Creativity and Mainstream ...

Tuesday, November 15, 2011. To be creative means to do new things, which have not been done before, which have not been generated before. Our society talks about creativity as something important. But when you are creative, you quickly recognize that it is easier to stay in the mainstream than to be creative!

Something new? Difficult to get through …

There is a type of creativity, which is easy. You take a particular style, and then you write a new melody in this special style. If the style is popular, there is a high probability that your melody will be popular as well. When something is widely accepted, then it is easy to be creative.

Many artist use the above rule. They have been creative at some point in their life. For example, there is the artist who had the idea to wrap large things. Then, for the rest of his life, he kept wrapping things … Is that creative? Not really! It has been, initially. But now it is mainly marketing. It is still fun. And the individual installations can have their creative moments. But he is mainly continuing what he did the first time, to make it well-known, to have fun, and to earn money. Probably it is well-known since he kept doing what he did once and then realized that it was good!

As a creative scientist I had to realize that it is more difficult to publish if you move into something new. Most publications are mainstream. They follow well-set paths. The work out what has been recognized as good already. They are creative in the sense that they work out a basic idea, that they investigate something new and important, but the result is basically as expected. It is really difficult to introduce something new into science - it generates a lot of resistance!

Creativity in the Church …

Creativity plays an important role in the church. For the community of believers it is very important to have creative people around. Of course it is also important to have managers, helpers, pastors and many more. And many of these have the gift of creativity … to develop the church to what it needs to be.

Our communities of faith live in the middle of a changing world. In each time we need to develop the community of faith in interaction with the world which surrounds us. That is a creative task, which needs to be done. Creativity is shown in music, in theatre, in dance, but also in the way we organize our services, our youth groups, our coffee times and seminars. Creativity is needed when young and old want to live together.

I am longing for more creativity in our churches. I am desperately longing for more power, more drive, more enthusiastic movement in our churches. It is needed, and I believe that God will fill us with his spirit to carry out his plans, today and tomorrow, driven by creativity in our church and beyond! (Roland Potthast) ... more texts