. But the answer isn’t the point.

The willingness to surrender everything is the point.

So in a season when we’re all overly-prone to add goals and objectives and resolutions and bullet points to our lives, what if God is inviting us to do the opposite? What if God, in His wisdom and love and unwillingness to quit us, is inviting us to boldly and desperately do one thing?

Give up.

What if that’s the invitation before us right now – to let it all go? To be willing to let it all come crashing to the ground?

The landing is hard, but the recovery is amazing.

__________________

Help get the word out.

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So as you hang on for dear life, here’s a blessing for you to receive, in the middle of it all.

______________

May your children see how much you love the Bride of Christ, and may resentment toward Christ’s Bride stay far away from their hearts.

May your messages to the masses be filled with truth and grace.

May you set up other people to excel on the platform God has given them.

May you be thankful for your current God-given platform, and may you proclaim His glory loudly from the center of it.

May you place your capo on the correct fret, as you turn the sheet music AND pray over your congregation at the same time, during a soft transitional moment.

If a scratchy throat and body aches are in your immediate future, may they begin on the 26th.

May you choose authentic over cool, in every service element, and every creative initiative.

May you perform tasks with God, not only for God.

May you be present in every moment God gives you with broken people.

May you remember how broken you are, too.

May you be fully present with your family during the unplanned down moments leading up to the weekend.

May the cord and electrical demons stay far from your church.

May you offer warmth, in every word and every phrase.

May you craft Christmas worship experiences that actually need the Holy Spirit.

May you collapse with a smile after the whole thing is over.

May you be reminded that your calling is to be faithful to the Christ Child today, and that outcomes and endgames aren’t yours to own.

May you view the babe in the manger with redeemed lenses this year – with a clearer focus than ever before.

May that child remind you that God never shows up when we expect, in the places we expect, or in the people we expect. And may you embrace this Divine mess that God seems only-too-happy to slather all over our best-laid plans.

I pray you have an amazing Christmas experience with your church, and that you also have an amazing Christmas experience in your heart. You are in that exact place, serving together with that exact team, for a reason. And whether or not you know the reason, God knows. There are so many people who will experience Jesus this year because of you.

Your tasks and to-do lists help proclaim the Messiah’s birth.

God’s richest blessing over you and your church this Advent.

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I was becoming someone who wouldn’t let other people in.

I would pride myself in having all the answers to every big question.

I was critical of other pastors who weren’t doing church the way I was.

My brother said that he was beginning to see things in me that I was blinded to. I had become more judgmental, more self-righteous, and frankly more plastic.

I was losing me.

As I reflect back on that, I realize that it all started when I was 23. At that point, I was asked to be a youth pastor at a local church, and I wanted to jump at the chance. But as I looked at the beautiful potential of that ministry, I also stood at the top of a slippery slope – a slope I would soon cascade down.

In that exact moment, I remember the Elders of this church grilling me about my personal holiness, in the middle of my interview weekend. And over coffee at a Perko’s restaurant, I remember answering them with several lines of complete crap, then thinking this on the drive home -

If I don’t have it all together, I’m dead.

I took the job, but I also began to live with this consistent belief that, in order to be an effective and well-liked pastor, I had to have it all together.

And that evening, I began my acting career.

Seventeen years later, I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the guy staring back at me. So I repented, and cried, and confessed, then repented some more. I vowed never to fake anything anymore – with my wife, my daughters, my friends, or with any group that would listen to me speak publicly.

And at 47, I think I’ve found me. Again.

So if you’ve lost yourself in the demanding and deceiving voices that accompany all who enter into pastoral ministry, please know this one simple truth.

People don’t need you to have it all together. 

You may want to read that again. Maybe aloud. Maybe to your spouse. Definitely to your Adversary.

From the deepest part of my finally-understanding-this-stuff heart, please know this…

People don’t need you to have it all together. They need you to be broken, and offer them Jesus anyway.

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I start with the assertion that art is any creative work that makes visible the invisible. For Christ-followers, art happens when artists attempt to make visible the invisible God.

So in our paintings and sculptures and music and lighting and blogs and filmmaking and web design and drama and dancing and storytelling, we’re simply trying to do one thing.

We’re trying to make visible a God who is invisible.

So when we pour ourselves into a space that’s empty until we arrive, and we try to bring something of God’s character into full view, then we’re creating art.

I have several friends who are highly administrative. They see life in terms of events that happen to reach a desired outcome. And they pour themselves into the detailed orchestration of these events to create something wonderful at day’s end.

My creative Tribe does not consider administrative people to be artists, primarily because they’re not as touchy-feely as we are. They don’t paint, don’t design, and have only heard the term “Photoshop” tossed around in circles that don’t include them. They don’t get us, and we don’t get them.

But have you ever met anyone who is truly administrative?

They leap into the future, discern what’s visible there, then leap back into the present. They do this several times every day. They have to.

They keep us on track.

They take someone else’s big idea, and create a series of tasks designed to make the idea come into reality.

They remind us of details.

They keep our finances in agreement with the banks records.

When we splatter grey all over the canvas, they stay black and white.

They are truly the best gift someone like me could be given.

And at their deepest core, they do the exact same thing I do. They seek to bring an invisible characteristic of God into full visibility, so a watching world can see, fear, and put their trust in the Lord (Psalm 40:1-3).

And the characteristic of God they make visible is one that I usually don’t. I’m busy helping the world see beauty and pain and redemption and grace.

Administrators are busy helping the world see that God is a God of order.

Administrative people are, by my definition, creating art. They are pouring themselves into a space that’s empty until they arrive, and they are bringing order to the forefront for the world to see. And the new song they’re singing isn’t borne of spontaneity, but of well-crafted order.

So without watering down classic and modern definitions of what an artist really is, I submit to you that administrative people are doing the same thing our Tribe is doing.

It just looks and tastes and smells differently.

Techies. Number crunchers. Geeks. Organizers. Call them whatever you want.

But I secretly wish that we would stop drawing such a thick black line between us and them – between the left and the right brain. There is a huge God-given difference, to be sure. But there’s also more bleed-over than most creative-types care to acknowledge. I wish that we would embrace the people around us who would NEVER call themselves artists, but who just might be set free if we helped them see what God already sees in them.

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Last week, the Floodgate Creative Team partnered with the Team at Pro Athletes Outreach to create a conference for MLB players and spouses. Francis Chan, Miles McPherson, Dave and Ann Wilson, Nathan George, and Aaron Lindsey (and band) were doing their thing all week long.

It was an amazing event where an amazing God was displayed in pieces of His glory.

Our Team provided the creative direction for the Conference, including video interviews with Lance Berkman and Adam Wainwright that will blow up to the world this Spring (more to come later).

We were also given the task to create a conference recap video – a video that would close out the conference on Friday night.

The Team running sounds, lights, and visuals is also the team that has worked with Cataylst (Velocity Productions). The sound guy (Jeff) was Chris Tomlin’s primary sound man, touring with the band extensively. The production manager (also named Jeff) is a gifted video editor and designer – a freelancer who you should hire for anything creative. The point person (Patrick) has forgotten more stuff about production than I’ll ever remember. This is a great group of men, and I was honored to serve alongside of them.

As the conference recap video was being built, I battled all week with my intended audience. As you might imagine, my heart kept telling me to create something that would inspire the MLB players in the room. But my mind kept telling me to impress Jeff, Patrick, and the other Jeff.

Create something inspirational to my intended audience, or create something cool for other artists.

The primary thing that helped me choose inspiration over cool came in the form of a vision. Sort of. I kept envisioning the moment when the video was over, and it faded to black. In that exact moment, I envisioned two options…

OPTION ONE – Jeff, Patrick, and the other Jeff would give me a thumbs up.

OPTION TWO – The MLB players and their wives would applaud as they wiped tears away from their eyes, clothed in a moment everyone knew was holy.

During the editing process (a process that kept us awake all night Thursday/Friday), I intentionally kept choosing to cut the video together so that Option Two would be realized.

The video finished processing at 7:45pm. I ran it down to the meeting area, where Francis Chan was halfway through his message. He ended, and the video played at 8:15pm. When it finished playing, the MLB players and their wives applauded and wiped tears away from their eyes. The moment was holy.

And then something totally unexpected happened.

In that exact moment – the moment where people were responding to a very emotional video with silence, tears, applause, and even God-worship – in that exact moment, almost in an instant…

Jeff, Patrick, and the other Jeff all turned around, and gave me thumbs up.

Friends – this is a heart issue I will battle until the day I die. Every artist I know is engaging in this battle all the time. But inspiring the largest potential audience always trumps my selfish desire to be well-liked by my Tribe.

And in the end, mass inspiration always wins over cool.

Help get the word out.

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Over and over, I make the claim that God doesn’t need our art. If you don’t believe that, you would do well to soak in a sunrise after a mountain snowfall, or to stare intently as white-capped waves crash against the jagged rocks of a coastal shoreline.

God doesn’t need our art. He’s doing just fine on His own.

But there is an audience that needs the art that you’re being called to create. Our audience is the world. And that’s the audience I want to explore in this post.

Many people who read the stuff I write about are part of a creative Tribe in the United States and Canada. We’re linked together through Twitter, and we all really seem to enjoy each other. I love these men and women who are creating art that makes visible the invisible God. Our Tribe is amazing and life-giving and willing to live out a radical redemption for the world to see.

But they are not the primary audience I’m creating art for.

I have this heart issue that, left unchecked, can easily begin to create art for my Tribe’s approval and applause.

I want other filmmakers to be impressed with my films. I want other authors to Tweet nice things about my blog. And when I fall into this trap, my goal is reduced to creating cool.

Creating cool.

I try my best to create something that other artists will be impressed with. But there’s a problem with creating cool.

The problem with cool is that it usually inspires the few, but not the many.

The audience God has given most of us needs inspiration more than they need cool. They need inspiration to see Jesus during the week. They need inspiration to love the broken and serve the poor and fight the sex-traffickers. They need inspiration to surrender every piece of their lives into the hands of a God who will both love them, and wreck them.

My audience does not need inspiration to create more amazing animation in AfterEffects, or to create a story arch that works for any video script. While those things are important, the people who view the short-films I create do not need cool.

They need inspiration.

And for me, when the goal is cool, I stand atop a slippery slop that eventually leads downward into a pit of pride and arrogance and insecurity.

So as you create art for the world, I pray that you know and embrace your larger audience. And I also pray that, when push comes to shove, you intentionally move against any tendency to create something that’s cool for your peers to be impressed by.

And that you choose to inspire the masses instead.

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