10 Ways to Create Artistic Community

Artistic community in the church is simply a "must do." Artists need each other. When you think about it, you have to admit that no artist, or person for that matter, enjoys being "used." Even task oriented people prefer to be appreciated for who they are in addition to what they can do. Over the years, my appreciation for the power of artistic community has grown exponentially, because artists and technical volunteers in the church create more transformational moments when they do so in the context of community. We all need to be known.

Some arts leaders naturally create a community of artists. Others need to work at it. The rest of this blog is for the later group. These ideas are for those who haven't yet moved their leadership to the "must do" community camp:

1. Buy the team pizza and sodas.
2. Create a green room backstage where the team can connect.
3. Put people into rotating teams who serve together regularly. Then switch the teams every six months or so.
4. Create a team blog.
5. Hold several team events each year (an early Christmas party or an artistic talent night).
6. Gather them monthly for an all-team meeting. Include programming and production volunteers. Use this time to cast vision and create community.
7. Pray together regularly before each rehearsal and each service.
8. Schedule a yearly or quarterly volunteer retreat.
9. Create a wall of appreciation (a bulletin board where they can leave each other notes of appreciation and care).
10. Place team members into shepherding groups. Assign a volunteer leader to each group to keep tabs on individuals' needs, prayer requests and major life events.

Raise the value of team and you'll raise the impact of your weekend services. It's worth every ounce of leadership effort.

Develop Your Artists' Gifts

Whatever you do as an arts leader, don't let people stagnate in their gifts. Art wasn't meant to be stagnant. Sure, great art endures, but great artists seldom paint the same piece twice. Great song writers strive for new melodies and lyrics. Great church leaders strive for fresh weekend services. The same applies to the artistic talent of church artists and technical volunteers. They need to keep improving, to learn to do something new.

Next time you're faced with the decision to build into the talents of those in your ranks or assume they come fully prepared, think twice before you proceed. People in the church need us to give them the tools to make a difference for Christ with their art. Most of them will show up with a basic toolbox, but we need to figure out which tools they need that aren't in their box. Then we need to craft a plan to offer them support and personal growth.

The dividends are obvious. People get filled up. Art becomes more transformational. Community grows as people learn together. Not your job? Really? Does your church come fully stocked with professional artists who are spiritually and artistically always at their peak? Didn't think so. Take the time to build into the people within your care. Not only will you retain your volunteers longer, but your services will simply be better. It's worth it to develop your artists' gifts.

Grow Your Artists Spiritually

What are you doing to help the artists in your worship arts ministry grow? What are you doing to actively disciple your artists? While it's easier to hope artists land themselves in a solid small group, read their Bibles regularly and develop a deep prayer life, the reality of being a worship leader or arts leader is that if you are the leader then you are responsible for the spiritual growth of your volunteers. God has entrusted men and women into your spiritual care, and you cannot hope someone else in the church is doing your job.

It's your job to reach out to those who serve on your teams and help them discover how God wants them to grow. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1. Pray regularly before rehearsals and weekend services.


2. Spend 10-15 minutes in the Bible together before each rehearsal.


3. Meet monthly with your teams to promote community, unity and spiritual growth.


4. Invite individuals to meet with you or their team shepherd whenever you see a spiritual need.


5. Write a blog or newsletter that includes spiritual direction.


6. Read a book as a team that promotes godly values and incorporates Christian character growth.


7. Invite team members to worship together during weekend services.


8. Serve as a team outside the auditorium from time to time.


9. Help each individual team member discover their next step or spiritual growth area for the year.


10. Grow yourself as a leader and share your personal areas of growth with the team.
    

Helping artists grow spiritually doesn't mean you need to complete an hour of Bible study each time you meet. But it does require you to build a culture of growth within your ministry. What's one thing you can do today to help your artists grow? Start now!

Taking Care of Your Spiritual Health

How healthy are you...spiritually? Yikes. Depending on the criteria you use to judge a person's spiritual health, it's likely that most of us will come up lacking in one way or another. Employing the basic spiritual disciplines as criteria, you could assess your spiritual growth based on how often you go to church, read your Bible or pray. Using community based criteria, you could judge your growth based on whether or not you attend a small group, serve regularly in your church or volunteer in your community. And to some extent, these measures would be accurate.

But how does God look at it? What does He use to measure my spiritual health? I think it's less about my practices and more about my heart. I think God looks upon our hearts and minds, searching for those who wholeheartedly worship and adore Him. I think He cares that I'm growing into the best Sandy Johnson He made me to become - one who displays the heart and character of Christ more and more each day.

Uh, oh. I sense a tension point here. Though spiritual practices are never the measure of a heart solely devoted to Christ, the more I become like Him, the more I will want to participate in the life He has to offer. The more I desire to grow, the more I will realize that growth requires me to put myself into positions to be taught and stretched by God. Some of these are spiritual practices.

It's easy to forgo reading the Bible or praying. It's simple to stay home on Sunday mornings or skip serving. Personal stagnation requires little to no effort on our part. Taking care of yourself spiritually requires more. It means placing yourself in positions to become more like Christ. And it means every time you encounter more of His truth, you yield more of yourself to that truth.

If you're the leader of an arts ministry, consider how you can work toward spiritual health yourself. Then lead your teams there. Artists who minister on the platform and behind the scenes must be yielded to Christ. There is no other option, if we are to draw people to God.

Introducing Online Consulting Resources

The Synergy Box has just released a series of online consulting resources for the creative arts ministry in your church. Online consulting, how does that work? Each resource is designed to introduce you to a critical topic on arts leadership, identity, culture or creativity and includes an overview of the topic and a discussion guide to help you lead your team through an assessment of your ministry in this area. After you've finished your discussion, you can email your notes to The Synergy Box, and within seven to ten days, you'll receive personalized suggestions for your church arts ministry.

The Synergy Box also offers telephone consulting and on-site consulting services. Check out our website at http://www.thesynergybox.com/.

Visit our booth at the Catalyst Conference in Atlanta this week!

Arts Team Needs

Art in the church is utilitarian. Hardly ever is a church or weekend service a gallery of art created for art's sake. In the church, we create art that moves hearts and souls toward Christ. We don't perform a drama or sing a solo simply to gratify ourselves and our own desires. We're aiming our art at a target (some of us more intentionally than others) and hoping we'll get to change some lives.

This distinct use of the arts in the church practically guarantees that the individual needs of artists will not be the same as the needs of a church artistic team. A church arts team needs:

• strong overall performance
• a sense of unity
• a heart of mutual servanthood
• transformational artistic content

As noted in the last post, artists need to be fulfilled, express themselves individually and be respected for their artistic identity. Not the same needs as the team, right!

Church arts leaders must be aware both the needs of individual artists and the needs of an entire arts team. Since they vary so widely and are sometimes polar opposites of each other, this is one area of the church where we might use extreme caution. No artist likes to feel insignificant. Nor does any team enjoy serving together in disunity with a lack of purposeful impact. If you're a church arts leader, choose wisely how you lead into meeting the needs of both artists and teams! Try building a culture of open handed artists who sacrifice, submit, communicate and respond to healthy leadership. When you fill this tension gap with the qualities of Christ and the purposes of the church artists grow willing to meet the needs of the team and ultimately find their own met in the process.

Individual Artist's Needs

Ever thought about the needs of your fellow artists? What if you're a leader in the church. Have you paid attention lately to whether or not the individual needs of those serving in your ministry are being met? If not, let's start now.

What do artists in the church need? Perhaps some need more than we're able to give and some don't need much at all. Here's a short list of what I've discovered I need to pay attention to when leading artists in the church:

• artists need to have their gifting fulfilled, their artistic purpose for existing
• artists need to maintain individuality, not loose their artistic identity
• artists need acceptance & respect
• artists need opportunities for individual artistic expression, serving in their sweet spots

Funny thing: what the church needs from artists doesn't always match what artists need.

So what to do? How do we maintain a sense of purposefulness in our churches while moving toward our church artists? My vote is to start with honesty. Do two things:

1. Be honest with your artists about which needs can be fulfilled in the church and which cannot. Do everything you can to help artists know their contributions are significant and relevant.
2. Yet teach them that the church does not exist to gratify the artistic desires of our congregation. The church is God's plan for redeeming a lost and broken world. Help artists get this straight in their minds, so they can volunteer with an attitude of servanthood.

10 Ways to Advocate for Church Artists

Artists in the church need a little bit of loving! Here are 10 ways you can advocate for their needs as you lead:

1. Vision - Paint a picture of the preferred future for your artists, so they can unite toward a goal that's bigger than themselves.


2. Servanthood - Help your artists see the value of servanthood, so the team can be about proclaiming God's message instead of self-promotion.


3. Information - Ask your pastor for sermon information at least three weeks in advance, so artists have time to create.


4. Preparation - Send music and scripts home several weeks in advance of a service, so your teams have time to prepare.


5. Rehearsals - Schedule rehearsals, so artists can rehearse not only their parts but how their parts fit into the whole.


6. Equipment - Ask for appropriate equipment, so your teams are not constantly frustrated with gear that doesn't work.


7. Budget - Give your teams enough money to allow creativity to flow, so that ideas are not immediately discounted because no money has been allotted for creative ministry.


8. Encouragement - Tell your artists when they're doing a great job, so they know their contribution is significant.


9. Constructive Feedback - Lovingly let your artists know when they're coming up short, so they want to keep raising the bar.


10. Hospitality - Find a place to set up a green room and supply it with basic food & beverages, so your artists will feel at home and cared for.

Where Healthy Church Begins

Books on healthy church abound. They contain references to relationships, emotions and workloads. They talk about ministry, programs and balance. With simple or radical methods of building church health, they each expound upon the idea that God desires the church to be a place of unity and community.

So why doesn't the church thrive on unity and community?

Sin is the obvious answer. We are all sinful people. And the church is made up of sinful people just like you and I. As Paul says in Romans 7:17, "For if I know the law but still can't keep it, and if the power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions, I obviously need help! I realize that I don't have what it takes. I can will it, but I can't do it. I decide to do good, but I don't really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don't result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time."

We hurt when we should help. We lie when we ought to offer truth. We hide when we should be exposed. We doubt when we should hope. We insist when we should desist. Our desire to do good is hindered by our sinful nature; we are broken.

Where does that leave the community of God?

It seems clear to me we have a choice. Every day we can choose to surrender to our sinful nature that seeks to hurt and deflect OR we can choose to believe in the power of God within us to create a healthy community filled with love, optimism and unity.

We choose our direction, for what we believe will inform our actions. And our actions will create the community of our mind's choosing. A healthy community of God begins in the minds and hearts a leader and a congregation who will not succumb to the failings of man's limited sight, but who will rely on God's presence and supernatural vision. It is only with godly, humble dependence on Him that healthy church begins.

Healthy Creative Team Culture

As passionate as I am about creatively crafting church services and vision to express the love and grace of our Savior, I am equally passionate about creating a safe and synergistic place for creative people to flourish. It irks me to no end when those of us in church leadership expect artists to produce moving and holy moments in an environment of open relational hostility or creative utility. Artists cannot be expected to lovingly lead our congregations in worship if when they are experiencing a lack of the same from the church.

Well, hardly any church sets out to alienate and dismiss the needs of artists. But at the same time, few understand how to meet the unique needs of the creatives in their culture. So they don't try. Or they try and come up short. A healthy team culture doesn't exist without a few key elements. We must work at it. In Organizing Genius, Warren Bennis suggests, "The most exciting groups...resulted from a mutually respectful marriage between an able leader and an assemblage of extraordinary people. Groups became great only when everyone in them, leaders and members alike, is free to do his or her absolute best."

So what gives artists this freedom? What does a healthy creative team culture look like? Here are my top ten non-negotiables:

1. Godly, visionary, creative leadership


2. A clearly defined church vision, artistic vision, style and identity


3. Senior leadership's active support


4. Well defined roles and communication processes for staff and volunteers


5. Excellent creative processes


6. Resources that match the desired outcomes


7. High doses of encouragement and constructive feedback


8. Active spiritual shepherding


9. Training and equipping opportunities


10. Shared community experiences

And bonus item # 11. A green room stocked with food and water. Seriously. It helps a ton!

So, if you read that list and thought, that's basically creating a great arts ministry, you're right. A healthy creative team culture reflects a well-thought out and intentionally implemented ministry. It is possible. And it starts with someone with a vision for creating a great artistic team. Perhaps you!

A red rubber ball helps you design a healthy creative culture for your life

Have you ever read the book Rules of the Red Rubber Ball by Kevin Carroll? If not, stop reading this blog right now, run to the bookstore and then continue reading. Seriously, I love this book. Go to the bookstore. Find it at the library. Go...

Okay now that you've got the book in your hands, page through it. Do you find yourself thinking: unique, creative...unusual perhaps? Maybe you've owned this little book for quite some time and never really gave the content much thought. Perhaps you got a bit sidetracked from the message of the material by its unique and creative form. Well, let me help a bit...

The big idea of the book is that you can live your creative dream. The book talks about designing your life - centering it around your dreams, filling it with vision, helpful relationships and a sense of passion and meaning. It's about building a healthy creative culture for your life. To accomplish this task, the author suggests you follow seven steps:

1. Commit to it


2. Seek out encouragers


3. Work out your creative muscle


4. Prepare to shine


5. Speak up


6. Expect the unexpected


7. Maximize the day

Sound easy? I don't think so. But with intentionality, strategy and follow-thru, it's possible. Now those are three words artists may find difficult: intentionality, strategy, follow-thru. So maybe you need to think about it as another form of creativity...creative life planning.

Why would you want to build a healthy creative culture for your life? Simple. Those who are healthy and creative themselves can lead others to that same place. They can fill the world with ideas, innovation and meaning that impact the world for Christ. Those who have not found a way to create this world around them settle for less. Ideas, innovation and meaning may be present, but their ability to access and implement them is compromised.

So did you get the book yet? Spend time designing a healthy creative culture for your life. Your impact depends on it.