A funny thing happened to the modern Church recently.
Somewhere along the way, a few key leaders, perhaps unaware of their potentially sweeping influence, decided that visuals, design, and themes could be leveraged to provide a framework for sermon content. They birthed the sermon series. They hired the church designer. They added the Creative Arts Design Ex-periential Conversational Picnic Rodeofest Planning Meeting to the calen-dar. Print budgets went up, clip art CDs went out, and video cameras zoomed in, creating a subculture of creativity for church media. And while the current incarnation may walk around in different packaging, creative church media is still rooted in an ancient desire to explain and support a message by engaging as many of the senses as possible.
So, what’s the problem? Isn’t this the missional mindset of learning a culture and then meeting people where they are? The church attempts to use all the available tools to spread the gospel and utilize a visual language people understand—how can that possibly be a bad thing?
Simply put, we tend to do it poorly. We over-inflate our view of the ar-tistic merit of our endeavors. We underdevelop our sense of the time, effort, skill, and passion it takes to execute world-class creative ideas.
Approximately 18 kazillion awesome things happen around us every-day, each with the potential to inspire and spark creativity in us, but more often than not we choose to flip through yet another graphic design annual or web design gallery, look at the same handful of magazines that every-one else in our field is flipping through, and skim RSS feeds instead of try-ing to dig into research and study. We employ the tired, misused excuse of there being "nothing new under the sun" to justify our latest poorly-executed pop culture parody. At some point, we stop cultivating and start copying. Artists and designers walk in a strange tension between derivative inspiration and flat-out plagiarism. The former is natural and healthy, driven by curiosity and a desire to learn and experiment. The latter is a deadly combination of ignorance, laziness, and lack of skill.
As a result of the church’s deficiency of knowledge about our own his-tory and our willful abdication of visual influence in the last 200 years, we have become artistically lazy, careless, and negligent—as if nothing is truly at stake in the art and design we make. "Good enough" is often just that to us—as if God is only concerned with truth and justice, not beauty and craftsmanship. These passive, lazy art and design practices will consis-tently produce immature artists and designers who are incapable of creat-ing compelling work. They will likely only produce sub-standard works while trying to play cultural catch-up with the rest of the world.
The Church is experiencing a resurgence of creative expression, which is welcomed, but we’d rather not be bothered with using our brains when someone else has already done the work for us. And if Jesus didn’t explic-itly command us to "Love the Lord [our] God with all [our] heart, soul, and mind" in the Gospels, we might be able to justify our actions. But for the Christian, the aforementioned command inextricably links thinking, worship-ing, and working.
The newly (re-)perceived need for creativity in the modern Church brings with it a swell of untrained, uneducated, under-skilled artists and de-signers into positions of visual influence. Those positions are frequently the first impression anyone has of the local church and of Jesus Christ. But most volunteers and staff members in these roles, myself included, have learned on the job, teaching ourselves along the way. So, where do we turn for education, inspiration, and improvement? How does an untrained per-son worship God by using their mind and serve others by refining their creative talents?
First stop: your local library. It’s a free education in exchange for time and effort. I’ve spent the last six years trying to make up for not studying art or design in college and I’ve done it all for "a dollar fifty in late charges," as Will Hunting would say. Don’t make the mistake of thinking there is a short-cut to learning the basics of your field or that shortcuts are unnecessary. We can’t build a strong creative culture on top of a foundation full of holes, so take the time to build on solid ground.
Second stop: everywhere else. It’s not just about art and design; we need to begin looking outside our field(s) for inspiration. "The thing about architecture is that everybody reads too many [architecture] books. Archi-tects look at architecture, but they don’t open their eyes and look beyond that," says architect Mark Dytham. You’re probably not an architect, but you can replace "architecture" with your field of choice and it still rings true. Whatever your daily role, chances are you spend your time reading, think-ing, dreaming, and planning similarly to many of your peers. Too little of that and you’re inept. But too much inward focus, and you lack objectivity or the chance for original thought. Then it’s easy to slide into creative cruise control where it becomes tempting to copy and not think.
As fashion designer Paul Smith challenges, "If you can’t find inspiration in the things around you, you’re not looking hard enough." Magazine spreads from Smith’s Small Paul campaign make frequent appearances in my office, so do articles about new takes on craft; photography, architec-ture, and interior design books; live performance calendars; places to visit; and a laptop full of links relating to installation art, new music, furniture, comfortable shoes, and how to grow tomatoes for a few weeks longer than my neighbor. In fact, after building that initial foundation, I find the less graphic design I look at these days, the less my graphic design looks like everything else. I started collecting magazine grid layouts for inspiration to use in web design user interfaces. Hand-drawn lettering has helped to shake up my Swiss typography sensibilities. Gardening gets me out of the office and into nature. Morning walks give me time to let my mind wander, free from action items and pixel pushing. You can’t cultivate anything new from already exhausted raw materials. Get outside, literally and metaphori-cally, and watch the work you do branch out and improve.
Martin Luther wrote to pastors and preachers, "Pray, read, study, be diligent … This evil, shameful time is not the season for being lazy, for sleeping and snoring." Should we, as artists and designers, be content to settle for good enough when good enough is so obviously "sleeping and snoring" in light of our culture? In an era where images are often more powerful than words, should the image-makers consistently choose the easiest solutions and abdicate any responsibility for the cultivation of a creative culture? Our challenge isn’t to strive for originality above all else; originality can quickly become a pressure-laden, unattainable goal and an idol to bow down before. Originality may likely be a byproduct of hard work, but it can’t be the goal if we haven’t already been diligently working toward competence in our pursuits.
Our challenge is to be craftsmen, to make good things. To kill the de-formed, cobbled-together monster of pop culture references, derivative de-signs, and lazy practices, and watch God birth new creativity and skill in us. We can honor Him with the work of our hands and our minds. We can re-flect the image we were created in by creating good things. We can build a culture of creativity. But it will take more work than we’ve been willing to give.
Joshua Blankenship is a hardworking designer in Small Town, SC. He serves as the Creative Director at NewSpring Church, where he spends far too much time derivatively plagiarizing various sources.