Becoming Christ-like Through Creativity

When Chris and I joined our church, we attended a smaller service (at our larger church) with simple, acoustic music in tune with our everyday lives and with opportunities to use our creativity in the service—readings, films, and music.

A couple of years later, our church canceled that service. Now we attend a larger service at the same church. The music (think The New Main Street Singers from Mighty Wind) makes me want to put my eardrums through a shredder, and I no longer have the chance to offer my writing and music in the Sunday morning service.

When Thomas posed the question “how do you use creativity in worship?”, I jumped at the chance to blog about it. I’d been struggling with this very thing for over a year.

To answer this requires two things: define creativity and define worship.

Creativity’s the easy one. Dictionary.com defines it as “the state or quality of being creative” or “the process by which one utilizes creative ability.”

Not as helpful as one might like.

So we move to “creative.” This time we get “characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative.”

This leaves us with the question how do you use your ability to be original, expressive, and imaginative in worship?

Which makes me wonder what we mean by worship (to say nothing of what I’m expressing).

Hebrew and Greek words translated into our English “worship” denote ideas of service, joy, and gestures. The International Standard Bible Dictionary says worship “begins with God. God the creator, the rescuer, and the redeemer initiates our human approach to Him. The remembered events of the Exodus, the Passover, the crucifixion, and the Resurrection evoke a response from God’s people. The response is worship” (vol. 4, p. 1117). Not exactly a definition, it provides a helpful description.

At the heart, worship responds to God’s worthiness.

Or, as Paul puts it, “I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship” (Romans 12:1).

In our response to God, we take our everyday, ordinary lives and offer them to God. We do everything as unto the Lord.

So we’ve refined the question to how do you use your ability to be original, expressive, and imaginative in your daily offering of your everyday, ordinary life as a response to God’s worthiness?

Or (to compact things), how do I use my original, expressive, and imaginative abilities to become more like Christ?

Becoming Christ-like implies ideas such as loving the Lord, loving your neighbor, and all the other godly things summed up in these two things. My creativity in worship, then, becomes about how I can serve God and others in my everyday life. How can I expressively respond to God’s hope and beauty in the midst of tragedy and despair? How can I imaginatively serve the needs of my elderly next-door neighbor or an orphan in Honduras? How can I use originality to care for God’s creation and combat consumerism?

I’ve breached my word limit, but I’ll answer quickly: I explore God’s hope and beauty in small gestures in my writing, both for my own discovery and to let others know they’re not alone. I knit clothes for friends, family, and strangers, treating my stitches like rosary beads. I dig my fingernails into the dirt, planting tomato and squash and edamame.

And on Sunday mornings, as I sing God’s praises (albeit to ear-contorting music) and as I taste the sacrament of God’s grace on my tongue, I rejoice in the diversity of a Creator who saw fit to revel in the worship of a diversity of personalities, tongues, and cultures.

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Bio: Heather enjoys silly puns, campfire stories, and conducting imaginary symphonies. When she’s not breaking into song and dance in grocery story aisles, you can find her contemplating life at http://heatheragoodman.com. She also meanders in the fields of http://twitter.com/heatheragoodman.