Why Care about Creativity?

By Doug Franklin March 30, 2011

“A youth worker’s job is to help students grow in Christ. It’s not their job to see students grow in creativity. It’s actually ridiculous to expect youth workers to even care about students’ creativity, after all it has nothing to do with a life in Christ.” Youth workers would never talk like this but they do think like this. The only time they give creativity a thought is when they are trying to reach out to the artsy kids, but why is this? Is not God a great creator and has he not given us creativity to help share who he is? I wonder if it’s because we don’t know how to teach creativity or even interact with it. Could it be that we don’t have any real understanding of creativity? The more and more I observe the church, the more I am convinced we are just mimics. We constantly copy others in our sermon illustrations, our marketing, our music, and our ministries. We don’t really engage with God on what he wants our ministries to be. If God called you to make your youth ministry radically different from the other churches in town, would you or even could you? In the end, there is a cost for all this mimicking; we continue to produce students who can’t think for themselves and don’t know how to pursue God on their own. They sit in pews waiting to be told who God is and what he wants, to the point that they are not even sure if he is there anymore. Creativity matters because it is an honest way to connect with God. And that’s exactly what we need.