Why I Get My Best Ideas In Church
The subtle creative power of spiritual rhythms
Where do your best ideas come from? Mine come from conversations I have with friends, from sentences and paragraphs in good books (and bad books, too), walks with my wife, news articles I read, long-form, biographies, and sometimes in the shower.
But a lot of them come from . . . church. You might think church is an odd place to draw inspiration, but you’d be wrong. This has especially increased in the last decade or so where I’ve not been a senior pastor, but a church member. Sure, I get invited to preach quite a bit, but the majority of my Sundays are spent hearing messages rather than giving them.
It’s uncanny. Often, in the middle of a sermon—one not even remotely related to my current project—an idea for a chapter or an outline or an illustration will pop into my brain. This forces me to either write it down in a journal (if I’ve even remembered to bring one) or open the notes app on my iPhone and start tapping away. I tap away until my wife sees me and tells me to pay attention to the sermon. I then show her what I’m doing to prove I’m not checking the box scores, and she shakes her head. I tap fast because I know I have a limited window before I’ll look like the kind of person who is on their phone in church instead of in the Word.
Why does the muse strike in the pews? It would seem that church services would stifle creativity. This is, after all, what we’ve been led to believe. But what if these stuffy routines are life-giving rhythms of grace? That is what they have been for me, shaping my heart and mind so that when I return on Sundays, my spirit is revived and my mind is awakened.
Weekly church attendance is a kind of spiritual reset. Repentance, prayer, fellowship, and Scripture all bring us back from the wild of the world. And thus it clears the mind and heart and soul.
I also think there is something deeper here at work that connects creativity to biblical worship. In his book, The Thrill of Orthodoxy, Trevin Wax writes:
The greater adventure is in exploring something beyond the depths of our own heart. The greater adventure comes when we find something beyond the realm of my perspective and your experience—truths we didn’t invent or adapt to suit ourselves, but truths we discovered, to which we adapt.
The Christian faith is a journey of adventure, the pursuit of Christ full of “unsearchable riches (Ephesians 3:8).” To go “further up and further in” as C.S. Lewis eloquently describes in The Last Battle is to provoke endless sources of inspiration and creativity.
What’s more, God is the source of beauty. He defines beauty. Beauty flows from God, who declared after his creative endeavors, “This is good.” The most beautiful things in the world should bring us, ultimately, back to God. Consider the Psalmist:
The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words,
whose voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
I’m currently reading a fantastic book by Matt Capps, Drawn by Beauty, Awe and Wonder in the Christian Life. He makes a persuasive case that in the modern world, we’ve wrongly divided beauty from Christianity. I agree.
So, you should attend church weekly because as a Christian, this is an act of obedience. You are a member of a new family and a new body. You need to hear the regular preaching of the word. You need to sing with your fellow believers.
But it’s also not a bad idea if you want to stir those creative juices.
You might find my book, The Characters of Easter, helpful.
Check out my latest podcast with Eric Patterson on the topic of just war