Right Under My Nose (part 2)

Sometimes “a-ha” moments can be enlightening and inspiring, like I described a couple of days ago when I said that the seeds of the creative community I have longed for exists in my own family.

But sometimes “a-ha” moments can be a little devastating, too. When you realize how long you’ve gone on with a mindset that constricts your dreams rather than releases them–that can be a little devastating, even while it inspires.

The Wild One, The Director and I were talking the other day about how we have all been recently inspired to pursue our creative gifts, but we feel there are things standing in the way. We talked about how, in many ways, the “ministry” has stifled our gifts–even though we were trying to employ a ministry that would encourage those gifts.

At first, this idea really and truly puzzled and disturbed me–because I have felt the call to ministry for most of my life and honestly desire to use my gifts for God. But then my mind took a little journey, and as I shared what I was thinking, we came to a remarkable revelation. I’d like to share some of that thought process with you now.

A few months ago, I had a bit of a paradigm shift about my gifts and calling. When I first began dreaming of doing music for a living (as a teenager), my thought was to enter the music industry. Even when I first began to feel “called” to ministry, I saw that “ministry” in the context of the music industry. But there has always been an element of worship in my music, and that naturally led me into church worship. And because good musicians are always in demand in churches, I found a lot of favor in the worship-leading position. Over time, I began to believe that this was what God had intended for me all along, that my previous desires had been self-centered, prideful fantasies. I belonged to God, and His will was for me to use my gifts to lead others into worship.

Then something very confusing began happening. I began to see that the institutional church systems I was part of were not really founded in Scripture, and weren’t really working well, for that matter. My own journey of faith started leading me out of those institutions into a more relaxed and organic practice of faith. Accordingly, my worship leading opportunities have lessened–at least within those contexts. So what is a person to do when the one thing he feels most “called” to do exists within a system he no longer believes in? As I see it, when that happens, one of two things must be true: either he was never really called to that practice, or he has misinterpreted the true nature of his calling.

One day, it occured to me: What if I’d been looking at this backwards? What if my earliest desires weren’t a prideful fantasy, put to rest by my “true calling” to the church worship ministry? What if, instead, the earliest desires were the true calling, and I stuffed them into the parameters of church worship ministry because it was expected of me, and because it worked there? Oh, I think the element of worship is unmistakable, so I’m not really talking about abandoning that. But what if “worship” is a lot broader than just the church service thing? What if the music itself were an act of worship, and could evoke worship?

What if the whole template could be re-written on this one?

Back to the conversation we were having…all of this came back to me in an instant. We had just pondered the idea that the traditional church “ministry” had been stifling our creativity, even though we’d tried to fashion a “ministry” that would embrace that creativity and stir it in others. But what if we could look at this from another angle, the way I’d begun doing about my own gifts and calling?

I said something to this effect: “All this time, because of our mindsets, the ministry has been the priority, and we’ve been trying to submit our gifts to the cause of ‘ministry’, instead of….”

The Director finished it for me: “…instead of letting the gifts BE the ministry.”

This was the “a-ha” moment I was speaking of.

I don’t know if I can fully express the magnitude of this moment for me. For the first time in my life, I actually took the lid off my thinking, and realized that we had been defining our gifts by the traditional view of ministry, instead of letting the ministry be defined by the gifts. We had lived under a church ministry template, trying to make our gifts fit within that paradigm, thinking that this was the way we yielded our gifts to God. But it isn’t just the church that has been institutionalized; it is the ministry, too. The institution of ministry had been the priority, not the creativity. Any creative expression that didn’t fit that template–as wide as we’d tried to make the template–was not even considered. The gift and the ministry had been compartmentalized in our minds, instead of seen as the same thing. In our attempt to yield our gifts to God, we’d been actually yielding our gifts to an institutional ministry paradigm. And as a result, we’d not only been stifling our own creativity, but the creativity of others as well.

This moment was extremely enlightening and inspiring, because I could now see all the possibilities in front of me. And it was also devastating, because I could see all the time and energy that had been wasted by that stifling paradigm. And it gave me hope that there is actually a way out of this in-between place we’ve been in.

I’ll have more to say on this soon, as this continues to percolate in my soul.