For the last few weeks there has been a lot of fighting, arguing, with myself trying to seek the truth.  Can I be honest with you… I mean really honest with you?  Over the last few months I have been slipping into a creative purgatory.  To be frank, I feel at times I’m treated more like a machine spitting out domesticated creativity than really producing something truly meaningful from my inner depths.  Sadly I’ve been relegated towards people thinking creative excellence is a high-powered faucet that can be turned on and off at will.  I fear becoming a widget.  There’s nothing fun about being an appliance, unless your an espresso machine.  I’m not a shiny machine that people jostle in-front of in wonderment of my golden, tinkling display of mechanized, electronic joy!  Seriously, machines are predictable and boring; that’s not me.

Yet every day, I feel like I’m fighting the status quo and the willingness to come against the fear and apathy that wants to keep me in a place of living beneath my potential.  I feel that my creative soul has been ripped away from me.  What can one do?

Where do you find your inspiration?

What did you learn at Echo 2010?

The church is a communication/storytelling machine. Narratives of changed lives, transformation, renewal, and, most importantly, the gospel include every component of a great story. But we communicate it like a textbook rather than a story. In many ways, story has taken a back seat to the cultural wave drowning out the unique voice of many churches. They have lost their brand and market place, instead creating fractured communication and presentation. Churches need greater content and less distraction in the stories they tell. We should revive the power of testimony to inspire people with our living God. Visual Communication and Storytelling are the language of our culture. No matter if its a graphic, typography, photography, or a video the primary way of learning today is through seeing. The more you see, the more you know. Words are no longer enough and people communicate visually more than ever.

You requested them, so here they are the slides from today’s session; love to carry on the conversation.

Door Prize #1: The books Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky and ReWork by Jason Fried and David Hansson. Plus HOW Magazine, Good Magazine and a Moleskin to hold all those visual ideas you come up with.

Door Prize #2: First addition painting I painted as a test for a sermon series last Feburary (See this Post) and the book Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky.

So how can you win?  It’s simple, you need to be active on Twitter by tweeting ideas and things that strike you tweet worthy. In addition I ask that you are engaged in our conversation in the room. The winners will be chosen at random by a third party at the end of the session.

So are you going?

What is your favorite Creative Website or RSS?

Over the last week, I’ve been working on a video with my creative team. I guess it was more than just a video. It was an honor and privilege to develop the video around an original song written by our worship pastor Greg Erway and his son Ethan.

With lyrics like: “Hearts were held captive; Help far away; Sinners, one and the same. Searching for freedom; Desperate for life; Broken and bound we came;” we wanted visually capture the essence of America and Christianity. So over four days we shot 8 plus hours and almost 100GB of video to produce this video…

(*please note this is only the introduction because the song has not been copyrighted yet)