Pursuing Life-Giving Creativity

Are you creative?

This is one of the questions I regularly asked students near the beginning of the Creativity and Innovation course I used to teach. Given that the course was only required for Entrepreneurship students, you’d imagine that I got far more affirmative than negative answers to that question. You’d be wrong. A surprising number of students, even ones hoping to be entrepreneurs, did not view themselves as particularly creative. This was the sort of surprising feedback that demanded I dug deeper. When I did, I found that students just didn’t see themselves aligning with what they imagined “creative” to mean.

My students, like many of us, thought of poets in berets, pop stars in meat dresses, or maybe tech wizards in black turtlenecks. This is what it looks like to be creative in pop culture. It means to defy culture. It means defining the world on our own terms. It means daring to be different, just like all the advertisements tell us.

I want to push back emphatically against this pop culture image. It’s not that people like these aren’t creative, the problem is that the image suggests that they are the creative ones. In reality, to be human is to be creative, because we are made in the image of the Creator. Just because some people sparkle with creative energies doesn’t mean that the rest of us are absolved of the calling to develop our creativity to the glory of our God. But what does creativity look like in our ordinary callings?

Defining Creativity

To start off, we should figure out what creativity is. The tech entrepreneurs of the world show us that it can entail bringing something new into the world. The great poets show us that it can entail subverting expectations. The great musicians show us that there’s beauty and play involved, too. We see all of these things in the Genesis account as well. God makes something out of nothing. He does this without struggle or conquest, subverting the expectation of pagan mythic narratives. Finally, He makes the world very good, a beautiful delight that God invites us to enjoy with Him. We can consider this a sort of maximal account of creativity. While our creativity will mirror God, it does not always have to reflect all of these attributes. One of our errors in thinking about creativity is to assume that it does.

When we place human efforts on too high of a pedestal, we tend to distort the good mirroring of God’s attributes into a number of idols. We shift the joy of making new into an obsession with novelty for its own sake. The subversion of our expectations degenerates into the notion that true creativity is transgressive. The subjective qualities of beauty are absolutized until we approve of whatever people find pleasure in. Play finds itself either swallowed by the market or set in opposition to it. We feel the pressure to turn our hobbies into side gigs or we celebrate true art as something that must be created for art’s sake alone. We struggle with these distortions as we lose sight of the proper object of our creative endeavors.

Instead, we need to recognize the glimmers of creativity that God has hidden in us. Nearly every word we say is a creative effort to communicate some thought we have. We may not think much of them, but the texts and emails that dominate our day are a nearly endless creative enterprise, crafting communication to reach a specific audience. We come up with new ideas all the time as we solve problems and find new ways to complete tasks. Creativity bubbles up naturally when we are constructively engaged with the world around us.

Models of Creativity

We often underappreciate our own creativity because we’re imagining it in terms of young prodigies. There’s good reason for this—many scientific and artistic geniuses revolutionized their fields at relatively young ages. As someone who just turned 40 this year, I could be forgiven for thinking that the window for me to change the world in such a way has passed me by, and perhaps it has. But these are not the only sort of creative folks out there.

In his book, Old Masters and Young Geniuses, David Galenson makes a distinction between conceptual innovation and experimental innovation. Conceptual innovators are what we typically think of, and they tend to peak young. Experimental innovators are masters of trial and error, building and refining over time. Interestingly, while prodigies often make meaningful things, masters tend to have more sustained creative output, even if it takes longer to come to fruition.

What difference would it make for us to diversify the models of creativity that we entertain in our heads? What do the old masters bring to the table? When I think of some of the people in my life who fit that model, I think of master craftsmen. Many have become master teachers from a lifetime of struggling to achieve excellence. Many have quiet pride in a job well done that seems less dependent on the approval of others that so often motivates the young. In short, the image in my head resonates with a biblical picture of wisdom. It’s a long, slow obedience in the same direction that marks a disciplined life. If we’re looking for this type of creativity, what might we notice that we miss when we look for prodigies?

Asking Better Questions

We often make creativity about ideas, and if we don’t have any right now, we think we’re just not creative types. In studying creativity, I’ve found that it’s often more about the types of questions we ask than waiting for inspiration to strike. The good news is that I’ve got a question you can use in most any situation—free of charge. If we look to the model of Creation, we see that God’s creative work overflows with life. It makes room for human beings as partners and co-creators. It blesses in a way that spawns new blessings. I think we should take our cue from this to ask: how can I make things better?

How can I make things better? It’s a deceptively simple prompt. It makes us attentive to pain points in our communities so that we can see what problems need solving. It puts us on the lookout for joy that we can share with others. It seeks our welfare in the communities in which God has placed us. In short, it is a posture that seeks to be a rising tide. It calls us to embrace the opportunities presented to us and transform them into new opportunities. It challenges us to favor the ideas that will do the most good for the most people.

This question was at the forefront of my mind when I was working on a proposal to change the honors program at Dordt in 2019. Our contemporary imagination around honors students often pictures prodigies ensconced in ivory towers, and I think we need to shift that vision. How could we learn to become old masters? My hope was to swap the elitism of the ivory tower for a metaphor more grounded in the model of God’s work.

Instead, I envisioned the program around the idea of leaven, where a small ingredient works profound change throughout the whole dough. Part of how we implement this is by requiring students to develop projects that promote scholarship, service, and community. As a result, students are regularly asking how they can help their communities, and they have organized community choirs, helped professors finish Ph.D. research, filmed instructional videos, created youth camps, and so much more.

I share this example not to brag on my creative genius. I’d be happy to brag on my students and the amazing things they’ve done, but that’s not the point, either. The purpose of the example is that I saw the opportunity to reshape the honors program as an opportunity to create a community that thrived by promoting thriving. This is what we see in creativity modeled on Creation. God’s life-giving overflows so that living things give life, too. My sincere prayer for my students is that encouraging a habit of looking to make our workplaces, churches, and families better will promote a whole generation of old masters, skilled in varied ways of bringing life to their communities.

Ideally, this posture toward creativity means that we will be on the lookout for how we can better love our neighbors, and, in doing that, we will reflect the creative love of our God. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s really about. If creativity comes from our constructive engagement with God’s world, then a posture for that engagement is seeking to make that world a better place. The notion might seem trite, since there’s so much detail to fill in. I would argue that it can be elegantly simple instead. Making this true means embracing the reality that we are creative. It means fueling our imagination with a diverse set of models for that creativity, and it means pursuing our calling with a child’s desire to be like our Father, the Creator of all things.